Part 38

There are thousands of these Germans, and they simply throw themselves at us. It is no joke fighting seven or eight to one. I can tell you we have lessened them a little, but there are millions more yet to finish.

Of the battle that reddened the foam of the North Sea during the last days of August many a seaman recorded his impressions. And what curious things stuck in the memories of the weary, powder-stained survivors! "The funny thing which you should have seen," wrote Midshipman Hartley to his parents, "was all the stokers grubbing around after the action looking for bits of shell." And a seaman on H.M.S. Hearty wrote:

Two cooks were in the galley of the Arethusa, just having their rum, when a shell killed one and blew the other's arm off. A funny thing, they've got a clock hanging up; it smashed the glass and one hand, but the blooming thing's still going.

There is fine realism in Seaman Gunner Brown's letter to the parents who waited for tidings in their cottage on the Isle of Wight:

We and another ship in our squadron came across two German cruisers. We routed one and started on the second, but battle cruisers soon finished her off. Another then appeared, and after we had plunked two broadsides into her she slid off in flames.

Every man did his bit, and there was a continuous stream of jokes. We penciled on the projectiles, "Love from England," "One for the Kaiser," and other such messages. The sight of sinking German ships was gloriously terrible, funnels and masts lying about in all directions, and amidships a huge furnace, the burning steel looking like a big ball of sulphur. There was not the slightest sign of fear, from the youngest to the oldest man aboard.

(From the Painting by Angelo.)]

Recently Made Military Governor of Belgium to Succeed Field Marshal von der Goltz.

(Photo from Ruschin.)]

But it remained for a naval Lieutenant, whose name is not given, to describe, in a letter to a friend, one of the most remarkable incidents of the war, an incident which might have occurred in the imagination of Jules Verne or of H.G. Wells in his youth. He wrote:

The Defender having sunk an enemy, lowered a whaler to pick up her swimming survivors; before the whaler got back an enemy's cruiser came up and chased the Defender, and thus she abandoned her whaler. Imagine their feelings--alone in an open boat without food, twenty-five miles from the nearest land, and that land the enemy's fortress, with nothing but fog and foes around them. Suddenly a swirl alongside and up, if you please, pops his Britannic Majesty's submarine E-4, opens his conning tower, takes them all on board, shuts up again, dives, and brings them home, 250 miles!

In his introduction to the book St. John Adcock calls the private letters of the soldiers "the most potent of recruiting literature." Undoubtedly this is true of some of them. The casual, almost flippant, records of splendid heroism, the reflection of a spirit of gay courage, the description of the most picturesque and romantic aspects of battle--these tend, certainly, to fill the mind of the stay-at-home readers with a desire for participation in this great adventure.

But, on the other hand, such passages as "The dead were piled up in the trenches about ten deep, and there were trenches seven miles long," and "Our Maxim gun officer tried to fix his gun up during their murderous fire, but he got half his face blown away," are not likely to make fighting seem a pleasant occupation. It is true that the dead referred to in the first of these passages are the enemy's dead; still, there is a wholesale quality about those seven-mile trenches filled with dead ten deep that is not a recruiting allurement.

Nor is this letter, vivid in its realism, likely to make those not already warlike eager to enlist. It was sent to his parents at Ilfracombe by Private William Burgess of the Royal Field Artillery:

We left our landing place for the front on the Tuesday and got there on Saturday night. The Germans had just reached Liege then, and we got into action on the Sunday morning. The first thing we did was to blow up a bridge to stop the Germans from crossing. Then we came into action behind a lot of houses attached to the main street. We were there about ten minutes when the houses started to fall around us. The poor people were buried alive. I saw poor children getting knocked down by bursting shells.

The next move was to advance across where there was a Red Cross hospital. They dropped shells from airships and fired on it until the place was burned down to the ground. Then they got a big plan on to retire and let the French get behind them. We retired eight miles, but we had to fight until we were forced to move again. We got as far as Le Cateau on Tuesday night. We camped there until 2 o'clock next morning.

Then we all heard there was a big fight coming off, so we all got together and cleared the field for action. [The letter mentions the numbers of men engaged, and states that the Germans were in the proportion of three to one.] We cut them down like rats. We could see them coming on us in heaps and dropping like hail. The Colonel passed along the line and said, "Stick it, boys."

I tell you, mother, it was awful to see your own comrades dropping down--some getting their heads blown off and others their legs and arms. I was fighting with my shirt off. A piece of shell went right through my shirt at the back and never touched me. It stuck into a bag of earth which we put between the wheels to stop bullets.

We were there, all busy fighting, when an airship came right over the line and dropped a bomb, which caused a terrible lot of smoke. Of course, that gave the Germans our range. Then the shells were dropping on us thick. We looked across the line and saw the German guns coming toward us. We turned our two centre guns on them and sent them yards in the air. I reckon I saw one German go quite twenty yards in the air.

Just after that a shell burst right over our gun. That one got me out of action. I had to get off the field the best way I could. The bullets were going all around me on the way off; you see, they got completely around us. I went about two miles and met a Red Cross cart. I was taken to St. Quentin Hospital. We were shelled out of there about 2 in the morning, and then taken in a train and taken down to a plain near Rouen. Next morning we were put on a ship for dear old England.

The First German Prisoners

The following letter from a soldier at the front who has taken part in the first fighting appears in the Temps of Paris, Aug. 16:

We are now able to realize the state of mind in which they arrive. The army corps to which I belong has already brought its guns into action. We have seen prisoners, and we have observed battlefields, and we have noticed a thing or two. First of all, these prisoners are not the least bit fanatics. Many of them don't know what they are fighting about. They have been told a thousand phantasmagoria--that France had declared war, that the Belgians and the Italians were helping the Germans, &c.; and one of them was tremendously proud at having the Czar Nicholas as his honorary Colonel! They were taken for the most part in isolated patrols, and it happened so often that it was impossible to get others to start off on reconnoissances, since their comrades never came back and they had no desire to share a like fate.

The prisoners are gentle and calm, and follow with their eyes the bits of bread which are passed about near them and which one gives them, and they eat them voraciously. For two days they have only received two rations of coffee. Their appetite is so great that, though in presence of a French officer they will click their heels together properly, they never cease at the same time to munch noisily and to fill out their hollow cheeks.

One feels that they believe us French to be up to every sort of devilment, that we are going to undress them, to take their papers, and they tremble from head to foot in fear of being shot. Even when you give them a cigarette, it does not seem to allay their mistrust. One of them, who was dying of thirst, would not drink the water that was offered him before the gendarme had tasted it in front of him.

They are all astonished at their adventure. They had been told that they were going to enter Maubeuge in company with the Belgians; to seize Maubeuge would be as easy as taking a cafe au lait--and there they are without their cafe au lait!

The officers are absolutely different. Prussian pride gave them an assurance which their mishap has transformed into irritation. A young Baron Lieutenant, like von Forstner, pretended that he couldn't make his bed, and refused to answer before simple soldiers. He couldn't feel anything but the humiliation of being a prisoner, and couldn't get accustomed to his new situation.

We found on the field of battle the medicine chest of a vet., who jotted down his impressions from minute to minute. When he was killed he was writing: "I see the shells bursting with a white smoke in the sky, which is lighted up from the south; luckily my helmet protects me from sunstroke." Evidently he was on an excursion, this veterinary surgeon, and was counting on coming to Paris, and had taken the most minute precautions of hygiene and of elegance. He was provided with scent and eau de cologne. He had even brought with him a rose ointment for the nails, and a superb gilt shoulder-belt which was to raise his prestige for when he passed under the Arc de Triomphe. The battery to which he belonged is annihilated now. We could observe on the spot the terrific effect of our artillery, which was very well commanded. Six abandoned guns, of which three are impossible to move, are there on the ground with all their crews, all their officers, all their horses--the pieces still mounted, riddled with splinters. They were taken back to the rear, and attracted all the way along the curiosity of the soldiers, with their sumptuous armorial bearings and their motto, Ultima regis ratio.