Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

"There are more than a hundred thousand American horses here," observed the Lieutenant. "They are very good horses."

Later on I stopped to stroke the soft nose of a black horse as it stood trembling near a battery of heavy guns that was firing steadily. It was American too. On its flank there was a Western brand. I gave it an additional caress, and talked a little American into one of its nervous, silky ears. We were both far from home, a trifle bewildered, a bit uneasy and frightened.

And now it was the battlefield—the flat, muddy plain of Ypres. On the right bodies of men, sheltered by intervening groves and hedges, moved about. Dispatch riders on motor cycles flew along the roads, and over the roof of a deserted farmhouse an observation balloon swung in the wind. Beyond the hedges and the grove lay the trenches, and beyond them again German batteries were growling. Their shells, however, were not bursting anywhere near us.

The balloon was descending. I asked permission to go up in it, but when I saw it near at hand I withdrew the request. It had no basket, like the ones I had seen before, but instead the observers, two of them, sat astride a horizontal bar.

The English balloons have a basket beneath, I am told. One English airship man told me that to be sent up in a stationary balloon was the greatest penalty a man could be asked to pay. The balloon jerks at the end of its rope like a runaway calf, and "the resulting nausea makes sea-sickness seem like a trip to the Crystal Palace."

So I did not go up in that observation balloon on the field of Ypres. We got out of the car, and trudged after the balloon as it was carried to its new position by many soldiers. We stood by as it rose again above the tree tops, the rope and the telephone wire hanging beneath it. But what the observers saw that afternoon from their horizontal bar I do not yet know—trenches, of course. But trenches are interesting in this war only when their occupants have left them and started forward. Batteries and ammunition trains, probably, the latter crawling along the enemy's roads. But both of these can be better and more easily located by aëroplanes.

The usefulness of the captive balloon in this war is doubtful. It serves, at the best, to take the place of an elevation of land in this flat country, is a large and tempting target, and can serve only on very clear days, when there is no ground mist—a difficult thing to achieve in Flanders.

We were getting closer to the front all the time. As the automobile jolted on, drawing out for transports, for ambulances and ammunition wagons, the two French officers spoke of the heroism of their men. They told me, one after the other, of brave deeds that had come under their own observation.

"The French common soldier is exceedingly brave—quite reckless," one of them said. "Take, for instance, the case, a day or so ago, of Philibert Musillat, of the 168th Infantry. We had captured a communication trench from the Germans and he was at the end of it, alone. There was a renewal of the German attack, and they came at him along the trench. He refused to retreat. His comrades behind handed him loaded rifles, and he killed every German that appeared until they lay in a heap. The Germans threw bombs at him, but he would not move. He stood there for more than twelve hours!"

There were many such stories, such as that of the boys of the senior class of the military school of St. Cyr, who took, the day of the beginning of the war, an oath to put on gala dress, white gloves and a red, white and blue plume, when they had the honour to receive the first order to charge.