Steadily we had battered down the stone and steel chain about her. We stood before the Rhine in dead of winter. At one sweep we were to stretch our arm across it and with the other crush the mighty militant menace that lay at bay between.
The slopes that were old in story, that had sustained the surge of unnumbered hordes from East and West and South and North; in whose grapes were the bloods of Roman, Teuton, Slav, Mongol, and Frank; that had been the source and shelter of a race’s song, science, and story—lay in silent slumber, muffled in midwinter’s snows.
That race stood at bay before its fellow’s vengeance. By this time all those of alien blood had dropped away from its single body like engrafted limbs. Its trunk stood bare and barkless before the blast, we to wring from its bloody, unbowed head, obeisance to our will—a will that had begun in covetousness of commerce, in rancor of humiliating reminiscence, in rage of race rivalry, a will that had grown beyond our grasp, beyond our consciousness. We lusted for the day that should press from Germany’s lips, “Your will be done.”
Unthinking were we that then would come the days of dull and devious diplomacy, of division of domain, of dragging indemnity from a people dumb and disheartened by devastation and death. At all costs to beat the breath from her body! The hour had come when this resistant something should be ours, ours, the Briton’s, the Frenchman’s, the Russian’s, the Italian’s, the Serb’s, the Rumanian’s, the Montenegrin’s, the Dane’s, the Mongol’s!
At midnight we moved, in silence. It seemed as if we heard from the Carpathians to the Rhine, from the sea to the Alps, the anthem of arms, the stir of destruction go up as we moved. We wrangled for the outpost places, that when the closing of the steel ring was flashed across the circle we might be first to see the white flag at our point.
I was fortunate—one of the three sent to see how clear the road from Ludwigshafen to Mannheim, and to cover the river crossing.
I was off and my aëroplane rose quickly. There were no lights beyond the Rhine. Where Mannheim used to be was darkness. The three miles between us and the river lay motionless in the moonlight. The Rhine was tight in ice. The batteries at the angle of the Neckar were invisible. In wonder I came down to three hundred feet and circled, watching our men creep tentatively up to the sharp-cut bank, hesitate, clamber down, and start across the ice recklessly. They were not spiked, never dreaming of getting to the ice at all.
The dark figures slipped and slid and fell. It was so still and the moon so bright I could hear the cracks shoot across the untried sheet and see the men’s faces twisted in apprehension. They were the only moving things. It was clear the Germans had fallen back. They had abandoned Malstatt by night—but Mannheim—and the Rhine! It was unbelievable. I rose and coasted down to above the Mannheim parade-ground. There was nothing to be heard but the distant stir of our line.
I touched. My machine ran along, bumping over hundreds of bodies lightly covered by the new snow. I got out, stumbled over them at my feet, felt them. They were not long dead. I looked about me at the dark, silent city of Mannheim. A panic took me. I ran to my machine, tried to get it off, but failed and sat numb and transfixed, vainly groping in the darkness of my mind for the thought that would not form, till my comrades came to me with blanched faces and bit by bit in swift succession pieced for me the words that could not find utterance, having never been uttered in the world’s life before.
The rest—a flowing phantasmagoria that tore me too far out of human experience, even of dream—to tell again. The thousands crumpled up in full-dress uniform, stained and tattered, beneath the new snow of the parade-ground, fallen at a moment, at a word, hands here and there stiffened in salute to the flag slow moving in the graying winter’s dawn. Death we had seen,—but here in the streets and in the houses, in all corners and in all byways, the vivid faces of those who had sought death freely, each face telling with ghastly eloquence a tale that had never been told in the life of man, of a race self-destroyed at a moment, at a word, for a vision which it alone had understood, leaving its epitaph in the words on the poison vials which a government machine efficient to the last had supplied—“Der Tag ist zu uns”—“The Day is Ours.”