Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

by Edward Lyell Fox

At first you thought of a cotton field, of white blown buds and then, as your vision shook off the spell of the bursting shells, you discerned down there a purplish, grayish patch of the earth, of which you were no longer a part, so remote, that only by peering down between your knees into the graflex-like observing glass set in the bottom of the car, could you distinguish even vaguely a single object in that colorous haze of distance. And then gradually there took shape in the glass, as in a crystal ball, accented lines and dabs of color, and there grew before you the black, zigzagging scars of the trenches—although you knew them to be brown with wet clay—and behind them more black lines, only straighter—and you guessed those to be reserve pits—and behind them, approaching at right angles, more black lines, only fewer and further apart—and these you judged the approach trenches. As you stared with the glass your eye never ranged the whole battle line, always the white puffing smoke obscured the view in tiny, white, swift-dispelling clouds, that rose from the area between the zigzagging lines. You wondered which were the French and which were the German trenches. Now a white spot suddenly appeared, exactly upon one of the black lines, and in fancy you heard the explosion of a shell and the groans of men, and you wondered if observers had seen officers coming up and if that shell had been particularly well aimed. A patch of earth, purplish gray in that hastening dusk, and illimitable lines of black stretching away, puffing white smoke quickly coming, quickly going; that was the battlefield as I saw it below the clouds.

Possibly my eyes were accustoming themselves to the great height, for in the glass between my feet objects were becoming clearer. From the thinnest thread the black lines had thickened perceptibly and now as it grew darker, I began to see innumerable, tiny, yellow-red tongues that had a way of darting out from the black lines and as suddenly withdrawing, and I began to think I heard a faint sound like the broken rolling of a drum, and somewhere very far off some one seemed to be beating a bass drum with less frequent but perfectly timed strokes, and there came up to me the booming of the battle—or did I imagine it? Observers tell me it is next to impossible to hear.

Even clearer became the battlefield, clearer though it was ever darkening, and it dawned upon me that we were descending; approaching that patch of black-lined land where the pygmies played with death. It was with a weird trembling fascination that you saw the picture in the glass become more and more distinct. It looked like a relief map now, with objects coming out of the purplish gray haze, and you wondered at the geometrical precision of it all. By staring steadily at the black scarred lines you slowly discerned another color and there at intervals, which gave that same impression of mathematical exactness, you made out darker colored dots. "The soldiers!" Involuntarily the words escaped me. And then the black lines seemed to march across the glass and were gone and you saw now only the parallels of the approach trenches, one at one extreme of the lines, the other but half visible on the outer edge.

You knew then that you were flying away from the battle firing line, but even as you looked, what seemed to be a row of broken boxes, moved across the glass, hesitated and paused there as the aeroplane hovered above them; and in that moment a yellowish box which seemed to stand apart from the others, and which you guessed to be the great house of the village, was blotted out by the spewing gray white smoke of a grenat and when the glass cleared you saw that the yellow box had changed to a jagged shape, red with flames. Fascinated, you watched the burning house, and then you realized that the celluloid shield behind you was rattling from violent rapping. Hals was shouting something; finally I guessed what it was—"Want to go down?" I shook my head no. As he bent to the levers, I think he chuckled.

I wondered if what immediately followed had anything to do with that mirth. My muscles were cramped from bending over the glass. I tried now the naked eye, but the gray dusk was blackening and the fringe of flame on the trenches becoming redder and more vivid. But this flame, which should have been even more lurid, began to grow dim and to wane away, like a thousand guttering candles, and I knew then that we were climbing once more; why, only the man behind me knew.

The flickering trenches slid by and away; below us the earth had become calm, luminous blue, pricked here and there with yellow pin points of light; but still I thought I heard that measured, muffled beating as of a great drum, only presently it became harsher as though the drummer was wielding his stick with sudden fury, an insanely growing fury; and you felt a wind on your face, then it was gone, and you felt it again, for the aeroplane had begun to swing round in a slow circle, a nightbird you thought, seeking something below. And then again came the roars, two, one almost upon the other; they seemed ahead on our right somewhere; and again I felt the wind on my cheek, but not again; we were flying straight now.

By this time I thought I knew what Hals had planned. Those pausing, slow, swinging circles had been made in order to get the exact source of the sound, and now Hals was flying towards it—his object the location of one of the enemy's batteries, a new battery, I judged as yet unknown to the Germans, possibly the one that had dropped the shell on the yellow house. Now, had Hals known that the shell was from a battery just getting into action? Because they are men of air as well as of earth, have these soldier-fliers strange powers?

I noticed that the tiny lights from what must be a farmhouse down there, had a way of increasing and as suddenly decreasing from two to four to two; and always the vanishing lights would be patches, not pinpricks, more vivid, too, as though they were not shone through glass, but came from doors that opened into illuminated rooms. And I was wondering why these doors always kept opening and closing. The place must be a brigade headquarters or something equally important. That was it! Soldiers were constantly coming and going. And as regularly appearing, these patches of light grew more lurid, and the guns raged on, I thought with a smile that the firing might well be the slamming of those farmhouse doors, for just then the two had perfectly synchronized—the sudden flaring lights, the faint sound of guns. And then it happened again, one upon the other, and I must have risen to my feet for it dawned upon me—There's the battery over there! Those lights that I thought were part of the farmhouse! Our motor seemed to thunder unnaturally loud then, again they flashed down there, again the faint boom tore up to us. "Kollosal!" Hals had spotted the French guns.

Of the race back through the night, I have only the most feverish recollections. I knew we were flying faster than ever before, for the fuselage was throbbing madly and you had a feeling that to escape an awful strain put upon it, the engine was trying to tear itself loose. And then you thought of the need for this speed. Had I been careless with the electric torch? Had we been seen? Might not even now the enemy be after us? Perhaps a telephone call from the battery down to the trenches where the muzzle of an aeroplane gun was tilted to the sky. Or had they telephoned their own aeroplanes to put up after us? Why the speed that Hals evidently deemed necessary?

You knew, too, that somewhere down there, shells from the German batteries were whining towards the enemy's positions. You knew, too, that to reach the earth, you would have to bolt down through this battle-filled sky. The chances were one in five thousand that we would be in the line of our own shell fire. You did not like to think of that one chance. The machine had ceased to shake. I imagined that Hals was looking down on all sides. The wind, certain signal of a turn, struck my cheek. The slow swinging circles began as before. And then, just upon sighting the French battery, Hals suddenly drove the machine forward. Off to the left, what had seemed an unnaturally bright point of light grew incredibly fast into a circle of light and beside it a smaller circle, and their circumferences seemed to be restlessly moving, intersecting here and there with exasperating frequency, although gradually becoming steadier and finally becoming almost concentric, intersecting not at all, the smaller though seeming to have moved in front of the larger, shifting from side to side, although never touching the outer fiery rim. And suddenly I remembered the two circular frameworks, fitted with the electric bulbs, in the field by the shrapnel-scarred willows and I recalled the explanation of them, that they were guide posts for an aviator at night, and that once he had them concentric, he knew that he was flying true to his landing field.