The Red Glutton: With the German Army at the Front

by Irvin S. Cobb

Of a battle there is this to be said—that the closer you get to it the less do you see of it. Always in my experiences in Belgium and my more recent experiences in France I found this to be true. Take, for example, the present instance. I knew that we were approximately in the middle sworl of the twisting scroll formed by the German center, and that we were at this moment entering the very tip of the enormous inverted V made by the frontmost German defenses. I knew that stretching away to the southeast of us and to the northwest was a line some two hundred miles long, measuring it from tip to tip, where sundry millions of men in English khaki and French fustian and German shoddy-wools were fighting the biggest fight and the most prolonged fight and the most stubborn fight that historians probably will write down as having been fought in this war or any lesser war. I knew this fight had been going on for weeks now back and forth upon the River Aisne and would certainly go on for weeks and perhaps months more to come. I knew these things because I had been told them; but I shouldn't have known if I hadn't been told. I shouldn't even have guessed it.

I recall that we traveled at a cup-racing dip along a road that first wound like a coiling snake and then straightened like a striking snake, and that always we traveled through dust so thick it made a fog. In this chalky land of northern France the brittle soil dries out after a rain very quickly, and turns into a white powder where there are wheels to churn it up and grit it fine. Here surely there was an abundance of wheels. We passed many marching men and many lumbering supply trains which were going our way, and we met many motor ambulances and many ammunition trucks which were coming back. Always the ambulances were full and the ammunition wagons were empty. I judge an expert in these things might by the fullness of the one and the emptiness of the other gauge the emphasis with which the fight ahead went on. The drivers of the trucks nearly all wore captured French caps and French uniform coats, which adornment the marching men invariably regarded as a quaint jest to be laughed at and cheered for.

We stopped at our appointed place, which was on the top of a ridge where a general of a corps had his headquarters. From here one had a view—a fair view and, roughly, a fan-shaped view—of certain highly important artillery operations. Likewise, the eminence, gentle and gradual as it was, commanded a mile-long stretch of the road, which formed the main line of communication between the front and the base; and these two facts in part explained why the general had made this his abiding place. Even my layman's mind could sense the reasons for establishing headquarters at such a spot.

As for the general, he and his staff, at the moment of our arrival in their midst, were stationed at the edge of a scanty woodland where telescopes stood and a table with maps and charts on it. Quite with the manner of men who had nothing to do except to enjoy the sunshine and breathe the fresh air, they strolled back and forth in pairs and trios. I think it must have been through force of habit that, when they halted to turn about and retrace the route, they stopped always for a moment or two and faced southward. It was from the southward that there came rolling up to us the sounds of a bellowing chorus of gunfire—a Wagnerian chorus, truly. That perhaps was as it should be. Wagner's countrymen were helping to make it. Now the separate reports strung out until you could count perhaps three between reports; now they came so close together that the music they made was a constant roaring which would endure for a minute on a stretch, or half a minute anyhow. But for all the noticeable heed which any uniformed men in my vicinity paid to this it might as well have been blasting in a distant stone quarry. This attitude which they maintained, coupled with the fact that seemingly all the firing did no damage whatsoever, only served to strengthen the illusion that after all it was not the actual business of warfare which spread itself beneath our eyes.

Apparently most of the shells from the Allies' side—which of course was the far side from us—rose out of a dip in the contour of the land. Rising so, they mainly fell among or near the shattered remnants of two hamlets upon the nearer front of a little hill perhaps three miles from our location. A favorite object of their attack appeared to be a wrecked beet-sugar factory of which one side was blown away.

There would appear just above the horizon line a ball of smoke as black as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high explosives. Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they told us, would be shrapnel. The German reply to the enemy's guns issued from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; and these German shells, so far as we might judge, passed entirely over and beyond the smashed hamlets and the ruined sugar-beet factory and, curving downward, exploded out of our sight.

"The French persist in a belief that we have men in those villages," said one of the general's aides to me. "They are wasting their powder. There are many men there and some among them are Germans, but they are all dead men."

He offered to show me some live men, and took me to one of the telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I focused for distance. Suddenly out of the blur of the lens there sprang up in front of me, seemingly quite close, a zigzagging toy trench cut in the face of a little hillock. This trench was full of gray figures of the size of very small dolls. They were moving aimlessly back and forth, it seemed to me, doing nothing at all. Then I saw another trench that ran slantwise up the hillock and it contained more of the pygmies. A number of these pygmies came out of their trench—I could see them quite plainly, clambering up the steep wall of it—and they moved, very slowly it would seem, toward the crosswise trench on ahead a bit. To reach it they had to cross a sloping green patch of cleared land. So far as I might tell no explosive or shrapnel shower fell into them or near them, but when they had gone perhaps a third of the distance across the green patch there was a quick scatteration of their inch-high figures. Quite distinctly I counted three manikins who instantly fell down flat and two others who went ahead a little way deliberately, and then lay down. The rest darted back to the cover which they had just quit and jumped in briskly. The five figures remained where they had dropped and became quiet. Anyway, I could detect no motion in them. They were just little gray strips. Into my mind on the moment came incongruously a memory of what I had seen a thousand times in the composing room of a country newspaper where the type was set by hand. I thought of five pica plugs lying on the printshop floor.

It was hard for me to make myself believe that I had seen human beings killed and wounded. I can hardly believe it yet—that those insignificant toy-figures were really and truly men. I watched through the glass after that for possibly twenty minutes, until the summons came for lunch, but no more of the German dolls ventured out of their make-believe defenses to be blown flat by an invisible blast.

It was a picnic lunch served on board trestles under a tree behind the cover of a straw-roofed shelter tent, and we ate it in quite a peaceful and cozy picnic fashion. Twice during the meal an orderly came with a message which he had taken off a field telephone in a little pigsty of logs and straw fifty feet away from us; but the general each time merely canted his head to hear what the whispered word might be and went on eating. There was no clattering in of couriers, no hurried dispatching of orders this way and that. Only, just before we finished with the meal, he got up and walked away a few paces, and there two of his aides joined him and the three of them confabbed together earnestly for a couple of minutes or so. While so engaged they had the air about them of surgeons preparing to undertake an operation and first consulting over the preliminary details. Or perhaps it would be truer to say they looked like civil engineers discussing the working-out of an undertaking regarding which there was interest but no uneasiness. Assuredly they behaved not in the least as a general and aides would behave in a story book or on the stage, and when they were through they came back for their coffee and their cigars to the table where the rest of us sat.