Antwerp to Gallipoli. Arthur Ruhl
chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or forty feet to the edge of the ravine. What a place to wait for an approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; and the Germans evidently thought so too, for from this part of town they carefully kept away. They burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate as to live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, they pillaged the houses whose owners had run away, and they ordered the town to pay them one hundred thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the fortitude to stay behind were not molested. The enemy were even polite, one woman told us—"Pas peur!" said the officer who visited her house, taking off his hat. On the gate of another house was scrawled in German script, "Sick Woman—keep away!" and as we passed the open windows, sure enough there was the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just as she had been when the Germans came.
On another door we read, also in German script, "Good people—they give everything!" and on several were orders to leave those within alone. And there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute—Schoenen!" chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their lives to the north of us and likely never to see their fatherland again.
Crepy-en-Valois, more fortunate than some of the towns, whose mayors were dismissed for revealing "a lamentable absence of sang-froid," had a mayor who stuck to his post. He was there when three-fourths of the village had fled and, getting up from a sick-bed to receive the German commander, he saw that the latter's orders were carried out, and signed the order for the town's ransom while his daughter held smelling-salts under his nose.
Whether the mayor of the old town of Senlis, a few miles west of Crepy, was in any way tactless is scarcely of importance now, in so far as it concerns him for he and the other hostages were shot, and, however little good it may have done anybody, he at least gave France his life. It is said that his order to the townspeople to turn in their arms was not completely obeyed. It was also said—and this several people of Senlis told us—that a few Senegalese, lagging behind as the French left, fired on the Germans as they approached, and that it was possible that one or two excited civilians had joined in.
Granting that civilians did fire after hostages had been given, there remains the question of reprisal. It was the German commander's idea that Senlis should be taught a lesson, and this consisted of shooting the mayor and the hostages, and sacking and burning the main street—a half mile, perhaps—from end to end. The idea was carried out with thoroughness, and men ran along from house to house feeding the flames with petroleum and even burning a handsome new country house which stood apart at one end.
A nice-looking, elderly gentleman whom we met in front of the ruined Hotel du Nord said that the Germans came there and, finding champagne in the cellar after the maitre d'hotel had told them there wasn't any, set fire to the hotel, and, as I recall it, shot him. How true such stories are I cannot say, but there was no doubt that Senlis had been punished. At least half of the old city on the banks of the wistful Nonette—it is a much larger place than Crepy, with a cathedral of some consequence—was smashed as utterly as it might have been by a cyclone or an earthquake. The systematic manner in which this was done was suggested by the fact that, in the long street running parallel to the one picked for destruction, nearly every door still carried its chalked order to "Schoenen." One house spared was that of a town fireman. "I've got five little children," he told the German soldiers. "They're one, two, three, four, five years old, and I'm expecting another." And they went on.
These were common sights and sounds of that gracious country north of Paris—deserted, perhaps demolished, villages; the silent countryside, with dead horses, bits of broken shell, smashed bicycles or artillery wagons along the road; and the tainted autumn wind. Along the level French roads, under their arches of elms or poplars, covered carts on tall wheels, drawn by two big farm horses harnessed one behind another, and loaded with women, children, and household goods, were beginning to move northward as they had moved south three weeks before. Trains, similarly packed, were creeping up to within ear-shot of the constant cannonading, and it was on one of these trains that we had come.
In Paris, recovered now from the dismay of three weeks before, keen French imaginations were daily turning the war into terms of heroism and sacrifice and military glory. Even editors and play-writers fighting at the front were able to send back impressions now and then, and these, stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as impersonal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting comfortably at some cafe table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over again, without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of unreality. Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard dies but never surrenders.
A man could leave the Café de la Paix and in two hours be under fire, where killing was as matter of fact as driving tacks. And in between these two zones—the zone where war was at once a highly organized business and a splendid, terrible game, and that in which its disjointed, horrible surfaces were being turned into abstractions, into ideas, poetry, rhetoric—was this middle ground through which we were now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation.
We returned to Crepy. All that night the trains went clanking through the station, pouring more men—Frenchmen, Englishmen—into the sodden trenches along the Aisne. For a week it had rained, cold shower following cold shower. In Paris shivering concierges closed their doors in the middle of the day in mournful attempts to keep warm—autumn's quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the armies had fought across this same country a fortnight before. It was into trenches half filled with water that the new men were going—Frenchmen trundling over to the bar in big overcoats, with their air of good little boy, to go galloping back with a bottle of red wine and a long loaf of bread; Englishmen, noisy, laughing, trying to talk French with their fingers and wanting a nip of brandy or hot water for their tea.
There were Highlanders among them, men with necks like towers and straight, flat backs and a swing of the shoulders—like band music going past. One watched them stride back to their cars with a sort of pang. What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was man's normal business might have fought their way through, must now, with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering the earth, be cut off by a mere wad of unthinking lead!
All that night it rained, and, through the rain and dark, trains kept pouring on up into the terrible north. Once I heard cattle lowing as their cars clanked past, and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night, saw the faces on the field at Betz, beaten on by the rain that had beaten them for days. And just before a feeble daylight returned again, the steady rumble of artillery.
After noon there was a break in the clouds, and we started on foot for Villers-Cotterets, some fifteen kilometres away. The hard macadam road was no more than dampened, and ambulances and motor-trucks went scooting by as on a city street. Occasionally there was an abandoned trench, once a broken caisson, and the wreck of an aeroplane, but the wheat was harvested and stacked. Beyond Vaumoise the country grew more hilly, and the caves and quarries, which the Germans were making such effective use of along the Aisne, began to appear.
And all this time the cannon were thundering—so close that it seemed each hilltop would bring them into view, and as the detonation puffed across the landscape, one even fancied one could feel the concussion in one's ear. Up from a field ahead of us an aeroplane rose and, in a wide spiral, went climbing up the sky, now almost cleared, and presently disappeared in the north. Then, after satisfying a sentry that our papers were correct—such things could be done in those first days—we got into Villers-Cotterets. Instead of deserted houses we found that nearly every house was quartering soldiers. There were infantrymen, dragoons, flyers, Senegalese, Algerians in white turbans and burnooses on their desert horses, and everywhere officers. We had stumbled into a headquarters!
With somewhat the sensation of walking a tight rope, we sought the mayor to ask for permission to stay in town—finally to ask for safe-conducts to Soissons. The charming old gentleman, undisturbed