The Red Glutton: With the German Army at the Front

by Irvin S. Cobb

"Our men just picked it up," he explained; "we think it must come from a French wireless station across the river. Naturally we cannot understand it, any more than they can understand our messages—they're all in code, you know. Every day or two we change our code, and I presume they do too."

Two of our party had unshipped their cameras by now, for the pass which we carried entitled us, among other important things, to commandeer that precious fluid, gasoline, whenever needed, and to take photographs; but we were asked to make no snapshots here. We gathered that there were certain reasons not unconnected with secret military usage why we might not take away with us plates bearing pictures of the field wireless. In the main, though, remarkably few restrictions were laid upon us that day. Once or twice, very casually, somebody asked us to refrain from writing about this thing or that thing which we had seen; but that was all.

In a corner of the turnip field close up to the road were mounds of fresh-turned clay, and so many of them were there and so closely were they spaced and for so considerable a distance did they stretch along, they made two long yellow ribs above the herbage. At close intervals small wooden crosses were stuck up in the rounded combs of earth so that the crosses formed a sort of irregular fence. A squad of soldiers were digging more holes in the tough earth. Their shovel blades flashed in the sunlight and the clods flew up in showers.

"We have many buried over there," said an artillery captain, seeing that I watched the grave diggers, "a general among them and other officers. It is there we bury those who die in the Institute hospital. Every day more die, and so each morning trenches are made ready for those who will die during that day. A good friend of mine is over there; he was buried day before yesterday. I sat up late last night writing to his wife—or perhaps I should say his widow. They had been married only a few weeks when the call came. It will be very hard on her."

He did not name the general who lay over yonder, nor did we ask him the name. To ask would not have been etiquette, and for him to answer would have been worse. Rarely in our wanderings did we find a German soldier of whatsoever rank who referred to his superior officer by name. He merely said "My captain" or "Our colonel." And this was of a piece with the plan—not entirely confined to the Germans—of making a secret of losses of commanders and movements of commands.

We went thence then, the distance being perhaps three miles by road and not above eight minutes by automobile at the rate we traveled to an aviation camp at the back side of the town. Here was very much to see, including many aëroplanes of sorts domiciled under canvas hangars and a cheerful, chatty, hospitable group of the most famous aviators in the German army—lean, keen young men all of them—and a sample specimen of the radish-shaped bomb which these gentlemen carry aloft with the intent of dropping it upon their enemies when occasion shall offer. Each of us in turn solemnly hefted the bomb to feel its weight. I should guess it weighed thirty pounds—say, ten pounds for the case and twenty pounds for its load of fearsome ingredients. Finally, yet foremost, we were invited to inspect that thing which is the pride and the brag of this particular arm of the German Army—a balloon-cannon, so called.

The balloon-gun of this size is—or was at the date when I saw it—an exclusively German institution. I believe the Allies have balloon-guns too, but theirs are smaller, according to what the Germans say. This one was mounted on a squatty half-turret at the tail end of an armored-steel truck. It had a mechanism as daintily adjusted as a lady's watch and much more accurate, and when being towed by its attendant automobile, which has harnessed within it the power of a hundred and odd draft horses, it has been known to cover sixty English miles in an hour, for all that its weight is that of very many loaded vans.

The person in authority here was a youthful and blithe lieutenant—an Iron Cross man—with pale, shallow blue eyes and a head of bright blond hair. He spun one small wheel to show how his pet's steel nose might be elevated almost straight upward; then turned another to show how the gun might be swung, as on a pivot, this way and that to command the range of the entire horizon, and he concluded the performance, with the aid of several husky lads in begrimed gray, by going through the pantomime of loading with a long yellow five-inch shell from the magazine behind him, and pretending to fire, meanwhile explaining that he could send one shot aloft every six seconds and with each shot reach a maximum altitude of between seven and eight thousand feet. Altogether it was a very pretty sight to see and most edifying. Likewise it took on an added interest when we learned that the blue-eyed youth and his brother of a twin balloon-cannon at the front of Laon had during the preceding three weeks brought down four of the enemy's airmen, and were exceedingly hopeful of fattening their joint average before the present week had ended.

After that we took photographs ad lib., and McCutcheon had a trip with Ingold, a great aviator, in a biplane, which the Germans call a double-decker, as distinguished from the Taube or monoplane, with its birdlike wings and curved tail rudder-piece. Just as they came down, after a circular spin over the lines, a strange machine, presumably hostile, appeared far up and far away, but circled off to the south out of target reach before the balloon gunman could get the range of her and the aim. On the heels of this a biplane from another aviation field somewhere down the left wing dropped in quite informally bearing two grease-stained men to pass the time of day and borrow some gasoline. The occasion appeared to demand a drink. We all repaired, therefore, to one of the great canvas houses where the air birds nest nighttimes and where the airmen sleep. There we had noggins of white wine all round, and a pointer dog, which was chained to an officer's trunk, begged me in plain pointer language to cast off his leash so he might go and stalk the covey of pheasants that were taking a dust-bath in the open road not fifty yards away.

The temptation was strong, but our guides said if we meant to get to the battlefront before lunch it was time, and past time, we got started. Being thus warned we did get started.