That evening, after a successful dinner, Herrmann took the edge off our pleasure by announcing that we must get up at five o'clock next morning. "You will be taken to the trenches with Captain Kliewer's party (another group of correspondents had come to Lille). We will all meet in Commines for luncheon and in the afternoon you may see a field battery in action. Of course, it is expected that you will not want to go, and it is understood that those who wish to remain in Lille may do so with the full approval of the staff."
Rotkohl was approved; so was the Dutch general. Rotkohl said something about his grandmother, who lived on the Christiania Fjord, and the general—well, he said there were more pretty girls to be seen in Lille than along those muddy roads; besides it might rain, and suppose his patent umbrella did not work. In three motors, one for Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann and I, and the others for Captain Kliewer's party, we raced through Lille long before dawn, to get into the trenches before daylight would reveal our approach to the French. We lunched with the Second Bavarian Army Corps at Commines as the guests of General von Stettin and we told every officer in the room that we wanted to see the trenches by night, and, being Bavarians, they thought it a tremendous joke, and roared with laughter.
Bidding the Bavarian staff good-by, we went out to our motors. With Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann and the photographers, I was supposed to go to a battery already in action. Hauptmann Kliewer's party were going to see their battery later. Telling myself that this early start—the heavy artillery firing never begins around Commines until four in the afternoon—was being made so that the photographers could photograph the battery, and that at this time of day there would be little doing there, I explained the situation to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann. With the utmost good nature—I knew from his smile that I had guessed right—he spoke to Hauptmann Kliewer, who courteously granted my request. So, with Poole, Reed and Dunn, I rode away from Commines, Hauptmann Kliewer following with an officer in another car. Poole was telling us that the Major who sat beside him at luncheon said that last night the English had dropped four shells into Commines, evidently taking a long chance on hitting headquarters; and Reed came back with another officer's story of how the enemy's observers had seen a motor leaving Commines and had put three grenaten in the field beside the road not forty yards away. And as the gray-green army auto car soughed down the heavy roads and you saw the puddled fields beginning to mirror a suddenly sunlit sky, you wondered if the enemy's observers could see your car too, and you caught yourself, every now and then, watching the sky, as though to spy the shell they had picked out for you. Nothing happened in that ride, but from the moment of leaving Commines we thrilled to innumerable paradoxical motions too laboriously complex to describe, that always come when you are approaching the firing line and the novelty has not worn off. Growing heavier with the sound, until it became almost the slow roll of huge drums, the sky filled itself with the echoes of the guns, crashing and crashing as though the heavens were a vault of blue steel. And always, out of that growing grumble towards which we rode, we heard more distinctly the explosions of the shells, each in a separate disconcerting violence, and always louder, nearer.
Two Uhlans, their mortar board helmets covered with cloth, galloped by; we overtook a transport train, the light, springy wagons moving easily through the mud, the drivers posting in their stirrups, which somehow seemed like an exhibition of beautiful riding that should have been done in a park. We turned out, our wheels spinning in mud up to the hubs, to let one of the big gray motor ambulances painted with huge red crosses, rumble by, with its red load for the field hospital in Commines. We passed two rosy-cheeked peasant girls, who carried food in baskets, and then the clank and jangle of a string of caissons, going at a canter, as though a battery needed shells. Perhaps the very battery we sought.
Somewhere on that road we must have crossed the Belgian frontier, for after passing through silent, shelled Maraid we drove into Houthem, Commando of the Second Bavarian Corps. We had been following a road that ran parallel to the firing line only a mile on our left. Shells from the German batteries had been flying overhead, but the muffler cut-out had drowned their wicked whine. We were in Houthem, and across the muddy fields there was that row of trenches where the German line seems to come to a point, and where there was a colonel of whom we had heard in Commines, Oberst Meyer of the Seventeenth Bavarians, who had pushed forward as far as he dared go, lest he be enfiladed, was waiting now for his supports to come up—hence the point that you may have seen on your newspaper maps of January of the lines near Ypres.
I looked out from under the dirt-colored top of our motor to find that we had stopped before a little yellow-brown building over the door of which was nailed a black and white letter shingle, saying that here were the headquarters of an artillery regiment. Seeing Hauptmann Kliewer and the Corps Staff officer from Commines get out of their car and enter the house, I concluded they were arranging for our visit to the battery, and climbed out with the others to look around. We stood at the intersection of one narrow, muddy road with another that seemed to lead off at right angles towards the trenches. I looked up the village street, at the end of which a red brick church laid its high white steeple against the blue sky. I could see the shell holes in the church walls, but the steeple appeared untouched. Poor marksmanship! I saw what had been a row of houses. All that was standing now was their walls, and in the ruins of one I saw soldiers picking up the heavy roof tiles; they would use them to floor their dugouts in the trenches.
A group of soldiers, evidently off duty, had been watching us, and one of them came over. "I'm a German-American," he said, introducing himself. "I lived in Brooklyn. I worked in an exporting house on Hanover Square."
"You're not a German-American," I replied. "There's no such thing. You're a German. That's why you came over to fight, isn't it?"
"Sure," he grinned; and then he put to me that everlasting question: "What do Americans think now? Are they more friendly than when I left?" (That was in August, and he had stowed away on an Italian steamer.)
I told him that I thought they were; whereupon, apparently greatly relieved, he told me something about the street upon which we stood.