Antwerp to Gallipoli A Year of the War on Many Fronts-and Behind Them

The

trable as the woods round an old chateau, rose at the farther end of these fields-the road cutting through it like a tunnel-an

ullen thunder of artillery, as it had been rolling since daylight. And the autumn wind, cold with the week of equi

re growing in the stubble and as still. They were in various positions. One lay on his back, with one knee raised like a man day-dreaming and looking up at the sky. Another was stretched stiff, with both hands clinched over his chest. One lay in the ditch close

off across the fields carrying shovels instead of rifles. Looking after them, beyond the belt of timber, one could see other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to the left, and here and there smoke. Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms. With the boyish good

lying outside it and shelling each other across the town. The main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on the edge of th

, and now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon to the north. The little hotel across from the railroad station in Crepy had kept open through it all. It was the typical Hotel de la Gare of these little old towns-a bar and coffee-room down-stai

in a few days; then with the same Germans falling back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing French. And now they were serving the men from

, raise her arms and sigh something about closing their doors, but, after all, they knew they should keep right on giving as long as they had anything to give. One of their daughters, a strapping, light-hea

ng it stiffly down a bit. The French officers and their men were like fathers and sons, but the Germans had a discipline you would not believe-she had seen one officer strike a man with his whip, she said, because he was not

u. On the outward side the walls of the 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 t

ve those within alone. And there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute- Schoenen!" chalked in

r 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,

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 se

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

at 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 th

; 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 house

s 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

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 int

s 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 trund

ched 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 migh

e lowing as their cars clanked past, and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night, saw the faces on the field at Betz, beaten

ances 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 h

ne 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. Inste

for permission to stay in town-finally to ask for safe-conducts to Soissons. T

t a long table set for officers from which we had a moment before been turned away; and we were rescued by a mysterious being at the head of the table-a dark, bald, bright-eyed, smi

e, a big French dragoon, just in from the firing-line, his horsetail helmet on the chair beside him, was also dining. This man was as different from the little infantrymen we had so often seen as the ai

hen an army is in flight it leaves baggage and equipment behind, guns in the mud. The Germans had left very little; they were falling back in good order. Their soldiers were good fighters, especially when well led. They might lack the individual initiative of Frenchmen, the nervous energy with which Frenchmen would keep on fighting after mere bone and muscle had h

the man at the h

weather-beaten cheek as if to suggest the other's well-made face-"monocle in h

were walking a tight rope. Following the genius who had got us our suppers, we emerged into the dark street, walked down it a few doors, entered a courtyard full of cavalry h

ho knew no one in Villers-Cotteret and had but landed there himself that night-had arranged this occupation, was beyond finding out. At the moment, with military motor-trucks rumbling past outside, soldiers coming and going in the court and tramping about in the room overhead-an extension of the adjoining hous

surprised to find them in the streets next morning. It was an Algerian horseman, however, muffled up

therly old mayor this time, but a sha

d put our case, "you want to get

answered

ssed out the safe-conduct and on the laissez-passer wrote: "Good for immediate return to Paris," and carefully set down the date. Half