With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

In other wars the “front” was something almost human. It advanced, wavered, and withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was electrified. It remained in no fixed place, but, like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with galloping horses and cheering men overwhelmed a valley. In comparison, this trench work did not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of a mining-camp during the spring freshet, and for all the attention the cavemen paid to them, the reports of their “seventy-fives” and the “Jack Johnsons” of the enemy bursting on Mont de Lorette might have come from miners blasting rock.

What we saw of these cave-dwellers was only a few feet of a moat that for three hundred miles like a miniature canal is cut across France. Where we stood we could see of the three hundred miles only mud walls, so close that we brushed one with each elbow. By looking up we could see the black, leaden sky. Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an arrow pointed to a first-aid dressing-station. Behind us was the winding entrance to a shelter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement and corrugated iron, and lit by a candle.

From a trench that was all we could see of the war, and that is all millions of fighting men see of it—wet walls of clay as narrow as a grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital, earthen steps leading to a shelter from sudden death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky and perhaps a great bird at which the enemy is shooting snowballs.

In northern France there are many buried towns and villages. They are buried in their own cellars. Arras is still uninterred. She is the corpse of a city that waits for burial, and day by day the German shells are trying to dig her grave. They were at it yesterday when we visited Arras, and this morning they will be hammering her again.

Seven centuries before this war Arras was famous for her tapestries, so famous that in England a piece of tapestry was called an arras. Now she has given her name to a battle—to different battles—that began with the great bombardment of October a year ago, and each day since then have continued. On one single day, June 26, the Germans threw into the city shells in all sizes, from three to sixteen inches, and to the number of ten thousand. That was about one for each house.

This bombardment drove 2,700 inhabitants into exile, of whom 1,200 have now returned. The army feeds them, and in response they have opened shops that the shells have not already opened, and supply the soldiers with tobacco, post-cards, and from those gardens not hidden under bricks and cement, fruit and vegetables. In the deserted city these civilians form an inconspicuous element. You can walk for great distances and see none of them. When they do appear in the empty streets they are like ghosts. Every day the shells change one or two of them into real ghosts. But the others still stay on. With the dogs nosing among the fallen bricks, and the pigeons on the ruins of the cathedral, they know no other home.

As we entered Arras the silence fell like a sudden change of temperature. It was actual and menacing. Every corner seemed to threaten an ambush. Our voices echoed so loudly that unconsciously we spoke in lower tones. The tap of the captain’s walking-stick resounded like the blow of a hammer. The emptiness and stillness was like that of a vast cemetery, and the grass that had grown through the paving-stones deadened the sound of our steps. This silence was broken only by the barking of the French seventy-fives, in parts of the city hidden to us, the boom of the German guns in answer, and from overhead by the aeroplanes. In the absolute stillness the whirl of their engines came to us with the steady vibrations of a loom.

In the streets were shell holes that had been recently filled and covered over with bricks and fresh earth. It was like walking upon newly made graves. On either side of us were gaping cellars into which the houses had dumped themselves or, still balancing above them, were walls prettily papered, hung with engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact. These walls were roofless and defenseless against the rain and snow. Other houses were like those toy ones built for children, with the front open. They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, and a reading-lamp.