For two days I had been in the vicinity of Lille with Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann of the Great General Staff. Near Labasse I had seen the trenches at night, but I wanted to see them by day; for at night the soldiers are all keyed high; it is then that the hard fighting is done. What did they do with themselves during the day? It was at Lille, the fifth night after I had left Berlin, that I met five other American correspondents, a Hollander and a Norwegian, who were in Hauptmann Kliewer's party. After dinner in the Hotel de Europe, Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, who had gone with Hauptmann Kliewer to the Staff of the Second Bavarian Army Corps, told me that from now on the two parties would travel together until we reached Brussels. "In the morning," he said, "we go to the trenches in front of Arras. You must be here in the lobby ready to take the motor not later than six."
In the inky darkness of a clear, cold morning three army automobiles left the Hotel de Europe and roared away through the streets of Lille. A Second Army Corps officer whom Bob Dunn, the New York Post's correspondent, was apologetically explaining as being a cousin of his, rode in the first car. This officer, who had never traveled the road to Arras before, was acting as our guide; soon we understood Dunn's apologetic way, for after one challenge upon another came ringing out of the night, and we had stopped to have our papers read in the lantern light of sentries and patrols, Dunn's cousin lost the way. "I knew he would," remarked Dunn. "No one related to me could go straight."
The officer tried again. He took us along the crumbling path of war, along a road where under a dark centered half moon we saw in the silvery graying light the lanes of abandoned trenches and rows of gaping shell torn houses, while one by one the stars turned to tiny icicle tips, and day slowly came on. I think after crossing the Ypres Canal at Douai, that we followed every blind alley between there and Vitry, for turning one corner after another, with each new row of poplars coloring clearer against a brightening sky, we seemed to come no nearer to the boom of the guns.
As we plowed through a heavy cross road to Mouchy le Preux and came out on the highway to Arras, we saw a German battery. The last stars had withdrawn, and in the grayish morning light the clanking field pieces lumbered by, a ghostly company with vague gray ghostly men on ghostly horses. I imagined they were moving parallel to the firing line, changing position. How close were we now? Probably six kilometers. Two miles riding up the road to Arras with the battlefield of October 1st, the muddy, desolated fields on either side. It was up this road that the French artillery made its retreat, across those fields that their infantry poured with the Duke of Altenburg's Saxonians in hot pursuit. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann had told me that the French had given way all along the line here before the German second drive, retreating to Arras, which they now held. I remember that he had spoken of Arras as an objective and that the Germans were constantly drawing nearer. How close were they now? How far from the French would we be in the trench? One began to feel a tremulous excitement.
Hauptmann Kliewer and Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann told us that this was as far as they dared go with the motors. To approach closer than two kilometers to Arras with automobiles, and we easily would be discerned by the French artillery observers. Evidently having been telephoned that we were coming, two gray cloaked officers were waiting for us outside a little brown shack that I guessed was regimental headquarters. The Captain, an intelligent looking Prussian—and, by the way, I've yet to see one of the upturned mustached bullies of whom our cartoonists are so fond—spoke perfect English.
"Leave your overcoats here," he advised. "It's rather warm going up to the trenches." Then he glanced at our feet and gave an approving nod. "No pumps or gaiters, I see. That's good; you'll be up to your knees in water," and as I walked up the road towards Arras, he told me that two Italian journalists—any newspaper man is a journalist in Europe—had visited the trenches at Arras. And the Captain laughed. "One wore a pair of gray spats and the other had one of those artist ties, those black fluffy things. One of our soldiers drew a sketch of them." When we had gone about a hundred yards, we turned to the right, descending by an abrupt runaway into a trench that dug in a plowed field, led away at right angles from the road. More than a thousand meters from the French trench, and with rifle fire yet to begin, and shielded by the very fact that you walked in a narrow pit seven feet under ground, comparatively less in danger than you had been in the motor from Mouchy le Preux on, you nevertheless tingled with a strange exhilaration. Keeping one eye on the top of the trench, prepared to duck, lest it suddenly became uniform in height and expose your head to the open field, gazing the rest of the time at the bottom of the pit, lest you slip in a hole and go sprawling in the yellow liquid ooze, we followed the officers, slavishly imitating their movements of progress. Then we came to another trench that made a right angle with our own, advancing towards the firing line, parallel to the road we had left as unsafe, exactly as in the approach trenches at Labasse. But as we trudged on, splashing now and then through water to our knees, we no longer imitated the officers. They walked as before, unconcernedly and erect. We were going along ducking our backs, for shrapnel was beginning to fly in a neighboring field, and I heard it panging in the mud on all sides.
It was light now, although a fleecy white moon still hung in the sky, and as it grew brighter, one after another, the batteries began the forenoon cannonade, and as I heard the bursting shrapnel ever growing more numerous, I guessed it was the same as at that other point on the line where I had been two days before, where the French cannonade before and after luncheon, always beginning at the same time. And then directly above me I heard the disconcerting burst of shrapnel and I saw the pretty billowing white clouds that the explosion always makes, and knowing that to be directly under shrapnel is to be out of danger for the little balls spray like the stream of a watering cart, I comfortably watched the smoke until it drifted away, thinning like blown silk.
From the field the trench sloped up into a deserted house. Obviously a part of the trench, I saw the wall of the house had been pierced to make a passage the same width of the ditch, and that in the far wall there loomed a similar passage doubtless leading down into the trench again. As I walked through the ground floor rooms of the house, it reminded me of something I had seen from the windows of the military train that had brought me from Metz to Lille. There the survey of the German pioneers had hit through the middle of certain villages, and I had seen houses flush against the track, with their side walls torn off so that the trains might pass without smashing into them; and I had seen everything in the disordered rooms of those houses. Here it was the same, only this time war had invaded homes with a trench instead of a train. First one, then through a doorway into a second room in utter disorder. I saw concentric holes that marked the entrance and exit of a shell and the confusion of turmoil and pillage. A bureau with the drawers emptied out, clothing strewn on the floor, a baby's high chair overturned, a crucifix lying broken in a heap of fallen plaster, those rooms seemed to be a contrast, a chaos, the picture of the illimitable dissolution of war in one home. Into the trench again, up another slope through another silent house, through a stableyard, vile with blackish typhus water, and so on along a path of desolation, if not where the trench led through farmhouses where it pierced unharvested beet fields, with the panging of shrapnel and now the sucking whistle of rifle balls until we came to another and wider trench. This at right angles to our own, crossed the road to Arras.
"This is the line," the Captain explained. "The French are only two hundred meters away. Don't expose yourself, and when you hear shrapnel close, it is best to stoop down a little. Come," and turning into the pit, he led the way towards the highway. We were walking parallel to the French, and they were only two hundred meters away. And I thought then of it being the great ditch, burrowed under Europe for three hundred miles, and I was soon to feel that I was among the inhabitants of a new and terrible world.
Your pulse quickened. Back there where you left the road and the brown muddy walls about you there had come a thrill; as you floundered on up through the approaches hearing the burst of shrapnel and the spatter of the balls on the soaked field, you were uneasy; but now as you gazed up and down the trench, which you have thought of not in so commonplace a way as to call it "trench," rather "firing line," as slowly its impressions came upon you, they left you amazed. This goal that you had been striving for during a whole month was a place where men looked bored!