Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

by Edward Lyell Fox

"An excellent canvas, is it not?" the staff officer at my right was saying, a slender man with one of those young mustaches; he wore a monocle, and the Iron Cross. "The Marquis, you know, has one of the best collections in France. He has several Rubens, I believe, but I have never seen them," he added hastily. "The gallery is on the second floor, and the Marchioness has a perfect terror of our going in there—we barbarians," he laughed.

Through the opened window I could see the green tops of the winter trees, enveloping each in a separate silvery haze, as the unceasing rains that have turned these Western battle lines into quagmires drizzled down. The sullen monotone of the guns made you glance around at Commander von Arnim, the rather frail, reserved, iron-grayed aristocrat who leads the Fourth Army Corps. Finding no trace of emotion there, you scanned the line of his staff, whose faces, thoughtful, mature, or as young and dapper as musical comedy ever staged its "Lieutenant of the Huzzars," all seemed as unconcerned as though they were lunching in a Berlin café. And, when the noise of the guns obsessed you, your ear caught the incongruity of the tinkle of coffee cups and you wanted to laugh, although you did not know why.

The Lieutenant who had spoken of the Marquis's paintings was saying that he had been in New York last winter—and asked where one went there after the restaurants closed at one o'clock? Just then I saw that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, who had been talking with Commander von Arnim, wanted to speak to me. I had learned that the Ober-Lieutenant generally had something keenly interesting to say, especially after conversing with a Corps Commander.

"We must go now," said Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann.

"Back to Lille?" I asked in dismay.

"Not until the evening when we go to the Second Bavarian Corps Staff for dinner. Meanwhile we see something behind the battle line."

Assured that they were not hurrying me away because at three o'clock—so they all had said—the French artillery invariably began heavy firing, I said good-by to the officers and climbed into one of the fast army motors, painted the same gray green as the uniforms, unable to shake off the feeling that it was not war at all, but that this buff-walled château in the beautiful iron-fenced park, had not been commandeered as an army headquarters, but that it was simply the home of one of these young men who had invited all his brother officers from a nearby garrison to a luncheon; and that now we were leaving to catch a train. But as the motor lurched soggily from the soaked driveway I took a last glance at the château; a wisp of blackish smoke beaten low by the rain, was creeping along the brick chimney, and an old servant was sweeping away the mud that our boots had left on the stoop; but as the motor swung past the little square-paned library windows I saw that they were pierced with tiny holes, through which passed the thin tendrils of six wires, caught against a great tree and leading off through the park; and in the window I saw a soldier telephoning, while another at a table seemed to be writing down what the man in the window was calling off. Ahead a tranquil driveway tunneled through the trees....

The army chauffeur, ignoring the insane skidding of the car, was racing through a desolated country. It is the contrast that always catches you in this war, and in the sugar beet fields that came up to the road I began to see an increasing number of mounds, some four, some thirty feet long, incongruously protruding from the flat ground. And I began to see little wooden crosses, turned the deeper yellow that new wood turns in the rain, and some of the crosses loosened by the downpours, leaned over, their arms resting in the mud, and on one a helmet hung. On either side the unharvested fields of sugar beets had become the harvested fields of the dead....

Where I saw the white sides of a farmhouse, no smoke mounted from the gaunt, gray chimney; and in the yard beyond, no human thing moved, for we were passing through a countryside where the armies had passed. We drove on, but we could not leave the long, sinister mounds behind, and I began to think: What an awful thing it is not to be able to go a hundred yards without seeing a grave. I noticed that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann no longer sat hunched with the blue collar of his cape turned up to his ears and staring straight ahead; restlessly he seemed ever glancing from left to right. I wondered what he, a soldier, who had been decorated for bravery in German Southwest Africa, thought of these things that he so restlessly saw.

"A great battle was fought here early in October," he said, after a time. "Sixty thousand men were engaged." He paused. "There were six thousand dead. Every day for five days a hundred were wounded for each mile of a forty-mile line."