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

an Trenches

matic tube-night expresses, racing military motors, snap-shots at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and military salutes. You are under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or barracks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is turned out in your honor; at four you are watching distant shell-fire from the Belgian dunes; at eleven, crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel, where the prices of fo

g and rather accidental place, however-you can scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of the war. Our moment came i

ssels, and by the next morning's train down to Lille. Armentieres was only eight miles away, Ypres fifteen, and a little way

others laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with a spade; once we passed half a dozen men dragging a harrow. Every tree in this country, where wood is grown like any other crop, was speckled

beside me in the passageway, thinking perhaps of his own home across the Rhine, laughed and breathed a deep-chested "Kolossal!" We passed Enghien, Leuze, Tournai, all with that curious look of a run-down clock. On the outskirts of one town, half a dozen little children stopped spinning tops in the road to demand tribute from the train. They were pinched little childre

ets, who looked as if he might, a few years before, have rowed on some American college crew; the other, in the officers' gray-blue frock over

t any guests-when three gray military motor-cars, with the imperial double eagle in black on their sides, whirled up. The officers took the lead, our happy family distributed itself i

nce from the village of Aubers, we alighted, and, with warnings that it was better not to keep too close together, walked a little farther down the road. Not a man was in sight, nor a house, nor gun, not even a trench, yet we were, as a matter of fact, in the middle of a battle-field. From where we stood it was not

d us, there was a geyser of earth, and slowly floating away a greenish-yellow cloud of smoke. From all over the horizon came t

. The tall young officer said that this might not be done-it would draw the enemy's fire, and as if to accent this

nly sailed over us. It seemed to be about six thousand feet above us, so high that the sound of its motors was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting across the blue. Did it take those three motor-cars and those little dots for some rec

out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front

d been in the war despatches for months, and looked it. Its church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from which each day a few shells took another bite. Roofs were torn off, streets strewn with broken

is, out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few minutes' walk of their work, so to speak. Others are distributed farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to the front. There is continual mo

swept bare-why did they not go, too? But where? Here, at any rate, there was a roof overhead-until a shell smashed it-and food soldiers were glad to share. There must be strange stories to tell of these little

led above our heads. In the shelter of a brick farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench service, to go back to La Bassée. They

some one asked. "Do t

chorused out from t

e trenches were not under fire at the moment, we might go into them. He led the way into the communication trench-a straight-sided winding ditch, shoulder-deep, and just wide enough to walk in comfortably. Yellow clay was piled up overhead on either

f the trench, so that an ordinary rain would not flood them, and covered with straw. And they were full of men, asleep, working over this and that-from one came the smell of frying ham. The trench twisted snakelike in a general north and sout

smoke of exploded shells. Shrapnel-casings and rusted shell-noses were sticking everywhere in the clay, and each curve exposing

e opposite trenches know you are awake, the afternoon was peaceful. Pink-cheeked youngsters in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped their hands to their sides as officers came in sight

ench, of course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this curious shut-in world as men do in a submarine-just as the lady in the old-fashio

beyond some straggling barbed wire and perhaps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another clay bank-the

war. You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which is your enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and run forward until you are cut down. And when you have, so to speak, been

("One of our bombs!") laughed a young soldier beside me, and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench. These bombs were cylinders, about the size of two baking-powder tins joined together, filled with dynamite and exploded by a fuse.

ht! Vor

om the English trenches and, very clear against the western sky, ca

g in the air. Again there was a dull report, and we sent a second back-this time behind their trench-and again-"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"-they sent an answer back.

ecracker. They are easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at night as part of a general bombar

er periscope through which they saw a space covered with English dead. There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack which h

tomobiles in its full light. Perhaps the glasses of some British lookout picked us up-at any rate the whisper of bullets became uncomfortably frequent an

ently we were both observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up and down which troops and munitions pass, is perfectly known, there was a rather uncomfortable

nimation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a city of the dead. The chambermaid shrugged her shoulders with something about a "punition" and, when asked

n," ordered the city to pay a 'fine of five hundred thousand francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go within doors at sundown and not stir abroad before seven next morning. Another poster warned people that two English

r their adventures, and here and there were older officers, who looked as if war had worn them a bit, and they had come here to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and the talk of some old friend. The bread was black and hard, but the other food as usual in France, with wine pl

hanging, and the German band playing in the central square; at two o'clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer hotels, now full of German officers; at four pausing for a tantalizing moment in Middelkerk, while the German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge of the town were banging away at the British at Nieuport down the beach. Next day Brus

type-lean, keen, firm-lipped young men, with a sense of humor-entirely different from the German often seen in cafes, with no back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar. Particularly interesting were those who, called back 'into uniform from responsible positions in civ

e grenadier barracks in Brussels we had been taken through sleeping-rooms, cool storerooms with their beer barrels and loops of sausages-"all made by the regiment"-and were just entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing h

h this vast creature, every muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or rather exploded: "Herr Hauptmann! Mannschafts-Kuche

e sight of these long, gray-blue coats and stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, hands at their sides. If they were talking, they became silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed out, and into their eyes came an expression which, when you have seen it repeated hundreds of times, you will not forget. It is a look of seriousness, self-forgetfulness, of almost religious d

reat time," in these men's eyes. The Belgian soul we did n

casional snowflakes whipping by on the damp north wind, the streets were all but deserted, and in the r

d that they used to have a good business here, but the good times were gone-"les beaux jours sont partis." Two others drifted over and asked questions about the bombardment. She answered politely enough, with the air of one to whom it was an old story now- she had left on the second day, when the bui

ust as soon... I did not catch the whole sentence, but all at once something flashed behind that non-committal cafe proprietress's mask. "Moi, je suis fiere d'etre Belge!" said the girl, and as she spoke y

coats, and she was sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in black at the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain paused as we passed, gave a stiff little bow from the waist, touche