My Year of the War by Frederick Palmer

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My Year Of The War

Including An Account Of Experiences
With The Troops In France, And The
Record Of A Visit To The Grand
Fleet, Which Is Here Given
For The First Time In
Its Complete Form

By Frederick Palmer
(Accredited American Correspondent at the British Front)

Contents

To The Reader
I. "Le Brave Belge!"
II. Mons And Paris
III. Paris Waits
IV. On The Heels Of Von Kluck
V. And Calais Waits
VI. In Germany
VII. How The Kaiser Leads
VIII. In Belgium Under The Germans
IX. Christmas In Belgium
X. The Future Of Belgium
XI. Winter In Lorraine
XII. Smiles Among Ruins
XIII. A Road Of War I Know
XIV. Trenches In Winter
XV. In Neuve Chapelle
XVI. Nearer The Germans
XVII. With The Guns
XVIII. Archibald The Archer
XIX. Trenches In Summer
XX. A School In Bombing
XXI. My Best Day At The Front
XXII. More Best Day
XXIII. Winning And Losing
XXIV. The Maple Leaf Folk
XXV. Many Pictures
XXVI. Finding The Grand Fleet
XXVII. On A Destroyer
XXVIII. Ships That Have Fought
XXIX. On The Inflexible
XXX. On The Fleet Flagship
XXXI. Simply Hard Work
XXII. Hunting The Submarine
XXXIII. The Fleet Puts To Sea
XXIV. British Problems

To the Reader

In 'The Last Shot', which appeared only a few months before the
Great War began, drawing from my experience in many wars, I
attempted to describe the character of a conflict between two great
European land-powers, such as France and Germany.

"You were wrong in some ways," a friend writes to me, "but in other
ways it is almost as if you had written a play and they were following
your script and stage business."

Wrong as to the duration of the struggle and its bitterness and the
atrocious disregard of treaties and the laws of war by one side; right
about the part which artillery would play; right in suggesting the
stalemate of intrenchments when vast masses of troops occupied the
length of a frontier. Had the Germans not gone through Belgium and
attacked on the shorter line of the Franco-German boundary, the
parallel of fact with that of prediction would have been more
complete. As for the ideal of 'The Last Shot', we must await the
outcome to see how far it shall be fulfilled by a lasting peace.

Then my friend asks, "How does it make you feel?" Not as a prophet;
only as an eager observer, who finds that imagination pales beside
reality. If sometimes an incident seemed a page out of my novel, I
was reminded how much better I might have done that page from life;
and from life I am writing now.

I have seen too much of the war and yet not enough to assume the
pose of a military expert; which is easy when seated in a chair at
home before maps and news dispatches, but becomes fantastic after
one has lived at the front. One waits on more information before he
forms conclusions about campaigns. He is certain only that the Marne
was a decisive battle for civilization; that if England had not gone into
the war the Germanic Powers would have won in three months.

No words can exaggerate the heroism and sacrifice of the French or
the importance of the part which the British have played, which we
shall not realize till the war is over. In England no newspapers were
suppressed; casualty lists were published; she gave publicity to
dissensions and mistakes which others concealed, in keeping with
her ancient birthright of free institutions which work out conclusions
through discussion rather than take them ready-made from any ruler
or leader.

Whatever value this book has is the reflection of personal
observation and the thoughts which have occurred to me when I
have walked around my experiences and measured them and found
what was worth while and what was not. Such as they are, they are
real.

Most vital of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit to
the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in
Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the
Marne; most precious, my long stay at the British front.

A traveller's view I had of Germany in the early period of the war; but I
was never with the German army, which made Americans particularly
welcome for obvious reasons. Between right and wrong one cannot
be a neutral. In foregoing the diversion of shaking hands and passing
the time of day on the Germanic fronts, I escaped any bargain with
my conscience by accepting the hospitality of those warring for a
cause and in a manner obnoxious to me. I was among friends, living
the life of one army and seeing war in all its aspects from day to day,
instead of having tourist glimpses.

Chapters which deal with the British army in France and with the
British fleet have been submitted to the censor. Though the censor
may delete military secrets, he may not prompt opinions. Whatever
notes of praise and of affection which you may read between the
lines or in them spring from the mind and heart. Undemonstratively,
cheerily as they would go for a walk, with something of old-fashioned
chivalry, the British went to death.

Their national weaknesses and strength, revealed under external
differences by association, are more akin to ours than we shall realize
until we face our own inevitable crisis. Though one's ancestors had
been in America for nearly three centuries, he was continually finding
how much of custom, of law, of habit, and of instinct he had in
common with them; and how Americans who were not of British blood
also shared these as an applied inheritance that has been the most
formative element in the American crucible.

My grateful acknowledgments are due to the American press
associations who considered me worthy to be the accredited
American correspondent at the British front, and to Collier's and
Everybody's; and may an author who has not had the opportunity to
read proofs request the reader's indulgence.

FREDERICK PALMER. British Headquarters, France.

My Year Of The War

I
"Le Brave Belge!"

The rush from Monterey, in Mexico, when a telegram said that
general European war was inevitable; the run and jump on board the
Lusitania at New York the night that war was declared by England
against Germany; the Atlantic passage on the liner of ineffaceable
memory, a suspense broken by fragments of war news by wireless;
the arrival in England before the war was a week old; the journey to
Belgium in the hope of reaching the scene of action!--as I write, all
seem to have the perspective of history, so final are the processes of
war, so swift their execution, and so eager is everyone for each day's
developments. As one grows older the years seem shorter; but the
first year of the Great War is the longest year most of us have ever
known.

Le brave Belge! One must be honest about him. The man who lets
his heart run away with his judgment does his mind an injustice. A
fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home in the
eighth month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative
efficiency of the different armies engaged.

"Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal
sympathies?" I asked.

"Certainly," he replied.

When he had my opinion he exclaimed:

"You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought it
was the best of all."

"Is that what they think at home?" I asked.

"Yes, of course."

"The Atlantic is broad," I suggested.

This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a
sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The
side which they favour--that is the efficient side. When I ventured to
suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to
be considered as an army, it was clear that he had ceased to
associate my experience with any real knowledge.

In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the
organization of their concerns, and their resources of competition with
a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: "I like him, but
he has a poor head for affairs." Yet he was the type who, if he had
been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war who
would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand and
to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany, where
some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a
business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position
on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men--
a general of civil life.

"But look how the Belgians have fought!" he exclaimed. "They
stopped the whole German army for two weeks!"

The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was
the popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the
pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil.
On that day when a gallant young king cried, "To arms!" all his
people became gallant to the imagination.

When I think of Belgium's part in the war I always think of the little
Belgian dog, the schipperke who lives on the canal boats. He is a
home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out
on the tow-path to pick quarrels with other dogs; but let anything on
two or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will
fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the
schipperke spirit. All the Belgians who had the schipperke spirit
tried to sink their teeth in the calves of the invader.

One's heart was with the Belgians on that eighteenth day of August,
1914, when one set out toward the front in a motor-car from a
Brussels rejoicing over bulletins of victory, its streets walled with
bunting; but there was something brewing in one's mind which was as
treason to one's desires. Let Brussels enjoy its flags and its capture
of German cavalry patrols while it might!

On the hills back of Louvain we came upon some Belgian troops in
their long, cumbersome coats, dark silhouettes against the field,
digging shallow trenches in an uncertain sort of way. Whether it was
due to the troops or to Belgian staff officers hurrying by in their cars, I
had the impression of the will and not the way and a parallel of raw
militia in uniforms taken from grandfather's trunk facing the trained
antagonists of an Austerlitz, or a Waterloo, or a Gettysburg.

Le brave Beige! The question on that day was not, Are you brave?
but, Do you know how to fight? Also, Would the French and the
British arrive in time to help you? Of a thousand rumours about the
positions of the French and the British armies, one was as good as
another. All the observer knew was that he was an atom in a motor-
car and all he saw for the defence of Belgium was a regiment of
Belgians digging trenches. He need not have been in Belgium before
to realize that here was an unwarlike people, living by intensive thrift
and caution--a most domesticated civilization in the most thickly-
populated workshop in Europe, counting every blade of grass and
every kernel of wheat and making its pleasures go a long way at
small cost; a hothouse of a land, with the door about to be opened to
the withering blast of war.

Out of the Hotel de Ville at Louvain, as our car halted by the cathedral
door, came an elderly French officer, walking with a light, quick step,
his cloak thrown back over his shoulders, and hurriedly entered a car;
and after him came a tall British officer, walking more slowly,
imperturbably, as a man who meant to let nothing disturb him or beat
him--both characteristic types of race. This was the break-up of the
last military conference held at Louvain, which had now ceased to be
Belgian Headquarters.

How little you knew and how much they knew! The sight of them was
helpful. One was the representative of a force of millions of
Frenchman; of the army. I had always believed in the French army,
and have more reason now than ever to believe in it. There was no
doubt that if a French corps and a German corps were set the task of
marching a hundred miles to a strategic position, the French would
arrive first and win the day in a pitched battle. But no one knew this
better than that German Staff whose superiority, as von Moltke said,
would always ensure victory. Was the French army ready? Could it
bring the fullness of its strength into the first and perhaps the deciding
shock of arms? Where was the French army?

The other officer who came out of the Hotel de Ville was the
representative of a little army--a handful of regulars--hard as nails and
ready to the last button. Where was the British army? The restaurant
keeper where we had luncheon at Louvain--he knew. He whispered
his military secret to me. The British army was toward Antwerp,
waiting to crush the Germans in the flank should they advance on
Brussels. We were "drawing them on!" Most cheerful, most confident,
mine host! When I went back to Louvain under German rule his
restaurant was in ruins.

We were on our way to as near the front as we would go, with a pass
which was written for us by a Belgian reservist in Brussels between
sips of beer brought him by a boy scout. It was a unique, a most
accommodating pass; the only one I have received from the Allies'
side which would have taken me into the German lines.

The front which we saw was in the square of the little town of Haelen,
where some dogs of a dog machine-gun battery lay panting in their
traces. A Belgian officer in command there I recollect for his
passionate repetition of, "Assassins! The barbarians!" which seemed
to choke out any other words whenever he spoke of the Germans.
His was a fresh, livid hate, born of recent fighting. We could go where
we pleased, he said; and the Germans were "out there," not far away.
Very tired he was, except for the flash of hate in his eyes; as tired as
the dogs of the machine-gun battery.

We went outside to see the scene of "the battle," as it was called in
the dispatches; a field in the first flush of the war, where the headless
lances of Belgian and German cavalrymen were still scattered about.
The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which was
something to pay for the grain smouldering in the barn which had
been shelled and burned.

A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some
account of it, and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of
secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to show that it had been
only a reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns
as well as cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a
tiny feeling finger of the German octopus for information. The
scouting of the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same
object. Waiting behind hedges or sweeping around in the rear of a
patrol with their own cavalry when the word came by telephone, the
Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive.
Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits
supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every
German cavalryman was a Uhlan, according to popular conception.
These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the
accounts that you read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted
youths, with horses fresh and a trooper's zest in the first flush of war,
returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without
finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss
of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the
eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.

A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with
her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old
with toil. "Les Anglais!" she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had
some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out
half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have
them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express
the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were
burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist
toward the Germans.

When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the
invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average
European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman.
But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his
dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly intrenching back of Louvain, or
flag-bedecked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with
the true schipperke spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which
was about to burst in a flood.

It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where
everyone learns a single language, English, that she and her
ancestors, through centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated
country to people who speak French and to French civilization,
should never have learned to express themselves in any but their
own tongue--singular, almost incredible, tenacity in the age of popular
education! She would save the lance-heads and garner every grain
of wheat; she economized in all but racial animosity. This racial
stubbornness of Europe--perhaps it keeps Europe powerful in jealous
competition of race with race.

The thought that went home was that she did not want the Germans
to come; no Belgian wanted them; and this was the fact decisive in
the scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the
Germans were "out there." Across the fields one saw nothing on that
still August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first
enemy aeroplane I had seen in war. For the last two days the
German patrols had ceased to come. Liege, we knew, had fallen.
Looking at the map, we prayed that Namur would hold.

"Out there" beyond the quiet fields, that mighty force which was to
swing through Belgium in flank was massed and ready to move when
the German Staff opened the throttle. A mile or so away a patrol of
Belgian cyclists stopped us as we turned toward Brussels. They were
dust-covered and weary; the voice of their captain was faint with
fatigue. For over two weeks he had been on the hunt of Uhlan
patrols. Another schipperke he, who could not only hate but fight
as best he knew how.

"We had an alarm," he said. "Have you heard anything?"

When we told him no, he pedalled on more slowly, and oh, how
wearily! to the front. Rather pitiful that, too, when you thought of what
was "out there."

One had learned enough to know, without the confidential information
that he received, that the Germans could take Brussels if they chose.
But the people of Brussels still thronged the streets under the
blankets of bunting. If bunting could save Brussels, it was in no
danger.

There was a mockery about my dinner that night. The waiter who laid
the white cloth on a marble table was unctuously suggestive as to
menu. Luscious grapes and crisp salad, which Belgian gardeners
grow with meticulous care, I remember of it. You might linger over
your coffee, knowing the truth, and look out at the people who did not
know it. When they were not buying more buttons with the allied
colours, or more flags, or dropping nickel pieces in Red Cross boxes,
they were thronging to the kiosks for the latest edition of the evening
papers, which told them nothing.

A man had to make up his mind. Clearly, he had only to keep in his
room in his hotel in order to have a great experience. He might see
the German troops enter Belgium. His American passport would
protect him as a neutral. He could depend upon the legation to get
him out of trouble.

"Stick to the army you are with!" an eminent American had told me.

"Yes, but I prefer to choose my army," I had replied.

The army I chose was not about to enter Brussels. It was that of
"mine own people" on the side of the schipperke dog machine-gun
battery which I had seen in the streets of Haelen, and the peasant
woman who shook her fist at the invader, and all who had the
schipperke spirit.

My empty appointment as the representative of the American Press
with the British army was, at least, taken seriously by the policeman
at the War Office in London when I returned from trips to Paris. The
day came when it was good for British trenches and gun-positions;
when it was worth all the waiting, because it was the army of my race
and tongue.

II
Mons And Paris

Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to
Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away,
their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne
the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on
to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering
the advent of "Tommee Atkeens" singing "Why should we be
downhearted?" was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers;
a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness
was its best security should the Germans come.

The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men
who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where
the British army was. All they realized were sleepless nights, the
shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the
onslaught of outnumbering masses.

An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry
with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his
wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street
which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away,
reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.

A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a
German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when
showers of shrapnel descended, and the Germans, in that grey-
green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the
orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made
another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night
with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any
transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train.
That was all he knew.

These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom
of action. They were interesting because they were the first British
wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.

Back to London again to catch the steamer with an article. One was
to take a season ticket to the war from London as home. It was a
base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of
military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. You soaked in England at
intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever you stepped on the pier
at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom
long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk
cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea
complete.

Those days of late August and early September, 10.14, were gripping
days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a
cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever-
deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea
was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. You still wondered if you
might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare.
Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory
chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of
detail.

They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-
room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet
glances, as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded
couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young
girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which
had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one
knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go
to the front.

Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert
glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat,
when he was not looking at her--which he was most of the time, for
reasons which were good and sufficient to others besides himself.
Apprehended in "wool-gathering," she mustered a smile which was
so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be
forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so
precious.

They attempted little flights of talk about everything except the war.
He was most solicitous that she should have something which she
liked to eat, whilst she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn't he
going "out there?" And out there he would have to live on army fare. It
was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning--she
was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The
incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an
institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for
young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.

One such incident does for all, whether the war be young or old.
There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I
was rather glad that I did not know this pair. If I had known them I
should be looking at the casualty list for his name and I might not
enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the
best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest
turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament
poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words.
The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It
was the hour of war, not of talk.

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