Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

by Edward Lyell Fox

And how can any one be uneasy or frightened when every one else seems as though the very safety of their existence is torturing them to death? But that was before I went into the advance trenches, for out posts make a difference in the soldiers, as I was presently to see.

"This position," explained the Captain, as we walked in single file, "was a French trench. We did some work on it. Made bombproofs out of some of their old rifle pits and dug new ones along what was the back of their trenches. Now the French see our guns sticking out where their stove pipes used to be."

I noticed one little square doorway after another cut in the back wall of the trench, curtained with burlap bags, and as we passed, the curtains were pushed aside and I saw the soldiers sitting inside playing cards by candlelight or smoking and talking, and all looking so comfortably bored; just as you would imagine them sitting in a Friedrichstrasse café and watching the crowds go by. "There's no attacking now," explained the Captain, "so only half the men are on duty in the rifle pits. The others lounge in their dugouts."

And as we went further along I saw signs of idle time when soldiers revert to childhood and remember that they used to dig things in the dirt and sand. Here in the trench wall four nitches had been dug, three in a line and the other below. And in the upper nitches, tiled in various attitudes suggestive of destruction, were three toy battleships, flying tiny Union Jacks and below them a toy submarine with U 9 painted on his gray hull. And I was positive that I knew the store in Leipzigerstrasse from which they had been sent by Feld Post.

To the right I saw the short wide passages leading up to the rifle pits where two soldiers stood on a platform cut in the dirt. One was cleaning his gun while the other squinted along a rifle barrel that protruded through a narrow port reenforced with bags of sand, and watched. His manner, the stiffened pose of the gray-green shoulders, the boot braced in the ground, set him off in increasing alertness and vigilance. In one of the dugouts I heard the whine of a harmonica; it was the waltz from "The Dollar Princess." And as I came along the line the impression grew on me, the men in the rifle pits, crouching statues of war; and the men in the dugouts behind, wondering what to do with their time.

The trench sloped upwards and we were crossing the road to Arras, but I could not see the village, for there loomed a barrier of sandbags six feet high; and thrust through this gray wall, I saw a machine gun, with a soldier dabbing it with oil, while another peered through a slit towards Arras. It was obvious that the gun was trained on the road. A Lieutenant came to meet us.

"The Lieutenant," said the Captain, after he had introduced us, "is in command of this section of the trench."

As we followed up along the line, I began to think of the French as being only two hundred meters away and that it was uncanny not to see them. Every now and then the whistle of a bullet told you that they too were watching this trench just as the Germans were watching theirs, and in an empty field, a quarter of a mile away, grenaten were bursting with terrific din. Yet perversely you half doubted that the French were there at all. Subconsciously the thing didn't seem possible, a line of armed men just across the field; and you had been walking opposite them for more than a quarter mile without any more of a realization of their presence than that caused by the suck of a rifle ball. Where were they? What did they look like?

At the next rifle pit, with a nod to the Captain, I turned in. The soldier who sat with his gun on his knee, smiled in a friendly way. I said something in German and his comrade at the oblong porthole, relaxed his vigilance long enough to look around and grin. Carefully I listened for bullets. On this point there was apparently no firing. With absurd stealth—I imagine they must have both grinned—I stuck my head up over the top of the trenches. I saw about a quarter of a mile away a fringe of trees with white and yellow houses showing through, and further forward, just off the macadam road, a house of grayish stone. The sky was blue and in the bright sunlight the furrowed rain-soaked field was a golden brown. I could see a black wisp of smoke curling from a red brick chimney, but where were the French?... Something slapped against the mud in front of me, and a shower of dirt flew over the trench. Down I ducked. Yes, the French were there.

The soldier at the porthole was talking excited German. "He says," smiled the man with the gun across the knee, speaking English now for the first time, "that you kept your head up too long. It's all right to look quickly and get down, but the other way they see you."