With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

The professional guide, who is already so professional that he is exchanging German cartridges for tips, supplied a morbid detail of impossible bad taste. Among the German wounded there was a major (I remember describing him a year ago as looking like a college professor) who, when the fire came, was one of these the priests could not save, and who was burned alive. Marks on the gray surface of a pillar against which he reclined and grease spots on the stones of the floor are supposed to be evidences of his end, a torture brought upon him by the shells of his own people. Mr. Kipling has written that there are many who “hope and pray these signs will be respected by our children’s children.” Mr. Kipling’s hope shows an imperfect conception of the purposes of a cathedral. It is a house dedicated to God, and on earth to peace and good-will among men. It is not erected to teach generations of little children to gloat over the fact that an enemy, even a German officer, was by accident burned alive.

Personally, I feel the sooner those who introduced “frightfulness” to France, Belgium, and the coasts of England are hunted down and destroyed the better. But the stone-mason should get to work, and remove those stains from the Rheims cathedral. Instead, for our children’s children, would not a tablet to Edith Cavell be better, or one to the French priest, Abbé Thinot, who carried the wounded Germans from the burning cathedral, and who later, while carrying French wounded from the field of battle, was himself hit three times, and of his wounds died?

I hinted to the lieutenant that the cathedral would remain for some time, but that the trenches would soon be ploughed into turnip-beds.

So, we moved toward the trenches. The officer commanding them lived in what he described as the deck of a battleship sunk underground. It was a happy simile. He had his conning-tower, in which, with a telescope through a slit in a steel plate, he could sweep the countryside. He had a fire-control station, executive offices, wardroom, cook’s galley, his own cabin, equipped with telephones, electric lights, and running water. There was a carpet on the floor, a gay coverlet on the four-poster bed, photographs on his dressing-table, and flowers. All of these were buried deep underground. A puzzling detail was a perfectly good brass lock and key on his door. I asked if it were to keep out shells or burglars. And he explained that the door with the lock in tact had been blown off its hinges in a house of which no part was now standing. He had borrowed it, as he had borrowed everything else in the subterranean war-ship, from the near-by ruins.

He was an extremely light-hearted and courteous host, but he frowned suspiciously when he asked if I knew a correspondent named Senator Albert Beveridge. I hastily repudiated Beveridge. I knew him not, I said, as a correspondent, but as a politician who possibly had high hopes of the German vote. “He dined with us,” said the colonel, “and then wrote against France.” I suggested it was at their own risk if they welcomed those who already had been with the Germans, and who had been received by the German Emperor. This is no war for neutrals.

Then began a walk of over a mile through an open drain. The walls were of chalk as hard as flint. Unlike the mud trenches in Artois, there were no slides to block the miniature canal. It was as firm and compact as a whitewashed stone cell. From the main drain on either side ran other drains, cul-de-sacs, cellars, trap-doors, and ambushes. Overhead hung balls of barbed-wire that, should the French troops withdraw, could be dropped and so block the trench behind them. If you raised your head they playfully snatched off your cap. It was like ducking under innumerable bridges of live wires.

The drain opened at last into a wrecked town. Its ruins were complete. It made Pompeii look like a furnished flat. The officer of the day joined us here, and to him the lieutenant resigned the post of guide. My new host wore a steel helmet, and at his belt dangled a mask against gas. He led us to the end of what had been a street, and which was now barricaded with huge timbers, steel doors, like those to a gambling house, intricate cat’s cradles of wire, and solid steel plates.

To go back seemed the only way open. But the officer in the steel cap dived through a slit in the iron girders, and as he disappeared, beckoned. I followed down a well that dropped straight into the very bowels of the earth. It was very dark, and only crosspieces of wood offered a slippery footing. Into the darkness, with hands pressed against the well, and with feet groping for the log steps, we tobogganed down, down, down. We turned into a tunnel, and, by the slant of the ground, knew we were now mounting. There was a square of sunshine, and we walked out, and into a graveyard. It was like a dark change in a theatre. The last scene had been the ruins of a town, a gate like those of the Middle Ages, studded with bolts, reinforced with steel plates, guarded by men-at-arms in steel casques, and then the dark change into a graveyard, with grass and growing flowers, gravel walks, and hedges.

The graves were old, the monuments and urns above them moss-covered, but one was quite new, and the cross above it said that it was the grave of a German aviator. As they passed it the French officers saluted. We entered a trench as straight as the letter Z. And at each twist and turn we were covered by an eye in a steel door. An attacking party advancing would have had as much room in which to dodge that eye as in a bath-tub. One man with his magazine rifle could have halted a dozen. And when in the newspapers you read that one man has captured twenty prisoners, he probably was looking at them through the peep-hole in one of those steel doors.