Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

by Edward Lyell Fox

"You see those houses over there?" and he pointed to the row of ruins. "Well, when we first came here, Artillery Headquarters were in the last house. Then a shell hit it when the officers were out—Gott sei Dank!—so they moved next door. A shell bursting on the street here"—and he indicated where the road was filled in—"smashed up that house so that it caught fire. Then the Colonel moved down to the yellow house there. I wonder when he'll have to move again."

I wondered too, and began to feel uncomfortable. Over in front of the yellow house—the first floor had evidently been a store—I saw a group of soldiers looking in the window. They were closely inspecting and talking about the photographic reproductions that have evidently been hung there by orders, there where all the soldiers, back from the trenches on their relief, might see. For I noticed that there were pictures of captured Russian guns, of General Hindenburg, of the victorious German troops entering Lódz. And I thought that here was but another instance of the marvelous system which is carrying on this war against nearly all Europe. Pictures of triumph from the Eastern lines posted where the soldiers in the West can see and be thrilled with national pride.

I began to notice these soldiers who, back from the trenches and cleaned up, were strolling around Houthem as on holiday, shaved, their uniforms made as clean as possible, smoking cigars, they reminded me of the workmen you see stopping before the windows of the cheap shop in a factory town on pay-envelope afternoon. In a field close by I saw a swarm of them, gathered round one of the yellow and black Liebesgaben wagons that bring gifts from home to the soldiers free of charge. Presently, his back bending under the weight of a bulky white bag, I saw one of the soldiers come away from the wagon and slowly shuffle down the street. You guessed he had been the one chosen to get the gifts sent to the men of his company, and as he plodded on past the shelled houses, I heard him whistling. There came, a few minutes later, from behind a gray shed where a transport had been delivering lumber, two other soldiers, and on their shoulders they carried a long box made of new wood—a coffin. And in confusion I thought it must be for some officer, and I thought of the man with the Liebesgaben pack and of the homes that had sent the gifts it contained, and that when he would read off the names, that there would be names of the dead....

The yard in front of the white-steepled church of the Annunciation of Mary the Virgin was filled with the familiar little wooden crosses, fitted in, it seemed, between the old tombstones of the Belgian inhabitants. As Hauptmann Kliewer swung back the heavy door, I was amazed to see that the church swarmed with soldiers. A confusing clash between the instincts of religion and military necessity, and I walked among the soldiers. They were recruits receiving a last drill in the use of arms, stiffening them before they went down into the trenches. You told yourself that you were glad all the benches had been torn from this church so that these men might be drilled here without being exposed to the shelling that their detected massed presence anywhere around Houthem would of a certainty bring on. I know had it not been war, instincts of my upbringing would have revolted against this, that the thoughtless like to speak of as desecration. But the more you see of war, the more you come to measure the things of war time solely in terms of life and death. It is not the spilling of Holy Water that matters, only blood.

Almost in a daze, I stared up at the gaping holes that the shells had made in the roof. Broken slates stuck down from out the smashed plaster ceiling, and you thought of them as of bones, and the brown tatters of hanging plaster as wounded flesh, for you came to think of this place as being a stricken personality, call it a stricken religion, if you like. But was it not written that He suffered so that a world might be saved? Surely, then, what could mean a few shell holes in one of His houses, if most of those who hid there might still be spared.

I walked between the lines of young recruits, some loading, others learning the sights, others emptying their magazines, and I came at last to a shrine of the Virgin built in a recess in the wall. Above it I could see a patch of the blue sky, framed in the hole of a shell; but it was not the shrine that held me; it was the soldiers before it. They were down on one knee, and I wondered if they were Catholics worshiping there while the others drilled. "Feuer!" And each man whom I had thought on reverent knee, snapped a gun to his shoulder; I heard the hammers click. They had been learning to shoot kneeling. I wondered if any of them thought of the Virgin.... "Damn dumbheads!" cried an officer. "Faster!"

Explaining that the enemy had left an observation post in the steeple and that the Germans were using it for the same purpose now, Hauptmann Kliewer led us into a circular staircase of wood that coiled away into the darkness of the narrow tower. Did we wish to climb up to it? The Hauptmann explained that it was dangerous, for "knowing we had observers in the steeple, the French artillery would, sooner or later, open fire." But arguing with yourself that the French had evidently tried to hit the steeple before but had only succeeded in putting a few shell holes in the church roof, you became convinced of the comparative safety of it, and began to climb the spiral stairs. The higher you got, the more rotten the boards became, and I was wondering if there wasn't more danger from my two hundred odd pounds being brought down on a rotten step than there was of a shell crashing through the brick cylinder. After climbing up a series of shaky vertical ladders we stepped out on the observing platform. To put us at our ease, Hauptmann Kliewer warned us all about not gathering around the observing window, a hole, a foot square, cut in the wall, adding that the platform was not strong. So, two at a time, we stood at the window and looked out.

I saw the country laid out as it is from a low-flying aeroplane, the soggy fields exaggerating the squareness that the gray fences gave; beyond the flat red-roofed houses I saw a dark green fringe of trees, and then above that a tiny puff of white smoke appeared, then another, until I counted four, all billowing out in the thinnest of fleecy clouds, until thinning all in a white blur, they vanished.

"That's shrapnel," Hauptmann Kliewer was saying. "Our trenches are right by the woods there."

And it came to me, the wondrous glory of the little white clouds; if that was so the soldiers might look upon beauty before death. The wind was blowing towards us, and we heard the shrapnel's peculiar whistling burst and then the heavy shaking roar of grenaten and over to the right, just at the edge of the wood, I saw rising the blackish smoke of heavy shells. About a mile away, exactly opposite, I saw a brown tower between the trees.