What has broken the peaceful tremor of our thoughts is the sight of some soldiers pulling into the town a half-wrecked aeroplane brought down by artillery fire the day before near our lines. Its wings are shattered and its propellers twisted into kindling, while its slight body (if one can use that expression) is torn and punctured by a score or more of shrapnel holes, with several gashes where bits of the shell case had penetrated the thin metal frame. Here at least is one example of artillery practice which has been able to cripple the bird of ill omen on the wing. After a generous breakfast, provided by our kind host the General, we are in our motor-cars again and in a few minutes are speeding down one of the roads westward to the head-quarters of a certain artillery brigade who over the telephone have consented to show us particular choice sights that they have on exhibition on their front.
Every village that we pass through is full of soldiers bestirring for the day, while already the main arteries of travel to the trenches are filling up with the activities of the morning. It is a perfectly still day, and with each advancing hour it is growing hotter. There has been no rain for a week or two, the dust is deep upon the roads, and as our cars hum along the highways we leave volumes of the thin cloud in our wake. Now and again we pass small columns of infantry marching cheerfully along in the sunshine, each man in a cloud of dust. Yet every face is cheerful, and almost without exception the men are singing their marching songs as they swing along the highways. In the villages and on the road everything suggests war, but now with quite a different atmosphere from that of last autumn. Then it was war also, but of war the novelty, the new and the untried. Then all faces were anxious, some apprehensive, some depressed. They were going into a new experience. Now, however, it is war as a tried and experienced profession that is about us.
The conduct of the campaign has become as much of a business to the soldiers and to the officers as the operating of a railroad to men engaged in running it. The deaths and the wounds have become to these men we see now simply a part of their profession, and they have seen so much of this side of the business that it has long since been discounted. The whole atmosphere of the front as we see it in May is as that of a permanent state of society. These men look as though they had been fighting for ten years and expected to be fighting for the rest of their days. War has become the commonplace and peace seems the unreality.
At brigade head-quarters we halt a few minutes and are directed to proceed slowly along a certain road, and advised to stop in a cut just before passing over a certain crest. When we learn that the enemy’s guns command the road over the crest we inquire with the keenest interest the exact location of the ridge mentioned, for something suggests to us that this is a bit of interesting information that the artillery officer is handing out to us so very casually. They are all casual by the way; probably they have all got so used to sudden death and destruction that they feel as nonchalant about their own fate as they do about others. Half an hour’s run over very heavy and sandy road, brought us on to a great white ribbon of a highway that ran due west and dipped over the ridge.
This was our place, and stopping the cars we climbed out to meet a few officers sauntering down the road. They seemed to be coming from nowhere in particular, but as I learned later, they lived in a kind of cave dug out of the side of the road, and had been advised by telephone that we were coming and so were on the lookout for us. The ranking officer was a colonel of artillery—one of the kind that you would turn about in the street to look at and to say to yourself, “Every inch a soldier.” A serious, kindly-faced man in a dirty uniform with shoulder straps so faded and frayed that a second look was necessary to get his rank at all. For six months he had been living in just such quarters as the cave in the side of the road where we found him. He was glad to show us his observation. One could see at a glance that his whole heart and soul were wrapped up in his three batteries, and he spoke of all his positions and his observation points with as much pride as a mother speaking about her children.
The country here is a great sweeping expanse, with just a few ridges here and there like the one that we have come up behind. The country reminds one of the valley of the Danube or perhaps the Red River Valley in North Dakota, except that the latter has less timber in it. We are ourselves quite uncertain as to where the enemy’s position is, for in the sweep of the valley there is little to indicate the presence of any army at all, or to suggest the possibility of hostilities from any quarter. I asked one of the officers who strolled along with us where the German lines were. “Oh, over there,” he remarked, casually waving his hand in a northerly direction. “Probably they can see us then,” I suggested. Personally I felt a mild curiosity in the subject which apparently my companion did not share. He stopped and offered me a cigarette, and as he lighted one himself, he murmured indifferently, “Yes, I dare say they could see us if they turned their glasses on this ridge. But probably they won’t. Can I give you a light?”
I thanked him politely and also commended the sun for shining in the enemy’s eyes instead of over their shoulders as happened last night when the observer in the German battery spotted us at 6,000 yards and sent five shells to tell us that we were receiving his highest consideration. On the top of a near-by hill was a small building which had formerly been the Russian observation point, but the Germans suspecting this had quickly reduced it to a pile of ruins. Near by we entered a trench cut in from the back of the hill, and worked our way up to an observation station cut out of the side of the slope in front of the former position.
A first-line trench in Poland.
It was now getting on toward noon and intensely hot. The view from this position as one could sweep it with the hyperscope was perfectly beautiful. Off to the west twinkled the silver ribbon of the Rawka, while the whole plain was dotted with fields of wheat and rye that stretched below us like a chess board. Here and there where had been houses were now but piles of ruins. The lines here were quite far apart—perhaps half a mile, and in between them were acres of land under cultivation. I think that the most remarkable thing that I have seen in this war was the sight of peasants working between the lines as calmly as though no such thing as war existed. Through the glasses I could distinctly see one old white beard with a horse ploughing up a field, and even as I was looking at him I saw a shell burst not half a mile beyond him near one of the German positions. I mentioned it to one of the officers. “Oh yes,” he said, “neither we nor the Germans fire on the peasants nowadays. They must do their work and they harm neither of us.”