Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

by Edward Lyell Fox

That was all, but his eyes roved from grave to grave. For two miles we followed the avenue of wooden crosses and then, still in the open country, the car stopped. I saw that the car ahead with the staff officers had stopped too, and that they were getting out.

"Over to the right there," said a captain, pointing towards a clump of trees through which the ruins of cottages loomed dismally in the rain, "is a village which we had to shell because the French had a position there. Then they took up positions in the cemetery," and, with a wave of his hand, the Captain indicated an ancient brick wall that had seemed to enclose a grove of tall cassia at the end of the sugar beet field. "It took us three days of hard fighting to capture the cemetery," he continued, as we waded through the mud.

"Three days and how many lives?" I thought, as we approached the brick wall, "and now it is not considered of enough importance to have a single soldier on guard"; which is one of the false impressions that always comes to you after hearing that a certain point was taken at such sacrifice, and then to find that point abandoned. For the moment you seem to think of it as being typically futile of war; and then its place in the vast strategical contemplation of a battle line three hundred miles long emerges from your temporarily befogged vision. It is the military point of view to think that too much peace makes a nation soft, and you become angry at the feeling that has whispered that war is futile and forthwith you place war where the idealists forget that it belongs, not beside barbarism, but with civilization.

We entered by the rusted iron gate and stood among the place of desecrated graves. But as I walked among them, their white monuments chipped with rifle balls, the leafless boughs of the great trees overspreading above splintered with shrapnel, the red wall torn open here and there to admit the shells that must have burst in that rain-filled crater by the iron-railed shaft; as I saw a clutter of rifle butts, smashed off against a tombstone, perhaps, so that the metal parts could be taken back to an ordnance factory to be molded again, I was thinking of the men who had fought here, and whether they had lived. I was wondering how many of those thick, white, bullet-chipped tombstones had shielded men from death. I was wondering how many more of them would have been killed had they fought in the open field; and as I examined the shattered granite slabs, I thought of the protection they had given.

One of the staff officers was speaking to me. "Will you return to headquarters with us for tea?" he was saying, and he gave a slight shudder. Perhaps it was from the cold rain.

As we motored into Vis en Artois, the sun broke through the gray-ringed dreariness of sky. Up a narrow hill street with the powerful car waking the echoes among the low white stone houses, two or three peasants in wooden shoes flattening themselves against the walls to escape the muddy spray from our tires, and we stopped in what seemed to be the village center. Down the street I could see the last hooped roof of a transport caravan, and from a stealthy creaking in the house across the street, I had an idea that shutters were being slowly pushed open and that there were frightened, bewildered eyes behind.

With Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, whose French is better than mine, I crossed the street to read the proclamation—Avis!—pasted to the wall of a church. Worded by the Germans and signed by the French Burgomaster of Vis en Artois, it told the inhabitants what to do if they would keep out of trouble.

From the church we walked to a tall, gray stone, square-turreted building that loomed above everything in the village and passing through a wide archway we came into a court filled with drilling soldiers. I wondered what it could have been before the war, for the stacks of hay and the manure piles were wholly incongruous. Clearly, it now was being utilized as a transport station, for at the end of the court I saw four empty, gray, canvas-covered wagons. Turning to the soldiers, you were instantly struck by the fact that they were smaller than any you had ever seen in uniforms. All of the same size divided into squads, each in the hands of a drill sergeant. I watched them doing the "goose steps," to the proud clapping of their boots on the cobbled court, while others marched by briskly in twos, saluting. It was the barest rudimentary training that they were being put through—but it was stiffening them for the firing line—and as they drilled these raw troops, I could hear in the distance the drumming of the guns. It seemed to electrify these stocky little fellows in the new uniforms, for their feet stamped the louder, and their saluting hands snapped up like automatons; and I wondered if it were hard to content yourself with harmless drilling in a manure-strewn yard, with the music of war playing for you to march; or if behind any of those stupid, utterly peasant faces there lurked a craven thought that they were glad to be there and not where those shells were bursting. But as I watched them and felt the eagerness with which they went about the drill, I found myself thinking of the craving I had seen the Jews of New York's Ghetto show for education and that these stolid peasants were just as eager to learn that they might go to war. And I wondered if after all it might not be a lark for the youth in them, better than giving themselves day after day to an industrialism that made them old before their time. Was it not better than trudging off in the morning to the blowing of a whistle? I asked Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann where they came from.

"They are all Saxonians," he explained; and I remembered what a German Socialist had told me, that the low laboring class of Saxony is notoriously poor and short-lived, their years taken by work in the mines. No wonder they had pranced at the roll of the guns! They were thinking of it as a deliverance.... Into what?

We walked under the gray arch and across the muddy street into a paved school yard, where evergreen hedges bloomed in pretty red tubs. The sun, as if to make up to those rain-soaked men who crouched in the trenches but six kilometers away, streamed down, as in a glory before its setting, and as the school yard rung to the fall of our heavy boots, it seemed for a moment as if the brown door must open and children come pouring forth.