Various - The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915

V >> Various >> The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915

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On the map it is at first sight a rather unhappy thing to see that
practically the whole of France north of Amiens lies open to German
descent from Belgium. To break up the German Army piecemeal and lure it
to its own destruction it was almost necessary to manoeuvre it into
precisely the position which it now occupies. The success of Gen. Pau
shows that the allied army is taking the offensive again, and that as a
great fighting machine it is still powerful and menacing.

I must again emphasize the difficulty of grasping the significance of a
great campaign by isolated incidents, and the danger of drawing
important deductions from the misfortunes in one part of the field. I do
so because I have been tempted again and again during the past few days
to fall into similar mistakes. Perhaps in my case it was pardonable.

It is impossible for the armchair reader to realize the psychological
effect of being mixed up in the panic of a great people and the retreat
from a battlefield.

The last real fighting was taking place at a village called Bapaume all
day Friday. It was very heavy fighting here on the left centre of the
great army commanded by Gen. Pau, and leading to a victory which has
just been announced officially in France.

A few minutes before midnight Friday, when they came back along the road
to Amiens, crawling back slowly in a long, dismal trail, the ambulance
wagons laden with the dead and dying, hay carts piled high with saddles
and accoutrements, upon which lay, immobile like men already dead, the
spent and exhausted soldiers, they passed through the crowds of silent
people of Amiens, who only whispered as they stared at the procession.
In the darkness a cuirassier, with head bent upon his chest, stumbled
forward, leading his horse, too weak and tired to bear him.

Many other men were leading poor beasts this way, and infantry soldiers,
some with bandaged heads, clung to the backs of carts and wagons, and
seemed asleep as they shuffled by.

The light from roadside lamps gleamed upon blanched faces and glazed
eyes, flashed into caverns of canvas-covered carts, where twisted men
lay huddled on straw. Not a groan came from the carts, but every one
knew it was a retreat.

The carts carrying the quick and the dead rumbled by in a long convoy,
the drooping heads of the soldiers turned neither right nor left for any
greeting with friends.

There was a hugger-mugger of uniforms, of provision carts, and with
ambulances--it was a part of the wreckage and wastage of war; and to
the onlookers, with the exaggeration, unconsciously, of the importance
of the things close at hand and visible, it seemed terrible in its
significance and an ominous reminder of 1870.

Really this was an inevitable part of a serious battle, not necessarily
a retreat from a great disaster.

But more pitiful even than this drift back were scenes which followed.
As I turned back into the town I saw thousands of boys who had been
called to the colors and had been brought up from the country to be sent
forward to second lines of defense.

They were the reservists of the 1914 class, and many of them were
shouting and singing, though here and there a white-faced boy tried to
hide his tears as women from the crowd ran forward to embrace him. These
lads were keeping up their valor by noisy demonstrations; but, having
seen the death carts pass, I could not bear to look into the faces of
those little ones who are following their fathers to the guns.

Early next morning there was a thrill of anxiety in Amiens. Reports had
come through that the railway line had been cut between Boulogne and
Abbeville. There had been mysterious movements of regiments from the
town barracks. They had moved out of Amiens, and there was a strange
quietude in the streets. Hardly a man in uniform was to be seen in the
places which had been filled with soldiers the day before.

Only a few people realized the actual significance of this. How could
they know that it was a part of the great plan to secure the safety of
France? How could they realize that the town itself would be saved from
possible bombardment by this withdrawal of the troops to positions which
would draw the Germans into the open?

The fighting on the Cambrai-Cateau line seems to have been more
desperate even that the terrible actions at Mons and Charleroi. It was
when the British troops had to swing around to a more southerly line to
guard the roads to Paris, that the enemy attacked in prodigious numbers,
and their immense superiority in machine guns did terrible work among
officers and men.

But on all sides, from the French officers, there is immense praise for
the magnificent conduct of our troops, and in spite of all alarmist
statements I am convinced from what I have heard that they have retired
intact, keeping their lines together, and preventing their divisions
from being broken and cut off.

The list of casualties must be very great, but if I can believe the
evidence of my own eyes in such towns as Rouen, where the Red Cross
hospitals are concentrated, they are not heavy enough to suggest
anything like a great and irretrievable disaster.

DIEPPE, Sept. 3.--Let me describe briefly the facts which I have learned
of in the last five days. When I escaped from Amiens, before the tunnel
was broken up, and the Germans entered into possession of the town on
Aug. 28, the front of the allied armies was in a crescent from
Abbeville, south of Amiens on the wooded heights, and thence in an
irregular line to south of Mezieres. The British forces, under Sir John
French, were at the left of the centre, supporting the heavy
thrust-forward of the main German advance, while the right was commanded
by Gen. Pau.

On Sunday afternoon fighting was resumed along the whole line. The
German vanguard had by this time been supported by a fresh army corps,
which had been brought from Belgium. At least 1,000,000 men were on the
move, pressing upon the allied forces with a ferocity of attack which
has never before been equaled. Their cavalry swept across a great tract
of country, squadron by squadron, like the mounted hordes of Attila, but
armed with the dreadful weapons of modern warfare. Their artillery was
in enormous numbers, and their columns advanced under cover of it, not
like an army, but rather like a moving nation--I do not think, however,
with equal pressure at all parts of the line. It formed itself into a
battering ram with a pointed end, and this point was thrust at the heart
of the English wing.

It was impossible to resist this onslaught. If the British forces had
stood against it they would have been crushed and broken. Our gunners
were magnificent, and shelled the advancing German columns so that the
dead lay heaped up along the way which was leading down to Paris; but as
one of them told me: "It made no manner of difference; as soon as we had
smashed one lot another followed, column after column, and by sheer
weight of numbers we could do nothing to check them."

After this the British forces fell back, fighting all the time. The line
of the Allies was now in the shape of a V, the Germans thrusting their
main attack deep into the angle.

This position remained the same until Monday, or, rather, had completed
itself by that date, the retirement of the troops being maintained with
masterly skill and without any undue haste.

Meanwhile Gen. Pau was sustaining a terrific attack on the French
centre by the German left centre, which culminated on (date omitted).
The River Oise, which runs between beautiful meadows, was choked with
corpses and red with blood.

From an eyewitness of this great battle, an officer of an infantry
regiment, who escaped with a slight wound, I learned that the German
onslaught had been repelled by a series of brilliant bayonet and cavalry
charges.

"The Germans," he said, "had the elite of their army engaged against us,
including the Tenth Army Corps and the Imperial Guard, but the heroism
of our troops was sublime. Every man knew that the safety of France
depended upon him and was ready to sacrifice his life, if need be, with
joyful enthusiasm. They not only resisted the enemy's attack but took
the offensive, and, in spite of their overpowering numbers, gave them
tremendous punishment. They had to recoil before our guns, which swept
their ranks, and their columns were broken and routed.

"Hundreds of them were bayoneted, and hundreds were hurled into the
river. The whole field of battle was outlined by dead and dying men whom
they had to abandon. Certainly their losses were enormous, and I felt
that the German retreat was in full swing and that we could claim a real
victory for the time being."

Nevertheless the inevitable happened, owing to the vast reserves of the
enemy, who brought up four divisions, and Gen. Pau was compelled to give
ground.

On Tuesday German skirmishers with light artillery were coming
southward, and the sound of their field guns greeted my ears in that
town which I shall always remember with unpleasant recollections in
spite of its Old World beauty and the loveliness of the scene in which
it is set. It seemed to me that this was the right place to be in order
to get into touch with the French Army on the way to the capital. As a
matter of fact, it was the wrong place from all points of view; it was
nothing less than a deathtrap, and it was by a thousand-to-one chance
that I succeeded in escaping quite a nasty kind of fate.

I might have suspected that something was wrong with the place by the
strange look on the face of a friendly French peasant, whom I met. He
had described to me in a very vivid way the disposition of the French
troops on the neighboring hills. Down the road came suddenly parties of
peasants with fear in their eyes. Some of them were in farm carts and
put their horses to a stumbling gallop.

Women with blanched faces, carrying children in their arms, trudged
along the dusty highway, and it was clear that these people were afraid
of something behind them. There were not many of them, and when they had
passed the countryside was strangely and uncannily quiet. There was only
the sound of singing birds above fields which were flooded with the
golden light of the setting sun.

Then I came into the town. An intense silence brooded there among the
narrow little streets below the old Norman church--a white jewel on the
rising ground beyond. Almost every house was shuttered with blind eyes;
but here and there I looked through an open window into deserted rooms.
No human face returned my gaze. It was an abandoned town, emptied of all
its people, who had fled with fear in their eyes, like those peasants
along the roadway.

But presently I saw a human form; it was the figure of a French dragoon
with his carbine slung behind his back. He was stopping by the side of a
number of gunpowder bags. A little further away were little groups of
soldiers at work by two bridges, one over a stream and one over a road.
They were working very calmly, and I could see what they were doing;
they were mining bridges to blow them up at a given signal.

As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with broken bottles
and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and carefully made.

It was a queer experience. It was obvious that there was very grim
business being done, and that the soldiers were waiting for something
to happen. At the railway station I quickly learned the truth; the
Germans were only a few miles away, in great force. At any moment they
might come down, smashing everything in their way and killing every
human being along that road.

The station master, a brave old type, and one or two porters had
determined to stay on to the last. "We are here," he said, as though the
Germans would have to reckon with him; but he was emphatic in his
request for me to leave at once if another train could be got away,
which was very uncertain. As a matter of fact, after a bad quarter of an
hour I was put on the last train to escape from this threatened town,
and left it with the sound of German guns in my ears, followed by a dull
explosion when the bridge behind me was blown up.

My train, in which there were only four other men, skirted the German
army, and by a twist in the line almost ran into the enemy's country,
but we rushed through the night, and the engine driver laughed and put
his oily hand up to salute when I stepped out to the platform of an
unknown station. "The Germans won't get us, after all," he said. It was
a little risky, all the same.

The station was crowded with French soldiers, and they were soon telling
me their experience of the hard fighting in which they had been engaged.
They were dirty, unshaven, dusty from head to foot, scorched by the
August sun, in tattered uniforms and broken boots; but they were
beautiful men for all their dirt, and the laughing courage, quiet
confidence, and unbragging simplicity with which they assured me that
the Germans would soon be caught in a death trap and sent to their
destruction filled me with admiration which I cannot express in words.
All the odds were against them; they had fought the hardest of all
actions--the retirement from the fighting line--but they had absolute
faith in the ultimate success of their allied arms.

I managed to get to Paris. It was in the middle of the night, but
extraordinary scenes were taking place. It had become known during the
day that Paris was no longer the seat of the Government, which has
moved to Bordeaux. The Parisians had had notice of four days in which to
destroy their houses within the zone of fortifications, and, to add to
the cold fear occasioned by this news, aeroplanes had dropped bombs upon
the Gare de l'Est that afternoon.

There was a rush last night to get away from the capital, and the
railway stations were great camps of fugitives, in which the richest and
poorest citizens were mingled with their women and children. But the
tragedy deepened when it was heard that most of the lines to the east
had been cut, and that the only line remaining open to Dieppe would
probably be destroyed during the next few hours. A great wail of grief
arose from the crowds, and the misery of these people was pitiful.

Among them were groups of soldiers of many regiments. Many of them were
wounded and lay on stretchers on the floor among crying babies and
weary-eyed women. They had been beaten and were done for until the end
of the war. But, alone among the panic-stricken crowd--panic-stricken,
yet not noisy or hysterical, but very quiet and restrained for the most
part--the soldiers were cheerful, and even gay.

Among them were some British troops, and I had a talk with them. They
had been fighting for ten days without cessation, and their story is
typical of the way in which all our troops held themselves.

"We had been fighting night and day," said a Sergeant. "For the whole of
that time the only rest from fighting was when we were marching and
retiring." He spoke of the German Army as an avalanche of armed men.
"You can't mow that down," he said. "We kill them and kill them, and
still they come on. They seem to have an inexhaustible supply of fresh
troops. Directly we check them in one attack a fresh attack is
developed. It is impossible to oppose such a mass of men with any
success."

This splendid fellow, who was severely wounded, was still so much master
of himself, so supreme in his common sense, that he was able to get the
right perspective about the general situation.

"It is not right to say we have met with disaster," he said. "We have to
expect that nowadays. Besides, what if a battalion was cut up? That did
not mean defeat. While one regiment suffered, another got off lightly";
and by the words of that Sergeant the public may learn to see the truth
of what has happened. I can add my own evidence to his. All along the
lines I have spoken to officers and men, and the actual truth is that
the British Army is still unbroken, having retired in perfect order to
good positions--the most marvelous feat ever accomplished in modern
warfare.

From Paris I went by the last train again which has got through to
Dieppe. Lately I seem to have become an expert in catching the last
train. It was only a branch line which struggles in an erratic way
through the west of France, and the going was long and painful, because
at every wayside station the carriages were besieged by people trying to
escape. They were very patient and very brave. Even when they found that
it was impossible to get one more human being on or one more package
into the already crowded train they turned away in quiet grief, and when
women wept over their babies it was silently and without abandonment to
despair. The women of France are brave, God knows. I have seen their
courage during the past ten days--gallantry surpassing that of the men,
because of their own children in their arms without shelter, food, or
safety in this terrible flight from the advancing enemy.

Enormous herds of cattle were being driven into Paris. For miles the
roads were thronged with them; and down other roads away from Paris
families were trekking to far fields with their household goods piled
into bullock carts, pony carts, and wheelbarrows.

Two batteries of artillery were stationed by the line, and a regiment of
infantry was hiding in the hollows of the grassy slopes. Their outposts
were scanning the horizon, and it was obvious that the Germans were
expected at this point in order to cut the last way of escape from the
capital.

One of the enemy's aeroplanes flew above our heads, circled around, and
then disappeared. It dropped no bombs and was satisfied with its
reconnoissance. The whistle of the train shrieked out, and there was a
cheer from the French gunners as we went on our way to safety, leaving
them behind at the post of peril.

ST. PIERRE DU VAUVRAY, Sept. 6.--England received a hint yesterday as to
a change in the German campaign, but only those who have been, as I
have, into the very heart of this monstrous horror of war, seeing the
flight of hundreds of thousands of people before an overwhelming enemy
and following the lines of the allied armies in their steady retirement
before an apparently irresistible advance, may realize even dimly the
meaning of the amazing transformation that has happened during the last
few days.

For when I wrote my last dispatch from Arques-la-Bataille, after my
adventures along the French and English lines, it seemed as inevitable
as the rising of next day's sun that the Germans should enter Paris on
the very day when I wrote my dispatch. Still not a single shot has come
crashing upon the French fortifications.

At least a million men--that is no exaggeration of a light pen, but the
sober and actual truth--were advancing steadily upon the capital last
Tuesday. They were close to Beauvais when I escaped from what was then a
death-trap. They were fighting our British troops at Creil when I came
to that town. Upon the following days they were holding our men in the
Forest of Compiegne. They had been as near to Paris as Senlis, almost
within gunshot of the outer forts.

"Nothing seems to stop them," said many soldiers with whom I spoke. "We
kill them and kill them, but they come on."

The situation seemed to me almost ready for the supreme tragedy--the
capture or destruction of Paris. The northwest of France lay very open
to the enemy, abandoned as far south as Abbeville and Amiens, too
lightly held by a mixed army corps of French and Algerian troops with
their headquarters at Aumale.

Here was an easy way to Paris.

Always obsessed with the idea that the Germans must come from the east,
the almost fatal error of this war, the French had girdled Paris with
almost impenetrable forts on the east side, from those of Ecouen and
Montmorency, by the far-flung forts of Chelles and Champigny, to those
of Susy and Villeneuve, on the outer lines of the triple cordon; but on
the west side, between Pontoise and Versailles, the defenses of Paris
were weak. I say "were," because during the last three days thousands of
men have been digging trenches and throwing up ramparts. Only the
snakelike Seine, twining into Pegoud loop, forms a natural defense to
the western approach to the city, none too secure against men who have
crossed many rivers in their desperate assaults.

This, then, was the Germans' chance; it was for this that they had
fought their way westward and southward through incessant battlefields
from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens and down to Creil and
Compiegne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for
deathpits. The prize of Paris, Paris the great and beautiful, seemed to
be within their grasp.

It was their intention to smash their way into it by this western entry
and then to skin it alive. Holding this city at ransom, it was their
idea to force France to her knees under threat of making a vast and
desolate ruin of all those palaces and churches and noble buildings in
which the soul of French history is enshrined.

They might have done it but for one thing which has upset all the
cold-blooded calculations of their staff, that thing which perhaps I may
be pardoned for calling the miracle. They might have done it, I think,
last Wednesday and Thursday, even perhaps as late as last Friday.

I am not saying these things from rumor and hearsay, I am writing from
the evidence of my own eyes after traveling several hundreds of miles in
France during the last four days along the main strategical lines, grim
sentinels guarding the last barriers to that approaching death which is
sweeping on its way through France to the rich harvest of Paris, which
it was eager to destroy.

There was only one thing to do to escape from the menace of this death.
By all the ways open, by any way, the population of Paris emptied itself
like rushing rivers of humanity along all the lines which promised
anything like safety.

Only those stayed behind to whom life means very little away from Paris
and who if death came desired to die in the city of their life.

Again I write from what I saw and to tell the honest truth from what I
suffered, for the fatigue of this hunting for facts behind the screen of
war is exhausting to all but one's moral strength, and even to that.

I found myself in the midst of a new and extraordinary activity of the
French and English Armies. Regiments were being rushed up to the centre
of the allied forces toward Creil, Montdidier, and Noyon. That was
before last Tuesday, when the English troops [Transcriber: original
'toops'] were fighting hard at Creil.

This great movement continued for several days, putting to a severe test
the French railway system, which is so wonderfully organized that it
achieved this mighty transportation of troops with clockwork regularity.
Working to a time table dictated by some great brain which in
Headquarters Staff of the French Army, calculated with perfect precision
the conditions of a network of lines on which troop trains might be run
to a given point. It was an immense victory of organization, and a
movement which heartened one observer at least to believe that the
German deathblow would again be averted.

I saw regiment after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern
Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern
Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war,
at Chalons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre
of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid
spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.

"It is nothing, my little one," said a dirty, unshaved gentleman with
the laughing eyes of a D'Artagnan; "we shall bite their heads off. These
brutal bosches are going to put themselves in a guetapens, a veritable
deathtrap. We shall have them at last."

Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges.
The youngest of them had bristling beards, their blue coats with
turned-back flaps were war worn and flanked with the dust of long
marches; their red trousers were sloppy and stained, but they had not
forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their spirits was a joy to
see.

They are very proud, these French soldiers, of fighting side by side
with their old foes. The English now, after long centuries of strife,
from Edward, the Black Prince, to Wellington, are their brothers-in-arms
upon the battlefields, and because I am English they offered me their
cigarettes and made me one of them. But I realized even then that the
individual is of no account in this inhuman business of war.

It is only masses of men that matter, moved by common obedience at the
dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and I thanked Heaven that masses
of men were on the move rapidly in vast numbers and in the right
direction to support the French lines which had fallen back from Amiens
a few hours before I left that town, and whom I had followed in their
retirement, back and back, with the English always strengthening their
left, but retiring with them almost to the outskirts of Paris itself.

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