It was not the brisk, invigorating cold that invites you out of doors. It had no cheery, healthful appeal to skates, toboggans, and the jangling bells of a cutter. It was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold of a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of a morgue. Your clothes did not warm you, the heat of your body had to warm your clothes. And warm, also, all of the surrounding hills.
Between the road and the margin of the lake were bamboo reeds as tall as lances, and at the edge of these were gathered myriads of ducks. The fishermen were engaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks. They went about this in a methodical fashion. All around the lake, concealed in the reeds and lifted a few feet above the water they had raised huts on piles. In front of these huts was a ledge or balcony. They looked like overgrown bird-houses on stilts.
One fisherman waited in a boat to pick up the dead ducks, and the other hurled stones from a sling. It was the same kind of a sling as the one with which David slew Goliath. In Athens I saw small boys using it to throw stones at an electric-light pole. The one the fisherman used was about eight feet long. To get the momentum he whirled it swiftly above his head as a cowboy swings a lariat, and then let one end fly loose, and the stone, escaping, smashed into the mass of ducks. If it stunned or killed a duck the human water-spaniel in the boat would row out and retrieve it. To duck hunters at home the sport would chiefly recommend itself through the cheapness of the ammunition.
On the road we met relays of water-carts and wagons that had been up the hills with food for the gunners at the front; and engineers were at work repairing the stone bridges or digging détours to avoid those that had disappeared. They had been built to support no greater burden than a flock of sheep, an ox-cart, or what a donkey can carry on his back, and the assault of the British motor-trucks and French six-inch guns had driven them deep into the mud.
After ten miles we came to what a staff officer would call an “advanced base,” but which was locally designated the “Dump.” At the side of the road, much of it uncovered to the snow, were stores of ammunition, “bully beef,” and barb-wire. The camp bore all the signs of a temporary halting place. It was just what the Tommies called it, a dump. We had not been told then that the Allies were withdrawing, but one did not have to be a military expert to see that there was excellent reason why they should.
They were so few. Whatever the force was against them, the force I saw was not strong enough to hold the ground, not that it covered, but over which it was sprinkled. There were outposts without supports, supports without reserves. A squad was expected to perform the duties of a company. Where a brigade was needed there was less than a battalion. Against the white masses of the mountains and the desolate landscape without trees, houses, huts, without any sign of human habitation, the scattered groups of khaki only accented the bleak loneliness.
At the dump we had exchanged for the impromptu motor-truck, automobiles of the French staff, and as “Jimmie” Hare and I were alone in one of them we could stop where we liked. So we halted where an English battery was going into action. It had dug itself into the side of a hill and covered itself with snow and pine branches. Somewhere on one of the neighboring hills the “spotter” was telephoning the range. The gunners could not see at what they were firing. They could see only the high hill of rock and snow, at the base of which they stood shoulder high in their mud cellars. Ten yards to the rear of them was what looked like a newly made grave reverently covered with pine boughs. Through these a rat-faced young man, with the receivers of a telephone clamped to his ears, pushed his head.
| From a photograph by William G. Shepherd. | |
| John T. McCutcheon. | John F. Bass. |
| Richard Harding Davis. | James H. Hare. |
| American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia. | |