Paris, Hotel Crillon, October 4th

Well, here I am again, but not without having been subjected to quite a few trials and tribulations on the journey. And the Colonel has flown! Well, not exactly flown; he was able to make the journey to Brest on his own feet although suffering from another acute attack of the gallstones. He was in much pain himself, and of course greatly distressed at the news of the President’s illness; there was ample room for him and his large party on the Northern Pacific and for the following week few sailings were scheduled so, making a quick decision, he embarked. He urged me to join him as soon as possible in New York, if I failed to reach Paris in time to sail with him, and with characteristic thoughtfulness he had arranged before leaving that when I arrived at the port of embarkation I should have priority over other “casuals” who might, and indeed most certainly would, be waiting on the dock.

I should now explain in greater detail how this swift change of plan and of base came about. In Berlin on the afternoon of September 27th I read in the Tageblatt a laconic cable to the effect that, broken in health and yielding to the insistent demand of his doctors, the President had interrupted his Western tour and was returning to Washington. I confess that the news did not surprise me. All through May I had been convinced that Mr. Wilson was in for a serious illness. Indeed, on the day I left Paris for Germany, the Colonel had shown me a letter from his constant correspondent, Mr. Kohlsaat, the Chicago editor, to the effect that the President was looking wretched, that he evidently needed a long, soaking rest, and that, unfortunately, was precisely what he seemed unable to secure.

An hour after reading the announcement in the paper there came to me a wire from the Colonel, telling me he was sailing shortly and asking me to join him as soon as possible.

While rushing about the hotel lobby in an attempt to get what information I could in regard to the infrequent international trains, I ran across Warwick Greene, who had at one time headed the Public Works Bureau of the Insular Government in Manila. Our last contact had been when, three years ago in the Philippines, we had together climbed the mountains to Haight’s Place, several thousand feet higher than Baguio, where the perspiring dweller in the tropics could at times wear a sweater and revel in the sight of hoarfrost glistening on the mountain pines.

Like everyone else, Greene was in the army now and on his way back from Riga, where he had been en mission for the Food Administration. He was leaving for Paris on the following day with an empty army car at his disposal. He invited me to join him, and added confidently: “We shall beat the International train by a day—at least.” I accepted on the spot, and bright and early the next morning we sallied out of the now grass-grown and garbage-littered streets of Berlin. By the time we reached Weimar it was plain, even to me, that our car was not a racer. In what was once the Athens of Germany we stopped for an hour, and while Greene “looked under the hood” I wandered about and visited the shrine where for so many years my old professor Erich Schmidt had presided over the Goethe Nachlass, or archives, and I also had a look at the modest rooms where the Committee of the National Assembly was at work on the new Constitution which was to bring happiness to the German people, some participation in their government at least, and peace to the world outside—it was hoped.

Even before we pulled into Erfurt at the end of our first day’s run, it was evident that Greene’s belief that we would reach Paris before the twice-a-week Berlin express arrived was an iridescent dream. Somewhere and somehow our car had been tampered with: our gasoline had been watered, our inner tubes had been extracted and replaced with others of very inferior ersatz quality, and our spark plugs had been swiped. However, Greene was a resourceful mechanic as well as an expert chauffeur, and somehow we kept plugging along….

While exasperating, our leisurely progress gave me an opportunity to see things that would have escaped me on the railway. In the agricultural districts we passed through there was much plowing in progress, and with grim determination the peasants, at least, seemed to be resuming their former tasks. At the entrance to each of the villages we passed through there were arches of pine branches now bedraggled and battered by the autumn storms and upon each and every one of them was inscribed the legend, “Willkommen zu unseten siegreichen Soldaten [Welcome to our victorious soldiers]” and often the message, “Mit Stolz und Liebe erinnern ivir uns an unsere Verblichene [We hold in affectionate remembrance those who died]”— who are not coming back.

But in the manufacturing towns the aspect of affairs was less reassuring. Men, women, and children, all thinly clad, were standing around or wandering aimlessly about, pale and hungry. Few if any of them seemed to be sustained by the thought that now the war was over the future promised better things; all they knew was that they were cold and hungry—and winter was coming on. . . .

As we generally reached our destination after midnight and left at crack of dawn, I cannot say that we spent our nights anywhere, but we were bedded for a few hours at Frankfort and again at Mayence. I suggested to Greene that the spectacle of our limping car would not enhance the fame of the American automobile industry and that in justice to the makers of the car, which had obviously been tampered with, we should haul down the flag which we had flown ever since we started out so hopefully from Berlin—to put the iron horse to shame. Greene thought well of the suggestion, but decided he could not comply with it. It seems that our transit visa from the German Kommandantur demanded that we fly the flag, and so we continued to do so. It is only fair to say that the showing of these colors which had brought imperial Germany to her knees provoked less hostility than it was natural to expect. It is true not seldom dark and dirty looks followed us as we made our way through the slums of manufacturing towns, but generally, when noticed at all, the appearance of our car and the flag that flew over it attracted nothing more than apathetic amazement. You could not startle people who had lived through the last four years. They appreciated that in these days anything might happen.

There did occur one near-altercation, but I could well understand the motive behind it. We were at a halt, tinkering with the motor, as so often before, in a street on the outskirts of Mayence when an old man, staggering from starvation weakness, or from drink, came toward us. “I gave the Kaiser my two sons!” he shouted. “Hans died at Verdun and Franzl was blown to bits at Ossowice on the East Front, and now I see I gave them for nothing, vergebens, vergebens. Why did you Kerls not stay where you belonged?”

“Tough luck, old man,” I answered, “but quite a lot of fine American boys died too. And you began it.”

He looked about him for a brick, but fortunately none was near at hand, and a minute later we were back in our coughing car and crawling out of this danger zone.

* * *

I have pleasant memories of the night we spent in Vasa, a little village in the Thuringian forest. The air was cool and bracing and the near-by mountain streams were alive with speckled trout, several of which, with robust appetites, we devoured for supper. Soon half a dozen of the village elders gathered around us and we enjoyed much friendly talk. “Thank God the war was over,” and we all agreed on the familiar formula—“What a pity it happened.” (Schade dass es so gekommen ist.) Soon, however, some debate developed as to the Emperor’s flight into Holland. Most of the villagers now gathered at the Stammtisch in the inn were of the opinion he should have died at the head of his troops, but one old man insisted, “No, it was his duty to survive, to live on. He personified the monarchial principle. It was his duty to live to fight another day when the Käfers (cockroaches) now in power in Berlin and Weimar would get their deserts.”

Naturally Greene and I kept out of this.

The following morning, bright and early, greatly refreshed, we pulled out of the village along a beautiful forest road. However, the night had not been as refreshing to the car as it had been to us, and soon it was again coughing—horribly. Then a flat tire developed and when that was replaced in silence, because all we had to say on that subject had been said before, we peered under the hood. Baffled as usual, for the survey gave no explanation of the weakening of the engine, I turned away and saw a weather-beaten and ragged German soldier coming along the road toward us. He was leaning heavily upon a stick or rather a staff about eight feet high, and certainly he was making but little progress. He reminded me of the many veteran grenadiers Grimm describes in his tales, plodding their weary way on the road back from Moscow in the Napoleonic days. As he drew nearer, I saw that the poor fellow was feeling his way with his staff rather than leaning on it and that his uncertain step was rather that of a blind man than a weary walker, although as it developed he was both. Just as he came up with us and I saw that the poor fellow’s face was a raw mass of red flesh, the result of a flame-thrower’s blast, and that his eyes were bandaged, Greene suddenly burst out into explanations of what really was the matter with the engine and how it could not possibly be remedied until we arrived at Mayence, where American mechanics and replacements would perhaps be available. The effect of these words in a strange tongue on the lonely traveler was startling. He staggered to the side of the road and fell with convulsive sobs to the ground. This was an unexpected sip of gall and wormwood in his bitter cup. “Die Englander sind schon in Thuringen [The English have already reached Thuringia],” he gasped. “I did not think they would have come so far, so soon,” he moaned. “Wie weit sind die Kerls vorgeschritten.”

We gave him a stiff drink, which he swallowed mechanically, and also several packages of cigarettes, which he pocketed without a word. Then, as it began to rain, we bundled him into our car and drove him back to Vasa, where we turned him over to the kind Wirth of the inn, by whom we had been so well received. It was a good deed and a daring one, to put an added burden of four miles upon our weakening motor—but we did it. As usual at sight of a personal disaster or continued suffering, my war “front” crumbled. To me the shambles of an impersonal battlefield was as nothing to the catastrophe that had overtaken this poor devil, and so I went to pieces. How far I went, I only realized many hours later when I discovered that in loading the blind soldier into the car I had left on the roadside bank both my camera and my much more valuable raincoat. But there was no turning back now. Even the ever-optimistic Greene was doubtful that we could reach the Rhine under our own steam.

* * *

The mechanic in Mayence did not prove to be the magician we had hoped to find there, but with the engine panting and coughing we pushed on and, about midnight, the broken, improvised bridges and the crater-marked roads revealed the fact that we were drawing near the immortal citadel of Verdun. The streets were still blocked with rubble and many barricades had not been removed. We wandered around within the town for another hour before we found an inn that was in operation, and certainly it was not operating on all cylinders. But even in the darkness I spied a mail rack and a telegram addressed to “General Bonsai, American Army.” Without doubt Frazier, whom I had advised as to our probable rtiute, had promoted me in the hope of securing quicker service. When I opened it, I found that the message was dated the very day I started from Berlin. It told me that our colonel was far from well, would sail at the first opportunity, and urged me to hurry, hurry, hurry!

At crack of dawn we pulled out of the ruined city and for an hour or two made good progress. Our hopes had revived when suddenly the old noises were heard, more intense if possible than ever before, and then with a wail of finality the engine stopped, and this time even Greene admitted that he was at the end of his remedies and panaceas. I thanked him warmly for the lift he had given me and, burdened with my bag and the Bosch magneto I was bringing for Frazier, I staggered along the railway track. I had walked on for an hour when I came to a station and looking up I read the word which under any circumstances would have been electrifying—“VALMY.” In my wanderings I had stumbled upon the field where on that never-to-be-forgotten day, September 20, 1792, modern warfare had been revolutionized.

I confess that for some minutes I forgot my weariness—even the weight of the magneto. In me, as with all others doubtless who have approached it, the name of Valmy awakened memories and invited reflection. It was, perhaps, on that very-hilltop that the tourist, Goethe, stood, and watching the raw recruits of the French Revolutionary Army rushing into successful battle, made this memorable entry in his diary:

“From this place and on this day a new era in World History begins, and you who are here can say you were present at its birth.”¹

The station was alive with historic memories, but apparently quite dead as to opportunities of transportation. For the time being there was not even a stationmaster, but I did not complain, for my motor mishap had landed me at the scene of the battle where modern warfare began, at least according to Goethe, who chanced to be there and who described what he saw as a poet rather than as a military expert. But his words have prevailed, as the words of poets generally do, and so it would be unwise to dissent from his view that here on this hallowed spot the “Nation in arms,” the young conscripts of the French Revolution, prevailed over the long-trained, the veteran Brunswickers. The truth is, of course, that in the army of valiant and enthusiastic citizens a number, quite a large number, of veterans trained under the monarchy had been enrolled and that it was very fortunate for the French Revolution that they were on hand. The whole truth is, however, that here as well as at Yorktown and later still at New Orleans the élan of the volunteer, who was also a sharpshooter, prevailed and a great change took place in what had been for centuries formal battle tactics.

Little Gneisenau, the father of the Prussian Army, an ensign in the Anspach regiment that had been hired out to the English and probably surrendered with Cornwallis at Yorktown, drew a profitable lesson from his humiliation. Fie appreciated the Virginia militia with their sure aim and supple movements at their true value, and when he returned to Prussia he put into practice the lessons he had learned. He limbered up the movements of Frederick’s Grenadiers, with the result that they won the War of Liberation and brought down to earth the Napoleonic eagles.

Having apparently no trains to announce, the chef de gare, when he appeared at last, was most desirous of showing the soldier from America over the battlefield; particularly he wanted to show me the historic ridge where years later Kellerman, the hero of many greater battles in foreign lands, who had been honored with a Napoleonic dukedom and a marshal’s baton, in his last testament ordered that his ashes be scattered to the winds that had been kind to his epochal victory here. But I was not to be decoyed away from the rusty steel rails over which so many hundred thousand gallant Frenchmen had rolled to their last rendezvous with destiny at Douaumont. An unannounced train might come sneaking by, I feared, and so I stuck to the battered platform and listened to the chef de gare, who, I concluded, was stronger on history than on timetables. And he certainly knew his Lamartine and loved to quote the poet-historian.

“As today,” he said, “on September 20, 1792, an autumn mist hung over the ridge.” Then he described how the battle was lost and how it was won. “It was the very day on which our first republic was born in faraway Paris,” he explained, “and, Monsieur, believe me, right in the cradle it was within a hairbreadth of destruction.” The chef was so eloquent that I soon fell in with his mood and I, too, could see the raw Carmagnoles rushing ahead, shouting “Vive la Nation” and singing the songs of freedom.

“The King of Prussia himself reproached his men for yielding before the onrush of our sans-culottes—but in vain.” Then, departing from the lyrical and speaking in the professional tones of a soldier who had been an auxiliaire in the Great War, he added: “But what a small expenditure of personnel there was! When they fled, the Germans only left six hundred dead on the field.” Somewhat arrogantly he added: “In our war such a petty casualty list would not have been recorded in the communiqués.”

Yes, as I was soon to realize more fully than ever before, ours had been a bloody war, and the battered bodies and the crippled lives had not all been buried underground, out of sight forever.

* * *

My hours in Valmy, and those that immediately followed, will mark a period in my own war memories. The train I ultimately caught was crowded, jammed, with the wreckage of war; it had been chartered, apparently, to carry the crippled and the crushed survivors of battle to Verdun, where they were to celebrate the anniversary of some great feat of arms which was, I think, the recapture of Douaumont, and now it was carrying them back to darkened homes. This train, crowded with those who survived, was a more horrible sight than any of the many ghastly battlefields I have witnessed in so many lands. It was clear to me that those who had died in a moment of exaltation and of inspiration were the lucky ones; to many of these death had been merciful, often it had come instantaneously, but the overcrowded train in which I now stood up for hours was filled with men and women who were dying slowly, the long-drawn-out death of conscious agony. All about me were groups of grand blessés, many with grotesquely distorted faces which even their loved ones could not look upon save with a feeling of repulsion that must have been difficult to conceal. Very much alone were the groups of war widows left to struggle for existence in a pitiless world, with perhaps a child, wearing as its only heritage the Médaille Militaire as substitute for the guiding hand of a father. As I traveled with this cavalcade of misery and of suffering, I realized more fully than ever before the terrible price our generation has paid for its victory. Is it not possible that we have learned our lesson? Can we not see to it that such a crime shall never happen again? Is not the panorama of calamity and distress by which we are surrounded .a sufficiently crushing indictment of the military epoch out of which no one has emerged victorious? Gone are the gay little wars and the picturesque and cheerful campaigns of but a few short years ago. They gave impetuous youth a field for service and opened avenues to high distinction. Casualties, of course, there were, but relatively few, and more often than not they were concealed by the smoking clouds of black powder. And the poets sang the songs of personal heroism. But the smokeless-powder campaigns, with the engines of greater destruction that are brought into action today, lead to mass slaughter, and the shambles of undistinguished mass graves are revealed in all their stark grimness. Yes, as the old ballad had it years ago, although the world would not listen: “Malbrouck est mort, et enterré [Malbrouck is dead and buried].” “Il ne reviendra pas [He will not return].” And with him has gone what there was of chivalry on the battlefield.

How I wish all who will be called upon to shape world policies in the next decade could have been exposed to this heart-rending spectacle. Out of such an experience might come something more substantial than our halting Covenant for peace and non-aggression, with reservations, signed by men well beyond the fighting age; perhaps might be reached even a universal decision not merely to disarm but to beat our swords into plowshares and to join in the forgotten prayer, “Peace! peace unto Jerusalem. They shall prosper who love Thee.”

* * *

From the moment I had abandoned the crippled car the Bosch magneto had proved a heavy burden. As the hours lengthened, it seemed to weigh a ton and I thought seriously of abandoning it, but I could not let down my loyal comrade of the Conference, and then was it not a harbinger of the peace and prosperity that might now come to the war-racked, devastated world? In sending me the commission Frazier had written: “There is no magneto in the world like that of Bosch and, the war being over, now again I must have one for my car.” Perhaps it was inventions such as this that would put the

Germans on their feet again, and so I staggered on under my burden. . . .

The train hobbled into Paris about midnight. After standing in the crowded corridor with my heavy pack for eight hours, I found I could hardly walk. I leaned against an iron pillar and watched and watched and waited. Slowly the silent mob of the lame, the halt and the blind, the crape-draped widows, and the pale-faced, sad-eyed orphans of some of the four hundred thousand gallant soldiers who died defending the great fortress against the onrush of the invading Germans, dissolved. For me the pomp and pageantry of war had vanished for a long time, perhaps forever, and what remained was misery and tears, loneliness and squalor. It was hours before the last of the war widows, carrying children who would never see their fathers, disappeared into the darkness of the city where victory perched. But I shall see them always—always.²