Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

by Edward Lyell Fox

As I turned to go back to the main trench, I saw that already in this little ditch the irrepressible German soldier had been at work. There in the mud wall was a heart, outlined with the ends of exploded cartridges, and as I looked at it, a boyish man smiled sheepishly and turned away. On the battleline, less—here in the outermost ditch—than two hundred meters from the French, they draw pictures and trace hearts, these sentimental people; and yet they have been accused of wantonly burning houses, these Germans, to whom the home is the biggest thing in all existence. Were every American who believes those Belgian stories, to live with the German soldiers as I have, and to know them off duty, and to watch them in the trenches, he would be utterly at sea. The stories of Belgium do not agree with the men of the German army.

Back in the main trench, I turned off with the Lieutenant, going down what seemed to be a retreating trench until he stopped before a wooden sign that read Kamp Fuhrer. The sign marked his bombproof, and descending a flight of dirt steps, I entered his quarters, different naturally from the private soldiers. He lived in a warren of straw and mud-caked bags and the walls of his ten by ten room in the ground were covered with genuine Afghanistan rugs. The carved desk, strewn with personal belongings, also had the château look, although the rickety washstand seemed to have come from a farmhouse. There was even a tiny window looking out away from the French, a mirror, a hatrack and a stone, and when upon coming out I saw that the door to this strange abode could be locked and that a little weather vane fluttered from the roof, I gave him up. He was too wonderful. He had been watching me with the quiet smile with which all these German officers regard you when they show you the marvels of their army front, and he said: "Would you like to telephone anybody in Berlin? I shall have my orderly get the connection."

I began to catch on and when he said that I could stand at the field telephone which lay in a niche in the trench wall, near his bombproof and get a series of connections that would terminate in Germany and that I actually could carry on a conversation from the firing line with somebody in the Hotel Adlon at Berlin—well, you come to expect anything possible of achievement by these people. I thanked the Lieutenant, but told him I knew of no one to telephone and he said with a laugh that he felt sorry for me, that one always knew a Charlottenburg telephone number in Berlin.

To get back to our motors, we used other approach trenches, and we had not gone a hundred and fifty meters from the trenches, when Bob Dunn and I—we had lingered so long to talk to a German soldier who spoke American that our party had gone ahead—discovered that the water in the pits was rising above our knees. The only thing then that occurred to us when the trench ran close to a road was to climb up out of it. Dunn was hungry and took some bread and cheese from his pocket; munching it we walked along. The sky was white with tiny clouds hanging over the trees ahead. For January it was too warm; we unbuttoned our coats.

"Amazing people," Dunn was saying. I happened to look behind me. The gray stone house! "Do you know," I said feeling cold, "that we're exposed to the French trenches?"

"What of it, they're not firing now," remarked Dunn, who would no more have said that two hours before than I would. And we walked along the road, eating our bread and cheese with the French to look at our backs if they cared to, a quarter of a mile away. There was no danger; the only danger was potential. We had let ourselves feel comfortable in the lulling security of the trenches, which paradoxically kills men....

You have read that trenches have changed war, that the life of a soldier is regarded as so precious by those who devise the war machines, that everything is done to protect him. "Digging in" and "trench-work," reassuring phrases for those who do not know, or for those who do not think. By statistics I tried to show how safe the trenches are. Yes, everything is done to safeguard the soldier; he is valuable to the State, which is not a cynicism, for feeling the tremendous national spirit of Germany, you come to think that there is only one thing worth while in these years, and that is the State; and you feel that such a thing as national pride is more worth while than dollar pride; which is something which would come shamefacedly to most Americans were they to walk through the German trenches from the Channel to the Vosges. But if trenches were devised to save the soldier, modern artillery and explosives were devised to kill him; and the only thing that makes you wonder about the trenches and their relative value to life, is how a man can go into them and be alive at the end of the war. At Labasse one night I talked to a captain who told me something of these things.

"Yesterday," he said, "the English fired a hundred and fifty shells over our trench. One hundred and forty-eight burst harmlessly. The other two dropped into the trench and killed fifteen men. It took one hundred and fifty shells to do it, but fifteen men," and the Captain shook his head. I asked him what the effects of shell fire were on the men and he told me: "The moral influence of shells in breaking courage is terrific. That's why a heavy cannonading always precedes the storming of a trench. Especially is this so at night when you have to keep sending up rockets that light the ground between the trenches so the enemy cannot creep up. You see, during the day, the soldiers sight their rifles on different points and at night they simply sweep those points with fire. We only use machine guns to repel air attack, but further down the line where the French are, officers have told me that the French will waste ammunition firing a machine gun for hours, apparently satisfied if they kill only one man."

And in conversations that I had with officers at the different brigade and corps headquarters where I dined while in the West, and from things I heard in Berlin, I formed an opinion about the trenches. They are tremendously important to Germany. I would go so far as to say that everything depends upon that three hundred mile ditch in the West. If the Germans hold it, it means this: the war is going to end with Germany in possession of Belgium and a big section of industrial France; and somebody has to pay Germany's bill for this war; and German troops may not leave captured soil until the bill is paid; whereupon billions of dollars depend on a six-foot hole in the ground that twists and burrows across Europe....

I had seen the trenches by day; later I saw them by night. A tedious, slipping walk through half a mile of muddy, unroofed tunnels and I was in the front German line near Labasse.