I asked him if he was in need of anything. He shook his big brown head, and answered: “Man ist sehr gut zu mir” (They are very good to me).
Had he relatives? I asked. Could I write to anybody for him? “Ich habe niemand,” came the reply in his sad voice.
A widower, all his children dead, this old German had left his farm on being mobilized, and had gone all through Belgium with the German Army until they had abandoned him, wounded, on the retreat from the Marne. When I left him, with a phrase about keeping a good heart, for he would soon be well (how senseless it must have sounded to that man who for days had seen the Black Angel hovering at his bedside!), he shook his head, and said: “Ich glaub’ es nicht!” I never saw him again or learnt his fate, for I left Paris that same afternoon. But I have often thought since then of the peaceful life of that humble Hanoverian farmer sacrificed to the insensate arrogance of the neurasthenic who wears the purple of the Hohenzollerns.
Apart from prisoners, the first German I encountered at the front in this war was in the space between the lines. His work for “Kaiser und Reich” was done. With hundreds of his fellows he lay stiff and stark in the moonlight before our trenches at Neuve Chapelle. He looked like a waxen image as he lay on his back in the grass, in his grey uniform all splashed with mud, his helmet, clotted with blood (I have it as a memento of that night), still on his head, his rifle with its rusting bayonet grasped in one hand flung wide. All around him lay his comrades as the machine-guns of the Indians had mowed them down. By the light of the flares I could see the grass dotted with these sprawling figures, so inert and limp that one would have said it was a group in a wax-work show rather than an actual picture of war.
I have looked down on the villages of Messines and Wytschaete, built upon the slope of the ridge that bears their names, where the Germans dwell in desolate cities and in houses which no man inhabiteth, which are ready to become heaps. I have seen the smoke of their Mittagessen rising into the air from the cellars and dug-outs in which they live by day, and once I caught a glimpse of a figure, grey against a red wall, slipping in and out of the ruins.
Looking out over the German lines with a telescope one day, my Ross focussed suddenly and surprisingly a portly German, a little forage cap on his head, absorbed in the preparation of something in a little pot. Presently he dipped down and disappeared, but almost the next moment two other grey figures came bobbing along down the trench. They were out of range of our rifles, and, with ammunition a luxury, not worth wasting a shell on.
More than once I have watched Germans at work behind their lines. One summer afternoon, in particular, I had a regular surfeit of Germans. First a cart appeared, slowly descending a field. As I followed it with my glass until it stopped, my eye caught two diminutive figures digging. In another part of my field of vision I saw two German officers out riding, the one on a bay, the other on a white horse. They galloped across a field, then walked their horses, to cool them, alongside the fringe of a belt of black forest. They were engaged in animated conversation, and as I watched I wondered what their feelings would have been had they known that two artillery officers at my side were discussing whether it was worth while putting a shell over at them. The verdict was against a shot, so the two officers continued their ride undisturbed.
There is nothing more thrilling than to watch the discovery and shelling of a working party by our guns. I was present one day when a detachment of Germans were made out digging on a road behind a screen of trees. I saw four of them myself quite distinctly, working busily in their white shirts, their tunics discarded. A few brief directions about angle and direction and shell went over the telephone to the battery behind us. Then I glued my eye to the glass and waited.
The four men worked on. I could see the flash of their shirt-sleeves behind the trees. One man had a loose sleeve which kept coming unrolled, and which he kept rolling up again. A loud explosion ... a rushing noise ... the telephone orderly’s voice, “First gun fired, sir!” ... three more explosions, and three more shells cleaving the air, and, almost simultaneously, as it seemed, a pear-shaped ball of white smoke, then another and another and another ... four detonations—boom! bum-bum-bum! Between the appearance of the first white pear-drop and the second there was a flash of white cloth between the trees ... then all was quiet. And presently I heard the telephone orderly slowly dictating a report to the Brigade ... “dispersed a German working-party on the —— road.”
The men love to get these glimpses of the Germans. When the line is quiet, and the messages, “Nothing to report,” accumulate in piles on the table in the Operations Section of the General Staff, sniping is a welcome break in the monotony of trench life. I was in the trenches of the Leinster Regiment one day and presently found myself in an outpost established in the ruins of a farm which was only some 15 yards from the enemy. As it was not desired that the Germans should know the farm was occupied, the men in the outpost had strict injunctions that they were not to fire except in case of an attack. The men squatting in a narrow trench—to have raised oneself to one’s full height would have meant instant death—showed me the German trench a stone’s-throw away in a periscope. “’Tis a pity we mayn’t shoot now,” they whispered to me. “D’ye see that bit of tree beyond there? Sure, the Allemans is always potterin’ about there. There’s a fine big fellow with great whiskers on him comes out of that sometimes. Faith! you couldn’t miss him!” They spoke with such regret that I almost laughed.