LUXEMBURG, Oct. 24.—I have just returned from the German Great Headquarters in France, the visit terminating abruptly on the fourth day, when one of the Kaiser's secret field police woke me up at 7 o'clock in the morning and regretfully said that his instructions were to see that I "did not oversleep" the first train out. The return journey along one of the German main lines of communication—through Eastern France, across a corner of Belgium and through Luxemburg—was full of interest, and confirmed the impression gathered at the centre of things, the Great Headquarters, that this twentieth century warfare is in the last analysis a gigantic business proposition which the Board of Directors (the Great General Staff) and the thirty-six department heads are conducting with the efficiency of a great American business corporation.
The west-bound track is a continuous procession of freight trains—fresh consignments of raw material—men and ammunition—being rushed to the firing line to be ground out into victories. The first shipment we pass is an infantry battalion—first ten flatcars loaded with baggage, ammunition, provision wagons, and field kitchens, the latter already with fire lighted and soup cooking as the long train steams slowly along, for the trenches are only fifty miles away, and the Germans make a point of sending their troops into battle with full stomachs.
After the flatcars come thirty box cars, all decorated with green branches and scrawled over with chalked witticism at the expense of the French and Russians. The men cheer as our train passes. A few kilometers further backed on to a siding, is a train of some twenty flatcars, each loaded with a touring car. Then we pass a battery of artillery on flatcars, the guns still garlanded with flowers; then a short freight train—six cars loaded with nothing but spare automobile tires—then a long train of heavy motor trucks, then more infantry trains, then an empty hospital train going back for another load, then a train of gasoline tank cars, more cheering infantry, more artillery, another empty hospital train, a pioneer train, a score of flatcars loaded with long, heavy piles, beams, steel girders, bridge spans, and lumber, then a passenger train load of German railway officials and servants going to operate the railways toward the coast, more infantry, food trains, ammunition trains, train loads of railway tracks already bolted to metal ties and merely needing to be laid down and pieced together, and so on in endless succession all through France and through Belgium. The two-track road, shaky in spots, especially when crossing rivers, is being worked to capacity, and how well the huge traffic is handled is surprising even to an American commuter.
Our fast train stops at the mouth of a tunnel, then crawls ahead charily, for the French, before retreating, dynamited the tunnel. One track has been cleared, but the going is still bad. To keep it from being blocked again by falling débris the Germans have dug clean through the top of the hill, opening up a deep well of light into the tunnel. Looking up, you see a pioneer company in once cream-colored, now dirty-colored, fatigue uniform still digging away and terracing the sides of the big hole to prevent slides. Half an hour later we go slow again in crossing a new wooden bridge over the Meuse—only one track as yet. It took the German pioneers nearly a week to build the substitute for the old steel railway bridge dynamited by the French, whose four spans lie buckled up in the river. The pioneers are at work driving piles to carry a second track. The process is interesting. A forty-man-power pile driver is rigged upon the bow end of a French river barge with forty soldiers tugging at forty strands of the main rope. The "gang" foreman, a Captain in field gray, stands on the river bank and bellows the word of command. Up goes the heavy iron weight; another command, and down it drops on the pile. It looks like a painfully slow process, but the bridges are rebuilt just the same.
Further on, a variety of interest is furnished to a squad of French prisoners being marched along the road. Then a spot of ant-hill-like activity where a German railway company is at work building a new branch line, hundreds of them having pickaxes and making the dirt fly. You half expect to see a swearing Irish foreman. It looks like home—all except the inevitable officer (distinguished by revolver and field glass) shouting commands.
The intense activity of the Germans in rebuilding the torn-up railroads and pushing ahead new strategic lines, is one of the most interesting features of a tour now in France. I was told that they had pushed the railroad work so far that they were able to ship men and ammunition almost up to the fortified trenches. The Germanization of the railroads here has been completed by the importation of station Superintendents, station hands, track walkers, &c., from the Fatherland. The stretch over which we are traveling, for example, is in charge of Bavarians. The Bavarian and German flags hang out at every French station we pass. German signs everywhere, even German time. It looks as if they thought to stay forever.
Now we creep past a long hospital train, full this time, which has turned out on a siding to give us the right of way—perhaps thirty all-steel cars—each fitted with two tiers of berths, eight to a side, sixteen to a car. Every berth is taken. One car is fitted up as an operating room, but fortunately no one is on the operating table as we crawl past. Another car is the private office of the surgeon in charge of the train. He is sitting at a big desk receiving reports form the orderlies. During the day we pass six of these splendidly appointed new all-steel hospital trains, all full of wounded. Some of them are able to sit up in their bunks and take a mild interest in us. Once, by a queer coincidence, we simultaneously pass the wounded going one way and cheering fresh troops going the other.
How the Belgians Fight
[By a Correspondent of The London Daily News.]
LONDON, Oct. 28.—Writing from an unnamed place in Belgium a correspondent of The Daily News says: