FROM 
 
 R DOUGLAS PINKERWN 
 

 /V^-f;-:o^ 
 
 
 N 
 
 %^^' 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^^'' ''^^■ 
 
 
 ..-^^ 
 
 .-^^ 
 
 
 
 \. 
 
 
 \V 
 
 ■^ ^ ^V 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ';^ 
 
 ,^3 --C. 
 
 ^0<: 
 
 •-?> %^- 
 
 
 .-/ 
 
 *^. 
 
 A^^ -^^ 
 
 o , . * ,\'> 
 
 ■^. 
 
 o. ^^ 
 
 
 
 
 o '^^'^^^ ^>^ "^^Z^^-^. 
 
 X- '^ 
 
 I' 
 
 '■'S^^-? J" 
 
 ..0.^/^ ••■-° .> 
 
 
 
 
 ^ v^^^ 
 
 
 ; X^^ ^^.^ 
 
 
 Sbt 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 

 ,s\ , < o^ _p. ., ^ 
 
 
 
 \Q^x 
 
 V S » <» / ^-i 
 
 .A-- 
 
 
 
 *>', 
 
 
 "■-. 
 
 o.\ 
 
 
 ^ -V 
 
 >^' 
 
 
 
 ^oo^ 
 
"LADIES FROM HELL' 
 
Sergeant R. Douglas Pinkerton 
 
"LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 BY 
 
 R. DOUGLAS PINKERTON 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH 
 PHOTOGRAPHS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1918 
 
 ^^ 
 
^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 A 
 
 o 
 
 f 
 
 .-'V ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 f^;^ 
 
 Copyright, 1918, by 
 The Century Co. 
 
 FuUxihed, April, 1918 
 
 APR -4 1918 
 
 ©CI.A492807 
 
TO 
 
 THE GIRL WHO WAITED 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
FOEEWORD 
 
 I realize the utter futility of writing a preface, 
 for no one ever reads one — unless by chance they 
 be in a hospital or waiting in a dentist's office. It 
 is for these unfortunate few, then, that I indict the 
 following. 
 
 After you have been through the mill and mire 
 of battle, your life is changed. It can never be the 
 same again. It seems that you must still continue 
 to fight, even though you be physically incapaci- 
 tated. 
 
 Therefore it is partially for my own amusement, 
 and partially to continue my fight for ultimate vic- 
 tory that I write this book. 
 
 In it I have endeavored, in a meager way, to tell 
 America what she wants to know. You are asking 
 about the same questions as did England in 1914 
 and 1915. You are in approximately the same 
 position as was England in those early days. You 
 are beginning to discover that business cannot be 
 as usual, and that war is not all flag waving and 
 hurrahing. You are learning, as did we ; and may 
 a just God grant that your lesson be shorter by far 
 than was ours. 
 
FOEEWORD 
 
 My efforts will be devoted to a truthful presenta- 
 tion of what I saw and what I know. There is 
 little humor in warfare. That little I will try to 
 preserve. My endeavor will be to loan you my 
 eyes for a space that you may see what I saw, and 
 thus know your war — for it is yours — just a wee 
 bit better. 
 
 I hope, as you turn the last page, that you will 
 realize the true meaning of this struggle, that you 
 will realize why I take pride in having been a mem- 
 ber of the London Scottish, and that, above all else, 
 you will realize the true duty of your America to- 
 day. 
 
 In closing let me express my appreciation to C. 
 H. Handerson for his assistance in arranging the 
 multitudinous incidents of my fighting days in 
 some sort of sequence, and in helping me to weave 
 them into a connected story of my little excursion 
 with **The Ladies from Hell.'^ 
 
 (Signed) R. D. Pinkeeton, 
 
Copy of Telegram to Colonel Malcolm from 
 
 Field Marshal Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief 
 
 of British Forces. 
 
 I wish you and your splendid Regiment to accept my 
 warmest congratulations and thanks for the fine work 
 you did yesterday at Messines. You have given a glo- 
 rious lead and example to all Territorial Troops who 
 are going to fight in France. 
 
 Copy of Letter to Colonel Malcolm from 
 Major-General E. H. Allenby, G. 0. C. Cavahy Corps. 
 
 Dear Colonel, 
 
 I congratulate you on the accompanying message 
 from the Commander-in-Chief, which you and your 
 grand Regiment have so richly deserved. I wish to 
 add my sincere thanks, and those of the Cavalry Corps, 
 for the self-sacrificing support you gave in a great 
 emergency. The behaviour of officers and men of the 
 London Scottish was worthy of the best traditions of 
 British Regular Troops. Only their steadiness and 
 courage saved a situation that was as difficult and crit- 
 ical to deal with as will ever occur. 
 
 Yours sincerely and gratefully, 
 
 (Signed) E. H. ALLENBY, 
 
 Major-General. 
 
Copy of Letter to Colonel Malcolm from 
 
 Brigadier-General C. £. Bingham, Commanding 4th 
 
 Cavalry Brigade. 
 
 My dear Colonel, 
 
 I venture to ask you to convey to your Regiment my 
 deepest gratitude and admiration for the work they 
 performed on October 31st, and through the following 
 night. No troops in the world could have carried out 
 their orders better, and while deploring the losses you 
 have incurred, I unhesitatingly affirm that the Allied 
 Armies in France owe to the London Scottish a place of 
 high honour amongst their heroes. 
 
 (Signed) C. E. BINGHAM, 
 Br.-Gen., 4 Cav. Bde. 
 Nov. 1, 1914. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER ^^®5 
 
 I How THE Call Came . 3 
 
 II France 23 
 
 III The Battle for Lille 60 
 
 IV The Man in the Blue Jeans— A Trench 
 
 Raid 84 
 
 V Mr. Findley's Grave — Trench Life — 
 
 Nichols Goes West 106 
 
 VI Sniping— The Traitor at Bethune— What 
 
 Happened at Lille 130 
 
 VII The Farm-House between the Lines — 
 *'Send Us More Ammunition" — The Spy 
 AT Headquarters 1^2 
 
 VIII The British Air Service Becomes 
 Stronger — The Refugee from Lille — 
 We Find our Wounded Sergeant . . 179 
 
 IX Raiding a German Trench— A ** Seam- 
 Squirrel" Returns to its Home— Back 
 to Blighty and the Hospital . . . 190 
 
 X Who Will Win the War— and How . . 228 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Sergeant R. Douglas Pinkerton . . . Frontispiece 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 The London Scottish entraining for the trenches . 20 
 
 The Sergeant- Cook's Instruction Class . . ,. . 56' 
 
 The London Scottish advance across a captured Ger- 
 man trench 68 
 
 After the day's work .......[.. 122 
 
 Advancing in skirmish order against the enemy . . 154 
 
 The London Scottish detaching a truck .... 174 
 
 One of our guardian angels 212 
 
LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
^XADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HOW THE CALL CAME 
 
 FROM a hospital cot in Flanders the story 
 came, from the tongue of a jawless, nameless 
 man. I and a thousand like me read it, and read 
 it again; then, along with the other thousand, I 
 went down to the drill-hall to scrawl my name on 
 the list of Great Britain's soldiers. 
 
 It seemed awfully odd to be there, for only three 
 months before I 'd teetered on the curb, not a block 
 away, and seen our boys of the London Scottish 
 marching off for their baptism at the front. 
 They 'd swung along very spruce in kilt and khaki, 
 and in the haze of August 4 the war seemed a long 
 way off. 
 
 As they passed, their pipers struck up that old 
 favorite of mine, *^The Cock of the North," and I 
 wished rather vaguely then that I might have been 
 along with them. The crowd cheered in a hearty, 
 
 3 
 
4 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 happy way, and I envied our boys, and I intended 
 to join them — sometime. But I delayed, because, 
 like the rest of us, I was asleep on August 4. 
 
 Even the boys in khaki underestimated the task 
 before them. They had marched away before, 
 they 'd been cheered and wished godspeed before, 
 and as old Johnny Nixon passed me he called out, 
 *^ Hello, Pink, old boy, I '11 see you again at Christ- 
 mas"; and I and the rest believed it. But that 
 was August 4. 
 
 So they marched away, gay and hilarious, al- 
 most out for a summer stroll, and only Lord Kitch- 
 ener knew or suspected the trial that was to come ; 
 and he kept silent. 
 
 To-day it was November 1, and of the thousand 
 who had marched away only three months before, 
 a scant three hundred remained. Johnny Nixon 
 had gone down with the rest. 
 
 Joffre's Frenchmen had swayed the German 
 line back thirty miles, from Paris to the banks 
 of the Marne, and trench warfare had begun. 
 Slowly we folks back home began to stop joking 
 about three-year enlistments as an impossible 
 term ; the casualty lists were longer, and England 
 was waking up. And then came the story of Hal- 
 lowe'en night. The Scottish, our Scottish, whom 
 we 'd seen go not three months before, had been 
 in action. They 'd mobilized just outside of 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 5 
 
 Paris ; been rushed up in the pink of evening, in 
 motor-lorries and afoot, to stop the onrushing 
 Germans. 
 
 Far off to their right they heard firing; like 
 breakers on the shore it sounded, dull, tireless, 
 meaningless. And then, as they drew nearer and 
 nearer, the sounds took on distinctive meaning. 
 Individual shell-bursts separated themselves from 
 the vast jumble of noise, and then were lost in the 
 ceaseless roar to the rear. 
 
 It was half -past eight when they got there, and 
 night was just coming down. They halted and 
 stood at ease, while their colonel climbed up on a 
 broken cart and addressed them. Then, with his 
 good wishes and godspeed, they stumbled off to 
 their trenches, mere threads on the face of the 
 earth. 
 
 On their left were the Lancers, on the right the 
 Carabiniers, both regular regiments. Our Scot- 
 tish were just volunteers — volunteers with orders 
 to hold their ground. 
 
 The night wore on till ten o'clock. Off in the 
 distance they heard the Germans coming, flushed 
 with their victories. They made no attempt to 
 hide their approach, and *^Die Wacht am Rhein'' 
 floated down to our men in the trenches. 
 
 On they came ; one could almost see them now, 
 but the British had orders to withhold their fire 
 
6 '* LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 until two hundred yards, and they held it. Wave 
 on wave the German troops came on, and wave on 
 wave they were mowed down ; but there is an end 
 to physical endurance, and in time numbers will 
 tell. The regular troops to the right and left fell 
 back, and left the Scottish, our Scottish, alone, 
 with the cream of the Prussian Guard at their 
 front, on their right, and on their left. Perhaps 
 if our boys had known their predicament this page 
 would never have been written; but, being just 
 volunteers, they had only their orders to go by, 
 and they fought on and on. 
 
 There were only a thousand of them, and three 
 times they formed up their thinning ranks. On 
 their third attempt the Prussians broke and fled, 
 and our boys returned to their lines, leaving some 
 five hundred and fifty behind in the mud and mire 
 of old Flanders. 
 
 But that isn't all the story. Back with them 
 came a stranger, a German officer. A bit of a 
 scratch on the head had knocked him out for a 
 time, and our stretcher-bearers carried him in, 
 along with our own wounded and dead. 
 
 In those days (we have learned more since) we 
 knew nothing of German Kultur. In those inno- 
 cent, early days a wounded man was a wounded 
 man, no matter what his creed or his color or his 
 race. So our boys took the German and treated 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 7 
 
 him as one of their own, and turned him over to 
 old Doc McNab for attention. 
 
 It was only a wee bit of a scratch he had; bnt 
 Doc leaned over him first, while our own wounded 
 and dying lay waiting, and as he finished his work 
 the officer asked for a drink from his bottle, which 
 he had thrown down on the floor. 
 
 Gad, we were innocent then ! They 'd not even 
 bothered to remove the Hun's service revolver, 
 which dangled from a strap at his side ; and, as old 
 Doc McNab leaned over, the German's right arm 
 twitched, there was a flash, and a tiny thud. The 
 Teuton sprang to his feet, his revolver still 
 grasped in his hand, but old Doc McNab lay still 
 where he 'd fallen. 
 
 That was the story that came from the hospital 
 cot in Flanders. It was enough for me. I awoke. 
 And when I got to the drill-hall there was no mis- 
 taking the place, for from a block away you could 
 see the crowd. A long, thin line of young fellows 
 wound in and out of that crowd, each in the grip 
 of that story of the night before. I took my place 
 at. the end of the line and waited. 
 
 Hours passed. 
 
 In the meantime the line strung itself far out 
 into the street, for from all over the country men 
 had come swarming in. Tall, lanky Scots they 
 were mostly, from up northward, crystallized into 
 
8 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 a solid fighting mass by the story of the Marne and 
 the tale of the London Scottish. 
 
 In that line there was little talk, though the 
 crowd hummed like a hive. We volunteers were 
 silent. Here and there perhaps was a burst of 
 laughter, but it was rare. Most of us were think- 
 ing, and thinking hard. As the hours crept slowly 
 by and I shifted from one tired foot to the other, 
 the enthusiasm which had filled me at the start 
 began slowly to ooze out and away. 
 
 **Was it worth it?" I questioned. ** Belgium 
 outraged, treaties broken, friends gone, and I was 
 going; but was it worth it, after all?" 
 
 And other men were debating, too. Dark 
 scowls of self-analysis clouded many a face in that 
 line, but not a man stepped out ; for the glorious 
 example of the London Scottish, the thoughts of 
 our friends, and the empty cheer that ** perhaps 
 we wouldn't see action, anyway," combined to 
 hold us in line. 
 
 I might as well be frank. Four hours of wait- 
 ing on a chill November day is likely to take the 
 romance out of even war itself. But there was 
 enough of romance there, just enough and no 
 more, to hold me in that line from four until eight 
 that night. 
 
 At eight came my turn to be examined. A 
 brusk and worn ofificer, dark and pouched under 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 9 
 
 the eyes, peered up at me in an impersonal sort of 
 way fromi under his vizor. He took down such 
 minor details as my name and address, and di- 
 rected me to step into an anteroom, where I 
 stripped, and then I was ushered into another 
 room with two or three other chaps. 
 
 Here we were hurriedly examined for physical 
 defects, and a flush of primeval pride crept over 
 me as they fled from my ears to my eyes and from 
 my eyes to my feet without finding anything the 
 matter. Long and tediously they lingered over 
 my feet and knees and leg muscles. The wait be- 
 came painful, so thorough was their work about 
 these apparently unimportant parts of my anat- 
 omy; but at last I was officially marked as 0. K. 
 and fit for service. 
 
 Little attention had been paid to my peculiar 
 fitness, by either education or experience, for any 
 particular branch of the service. These tired and 
 hurried men in khaki seemed much more inter- 
 ested in how soon I could report for active duty 
 than in aught else concerning me. There was 
 nothing about my examination that would lead the 
 casual observer to think that Great Britain had 
 spent time or forethought in selecting from this 
 mob of men those specially skilled in this or that 
 branch of industry. We were men, all of us, just 
 men, and Great Britain wanted men, and in those 
 
10 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL" 
 
 dark days of 1914 many a man who could have 
 served his country better at the bench or in the 
 workshop was rushed trenchward and lost, with 
 all his potential usefulness. 
 
 Hastily I dressed and joined the silent group of 
 some fifty or sixty other chaps who waited in an 
 anteroom to the right. There we stood, staring 
 morbidly at one another. There was nothing to 
 be said; comradeship was banished by the solem- 
 nity of the moment. Occasionally a time-worn 
 joke would be passed among the groups, and the 
 laughter was just a trifle forced and hollow. 
 Some of us made brave attempts to hide our 
 thoughts — thoughts of home and mother, fam- 
 ily, and all that. What little talk there was 
 was rough, inclined to braggadocio, punctu- 
 ated by laughter that rang peculiarly out of 
 place, like laughter in a doctor's office or in a 
 morgue. 
 
 Abruptly the door opened, and we were herded 
 into a darkened room. At a table sat an officer in 
 uniform rumpling through a mass of blue and 
 yellow papers. Before him stood an ink-well and 
 a Bible. A hooded light cast weird shadows over 
 us, and we stood about, first on one foot, then on 
 the other, and waited. For a time he worked fev- 
 erishly, meanwhile grunting out hoarse, unintel- 
 ligible orders to a pale and anemic-looking chap 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 11 
 
 who dashed in and out of the room like some 
 automaton. 
 
 Suddenly — so suddenly that most of us jumped 
 — he stood up, and swung the Bible over his head 
 with the habitual movement of a man practising 
 his morning exercise. 
 
 *^Eaise your right hands and repeat after me,'' 
 said he. A forest of hands shot up, and we re- 
 peated, word for word, the solemn oath of alleg- 
 iance of the British Army. 
 
 **I hereby swear by Almighty God that I will 
 bear faithful and true allegiance to His Majesty 
 King George V, his heirs and successors, and will 
 obey as in duty bound commands of all officers set 
 over me, so help me God. ' ' 
 
 **Now kiss the Book," said he, and we kissed 
 that dog-eared volume with various degrees of 
 explosiveness and enthusiasm. 
 
 I was now a soldier of the British Empire. I 
 had been duly accepted and sworn, and, truth- 
 fully, I was rather disappointed at the feeling. I 
 looked no different, I felt no different, unless it 
 was for a sense of duty done and suspense ended. 
 I was rather dazed, but at a pointed hint from the 
 recruiting officer I picked up my hat and departed 
 for the quartermaster's stores. It was now ten 
 o'clock at night, and the order was to appear the 
 next morning at nine. 
 
12 ** LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 The details of our preliminary training in Lon- 
 don would be of little interest to the average 
 reader. It varied little from that now being given 
 your boys at their respective camps. 
 
 The short days of November and December flew 
 by quickly enough, with marching and counter- 
 marching, bayonet-fighting, and light field work, 
 all intensely interesting at the time, but soon for- 
 gotten in the new duties and new excitements that 
 were thrust upon us. 
 
 Gradually our flabby civilian muscles took on a 
 more sturdy texture. The kinks crept out of our 
 desk-bent backs, and our sallow civilian skins be- 
 came bronzed with a rosy admixture of sheer 
 health, while the seventy-five-pound service kit 
 ceased to be a herculean burden of leaden weight. 
 
 As we marched and fought our mimic wars, 
 grim reports drifted back to us from the firing- 
 line in France, sometimes mere haunting rumors, 
 sometimes the sullen facts themselves; and our 
 faces grew grimmer, our practice less mechanical 
 and more intense. Something of the spirit that 
 had dominated the London Scottish on Hallowe 'en 
 came to us, and all sense of dread, conscious or 
 unconscious, vanished. But the gulf between us 
 and civilian London grew ever wider. We were 
 nothing to them but a passing show, interesting, 
 perhaps, as an incarnation of the fighting spirit 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 13 
 
 of England, with a certain charm as examples of 
 the impetuosity of youth, nothing more. England 
 slept, though the war was already in the fifth 
 month of horrible reality. The people of the 
 London streets, the happy, care-free, busy throngs, 
 drifted on in a mist of unreality, while we lived, 
 and lived intensely. Not that they could fairly 
 be blamed, however. It was not their fault that 
 they looked so resolutely the other way while Lou- 
 vain and Rheims and Ypres were shattered and 
 burned. We soldiers received news, some of it 
 authentic, some sheer rumor. But no such news 
 ever reached * * the man in the street. * * He was an 
 outsider. 
 
 The newspapers were hammering out ream on 
 ream concerning the brutality toward Belgium. 
 Dark hints occasionally burst forth, flickered on 
 the popular tongue, and died. An uncompromis- 
 ing, uneducated censorship kept the real facts 
 darkly closeted, and though the newspapers knew 
 much, their inky lips were shut, and the masses 
 devoured miles of newsless news, while the facts 
 crawled from lip to lip, and only empty rumor 
 told the truth. When some fact, red from the 
 firing-line, actually did slip from under the clumsy 
 thumb of our early censorship, enlistments 
 doubled and trebled and quadrupled instantly. 
 A Zeppelin raid, fortunately, could not be stowed 
 
14 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 away in a musty cubbyhole, and hence did yeo- 
 man's service for our recruiting officers. But 
 while the civilian, fed on vague nothings for the 
 most part, dreamed on peacefully, we soldiers in 
 ■the making, who received the real news from re- 
 turning veterans, blazed in earnest fury to be done 
 with our training, and over and at the enemy in 
 fact. 
 
 Late in December came orders to inoculate us 
 for typhoid, and we rejoiced, for we knew that our 
 days in London were now numbered. When the 
 medical chaps appeared, we lined up dutifully and 
 laughingly watched their advance. No more vil- 
 lainous-looking array of venomous little needles 
 had I ever seen before. 
 
 Now, a typhoid inoculation is a simple thing. 
 Like marriage, one never appreciates it at its true 
 value until later. As fast as we were treated, we 
 were given forty-eight hours' leave of absence, 
 ' * on our own, ' ' surely a silly precaution for such a 
 tiny pin-prick! But the omnipresent brain of 
 headquarters seldom errs in its directions, nor did 
 it err this time, for I was scarcely half-way home 
 when I was seized with a sudden and unaccount- 
 able clammy coldness that traversed my spine in 
 elephantine shudders. I chattered into the house, 
 a picture of frozen misery. All afternoon I 
 hugged the roaring fire in an agony of chills, all 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 15 
 
 night I shook and chattered gloomily to myself 
 upon a bed piled high with blankets. Not till 
 the wee small hours of morning did I cease to 
 curse the idle jests that I had flung at the toy 
 weapon of that grinning medical officer. 
 
 Then came notice that we would start for our 
 intensive and final training at Dorking, on Jan- 
 uary 1. With this news came the Christmas holi- 
 days, and some of us who were among the fortu- 
 nate romped homeward, bursting with health. 
 
 Not even all the spoiling I got at home, however, 
 during those few days, and the real pang I felt at 
 leaving, could dull my enthusiasm when I went 
 back to join my regiment, bound for Dorking, the 
 first step toward France. 
 
 Dorking is, or rather was before our arrival, a 
 little town of some five thousand inhabitants ; but 
 by December its population had doubled, and sol- 
 diery swarmed its streets by day and night. The 
 town faded into the background like a frightened 
 child, and the inevitable kilt brightened an other- 
 wise colorless winter landscape. 
 
 From six-thirty in the morning until five-thirty 
 at night, and often until the gray of coming dawn, 
 we drilled and drilled and played at fighting. 
 Thousands of straw Teutons were annihilated 
 daily. Our rifles, at first clumsy clubs in our 
 hands, gradually became a part and parcel of us 
 
16 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 and of our daily lives; and happily so, for when 
 you are plowing through the mud of no-man's 
 land the only friend you have is your rifle. No 
 single piece of training stood me in better stead 
 than the incessant training at handling our Lee- 
 Enfields. 
 
 Our rifle-practice might destroy some of the 
 cherished delusions of the arm-chair theorists. 
 The ranges were usually from two hundred to six 
 hundred yards. It is within that zone that the 
 rifle-bullet does its sweetest work, and at two 
 hundred yards, when a wild mob of howling Huns 
 are belching down upon you, or you on them, the 
 dainty rifle-sight is well-nigh forgotten. Its coy 
 outlines are those of a stranger dimly seen and 
 hardly recognized. You slap your rifle to your 
 shoulder; no time for fancy beads and adjust- 
 ments of wind-gage. It is just a case of shoot, 
 shoot hard and fast, and may a kind Providence 
 and a skilful doctor look after the poor man who 
 fritters away his precious seconds in pretty loga- 
 rithms. 
 
 At the front, unless you 're sniping, the rifle- 
 sight well-nigh loses its identity. Fine, hair-split- 
 ting arguments about it are forgotten, and sheer 
 instinct, guided by the rifle-barrel's blackened 
 bulk, is enough, as the notches that might decorate 
 any Tommy 's gun would indicate. 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 17 
 
 Don't misunderstand me. The rifle is no ap- 
 prentice tool. It is not used to hammer nails or 
 tacks. With all his apparent nonchalance and 
 carelessness, your Tommy or your poilu (Fritz, 
 too, I dare say) regards his rifle as his most cher- 
 ished pet. He puts in hours a week upon its 
 pretty mechanism, oiling, polishing, truing, always 
 and everywhere; for the canny Tommy knows 
 from cruel experience that the day may come when 
 between him and the grim reaper with a German 
 name stands only the shadow of his rifle. 
 
 Winter settled down, and with its shortened 
 days the pace became faster, the training harder, 
 always harder. Eegular hours? We had none. 
 It was just train, train, train, from field to rifle- 
 range, from rifle-range to field again. Play it 
 was, hard play, but news from across the channel 
 spurred us on, and we yearned to be over helping, 
 and avenging our brothers who had gone before. 
 
 But the end was nearer than we knew. 
 
 At 4:30 one morning (it was ghastly cold, 
 with three or four inches of mica-like snow 
 swirling underfoot and rasping into the bare 
 flesh) we were routed out of our bunks to entrain 
 for Epsom Downs. Like lightning the word ran 
 down the line : we were to be reviewed by the Iron 
 Man of the British Army, Lord Kitchener him- 
 self. 
 
18 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 By 5:30 we were on our way, and in a short 
 half-hour we tumbled out of our refrigerated 
 coaches into the most blinding snow-storm of the 
 year. Through it we trudged, each an animated 
 snow-man, and then from six until eight-thirty 
 that morning we awaited the arrival of the great 
 Lord K. of K. 
 
 But it was worth the wait. A splendid figure 
 he was, big upstanding, a man's man from his 
 boots, black against the snow, to the vizor of his 
 immaculate cap, impervious alike to man's petty 
 criticisms and God's storms. 
 
 Chattering with cold, we marched by in stiff 
 review, and then lined up before him and listened 
 as his big voice boomed out above us, brief, terse, 
 to the point, a message worth the hearing. 
 
 ' ' Men of the London Scottish, you have a record 
 to uphold. Three things only would I leave with 
 you to-day, you soldiers of the British Empire. 
 First, fear God; second, honor your king; and 
 third, respect the women." His voice caught, 
 and he repeated with added emphasis, ''Respect 
 the women. ' ' 
 
 Then, with a brief nod of dismissal, he thanked 
 and congratulated our colonel for the splendid 
 appearance of his men, and disappeared into the 
 blinding snows. 
 
 No trains were waiting to bear us back. They 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 19 
 
 had long since gone about other and more im- 
 portant business, and we were left to plow home- 
 ward through fifteen miles of sodden sleet and 
 slush. 
 
 Then came the call ; one hundred and fifty of us 
 were going to France immediately. Some kind 
 fate smiled on me, and I was among the first of our 
 battalion to be selected. There were brief, but 
 hearty, congratulations from the unfortunates who 
 remained behind, and we of the favored few were 
 off for forty-eight hours' leave before entraining 
 for Southampton. 
 
 Forty-eight hours is a niggardly enough allow- 
 ance for some occasions, but forty-eight hours 
 before departing for the battle-front is an ever- 
 lasting hell of torment. My first advice to any 
 soldier in similar circumstances is to go to the 
 theater, the tavern, go to any place but the place 
 you want to go, home. I say this because I know 
 what those last forty-eight hours cost my mother, 
 though she showed the terrific strain but little. 
 
 It was a Sunday night; I remember we had 
 been to church together; my mother, my sisters 
 and my little dog. Rags, walked to the sta- 
 tion with me. I wished devoutly that they had 
 stayed at home, and yet I valued every minute 
 with them as my life, and blessed the long walk 
 and the belated train. 
 
20 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 All about us were other men and other women, 
 some talking excitedly, feverishly trying to cram 
 into a moment the thoughts and hopes and prayers 
 of a lifetime. Others stood silently, crowded 
 close together, seeming to suck some modicum of 
 comfort from their very nearness. Porters — 
 there were porters then — brushed past with pro- 
 fessional zeal ; trains shrieked and roared ; people 
 came and went, bumped us, jostled us, but we felt 
 them not a bit. We and those others about us 
 were living in the past and the future, and all man- 
 kind might have roared by and we would not have 
 seen or felt their going. 
 
 Even the little children seemed awed by the 
 unaccustomed atmosphere about them. Women 
 with babies in their arms held them up for a last 
 fond caress of a khaki-clad father, not too proud 
 to show a glistening eye. One chap — he sat next 
 to me — ^was going back for the second time, and 
 he leaned far out of the quaint old English coach 
 to implant a last kiss upon the candy-covered 
 lips of a pink little cherub. 
 
 My mother watched and chatted until the final 
 preliminary jerk told us that we were on our way. 
 Then she waved gaily to me, and flung me a last 
 brave kiss. I thought I saw her lips quiver for an 
 instant, but she bent to pick up Rags, who was 
 making frantic efforts to board the train, and 
 
HOW THE CALL CAME 21 
 
 when she straightened again her eyes smiled, 
 steady and brave, above his wriggling body. 
 
 At London we entrained for Southampton amid 
 the cheering strains of that ancient Scottish dirge, 
 **Will Ye nae Come back again,'* truly an in- 
 spiring note to waft after a bunch of trench-bound 
 soldiers. At Southampton we were given the 
 allegorical keys to the city and more freedom than 
 was good for some of us. The group to which I 
 attached myself made a valiant, but wholly vain, 
 endeavor to consume the entire stock of some 
 score or more ale-houses, and the results were not 
 unusual. 
 
 I must admit that I have only faint recollections 
 of a rather rough and toilsome journey to the 
 camp-grounds. There was a moment of awful 
 concentration as I endeavored to gather my scat- 
 tered wits sufficiently to pass muster as a soldier, 
 sober and sedate. Then came an agony of fear 
 as I realized that I had failed in my endeavor ; but 
 a kindly provost marshal shut his experienced eye, 
 and looked the other way, and the only punishment 
 that awaited me was the usual morning of repent- 
 ant thirst, and an awful fear of the effects of 
 the channel-crossing upon my addled pate and 
 stomach. 
 
 At dusk, the following evening, we embarked 
 for France, cheered on by half of Southampton. 
 
22 ^ ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 The dock was as black as the Styx itself, but the 
 ship was even blacker. There were the usual 
 false starts and cries of late arrivals, the usual 
 turmoil and bustle, and then, as the chimes struck 
 out eight 'clock, the dock noises suddenly became 
 dimmer, as if a multitude of gauze-like curtains 
 had been let down between us and them. 
 
 We were off. At the Southampton bar two 
 powerful search-lights cut through the night and 
 pinned us to the darkness. Through their rays 
 flashed a torpedo-boat destroyer, a dashing black 
 shadow smothered in spray. Semaphores wig- 
 wagged up and down; a search-light wavered 
 drunkenly. The tiny destroyer dashed to star- 
 board and encircled us, round and round, like some 
 joy-crazed fox-terrier pup. Our engines increased 
 their steady thumping, and we were off — off for 
 France ! 
 
 \ 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 CHOPPY channel seas, proverbial the world 
 over, a reeling world underfoot, scudding 
 clouds, bully beef, hardtack, and a night of well- 
 earned, but unwisely spent, revelry, mixed with 
 the same gladsome cordiality that distinguishes 
 oil and water. From eight that evening until mid- 
 night, I decorated an unsteady, but extremely 
 popular, rail. But who shall say that even the 
 darkest cloud has not its silver lining? Had it not 
 been for that ill-timed mixture of tempest and 
 toddy, midnight would not have brought with it 
 a sight that will cling to me imtil my last reveille 
 dies away. 
 
 We were four hours out, fighting through solid 
 sheets of salty spray, when away off to the east 
 a dim glow welled up from the horizon. By in- 
 distinguishable degrees it grew into a ball of 
 yellow light, and a hospital ship rushed out from 
 the mist, homeward bound, with its pathetic cargo. 
 
 White as bleached linen she was, with a huge 
 red cross of mercy painted on her side and illumi- 
 
 23 
 
24 ^ ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 nated to all tlie neighboring seas by a powerful 
 search-light hung from her rail. Brilliantly 
 lighted at her foremasthead was a tremendous 
 Red Cross flag, held out stiff and taut by the 
 nipping breeze. At the stem a Union Jack floated, 
 and about her rail a band of alternate white and 
 green lights set this ship apart, beyond all mis- 
 taking, as a vessel that held nothing that she 
 feared to show. 
 
 As far as you can see her a hospital ship is a 
 hospital ship and nothing else. Out of the night, 
 like a torch, she springs, and into the night she 
 speeds, bound for Blighty, for home. Such ships 
 it is, these white messengers of mercy, plainly 
 marked, that the Hun sinks '*by inadvertence. ' ' 
 She passed, and we held on our course through the 
 thick blackness of the night. 
 
 Out of the morning mist came France, and down 
 to the boat to meet us pushed a great somber- 
 colored throng, of women mostly. There were a 
 few men, old fellows, and a scattering of chatter- 
 ing little children. 
 
 Color? There was none; it was black every- 
 where. Even in those early days France was a 
 mourning nation. The Marne had cost. Mons 
 had cost. They are four years past, and still, even 
 to-day, France fights on. 
 
 The France of the boulevardes and cafes is 
 
FRANCE 25 
 
 not and never has been the real France, any more 
 than the children of your comic supplements are 
 the real children of America. The real France is 
 a nation of impenetrable depth and strength, grim 
 and everlasting. 
 
 As we skipped off from the boat, the cheery 
 faces of a few American women called to us. Be- 
 fore them were great piles of rolls that tasted like 
 home, and huge urns of steaming coffee belched 
 forth untold gallons of renewed life to wave-worn 
 Tommies. 
 
 You can have no realization of how delicious 
 a roll and a steaming cup of coffee can be until be- 
 hind you is a night on the English Channel, and 
 before you France and the fighting-line. 
 
 Up into the railroad yards we moved, after a 
 brief rest, and then war — the first intimation of 
 it — jumped out at us. Gone were the English 
 coaches, with their unappreciated comforts. Be- 
 fore us was a string of very ordinary and very 
 dingy box-cars, boldly labeled : 
 
 Hommes 40 
 Chevaux 20 
 
 The above, which was translated by the more 
 worldly-wise among us, referred to the ability of 
 said cars to carry forty men or twenty horses. 
 Personally, I am convinced that some one made a 
 
26 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 grievous error in figuring the carrying capacity 
 of these cars. I was one of the forty ^^hommes" 
 in one of them, and the proverbial sardine must 
 feel lonely in comparison to us. Twelve hours of 
 jolting added nothing to our joy, although it served 
 to shake us into a more perfect fit within the car. 
 Never will I complain of the five o'clock rush on 
 your street-cars. With all its horrors, it is a 
 stroll in the park, compared with a twelve-hour 
 massage in an antiquated perambulator, labeled 
 by some practical joker, **Hommes 40, Chevaux 
 20." 
 
 Rouen, our destination, was a funny, squat little 
 town, amusing in the extreme to us of London's 
 busy thoroughfares. We whistled our way along 
 its funny little cobbled streets just as church was 
 letting out, for it was Sunday. Lined up on each 
 side of us were rows of chattering French folk, 
 three deep. Apparently the war was forgotten 
 for the moment, and we in our kilts became the 
 chief topic of discussion. Gay jests were thrown 
 out at us, and were returned in kind, but the 
 Frenchmen had the best of it. I remember one 
 little gamin, with the shrill yelp of the street 
 urchin, nearly wrecked the regiment by loudly 
 calling attention in surprisingly good English to 
 the marvelous shapeliness of our captain's legs. 
 
 The enjoyment, however, was not all on the 
 
FRANCE 27 
 
 side of the populace. We of the London Scottish, 
 many of us bred among the rattle of trams and 
 the roar of trains, found plenty that was novel 
 in the curious old town. Its fifteenth century 
 architecture, its thatched roofs, its jagged sky- 
 line, and whitewashed walls reminded one 
 strangely of the second act in one of Raymond 
 Hitchcock's comic operas. I almost expected to 
 see the inevitable brewer from Milwaukee rush 
 in, escorted by two wax-mustached gendarmes and 
 followed by a weeping soubrette and a crowd of 
 irate villagers. There were plenty of soubrettes 
 and villagers ; we lacked only the German brewer. 
 He, and a hundred thousand like him, were forty 
 miles away. 
 
 Our camp, or base, was at the top of a hill over- 
 looking the town. Long avenues, cobbled with 
 unthinkably cobbly cobble-stones and lined with 
 funereal-looking poplars, stretched away before 
 us. Neat little houses, each with its flaming 
 garden, broke up the wayside into homey patches 
 of color. Over it all swam the dust from our 
 pounding feet. 
 
 At the base we were given a riotous welcome 
 by the older soldiers, some of whom had already 
 gone, to return slightly wounded, while others 
 had yet to see the whitish, cotton-like plume of 
 exploding shrapnel. 
 
28 ^'LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 Friendships were struck up immediately; word 
 from England was exchanged at par for word 
 from the fighting-line. In time, facts gave way 
 to rumor, rumor to gossip, and at last gossip 
 itself resigned to the unceasing chaffing and 
 friendly ** strafing" that is a sign of healthy, happy 
 camp-life. 
 
 The days were largely our own, and the mo- 
 tion-picture theater and the canteen, with its 
 delicacies, did a land-office business. Fifteen 
 thousand of us boys were there. What little 
 routine we had was similar to that of the training- 
 camp back home, but there was a slight difference. 
 The orders were sharper, the officers looked more 
 tired and careworn. Everywhere there was an 
 atmosphere of tension and strain, a waiting for 
 the call that would start us flying trenchward. 
 
 And one night, at 9:30, that call came. I 
 and a dozen or so of my new-found pals were 
 attending a moving-picture show. I remember 
 that Charlie Chaplin had just completed some 
 target practice with a large and succulent cream 
 pie when the alarm rang out. We dashed out 
 into the night without ceremony. At the alarm- 
 post was our officer. The Germans were breaking 
 through our lines. We were to be off immediately. 
 We stumbled away through the dark to get our 
 packs; and then the bugle sounded again, and it 
 
FRANCE 29 
 
 was announced that we would move early in the 
 morning. 
 
 It was a real relief to know that after five or 
 six months of training we were to be released 
 from the leash and freed to do our bit. Like 
 prize-fighters were we, in the pink of condition, 
 eager for the gong and the test. Our bodies 
 were rested, our spirits superabundant. Fear! 
 There was none. There was no room for fear in 
 the excitement of the moment, for to-morrow we 
 were to become, in deadly earnest, members of 
 Great Britain's fighting forces, and we longed for 
 sun-up, as a school-boy longs for Christmas 
 morning. 
 
 Sun-up finally came, red, then yellow, and a 
 glorious morning unrolled from the east as we 
 marched away to the railroad station and the train 
 that was to take us to the front. 
 
 The scenery was no longer a novelty, but, in our 
 intoxication, peculiar modes of dress, and odd col- 
 loquialisms gained a renewed amusement for us, 
 and were again held up to rude banter and ridicule. 
 But the French laughed with us at our jokes or 
 at our French ; for they had come to know Tommy, 
 and they knew that his bark was a hundred times 
 worse than his bite. 
 
 The British Tommy, you know, is not a bad 
 man at heart. He loves to chaff and chatter, and 
 
30 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 the French have come to love him, with all his 
 faults, almost as well as they love their own poilus. 
 There is something so solid and stolid about the 
 British Tommy that it appeals by contrast to the 
 Frenchman, used as he is to his volatile, excitable 
 countrymen. It is the Tommy's stability, his 
 solidity, that makes him valuable, especially when 
 mixed with, and cooperating with, less-experienced 
 troops. He steadies the line, gives steel-like 
 tenacity to its backbone, and grim, unquenchable 
 determination to its morale. But to see your 
 British Tommy cavorting on the green of a rest 
 billet or about a railway depot, you would never 
 suspect him of those sterling qualities for which 
 he is justly famous. 
 
 While we waited for the train bedlam was let 
 loose. French people were burlesqued, French 
 trains were imitated, everything French came in 
 for its share of ridicule, and the Frenchmen stood 
 about us and grinned and enjoyed it with us. 
 They knew better than did we that despite it all 
 we loved France, and would love her still more 
 as we gave more to her great cause. 
 
 All day we waited for that train. Thanks to 
 the Y. M. C. A., hot coffee and rolls were forth- 
 coming, and, be it known, at a shamefully small 
 sum. We of the wise, who had held council with 
 veterans of similar uncertain trips, filled our 
 
FRANCE 31 
 
 haversacks with chocolate, hard-boiled eggs, and 
 bread, as f ortiJSLcation against possible vicissitudes 
 of war-jtime travel, and we did well. 
 
 Ultimately the dilatory train, such as it was, 
 pulled in, amid jeers and cheers from the as- 
 sembled soldiery. It was a decidedly dilapidated- 
 looking little train, made up of ancient third-class 
 coaches, loose-jointed box-cars, and first-class 
 coaches, remodeled to suit the momentary need. 
 
 Like a Sunday-school class out for a picnic we 
 piled in. After an interminable argument, all 
 were seated, and the officers repaired to the plat- 
 form until a fitting moment of departure should be 
 granted us by a crabbed looking train-despatcher. 
 No sooner were the officers out of the door than a 
 full third of the car left by the windows on the far 
 side, to return, triumphantly bearing luxuriously 
 upholstered seats from some empty and neighbor- 
 ing first-class coaches. 
 
 I suspect that future Baedekers will earnestly 
 beseech American tourists to bring their own 
 cushions when traveling in France, for I am quite 
 sure that another year of war will totally denude 
 French first-class coaches of such luxury. 
 
 Evening drew on, and it was with difficulty that 
 the rickety coaches bore up under the strain 
 within; but, perhaps because he realized the im- 
 pending danger to his train, the despatcher finally 
 
32 '^LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 let US loose, and we were off for the front, just 
 as night closed down upon ns. 
 
 Immediately the blinds must be drawn, for 
 Teuton airmen have been known to spot such 
 speeding trains and to bestow a bomb or two upon 
 them, or perhaps a dose of machine-gun fire cast 
 in at open windows. But we were not in total 
 darkness ; no such luck. Above us, thrust through 
 holes in the roof, were consumptive oil-lamps that 
 served rather to emphasize the gloom than to dis- 
 pel it. Nevertheless, these aspiring, but inade- 
 quate, lamps were at premium, and one enter- 
 prising Tommy, at the risk of his own life, crawled 
 along the roof of the rocking train and pilfered 
 the lifeht from our compartment that he might the 
 better mend a slight tear in his equipment. 
 
 But gradually the practical joking ceased for 
 lack of further food to feed upon; conversation 
 dwindled, and one by one we dropped off into 
 the land of nod, surrounded by the fumes of 
 the dilapidated oil-lamps and by a few wakeful 
 souls whose voices droned away tirelessly through- 
 out the night, telling and retelling little anecdotes 
 of home life, of London, and speaking of their 
 hopes and fears for the future. 
 
 The night wore on amid the rattle and groans 
 of the train, and those half-indistinguishable 
 noises of the dark as it slipped by us. But with 
 
FRANCE 33 
 
 the first faint rays of morning came another 
 sound entirely new to us; and yet it was not a 
 sound at all at first, but a feeling of omen, a sensa- 
 tion of vibrations too low in degree to shake our 
 tiny ear-drums. Gradually it became more and 
 more pronounced, and all at once, as if a door 
 had been opened, the clean, clear bark of an Eng- 
 lish field-piece burst in upon us, punctuated by the 
 sharp crack and crash of German high-explosive 
 shells. 
 
 Instantly the traiq^was a hive of excitement. 
 Bark, hark, boom came back those waves of sound. 
 A window flew up, another followed, and the full 
 and incessant roar of distant battle surged in 
 with the morning sun. 
 
 War! 
 
 It was in the air, and yet it was nowhere. 
 
 Little peasant houses, stage-like through the 
 mist, sent up wee columns of smoke from their 
 kindling fires. An old man, dressed like a page 
 from a nursery-book, puttered in his garden, but 
 straightened up and waved to us as we fled by. 
 A tiny little town popped past, another, and then 
 another, and the inhabitants toddled to their gates 
 and waved and called in the high falsetto voices 
 of old age. An automobile, with the chauffeur 
 bent low over the wheel, plunged round a corner 
 and stopped in a cloud of dust and explosive 
 
34 '^LADIES FEOM HELL" 
 
 French expletives ; and through it all and by it all 
 we raced, while the tumult of battle became ever 
 more audible. 
 
 After an unforgivably long time the train 
 stopped, hesitated, and crept into a station. On 
 the platform were a group of kilted officers, repre- 
 sentatives of the battalion to which we were going. 
 Stiff and sleepy from hours of travel, we lumbered 
 out of the coach, amid a clutter of equipment, and 
 lined up, while the waiting captain briefly and hur- 
 riedly welcomed us to our new quarters. 
 
 Then, with two pipers at our head, we swung 
 eagerly out into a cross-road, turned to the left, 
 and stretched out, a long, party-colored line, down 
 one of those typical, cobbled French roads, lined 
 with its long, lean poplar-trees. 
 
 A staff automobile, drab-colored and mud- 
 spattered, flashed by, oblivious of ruts and bumps 
 and all other traffic. At a cross-road a seemingly 
 endless line of huge khaki-colored transports, 
 laden with food and ammunition for the front, 
 rumbled and rattled by. All day long this line 
 wound on, endless, tireless, a monument* to the 
 tremendous appetite of war and to the efficiency 
 of the British War Office. 
 
 By the wayside quaint little thatched peasant 
 huts crept up to meet us, and crawled away into 
 the dusty distance. Old folks — always old folks 
 
FRANCE 35 
 
 — toddled about, pursuing the humble duty of their 
 age — to the grim accompaniment of distant, but 
 continuous, gun-fire. 
 
 At last we trudged into the town of Alougne, 
 where we were billeted. I, fortunately, was 
 quartered with an old French woman, a wrinkled, 
 bespectacled old grandmother of wondrous sweet- 
 ness. Her **boys," she called us; ** Mother'' we 
 called her. There were thirty-five of us stationed 
 with her, and, as I came up, some of the boys who 
 had just returned from the firing-line were noisily 
 enjoying their first bath in five weeks. 
 
 We of the new draft looked on wide-eyed, wor- 
 shiping the naked heroes of the trench, and later 
 some of a more practical turn of mind helped our 
 adopted mother with her little household chores, 
 her garden, or her much-beloved cow. One of the 
 city-bred chaps of London gallantly offered to 
 milk her cow for her. 
 
 '^Non," said Mother Lecoq, smiling broadly at 
 his blissful ignorance ; and then, in exquisitely bad 
 English; *^One tried to milk her las' week; he 
 still dans VhopitaL Ma vacJie no friend of 
 Tommy." And with that Mother Lecoq rolled 
 off with her milking-pail to do the task herself. 
 After viewing ma vacJie, I am inclined to believe 
 the tale. 
 
 By evening the old-timers were sufficiently 
 
36 **LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 washed and polished to satisfy even the most 
 fastidious, and we gathered around our coffee and 
 milk, with an appetite whetted for the tales that 
 were certain to come forth with the dusk and the 
 reminiscent glow of lighted pipe and cigarette. 
 
 After considerable coaxing, Pete — we never did 
 learn his last name — grudgingly agreed to tell of 
 his latest escapade in no-man's-land. 
 
 Pete was about as big as a minute and as bash- 
 ful as a two-year-old child. To extract a tale 
 from him was a task ; but, once in it, he gave him- 
 self over to the telling with a gusto of a profes- 
 sional raconteur. 
 
 It seems that he had been given orders to take 
 a little excursion out into no-man's-land in order 
 to locate a German machine-gun emplacement 
 which had been proving needlessly annoying to 
 one of our communication trenches for two or 
 three days. 
 
 During the day he took his bearings and ar- 
 ranged a private code of signals with the listening- 
 post from which he would depart, and to which 
 he planned to return after the completion of his 
 task. 
 
 Promptly at the appointed hour he went over 
 the top and stumbled across the pitted surface 
 of no-man's-land. Everything went smoothly, 
 enough, and he was well on his return journey 
 
FRANCE 37 
 
 with the desired information stowed away m his 
 pocket when a flare hissed up into the sky and 
 turned no-man 's-land into a river of calcium light. 
 
 At that moment, Pete was only about seventy 
 yards from the German trenches and he pros- 
 trated himself with a curse and a prayer for luck. 
 As he fell, his eye caught a movement to his left, 
 and he dimly saw three helmeted figures, like him- 
 self groveling in the mud, German reconnoitering 
 patrols in no-man's-land. 
 
 Instantly he ripped his revolver out, but re- 
 turned it to its place with equal despatch, for 
 in such circumstances indiscriminate shooting is 
 the height of folly. Any shot in no-man's-land 
 is likely to bring down a hail of bullets from both 
 the opposing trenches — bullets that seek out friend 
 and foe with equal favor and equally disastrous 
 results. 
 
 There is an unwritten law, founded on stern 
 necessity, that governs no-man's-land. While all 
 patrols in this forbidden territory carry revolvers, 
 they are seldom used, for obvious reasons. When 
 hostile parties meet, if they be of equal strength, 
 they pass each other with an exchange of horrible 
 threats, but little else. However, if one patrol 
 is stronger than the other, it may endeavor to cap- 
 ture the weaker party, but always without firing, 
 if possible. Firing a shot in this God-forsaken 
 
38 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 territory is like lighting a match in a powder- 
 magazine. It is about as certain a method of sui- 
 cide as has yet been discovered. 
 
 But to return to Pete. The German patrol was 
 only about twenty or twenty-five yards from Pete 
 when the flare flashed up, and as darkness again 
 settled down they worked so close to him that 
 he could have touched them, had be been in a 
 careless mood. t)iscretion, however, was Pete's 
 middle name, and he let the Germans lead him by 
 thirty or forty yards until they halted squarely 
 between the outreaching arms of two English lis- 
 tening-posts. 
 
 At this psychological moment Pete, in his eager- 
 ness, tripped and fell full on his face with a re- 
 sounding splash. Instantly the three Germans 
 dropped, and Pete resigned himself to what ap- 
 peared inevitable capture. But for once the in- 
 evitable failed to materialize, and the Germans 
 set on about their mission and moved ahead until 
 they were within one hundred and fifty yards of 
 the English trench, and still exactly between the 
 two outstretched listening-posts. 
 
 Then Pete took his life in one hand and his re- 
 volver in the other, fired into the night in the 
 direction of the Germans — and hopped into a lis- 
 tening-post. The report was not dead on the air 
 before no-man's-land was ablaze with flares, and 
 
FRANCE 39 
 
 the three Germans were neatly trapped squarely 
 between the English listening-posts. 
 
 The German line, scenting trouble, started up a 
 fusillade, effectively preventing their own com- 
 rades from returning homeward in the intervals 
 between the flares of exaggerated daylight. 
 
 During a momentary lull in the firing, while the 
 English flares were withheld, a strong reconnoit- 
 ering party went out from the ends of our listen- 
 ing-posts, which were about seventy-five yards 
 apart, and neatly pocketed the Germans, who 
 were found cursing lustily and worming slowly 
 Berlinward on their stomachs. 
 
 Pete's experience provoked similar tales, some 
 of actual experiences and some of a lurid nature 
 that would make Diamond Dick and his associates 
 as green as mint with envy. 
 
 One story I remember particularly, for at the 
 time it struck me as being ample proof of the 
 necessity for rigid discipline in trenchland. 
 
 It seems that an officer, accompanied by six 
 men, planned a bit of gum-shoe work in no-man's- 
 land. Word of their plans was passed down the 
 line, and at the appointed hour they set out. On 
 returning, they had approached to within thirty- 
 five or forty yards of their own trench, when a 
 lance-corporal called ^^Tiny," because he was six 
 feet five in his stocking-feet, let fire at them with 
 
40 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 a speed and energy imparted by six months' in- 
 cessant practice. Tiny had forgotten his orders, 
 and did not recall them until a familiar and acid 
 voice boomed out from before his rifle-sights : 
 
 * ^ You damn fool, you ! Want to kill your own 
 menT' 
 
 Tiny collapsed on the firing-step and hurriedly 
 computed the possible extent of his damage and 
 the probable severity of the forthcoming punish- 
 ment. More by good fortune than design, how- 
 ever, his aim had been as bad as his intentions had 
 been good, and therefore six weeks at hard fatigue 
 was the punishment for his temporary lapse of 
 memory. 
 
 It was amid a hurricane of similar incidents that 
 the evening wore on. The men seldom if ever 
 spoke of casualties, confining themselves rather 
 to the humorous side of trench life or to tales of 
 rare professional skill of one sort or another. 
 
 To our avalanche of questions they gave only 
 patronizing, tantalizing answers. 
 
 *^0h, you 11 soon find out, my boy," was the 
 usual response to some query that had been quiv- 
 ering on our tongue for hours. 
 
 **How does it feel to be under firel Well, were 
 you ever in a bath-tub of hot water when — well, 
 you just wait and see. You '11 find it 's almost ex- 
 actly as I have been telling you. 'T would be a 
 
FRANCE 41 
 
 crime to spoil the feeling for you by describing 
 it too minutely beforehand. '^ 
 
 But out of their idle conversation I gathered 
 that of all war's manifold horrors the most 
 dreaded is the waiting under fire — waiting to go 
 over, to do anything that will expend your pent-up 
 energies and nervous force, anything that will stop 
 your thinking, anything that will stop your imagi- 
 nation from running riot and making a coward 
 of you despite yourself. Within a fortnight I 
 sounded a loud ^^Amen^' to these complaints. 
 
 During the course of the evening they repeatedly 
 lamented the death of a certain Tommy Thomp- 
 son, their machine-gun sergeant. Tommy, it 
 seems, had been busily engaged in scattering his 
 steel-jacketed gifts among the Germans with 
 marked and invariable success. But success 
 brings with it its own penalties, and early one 
 morning, prior to their usual eleven o 'clock Hymn 
 of Hate, the Germans started throwing over some 
 heavy stuff as a token of unusual spleen. These 
 shells were surprisingly well timed, and appeared 
 to be focusing perilously near to Tommy's 
 machine-gun emplacement. A little to the left 
 they dropped, and then a little to the right; then 
 one to the rear by five yards, and then one a bit 
 to the front, but always creeping closer, like the 
 flow of a horrible tide. 
 
42 ^^LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 Here the story-teller paused, and spat reflec- 
 tively at the barn-door before continuing. The 
 others stared hard into the fire. 
 
 **I was out at a listening-post,'' resumed the 
 speaker, **when a shell went over my head with a 
 noise like the ** Flying Scotchman" on its run from 
 London to Glasgow. I felt in my bones that she 
 was the one that was going to do the work; and 
 she did. I looked back, and saw the whole em- 
 placement and most of the neighboring scenery 
 thereabout heave up into the air in a cloud of 
 nasty, brownish smoke. When the wind caught it 
 away, there wasn't anything left of the place, 
 and where old Tommy had been dozing was just 
 a bit deeper than the rest. 
 
 * *I went back when my time was up, and met one 
 of the machine-gun crew coming back with 
 Tommy's identification disk in his pocket and the 
 remnants of the machine-gun on his shoulder. 
 
 *^ *That,' said he, * is the sixth one they have 
 clicked for us in the last week, and I 'm going back 
 to get another. ' ' ' 
 
 After this recital there was a prolonged silence. 
 Tommy Thompson had been extremely popular 
 among his mates, and one by one they withdrew 
 into the cow stable, which was our boudoir for 
 the nonce. 
 
 This particular cow stable, I soon learned, was 
 
FRANCE 43 
 
 on a par with its thousand fellows of northern 
 France. 
 
 It was alive with rats of an embarrassingly 
 friendly disposition. That was my first experi- 
 ence with rats on such terms of intimacy. To 
 this day a rat running across my face will wake 
 me, but that night a rat scampering across my 
 wrist sufficed to wake the echoes of the entire 
 neighborhood. I was sternly cautioned to be 
 scrupulously silent, else I might wake not only 
 the echoes, but the remainder of the rats. This 
 sage advice had the desired effect until two of 
 the little creatures engaged in a friendly sparring 
 match, within three feet of my head. I hastily 
 seized my rifle, and managed to place its butt 
 neatly upon the upturned face of a chap three rows 
 farther down the line. Forthwith I was pro- 
 nounced worse than the Boche himself, and was 
 deposited outside of the shed for the balance of 
 the night, that my comrades might enjoy the 
 silence and the rats undisturbed. 
 
 But even in the open I was not alone. At three 
 'clock I woke with a feeling that was a cross be- 
 tween an itch and a bite. Shortly, however, the 
 itch disappeared completely, and gave way to a 
 series of unmistakable and undeniable bites. The 
 ** crawlers'' were among us. Crawlers, be it 
 known, is a popular and esthetic cognomen for lice, 
 
44 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 plain body-lice. They are particularly friendly 
 with the Scottish, owing to the comfortable quar- 
 ters afforded by the Scottish pleated kilt. 
 
 By morning we of the new draft were thor- 
 oughly aroused to their presence, and an aston- 
 ishing and horrible array of germicides appeared 
 in protest. Most of us had come armed to the 
 teeth for these much advertised creatures, and we 
 longed to try conclusions with them. 
 
 The conclusions, however, were all in favor 
 of Monsieur the Crawler. He is invincible. 
 Powders guaranteed to kill anything on four feet 
 or centipedes, are as nothing to his Satanic 
 Majesty. A patent grease with which you are 
 supposed to butter your body appears to be a 
 haven of refuge and a mine of nourishment for 
 him. 
 
 After experimenting for a few hours with all 
 our powders, greases, ointments, and a mixture of 
 all three, we retreated before the inevitable, and 
 joined that day's crawler party about a bonfire, 
 in which our contributions were deposited as fast 
 as we could locate them and convince them of our 
 earnestness. 
 
 And over us always floated the tireless boom 
 and crackle of the battle. We wanted to be in it. 
 The older men, with their good-natured bantering, 
 had made us feel woefully out of it. We longed 
 
FRANCE 45 
 
 to duplicate their experiences, to be able to speak 
 casually of bombs and shell-fire, as if we lived and 
 thrived upon the stuff. There was no feeling of 
 fear or dread ; but the nervous strain of waiting, 
 coupled with the monotonous work about the billet, 
 had its usual effect, and soon, for lack of other 
 amusement, Tommy, new and old alike, fell back 
 upon his genteel and ever-handy pastime of grous- 
 ing. 
 
 This business of grousing is Tommy's foremost 
 and dearest accomplishment. He didn't invent 
 it, but he has perfected it to an unbelievable de- 
 gree. If Tommy can't grouse and grumble about 
 the weather or the fit of his socks, he will pick upon 
 his sergeant. If the sergeant, by some stroke of 
 Deity, is flawless, the commissary department will 
 be aired to the breezes. If the commissary de- 
 partment has furnished agreeable grub of late, 
 't will be the post-office which has failed in its duty. 
 Always your Tommy will find something seriously 
 wrong if he really sets out to do so. But at the 
 bottom of it all is nothing but a big heart and 
 a desire for a little encouragement and sympathy ; 
 which, if not satisfied immediately, begets the de- 
 sire to have revenge on the nearest object. Grous- 
 ing is nothing but a poor substitute for sympathy, 
 and it is as harmless and as meaningless as a 
 lassie's smile. 
 
46 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 For four days we rested and ranted in our billet 
 behind the firing-line, while the grumbling of 
 Tommy and the growling of the battle-front be- 
 came steadily more noticeable. Which of the 
 two rumblings brought the welcome order to be 
 otf , I do not know ; I only know that it came, and 
 early on the fourth day of our stay we formed up 
 and prepared to leave. 
 
 As I ran out of the gate to join my company, 
 our old hostess called to me, and, flushing like a 
 school-girl, breathlessly handed me a wee bundle. 
 
 *'Voici, mon fits/' she said, ^*you keep him, an' 
 do not forget moi et ma vache/' 
 
 With that she turned back, waved me a pretty 
 good-by, and thew a kiss to all of us as gaily as a 
 maid of one fourth her age. 
 
 I opened her humble packet, and a worn and 
 battered rosary fell out into my palm. Touched 
 by the sentiment, I poured it into my breast pocket, 
 and to this day I carry it, half as a talisman of 
 good fortune, and half as a reminder of old 
 Madame Lecoq and her indomitable vache. She 
 calls up a vision of all France personified, that 
 gay old soul who had given her three sons, yet, 
 for all her sorrows, kept a brave spirit. 
 
 As we swung away through the village, bent old 
 figures waved to us, some gaily, some gravely, 
 from each little doorway and garden, and a horde 
 
FRANCE 47 
 
 of chattering children followed us, just as I used 
 to follow a traveling-show, wide-eyed and wonder- 
 ing. Far out to the edge of the town they trotted 
 beside us, and would have continued on indefi- 
 nitely, I firmly believe, had not we ourselves 
 ordered them back. 
 
 And how we hated to see those kiddies go! 
 French they were, foreign to us as foreign could 
 be, but kiddies still, and reminders of home. To 
 send them back was to snap the last tie that must 
 ever link man to home and fireside. 
 
 As the tail of their chattering procession dis- 
 appeared around a bend, we settled down to the 
 wearisome grind of march. Dust welled up all 
 about us. It was hot, desperately hot for May, 
 and our tongues soon became thick and leather- 
 like. Some of the boys sucked incessantly on 
 malted milk tablets, and what a godsend they 
 were. Aside from their slight nourishment, they 
 helped wonderfully in alleviating thirst, the 
 grim specter of which dogged us all day long. 
 
 By noon we had covered about half our journey 
 to Richbourg St. Vaast, but only a fifteen-minute 
 halt was allowed before we were again up and 
 away, gray, dust-covered ghosts plodding through 
 a mist of chalky atmosphere. Toward evening 
 a sky-line rose up to meet us. It was the high- 
 water mark of the German advance in that sector. 
 
48 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 What the name of that villa'ge was I do not 
 know. It was lost with the viUage itself, perhaps. 
 Not a house was left ; as far as the eye could reach 
 to the left and to the right was only ruin and 
 then more ruin. A chimney, gaunt and unreal in 
 the evening light, jutted up into the sky ; a solid 
 wall, perhaps, or a roof, but never the two to- 
 gether. Through some broken wall or open door- 
 way one could still see the little homey scenes, 
 a bed, a chair or two beside a shattered hearth, 
 a table with the dishes still resting on it. In the 
 center of the village stood what was once a church, 
 now a rubbish-pile of blasted brick and multi- 
 colored plaster. In the ditch beside the road were 
 occasional dead horses, loathsome objects. A lean 
 dog rested across the shattered threshold of one 
 house, and near by, in eternal truce, were the bat- 
 tered remains of his ancient enemy, the family 
 tabby ; but the family were gone, unless the little 
 cross in the doorway and the mound of new earth 
 perchance marked the last resting-place of the 
 owner. 
 
 Such sights were new to us, and they had their 
 full etf ect. Laughter and talking died, and curses, 
 mumbled through clenched teeth, took their place. 
 The spirit of France sifted down upon us and 
 took up its abode in our hearts. 
 
 From soldiers in name, this village, a habita- 
 
FRANCE 49 
 
 tion fit only for crows and scurrying rats, turned 
 us into soldiers in fact; and as we stumbled 
 wearily on, grumbling was gone, and grim, silent 
 determination had taken its place — determination 
 to avenge those roadside crosses, those homes, and, 
 yes, that lifeless dog and cat, dumb, but eloquent 
 symbols of homes violated, firesides wantonly 
 wrecked, women and children murdered or car- 
 ried away to a bondage more horrible by far than 
 death itself. 
 
 Our billet that night was a war-racked house. 
 The windows were gone, the door swung drunk- 
 enly on a broken hinge, the garden was a hole 
 half filled with brackish water, the walls were 
 staggering uncertainly, and the little orchard was 
 a mass of charred and jagged stumps. It had 
 been a home once, and a home it was again to a 
 score of dusty, kilted Tommies; for Tommy's 
 home is where he hangs his hat. 
 
 But scant time we had to enjoy its rude com- 
 forts, for ten of us were ordered out to the firing- 
 line. Our excitement was intense; but it was 
 dampened when, instead of guns, we were handed 
 shovels, and, instead of cartridges, pickaxes. 
 War, you know, is not all shooting; ninety per 
 cent, of it is hard, laborious work. 
 
 After being cautioned to make no noise and 
 to beware of all light, we stole forward through 
 
50 ''LADIES FROM HELL^' 
 
 the night to a point about four hundred yards be- 
 hind the firing-line, where a communication trench 
 required lengthening and deepening. Here for 
 the first time I saw the scene for which I had been 
 in training these six months past. 
 
 Spread out before me like a panorama, as far 
 as the eye could reach, were the trenches, out- 
 lined by hundreds of twinkling, flashing star-shells, 
 some red, some green, others yellow or white. 
 Blot out the sounds and the unmistakable odor, 
 and it might have been a fireworks display at some 
 summer amusement-park. But the sounds ! Who 
 can describe the sounds of no-man's-land and its 
 environs at night 1 There is the nasty hollow rat- 
 a-tat-tat of the machine-gun, now far oif and dull, 
 now sharp and staccato, like a snare-drum, as its 
 hungry mouth sweeps in your direction. Then 
 comes a series of echoes, hollow, sinister echoes, 
 that you feel as much as hear. A spent bullet 
 whistles past you, and dies away in the distance ; 
 a big gun booms down from afar; and over it all 
 rises the intangible sound of men moving, living 
 things living, or transports groaning up, and a 
 medley of nameless noises that arise from no- 
 where, yet are everywhere in no-man's-land. And 
 all about you is the smell of dank water, of black- 
 ness that is all the blacker for the distant star- 
 shells, of dead and living things, all bound together 
 
FEANCE 51 
 
 into an odor that is the property of no place but 
 no-man's-land. 
 
 As we began to dig, the heavens opened np, and 
 in five minutes we were ankle-deep in mud and 
 blaspheming our way through the stickiest soil 
 that ever cursed mankind. It took superhuman 
 effort to get it on your shovel and equally super- 
 human effort to get it off. The Creator made that 
 soil to stay put. As we struggled with our shovels 
 and picks, a merry company of rifle-bullets, di- 
 rected at no place in particular, kept up a medley 
 of falsetto whines above our heads. Off to our left 
 had been a wood, — I use the past tense advisedly 
 — for now there remained only a collection of 
 stumps and prostrate branches outlined black and 
 phantom-like against the sky. To our right was 
 an ancient cabbage-field long since gone to the 
 great beyond. Hour on hour we struggled on 
 through that gum-like soil, until my knees wobbled 
 and my breath came hard ; but I, like the others, 
 labored on. 
 
 There is something about the firing-line that 
 tightens your sinews and lends a triple toughness 
 to your muscles. I have seen men fight for days, 
 uncomplaining and unfatigued; I have seen them 
 fight for days and labor for nights without thought 
 of rest. I have seen men go through the trials of 
 hell, and do it smilingly and easily, apparently 
 
52 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 blessed with an unfailing fountain of strength; 
 and then I have seen these same tireless workers 
 go back to the billet when their labors are at an 
 end, and collapse in a heap, spent utterly. 
 
 There is a species of auto-intoxication that per- 
 vades trenchdom. Men are dying all about you, 
 and in the face of death, life's uttermost efforts 
 seem puny and small. Of course you never really 
 reason it out that way, at least I know I never 
 did ; but the fact that others are sticking it out, 
 that others are holding and giving their all, must 
 have an unconscious reaction that draws upon un- 
 suspected wells of nervous and physical strength. 
 
 Perhaps no such strength buoyed us up that 
 night. It was probably the excitement and the 
 novelty of it all, for it is a novelty to hear bullets 
 whining past when the swiftest messenger of death 
 with which you have had experience is a London 
 taxicab ; it is a novelty to picture the Huns crouch- 
 ing over there, a few hundred yards away from 
 you ; it is a novelty that I wish every man might 
 experience, and stop with the experiencing. 
 
 Just as the first hint of morning specked the 
 sky we stumbled back to our billet, tired as no 
 human was ever tired before. Not a man spoke ; 
 even the firing-line was passably quiet. You 
 could hear the German transports pounding 
 along faintly over the cobbled roads, and I re- 
 
FEANCE 53 
 
 member vaguely wondering why we did n 't drop a 
 shell in their direction. A ** greenhorn" is likely 
 to be remarkably generous with ammunition. 
 
 No hot meal awaited us, just a scant pile of straw 
 that looked better and felt softer than the mat- 
 tress in the guest-room at home. Four hours 
 flashed away, and the morning broke with the com- 
 fortable sound of a British field-piece barking 
 away angrily, like a little dog at a treed cat. I 
 tested myself experimentally for symptoms of a 
 cold, but found not the slightest trace. 
 
 It is an interesting thing that despite the hor- 
 rible and all pervading dampness of the firing- 
 line there is little sickness. In the midst of all the 
 hardships and privations there seems to be no 
 room for the petty annoyances of civilian life. 
 It is seldom that a man visits a medical officer. 
 Blistered feet are the soldier's foremost ailment, 
 yet many a man will go for days with his feet 
 blood-soaked from blisters rather than seek a 
 medical officer for remedies. It is not bravado; 
 in the trenches you don't place much importance 
 on such things. After all, life is a matter of com- 
 parisons. You are rich in my estimation be- 
 cause I am poorer than you, and I am comfortable 
 despite blistered feet, because you have lost an 
 arm or perhaps a leg. So it goes. In the midst 
 of death there is no room for colds or fevers. 
 
54 '* LADIES FEOM HELL'^ 
 
 There are so many more expeditious methods of 
 making your exit from this world that the old- 
 fashioned maladies have quite lost caste on the 
 firing-line. 
 
 Our next billet was another empty shell of a 
 house, afloat on a sea of mud. All the land there- 
 about had seen much of shell-fire, and presented 
 the general appearance of a huge black lake that 
 had been beaten into a raging fury and then frozen 
 as it ran. Huge holes, great billows of earth, with 
 brambles and bricks floating in weird, unnatural 
 positions upon its surface. 
 
 For several days. we worked at odd, meaning- 
 less jobs about the place, gathering a vast fimd of 
 information and experience. I presume that this 
 is what we were supposed to do, to become accli- 
 mated to the sights and sounds, to familiarize our- 
 selves with the modus operandi of the front-line. 
 We rapidly became rather set in our ways. Like 
 old bachelors, we acquired little idiosyncrasies. 
 Experiences that would have filled a volume a 
 month before were now ignored and forgotten; 
 and why not ? Here we were, hovering about the 
 brink of the Hun-made hell. We never expected 
 to return to familiar sights and sounds except on 
 crutches or on a stretcher; so why should we be- 
 come ruffled at the sound of an onrushing shell? 
 
FRANCE 55 
 
 Fatalism? Oh, perhaps, but not bravado; just a 
 stoical complacency that takes possession of you 
 after the first five or six shells have failed to make 
 you their mark. 
 
 I don^t mean to say that shell-fire is welcome. 
 No man who speaks the truth can aver that he has 
 any hankering after the heavy stuff. He may 
 become accustomed to rifle-fire, to the red-hot hell 
 of machine-gun fire, but shell-fire has a horror 
 all its own. You never really get accustomed to 
 it, and it is for that reason that many men are 
 captured after a heavy shelling. They are un- 
 hurt, but the horror of continued shelling saps 
 their will to fight, and leaves them dumb and dazed 
 and void of all will to think or do. 
 
 It was in this atmosphere of stray shells and 
 rifle-fire that we acquired our trench legs. Then 
 came the order to move up another notch. This 
 proved to be six hundred yards from the front 
 trenches, and for the next three days we had box- 
 seats for the grand performance. From the real 
 we approached what was once the unreal, and now 
 the unreal proved far more real and much more 
 full of life than the most important event of our 
 little yesterdays. 
 
 My first night at the new billet I was detailed 
 off to ration fatigue, which in plain English is 
 
56 '^LADIES FEOM HELL" 
 
 the job of getting the company's rations from the 
 cook. Our cooks were stationed at a spot known 
 as ** Windy Corners,'' so named because of the 
 Teuton's earnest endeavors to wipe it out of ex- 
 istence. 
 
 The Teuton, let me say, is a wise bird, and he 
 has an uncanny way of knowing your movements 
 before you yourself become aware of them. 
 French civilian traitors are usually to blame. In 
 fact, nothing so endeared Sir Douglas Haig 
 to the men as his order relegating non-com- 
 batants to the rear by fifteen miles. After this 
 order went into effect the Hun's remarkable guess- 
 work fell off markedly. Prior to that time I had 
 seen instance after instance where traitorous 
 guidance was evident. 
 
 One peculiarly clever case comes to my mind. 
 Near us, at one time, on the firing-line, was a 
 house. For days we called it the ** charmed cha- 
 teau" because it alone of all its neighbors re- 
 mained standing. In our early innocence we mar- 
 veled at it, and talked vacantly of supernatural 
 causes, until an officer remarked a rather striking 
 coincidence. When any considerable company of 
 our men went forward through one or more com- 
 munication trenches, the chimney of the ** charmed 
 chateau" would emit a sudden series of smoke- 
 puffs, and instanter the German shells would be- 
 
FRANCE 57 
 
 gin to flit about with remarkable exactness. In 
 the telling it seems simple enough, and yet no one 
 had noticed this coincidence before. 
 
 There was an elderly woman living in the place, 
 and I can testify that she was a marvelous cook. 
 Her home, partly by reason of her kindness and 
 her cooking, aided, perhaps, by her remarkable 
 immunity from shell-fire, soon became a gather- 
 ing-place for our officers. She was always most 
 solicitous about our health, and showed an ap- 
 parently justifiable interest in our movements. 
 She also had a dog. Even the dog was friendly, 
 and, like the woman, was soon adopted as a part 
 of our trench family. But for the canniness of 
 one of our superior officers she and her dog might 
 still be dishing out soup with one hand and shrap- 
 nel with the other. 
 
 When suspicion was at last centered upon her, 
 the first move was to watch the house and the dog. 
 Two days later the dog appeared innocently me- 
 andering homeward from the direction of the 
 trenches. Three Tommies waylaid the unaccount- 
 ably shy Fido and abstracted a neat bundle of 
 Oerman memoranda from his tubular collar. Our 
 dear French friend had kept the Hun batteries 
 well supplied with full data, and the mystery of 
 their remarkably well-ordered fire disappeared 
 forthwith. 
 
58 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 Two hours after her arrest her home was vis- 
 ited by a German high-explosive shell. Who told 
 them of her arrest? Ask the Huns. They have a 
 system all their own. 
 
 But to return to ** Windy Corners" and the 
 cookers. The roadway ran parallel with the 
 trenches and within tempting rifle-range; but it 
 was nearly eight o'clock and dark, so that Bill 
 Nichols and I scampered along with little fear of 
 detection. We reached the cookers, we filled our 
 sacks, and we started back, quite overflowing with 
 the joy of living and a great contempt for our 
 enemies across the ditch. 
 
 There was a fool with us. I was that fool. I 
 started whistling **Tipperary." About the first 
 eight notes had been confided to the night air when 
 a bullet hit the road three feet in front of me, and 
 pi-i-i — nged away in the dark. I needed no sec- 
 ond invitation, but dropped *^Tipperary," the bis- 
 cuits, and everything that would impede my rapid 
 progress, in a heap on the road, and made a run 
 for it. 
 
 The billet was all there to meet me, including 
 the sergeant. 
 
 * ^ Where are the rations, Pink 1 ' ' said he. 
 
 **Down the road, sir," I replied between puffs. 
 
 **What the hell? Down the road?" he coun- 
 tered. 
 
FRANCE 59 
 
 I explained that machine-gun fire had no great 
 allurements for me, and that therefore I had de- 
 parted rather hastily without the rations. But 
 my sad tale produced no sympathy, only an order 
 to go back and get the grub. 
 
 My progress on the return trip was via a ditch, 
 which put twelve feet of solid roadway between 
 me and the Huns' rifle practice. Half-way back 
 I met Nichols, progressing stealthily like a child 
 with a stolen cooky. He, too, had discovered the 
 ditch and was making good use of it. 
 
 My return with the biscuits was the reverse of 
 what I had pictured. I had visions of being wel- 
 comed as a hero of some note, perhaps of being 
 mentioned for bravery under fire ; but I was acidly 
 informed that ten days' extra fatigue was my pun- 
 ishment for not obeying orders. I had been told 
 to bring back the rations, and I had returned with- 
 out them. 
 
 For the benefit of the reader I will pass over the 
 next ten days, with their incessant round of tire- 
 some duties of a nature usually delegated to those 
 in disgrace in the army. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 
 
 EARLY in May, 1915, I was enjoying a few 
 hours off duty when I met an artillery officer 
 who was stringing wires from the front-line ob- 
 servation positions to the batteries at the rear. 
 
 * * Something big coming off ? ^ ' said I. 
 
 **Just that, my son,'' was the non-committal 
 reply. 
 
 This opening seemed interesting, if difficult, and 
 I struck up a precarious conversation with the 
 taciturn old fellow. Two hours of hard work on 
 my part netted the information that the long- 
 delayed battle for Lille was in the making. 
 
 For days past our artillery preparations had 
 been active in the extreme. The advance, I gath- 
 ered, was to be over a line about fifteen hundred 
 yards wide, and from one thousand to twelve hun- 
 dred artillery pieces were to be concentrated upon 
 that area. According to my oracle, the advance 
 would be simplicity itself, merely a matter of a 
 few hours ' artillery fire, and then through the gap 
 and on to Lille. 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 61 
 
 With these hearty assurances bubbling in my 
 heart, I ran back to the billet and spread the glad 
 news among the boys. Immediately the optimists 
 and the pessimists took sides, and the battle be- 
 fore Lille was fought out according to their re- 
 spective views. The old-timers were particularly 
 pessimistic, and for good reason. They had been 
 through the Marne, when the Allied artillery was 
 noticeable principally for its absence, and hence 
 word of dominance in artillery-fire was consid- 
 ered too good to be worth the hearing. 
 
 At best, they maintained, a battle is merely a 
 matter of luck, and no human brain can forecast 
 the outcome with any degree of accuracy, no mat- 
 ter how elaborate the preparations may be. Fur- 
 thermore, we had been given to understand that 
 the Germans far outnumbered us, and this fact, 
 coupled with the skepticism concerning our artil- 
 lery, held sway until the night of May 8, when 
 word came through that on the morrow, Sunday, 
 we would make the long-heralded advance upon 
 Lille. 
 
 With the formal news of the impending battle, 
 all skepticism vanished. In its place appeared 
 only optimism and a great eagerness for the on- 
 slaught. 
 
 Saturday evening, the evening before the battle, 
 we gathered in a shell-proof dugout, where we 
 
62 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 held high carnival around a bowl of punch. Each 
 lad told his favorite story or sang his favorite 
 song. The health of the British Army and Navy 
 was drunk a score of times. The battle of the 
 coming day was fought and won unquestionably. 
 The spinal cord of the beast was broken. We 
 marched on and on and on into Berlin. Glowing 
 faces grew gay under the mellow, congenial influ- 
 ence of this ^^Last Supper," as we flippantly 
 called it. 
 
 Evening dusk came, we fell into line, and set off 
 on the road which led to * * Windy Comers ' ' and to 
 Lille. 
 
 At the usual place the German machine-guns 
 picked us up, and for safety's sake we took to the 
 ditch for protection. Across field after field, pit- 
 ted like the face of the moon, we stumbled, often 
 up to our knees in icy, sticky mud; but about mid- 
 night we reached a little wood two miles behind 
 the line, and here we bivouacked for the night. 
 
 And here let me offer my very sincere respects 
 to the commander of our platoon, Mr. Findley. 
 He had risen from the ranks and had been deco- 
 rated with the D.C.M.; and a more conscientious 
 officer I have never known. No matter what his 
 own problems or discomforts, he never forgot 
 **his boys." Around, among us he circulated, 
 now, urging us to be of good cheer, telling of the 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 63 
 
 invincible support of our artillery, tucking water- 
 proof sheets a little tighter, adjusting a haversack 
 for one, a head-rest for another, always helping 
 to make us as comfortable as circumstances would 
 permit. He was self-forgetful, simple, unassum- 
 ing; always one of us, yet at all times thoroughly 
 respected. And that night was his last night on 
 earth. 
 
 The front was as quiet as a sepulcher. From 
 far to the right, however, where the French held 
 the line, came the incessant rumble and crackle of 
 battle. We who knew the code could make out the 
 ebb and flow of the fight from where we lay by 
 the stream of star-shells and multicolored flares. 
 
 No one slept; we lay there relaxed, staring up 
 at the stars. God seemed very near to us that 
 night. When the morning may bring your last 
 day on earth, God becomes a very real and per- 
 sonal being and not some far-off, intangible Deity. 
 No man can go into the trenches and long remain 
 an atheist. He may, and usually does, blaspheme 
 magnificently in the heat of battle, but in the cool 
 quiet of night, when only the sky is overhead, he 
 knows beyond all question that there is a God. 
 I believe that war has converted more men to a 
 true Christianity than any other force of modern 
 times. 
 
 War's Christianity is not the sort that sings 
 
64 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 hymns on public corners. It is a better sort, 
 which serves and gives untiringly. 
 
 With the morning came the silence that is pro- 
 verbial before the storm. Hardly were we out of 
 our waterproof sheets before the ever-present 
 Mr. Findley was among us, passing out good cheer 
 and chocolate. He knew from experience that 
 after such a night none of us could stomach the 
 usual bully beef and biscuit. 
 
 At 4:45 a red-capped observation officer ap- 
 peared from nowhere and clambered up into a 
 tree-top. After an impressive period of time he 
 descended with every evidence of satisfaction. 
 Evidently the stage was set to a nicety and only 
 awaited the actors. Birds were twittering; they 
 seemed oddly out of place. Their chirpings ac- 
 tually annoyed us, so tense were our nerves. A 
 lark shot suddenly heavenward, and was roundly 
 cursed for its efforts. 
 
 It was 4 :59 ; one minute more and we would be 
 off and away. 
 
 As the hands of my watch touched five the earth 
 shook, the heavens rolled back vast billows of 
 sound, and the air quivered like a living thing. 
 The quiet of a minute before was engulfed in a hell 
 of sound that defied all description. As if a huge 
 hand were manipulating the keys of a tremendous 
 organ, the batteries, massed, some of them wheel 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 65 
 
 to wheel, over that front of fifteen hundred yards, 
 sent out their challenge to the German hosts. 
 From an invisible thing two miles away, the front 
 line burst up before us in a streak of smoke, 
 heaped high, wave on wave, and shot through with 
 green sulphurous fumes, scintillating like waves 
 of heat on a scorching day. 
 
 Overhead our aeroplanes roared and hummed, 
 guiding and directing our fire. Pretty things 
 they were, too, oddly birdlike and out of place 
 amid such stern surroundings. In numbers they 
 far outnumbered the German fleet, and success- 
 fully held back the Teuton scouts throughout the 
 day. 
 
 As we stood drinking in this panorama, the or- 
 der to advance came through, and we started for- 
 ward in Indian file, three or four paces apart. 
 Across the terrain we floundered, picking our way 
 around shell-holes and across the debris of former 
 battle-fields. There was no fear. In the midst 
 of such terrific noise one becomes only a shriveled 
 nonentity, incapable of conscious thought. 
 
 As we passed in front of our batteries, the con- 
 cussion doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in inten- 
 sity, and the roar of a million boiler-shops ripped 
 up and down that line with inhuman exactness 
 and promptitude. 
 
 The journey forward was a difficult one, but by 
 
66 '^LADIES FEOM HELL" 
 
 9 :30 we were within a few hundred yards of the 
 front line, and German shells were beginning to 
 steal into our ranks. Across a particularly ex- 
 posed space we ran, but even yet the progress of 
 the battle was a mystery. No authentic word 
 came back ; the trenches to the front were merely 
 a vortex of greenish and white smoke. 
 
 The Germans were concentrating their fire on 
 the communication trenches and on our reserves. 
 In fact, at this time the men in the front line were 
 comparatively safe. We of the new draft were 
 having our first experience in the gentle art of 
 dodging shells. One learns at a rapid rate under 
 such forced schooling. Within an hour I could 
 tell with a fair degree of accuracy, or so I thought, 
 the shells that bore the message **I want to get 
 you.'' The shells that would break at a comfort- 
 able distance seemed to have another and less 
 ominous sound about them. I was mumbling 
 pretty compliments to myself on my own good 
 judgment when a heavy howitzer-shell burst just 
 a little to my left. Instantly my newly acquired 
 confidence vanished. The fear of God entered my 
 heart, and, like Abraham of old, I fell flat on my 
 face and remained there until the sergeant-major 
 delivered a well-directed kick on a fitting portion 
 of my anatomy. 
 
 In addition to the shell-fire, we were now the 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 67 
 
 recipients of the small stuff — pip-squeaks, aero 
 torpedoes, whiz-bangs, and machine-gun-fire. 
 Aside from shell-fire, it is machine-gun-fire that 
 is the most dangerous of all. It traverses up and 
 down your line like a great finger. As it kicks 
 up the dust at your feet your first inclination is 
 to flinch or dodge, and it takes some time before 
 you realize that it is only the harmless bullet that 
 you hear ; the one that gets you is as silent as the 
 path to which it leads you. 
 
 After two hours of this small stuff we behaved 
 like well-seasoned troops, for we realized fully the 
 utter futility of dodging, and the inevitable fact 
 that our personal bullet would bring lio warning 
 spat to guide us. 
 
 The pip-squeak, however, continued to annoy 
 me. In fact, I never could get really used to their 
 acrobatics. The father of the pip-squeak is that 
 whistling pinwheel of the fireworks display, which 
 churns upward fifty or a hundred feet, skids, and 
 then explodes in a thousand ill-chosen directions. 
 You can hear a pip-squeak coming, but its crazy 
 course is uncharted. Like a drunken automobile, 
 it careens, now here, now there, and then back 
 here again. The staggering figures following the 
 explosion of a pip-squeak, however, will testify to 
 its effectiveness as an instrument of destruction. 
 
 After another half -hour's delay there came an- 
 
68 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 other run for it, and we plunged into a conununi- 
 cation trench close to the parapeted dressing-sta- 
 tion. 
 
 Here the horrors of war burst in upon us in all 
 their awful realism. Oh, how a chap's heart goes 
 out to those poor wrecks, tottering, crawling, 
 dragging themselves as best they may to the haven 
 of a first-line dressing-station! You pity them, 
 yes, and you envy them. Their duty is done, their 
 waiting is over, they are going back ; your duty is 
 ahead, your fate is uncertain. 
 
 They say that the first wounded man you see 
 remains with you throughout your life, and to this 
 day I remember mine with an awful vividness. 
 He was just a kid, and was sitting propped up 
 against the sand-bagged parapet, by the side of 
 a shell-hole filled with slimy water. Off to the 
 left a frog croaked tirelessly, heedless of the hell 
 about him. The wounded man 's eyes were closed, 
 and his breath was coming in labored gasps. His 
 tunic was thrown back, and his chest was as white 
 as a babe's; but just over his heart was an ugly 
 red smudge. Clean through the lung he had it, 
 and as we passed by he went west, quietly and 
 peacefully, like a little child moving in its sleep. 
 There was none of the glory of a dying hero about 
 his passing over the great divide. He had merely 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 69 
 
 done his duty, having been shot on his return 
 from delivering a despatch. Through will power 
 only he held consciousness long enough to crawl 
 back to his superior's dugout to report his duty 
 finished, and then he had passed on. 
 
 I was still struggling to throw this picture out 
 of my mind when another chap came limping 
 back, sweat streaming from his face and both 
 hands held to his groin. 
 
 **Got a fag, boysT' were his first words. The 
 fag was instantly forthcoming, but some one had 
 to light it for him, for he refused to take his hands 
 from his injured side. 
 
 **I got a pretty ^package' here,'' said he — 
 ** shrapnel." That single word ^^shrapneP' told 
 the entire story, the story of a big gaping wound, 
 and I looked at him curiously. 
 
 **I 'm getting awfully tired, lads," were his 
 next words; ^*I guess I '11 sit down." We helped 
 him to a comfortable corner, where he puffed con- 
 tentedly for a moment upon his borrowed ciga- 
 rette, and then gasped and died. 
 
 Crowding by us in that narrow trench, came an 
 endless line of blood-soaked stretcher cases, some 
 writhing in awful agony, others white and still 
 with head wounds. And down on the quick and 
 the dead alike beat the heat of a noonday sun. 
 
70 '^LADIES FEOM HELL^' 
 
 The ghastly harvest streaming by us like a night- 
 mare blanched our faces and made us ache to be 
 over and done with our share. 
 
 The waiting — yes, the boys were right — ^was 
 far more wearing than any fighting that I ever 
 afterward experienced. Perhaps you will not un- 
 derstand the agony of waiting under fire. But 
 have you ever paced the creosoted corridors of a 
 hospital while some one near and dear to you 
 lay up-stairs under a skylight, with white-robed, 
 masked figures all about? Do you remember how 
 the minutes crawled past, and how every noise 
 was an explosion? Do you remember pacing the 
 floor of your own room, waiting for the doctor to 
 come down and tell you, *'out of danger'' or the 
 reverse? Do you remember how the minutes 
 passed then, and how you would have sold your 
 soul itself to have set the clock ahead, if only for 
 one half -hour? 
 
 Intensify your feelings of those moments a hun- 
 dred-fold, and you will have some idea of the 
 agony of waiting in a trench under fire. 
 
 By noon our artillery began its barrage fire 
 with renewed fury; but the Germans were still 
 returning shell for shell, and by one o 'clock many 
 of our batteries were silenced. 
 
 Then the report came back that the Goorkhas, 
 those fierce Indian fighters, had taken the first 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 71 
 
 line German trench ; but later in the afternoon we 
 were told that they had been driven out, and still 
 we huddled behind those cursed sand-bags, in- 
 active, burning to be off. 
 
 And while we waited, let me just say a word 
 about those same Goorkhas. They are peculiar 
 fellows, as faithful as dogs, fierce as tigers, with 
 a love for their superior officers that is childlike 
 in its simplicity. Many times, when one of their 
 leaders is killed, the thin veneer of civilization 
 which divides the Goorkha from the stone age 
 peels away, and without orders or leaders they will 
 go over the top, sans rifle and revolver, armed 
 only with a bowie-knife and a fanatical rage that 
 knows no fear or reasoning. 
 
 The bowie-knife is the Goorkha 's favorite 
 weapon, and his expertness with it is uncanny. I 
 have known one to snake away across no-man's- 
 land at night and tap gently on the German para- 
 pet. Instantly a helmeted head bobs up in in- 
 quiry, a polished blade flashes swiftly, silently, 
 and a German head rolls back into the trench, 
 while a Goorkha snakes back across no-man's- 
 land with a fiendish gleam in his eye, and another 
 story of prowess to tell to the family circle 
 hunched about the meat-pots back home. 
 
 At last came the hoped-for order, and up to the 
 second line trenches we filed. But here again we 
 
72 ^ ^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 were delayed. Men, some wounded, some stark 
 mad, rushed past us, fruits of high-explosive shell- 
 ing. A young lieutenant plunged down the trench. 
 He was the sole survivor of a Welsh regiment, 
 and the frightfulness of his losses had quite un- 
 seated his reason. Entirely alone in our trench 
 he stood, waving a light cane in one hand and a 
 smoking revolver in the other, and screaming to 
 the sky: 
 
 '^ Where are my men? Good God, where are 
 they? Gone? All gone?'' Then he burst into 
 tears. 
 
 A sergeant-major who had been wounded in the 
 arm came running up to him. 
 
 **Sir,'' said he, ^'let me rally your men while 
 you go back to the dressing-station. I '11 get the 
 boys together and bring them back to you." 
 
 A long and heated argument ensued. The lieu- 
 tenant was for rallying his own men, but the ser- 
 geant-major, a big strapping fellow, with medal 
 ribbons of the Indian Mutiny across his breast, 
 was no mean diplomat, and at last led the lieu- 
 tenant back and away from the scene from which 
 he alone survived. 
 
 We of the Scottish sat huddled together in the 
 trench and saw it all and did nothing. At such 
 times reason sits but lightly, and some of us joked 
 horribly, some sang popular songs in hoarse, un- 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 73 
 
 natural voices, others laughingly made out their 
 last wills and testaments. Fritz and his wonder- 
 ful war machine came in for their share of compli- 
 mentary criticism and cursing. The older men 
 recounted many of the ancient trench supersti- 
 tions — how it is bad luck to light three cigarettes 
 with the same match. For a time premonitions of 
 disaster held the floor as the topic of a heated 
 discussion. A veteran of the Marne swore sol- 
 emnly that a controlling Deity stood between us 
 and ultimate defeat, and he retold with fervent 
 earnestness how the British retreated for ten days 
 at the Marne, and how on the seventh day a great 
 white sheet interposed itself between our men 
 and the onrushing gray horde of Germans. On 
 the eighth day this sheet took form and shape, 
 and the Christ looked down upon our troops. 
 
 So the minutes passed, but still the order to ad- 
 vance was withheld. Another young lieutenant 
 careened into the trench, bleeding freely from a 
 wound in his arm. Following him came the rem- 
 nants of his regiment, thirty or forty mud-covered, 
 torn, and tattered men, some limping, others curs- 
 ing blindly and unceasingly. Squarely in front 
 of us the lieutenant formed his boys up, and then 
 addressed us : 
 
 *'Well, Jocks, here 's what 's left of us after 
 half an hour up forward. You know what you 
 
74 ^'LADIES FROM HELL*^ 
 
 can do for us when you go up and over the top 
 this afternoon. '^ 
 
 And individually and collectively we swore to 
 avenge his losses, the losses of all England, the 
 losses of France and Belgium, and the losses of 
 humanity. 
 
 But the opportunity to avenge was delayed, al- 
 ways delayed. By us streamed an endless chain 
 of war's fresh horrors, constant reminders of our 
 duty still undone. Blood, for us, had become an 
 old story. We were old men, aged immeasurably 
 by six hours in helPs own kitchen, aged by six 
 hours of waiting. 
 
 Oh, it is the waiting that tells, my friend. You 
 can fight eternally, you can fight and die, but the 
 horror of waiting is unbearable. You sing, you 
 chatter aimlessly, you count away the seconds and 
 the minutes, while over you stream the Teuton 
 shells, and by you flows the awfulness of war, end- 
 less testimony to the efficiency of forty years of 
 Teuton preparation for **der Tag.'' 
 
 At last our major came running up. 
 
 **Come on, boys; it 's up to us now to finish the 
 job that was started this morning. We 're off; 
 hurry up." There were no laggards, and up to 
 the first-line reserve trenches we ran. 
 
 It was now 2 :30. The attack, our attack, was to 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 75 
 
 begin at three. Ahead of us the Black Watch had 
 gone forward. Excitement rose to fever pitch. 
 Our time had come, but no. At 2:50 the briga- 
 dier's runner came through, bearing a counter- 
 mand. If curses could have killed a man, that 
 man v^ould have gone west on the double-quick. 
 After delivering his order he was off to stop the 
 Black Watch. 
 
 But he never reached them. A cry went up 
 from down the trench. The Black Watch were 
 going over alone. Utterly regardless of machine- 
 gun-fire, our heads popped up over the parapet. 
 Not four hundred yards away were those chaps. 
 We 'd been chatting with them two hours before. 
 They were as cool as on home parade. There was 
 no shouting or yelling, just a clean, collected 
 string of men at double-quick, rifles at their sides, 
 bounding across no-man's-land. 
 
 There is something awful in such a sight — eight 
 hundred men headed for sure destruction, and 
 with no chance to help them. We were fascinated 
 by the spectacle. Our captain took in the situa- 
 tion at a glance, and rushed to the brigadier's dug- 
 out, where he pleaded and begged to be allowed 
 to go over with them ; but already the brigadier 
 had used too many men. The charge of the Black 
 Watch was a mistake ; they had failed to receive 
 
76 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 the countermand. At some place between us and 
 them the despatch-bearer had fallen, and eight 
 hundred men went with him. 
 
 It was perhaps seven or eight hundred yards 
 from our trenches to the German line, nearly half 
 a mile, and over this space went the ** Ladies from 
 Hell," as the Germans call the Scottishers. Even 
 the Hun, with all his horrors, seemed stunned by 
 their advance. The shell-fire slackened visibly, 
 and only the machine-gun bullets remained to re- 
 mind us of our personal danger. 
 
 That day, it is estimated, the Germans had a 
 machine-gun for every five yards of front. A 
 machine-gun can pour out six hundred to six hun- 
 dred and fifty bullets per minute. It was into this 
 hail of steel that our friends, the Black Watch, 
 plunged. 
 
 A hush fell over our lines. Half-way across, 
 and only a scant six hundred of the original eight 
 hundred remained. Another hundred yards took 
 their toll, another, and then another. Then they 
 came to the dummy trench, some twenty-five or 
 thirty yards in front of the German first line. 
 This dummy trench was filled with barbed wire, 
 and a rivulet had been turned into it for the occa- 
 sion. Two hundred men reached that trench, two 
 hundred men went into it, but only one hundred 
 crossed it and dashed on over the last few yards. 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 77 
 
 Then they were gone from sight. Sixty of the 
 eight hundred had reached the German trench. 
 It was all over; but, no! Their signaler is on 
 the German parapet calling for help, and he is 
 calling for the Scottish, for us ! And we had or- 
 ders to stay! God, man, it was awful! During 
 those minutes of agony I grew old. The signaler 
 had barely finished his message when he was shot 
 do\vTi, and we sank back into our trench, dumb 
 with the horror of it all. That stretch of no- 
 man's-land, dotted with still or writhing figures, 
 swam before my eyes. 
 
 A cry went up. They were coming back. Yes, 
 sure enough, twenty-five or thirty of them, di- 
 vested of all equipment, were running back to- 
 ward us. 
 
 Then the heart that actuates the Teuton army 
 showed itself for what it was. Running across 
 no-man's-land came thirty brave lads who had 
 fought a brave fight and lost. They were entitled 
 to the honor of any soldier, be he friend or foe; 
 but do you think they got it from the Hun? 
 They did not. 
 
 Here they came running toward us, the last of 
 eight hundred. Behind them you could hear the 
 crack of a German machine-gun going into action. 
 Like pigeons at a pigeon shoot they were trapped, 
 but without half the chance of escape that we give 
 
78 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 the bird. Away over to the left I saw McDonald 
 stagger and collapse. On across that fleeing line 
 of heroes traversed that German machine-gun. 
 One by one the boys dropped until not one re- 
 mained. KULTIJR! 
 
 •Our men at first were dazed ; they did n't believe 
 their own eyes. It was impossible barbarism. 
 Thirty men entitled to all the scant privileges of 
 war had been shot down like gutter-dogs. Then, 
 as the reality broke in upon us, a cry went up, and 
 a demand to go over and avenge that wholesale 
 mu»rder. If discipline was ever put to the test it 
 was then. It seemed for a minute as though noth- 
 ing could restrain that wild rage, that thirst for 
 vengeance, that desire to rid ourselves of the hid- 
 eous sense of impotence in the face of such hor- 
 rors. But the months of training told, and with 
 a few steadying words the officers kept control of 
 the situation. 
 
 The day was done. Our artillery had failed to 
 sever the German barbed wire sufficiently, and as 
 our men cut away at it they had been shot down 
 like rats. Lille was still to be won. 
 
 The artillery of both sides still worked away 
 intermittently, but the work was done, though far 
 from finished. 
 
 Like a continuous bad dream the wounded 
 drifted past us, but we did not see or hear them. 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 79 
 
 It was out yonder, in no-man's-land, that we lived, 
 out there where our men lay kicking their last, 
 under the heat of an afternoon sun. But even 
 yet the day had not completed its tale of horror 
 for us. 
 
 A random howitzer-shell shrieked overhead. 
 Closer and closer it came. There was a flash, a 
 stunning concussion, and our Mr. Findley rolled 
 out of the smoke. A dozen of us rushed up to him 
 and tried to stop the flow of blood from the wound 
 in his side. He was in frightful agony. Beads 
 of icy sweat stood out on his forehead, and his 
 eyes burned like coals. Near him lay three other 
 boys of the London Scottish. He saw them, and 
 motioned to us to stop in our work. 
 
 ** Don't mind me, fellows," he said; **look after 
 those poor chaps over there. I '11 be all right — 
 soon." 
 
 At this juncture Mr. Steadman, our command- 
 ing officer, rushed up and ordered a stretcher ; but 
 poor Findley was gone. They got him back of 
 the lines all right, but somewhere on the rough 
 road between there and the hospital at Bethune 
 he went west, and as he went the British Empire 
 lost a man among men, a Christian of war's awful 
 making. 
 
 Volunteers were asked for to go out into no- 
 man's-land that night and bring in the wounded. 
 
80 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 My pal Nichols and I stepped forward, as did the 
 vast majority of our company. We were fortu- 
 nate enough to be selected. 
 
 Just as we were leaving for the rear, another 
 shell found us, and ten of our number felt its bite. 
 I knew them all intimately. Eight of them never 
 reached the hospital. Callendar had a leg off, and 
 one of the others had had his head blown off. 
 Three fell where they stood. I thought they had 
 fainted, but later I learned that they had been 
 killed by the concussion. 
 
 From this scene we stretcher-bearers went back 
 for final instructions to the dressing-station ; and, 
 oh, the horror of that dressing-station! Long 
 rows of wounded, mud- and blood-bespattered 
 wrecks, some groaning softly, others quiet, still 
 others puffing cigarettes. A canvas curtain 
 flashed back, and three surgeons were revealed 
 under the oil-lamp. 
 
 Comparatively few operations are performed at 
 the dressing-station ; only when seconds divide life 
 from death does the dressing-station do aught but 
 temporary bandaging. From this first station you 
 are sent to a station farther back, where your 
 wounds are minutely examined, and you are 
 marked for Blighty or for a field hospital, as the 
 case may indicate. 
 
 At nine, as darkness fell, we went out into no- 
 
THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 81 
 
 man's-land for the first time since we had come 
 to France. Darkness after a battle is a pleasing 
 thing. It hides the gruesome details that day lays 
 bare in horrid profusion. After the day the night 
 seemed quiet, and we went from form to form 
 seeking those in whom the spark of life still clung. 
 As star-shells or flares sputtered upward we fell 
 prone, and imitated the still figures about us. 
 Between flares we worked feverishly. 
 
 I will not describe that night. It beggars all 
 description. In the heat of battle you forget the 
 horror of it, but in the stillness of night it flashes 
 back over you in a mighty flood. 
 
 I remember, I will always remember, those end- 
 less trips to and from the dressing-station — now 
 with a chap crying softly to himself, like a little 
 baby, now with one lying limp and voiceless. 
 Those pleading eyes that looked up at us as we 
 passed will haunt me till Berlin bows. 
 
 *^For God^s sake, boys, take me in! I 've got 
 a little wife and a kiddy at home — a kiddy with 
 big blue eyes ; yes, fellows, blue eyes." 
 
 *^0h, boys, water! God, give me water!" 
 
 **A cigarette, men. I 'm going west soon, and 
 I Ve got to have a cigarette before I start. ' ' 
 
 Such are the echoes of battle ; but it is the still 
 form, shapeless, somber, that raises no echoes, 
 that calls the loudest to you. How many such 
 
82 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 forms lay out in no-man 's-land that night I do not 
 know. I do not even want to know. It is enough 
 to remember that call : 
 
 **For God's sake, boys, take me in! I Ve got 
 a little wife and kiddy at home — a kiddy with big 
 blue eyes." 
 
 All night we rushed back and forth from one 
 hell to the other ; but as day dawned we reported 
 for the last time. Half of the fellows who had 
 gone out on that errand of mercy that night re- 
 mained out there among the other dead and dying, 
 victims of the machine-gun-fire, which sweeps up 
 and down no-man's-land by night and day. 
 
 Our battalion, on its return from the trenches, 
 had been billeted fifteen miles back of the lines, 
 and as the sun peered over the red rim of the 
 world we trudged homeward to this billet. Those 
 were the longest fifteen miles I ever covered. The 
 excitement was gone, but the horror still remained. 
 The reaction had set in, and Nichols and I floun- 
 dered along those interminable miles of road, as 
 silent as the grave which we had left. 
 
 We found our company in a long shed, and we 
 tumbled in among them, worn to the point of 
 breaking. Two hours of unconsciousness, and we 
 were wakened for roll-call. 
 
 Roll-call after a battle ! It is the saddest of all 
 scenes. As each man's name is called the com- 
 
THE BATTLE FOE LILLE 83 
 
 pany listens. There is a silence — gone, another 
 one gone, another. God ! Eoll-call after a battle 
 is almost as bad as the battle itself. You re-live 
 it all, you see that shell strike five yards from 
 your dearest friend ; Jim, Pete, Tommy — all gone, 
 and you remember how they went. 
 
 We had but a scant eight hundred left from our 
 battalion of nearly four thousand! That is roll- 
 call after a battle. Thirty-two hundred names 
 were called out with no answer. 
 
 We of the London Scottish alone had clicked 
 five hundred and fifty-four of our original one 
 thousand, and we had been mere reserves and had 
 seen none of the real fighting. 
 
 The horror of it all is indescribable. We were 
 stunned by our losses. In the heat of action we 
 had hardly realized their immensity. We had 
 seen individual cases, but here the vast panorama 
 of horror was unrolled before us. The officers 
 realized our sensations and set us free, and we 
 rambled over to an orchard, a cherry orchard, in 
 full bloom. 
 
 From far off came the boom of the firing line, 
 but thank God that was past for the time. We 
 read letters from home, and wrote replies; we 
 chatted vaguely, and rested, preparatory to the 
 next assault on the German lines. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS — A TRENCH RAID 
 
 AS the afternoon wore on and our letters were 
 duly written and censored, several of us 
 wandered over to an estaminet. 
 
 An estaminet is one of those denatured cafes, 
 found far behind the lines, at which soft drinks 
 and light refreshments may be purchased from 
 the peasantry of the community. 
 
 This estaminet was filled to overflowing with 
 the f ortunates who had survived the battle of the 
 previous day. Here we met the Guards Regiment 
 which had gone over the top, only to retreat in 
 the face of the withering Teuton machine-gun fire. 
 I say we met the regiment, but what we actually 
 met was a scant tenth of it, for the rest were 
 either back yonder in no-man's-land or in one or 
 more of the field hospitals. 
 
 For an hour or two the battle for Lille was re- 
 fought. The reason for its failure was sought out 
 and found a hundred times, and at a back table 
 a group of Frenchmen listened in silence. 
 
 Then, during one of those lulls which sometimes 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 85 
 
 come over even the noisiest of gatherings, one of 
 these taciturn Frenchmen sprang to his feet. In 
 broken, but excited, English he denounced the Scot- 
 tish and all we stood for. In fact, his denuncia- 
 tion covered quite an extensive territory, for it 
 encompassed the whole of England and Ireland 
 and most of the colonies. He cursed us roundly 
 as ** slackers'' who had failed to accomplish our 
 objective. 
 
 Immediately the room was in an uproar. An 
 old lady, who was the proprietress, rushed in and 
 added her shrieks to the general clamor. 
 
 For two or three minutes it looked like a riot 
 or a murder or both. But, fortunately for the 
 discomfited Frenchmen, saner heads took hold of 
 the situation. The hot-headed native who had 
 forgotten himself was escorted none too gently 
 from the estaminet, to be persuaded verbally, but 
 effectively, of the error of his ways in a less pub- 
 lic spot. 
 
 The old proprietress apologized to us in her 
 most elegant and effusive English, and then the 
 meeting broke up. We were momentarily too 
 disgusted to continue to enjoy French hospitality. 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. We Tommies like 
 the French, we thoroughly love them, but occa- 
 sionally one of these fiery Frenchmen, brooding 
 over multitudinous hardships, will burst loose, 
 
86 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 and, although his eruption is harmless enough to 
 us of more stoical English stock who understand, 
 each such outburst leaves a temporary wound. 
 But in a few hours our anger wears off, and we 
 laugh the matter down and forget it, along with 
 the rest of our manifold troubles of trenchdom. 
 
 On returning to the billet that evening, word 
 was passed around that there was a spy in our 
 midst, who had been active in obtaining informa- 
 tion and in forwarding it with remarkable de- 
 spatch to the German lines. 
 
 Suspicion had been directed to a workman in 
 one of the adjoining fields. Innocent enough 
 he seemed, to all outward appearances, — short, 
 stocky, dressed in blue jeans about ten sizes too 
 big for him. To the casual observer he was a 
 hard-working French peasant, and naught else. 
 There was, however, something a little unusual 
 about him. It was perfectly natural that a 
 Frenchman should take some interest in our go- 
 ings and comings, but there is a point at which 
 legitimate interest stops, and this man in the blue 
 jeans had exceeded these bounds of decent curi- 
 osity. Each morning as we went out on route 
 marches, regardless of the hour or weather, we 
 observed him out there digging in the field, always 
 digging. Apparently this gentleman belonged to 
 the Night Owl fraternity, for he was up long be- 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 87 
 
 fore the larks and retired but very little before 
 moon-up. 
 
 Such diligence, even for a French peasant, is 
 remarkable. Even so, he might have passed with- 
 out exciting suspicion, had he not on one occasion 
 been observed to pull out a pair of binoculars 
 from the depths of his jeans and scan the horizon 
 and the varied actions of our troops. 
 
 Now, binoculars are not generally found on 
 French peasants. Neither does a French peasant 
 habitually use chance binoculars industriously, 
 and then jot down notes in a little book. Yet the 
 man in the blue jeans had been observed engaged 
 in both of these unusual pastimes. 
 
 Obviously, the case required diplomatic han- 
 dling. In the first place, there was danger of 
 hurting the peasant's feelings, should he prove to 
 be but an innocent observer who by sheer chance 
 had come into possession of a pair of binoculars. 
 As you can guess, the feelings of a Frenchman 
 are somewhat easily injured, especially by false 
 suspicions of loyalty, and, as we had informal 
 orders to keep on the sunny side of the French 
 people, both collectively and individually, our com- 
 manding officer desired that the man in the blue 
 jeans be given the most cordial treatment possible 
 under the circumstances. 
 
 Sergeant McFarland, who was something of a 
 
88 * ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 linguist and particularly adept at the French lan- 
 guage, was appointed Sherlock Holmes of the oc- 
 casion. Promptly at six o'clock in the morning, 
 he walked leisurely down the road which ran 
 alongside the field in which the peasant worked. 
 The sergeant's air was one of great unconcern. 
 To all outward appearances he might have been 
 a gentleman out for a stroll, viewing his estate. 
 
 From the neighboring bushes we watched his 
 progress. Quite casually he observed the peas- 
 ant, and engaged him in idle conversation. The 
 weather was thoroughly covered. Past, present, 
 and future battles were discussed, all quite cas- 
 ually, of course, and then we observed the two 
 walking down the road together toward battalion 
 headquarters. Later we found that our sergeant 
 had invited the peasant to have a neighborly 
 drink with him at the estaminet. 
 
 It had been arranged that if both of them 
 walked by headquarters, real suspicions had been 
 fastened upon the peasant and he was to be quietly 
 nabbed on his arrival. In order to make the kid- 
 napping as genteel as possible, the sergeant in- 
 vited him to step into headquarters, but the peas- 
 ant was wise beyond his day and age, and pro- 
 tested vehemently. 
 
 Immediately a couple of our boys, who had been 
 waiting for just such a protest, carried him in 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 89 
 
 bodily, and he was immediately quizzed in regard 
 to his past, present, and probable future. 
 
 It was found that he was a Frenchman all right, 
 but for a long period had been in the employ of 
 the Wilhelmstrasse. He was of German-French 
 parentage, born in Alsace of a German father and 
 a French mother. Of course, under these circum- 
 stances, the German parentage predominated, and 
 the subtle doctrines of the kaiser had been incul- 
 cated in him from his earliest youth, until now, 
 half French though he was, he was a willing 
 worker for that great fetish of all Germans, der 
 Vaterland. Pending further investigation, this 
 Germanized native of Alsace was sent back under 
 escort to divisional headquarters. 
 
 The following day the field in which he had been 
 so industriously digging for several weeks was 
 thoroughly searched, and in a little straw-pile near 
 a stable, a complete heliograph outfit was dis- 
 covered. With this he had been relaying his in- 
 formation to a German observation balloon not 
 many miles away. 
 
 After observing the action taken by your coun- 
 try under somewhat similar circumstances, I am 
 led to believe that had this man been caught in 
 the same act on the parade ground of West Point, 
 he would have been interned as a dangerous char- 
 acter. But over there in France, where the bodies 
 
90 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 of civilized humanity are pushing the daisies up, 
 there is no room for dangerous characters. Over 
 there you are either for us, or you are against us. 
 There is no neutral ground. You cannot be dan- 
 gerous and live. In fact, it is wiser not to be 
 even suspected of dangerous inclinations. 
 
 Circumstantial though the evidence against this 
 spy may have been, the Flanders front had little 
 shrift for him, and a few mornings later his back 
 was against a stone wall and the firing squad 
 was in front. 
 
 In and about this little village we rested for 
 four days, and much rivalry was provoked by the 
 village beauty. Every village in France, you 
 know, has its ** beauty." When the number of 
 soldiers sufficiently outweighs the number of girls, 
 every girl becomes a recognized village beauty. 
 But in this particular instance there was one 
 lassie who so far outshone the others that she 
 was unanimously accepted as the logical Queen 
 of the May. 
 
 I remember her well. She was tall and dark, 
 with the sparkling eyes and beautiful carriage of 
 the typical young French peasant girl. 
 
 Hardly had we been in the village an hour be- 
 fore discussion was rife as to who would be her 
 escort for the period of our stay. There was a 
 great deal of good-natured skirmishing for her 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 91 
 
 smiles; in fact, the neighboring estaminet was 
 well-nigh forsaken in favor of this fair damsePs 
 dwelling. She was running no estaminet, but it 
 was remarkable how many soldiers found her 
 farm-house much cooler and more attractive than 
 the established estaminet a few rods farther 
 down the street. I think before the day was over 
 the entire platoon had called, quite informally, 
 of course, at her home and begged for a cup of 
 coffee, some bread and butter, or for almost any- 
 thing that would give an excuse to linger in her 
 presence. The prices which she received for such 
 small favors would make your Mr. Hoover wail 
 with anguish. 
 
 I myself was one of the aspirants for this fair 
 maid's affections, and, thinking to steal a march 
 on the rest of the platoon, I went over there at 
 dusk one night, with a very definite plan worked 
 out for gaining her company during the balance 
 of the evening. By devious paths I arrived at 
 her farm, and was just going around the barn 
 when I ran into and nearly knocked over an 
 officer, engaged'in a similar flank attack from the 
 rear. 
 
 Evening is the favorite time with officers for 
 affairs of the heart. The reasons are obvious. 
 An officer is not popularly supposed to be prone 
 to such airy fancies. Some of them feel that it 
 
92 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 would lower them in the estimation of their men, 
 were they to be so much as suspected of playing 
 the gay Lothario. Hence, from the standpoint of 
 safety, as well as for the romantic glamour which 
 sifts down of an evening, it is in this dusky sea- 
 son that the young officer of the army must do 
 his billing and cooing. 
 
 Knowing this full well, I required no engraved 
 invitation from the officer to retire. This I did in 
 bad order, and the officer, by force of superior 
 authority, became the acknowledged escort of the 
 lady fair throughout the balance of our stay. 
 
 From this village we went to Givenchy. You 
 have heard long before this, perhaps, of the fa- 
 mous brick-fields of Givenchy. A few days before 
 our arrival these brick-fields had been the scene 
 of a bloody battle in which three of our regiments 
 had been engaged. 
 
 The brick-fields, or kilns, were arranged in long 
 rows twenty or thirty yards apart. It took our 
 forces an entire day to capture the first line of 
 kilns, and the better part of a week was consumed 
 in cleaning the Germans out of the vicinity. It 
 was in this locality that we were to stay until the 
 new draft arrived from England to fill our ranks, 
 depleted by the catastrophe before Lille. 
 
 As we marched up, the men whom we were to 
 relieve were just returning from the front-line 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 93 
 
 trenches, and, during a brief halt, we had an 
 opportunity to exchange the time of day with 
 them. 
 
 I well remember talking with one young chap 
 who had seen his first action at these brick-kilns, 
 and I asked him how things were going. He 
 said: 
 
 **To be truthful, it 's hell up there. I never 
 realized the awfulness of war before, and do you 
 know, I don 't mind the fighting a bit ; it is before 
 and after the fighting that hurts. Before the 
 fighting you are waiting to be shot, and after 
 the fighting you are waiting to bring in the fel- 
 lows who were shot, and you hear and see them 
 all about you. Give me fighting every time, but 
 let me skip before and after. ' ' 
 
 Givenchy was just a little hamlet, with few 
 points of interest aside from the brick-fields and 
 the remains of a house which had served both 
 Germans and French as headquarters when the 
 battle-lines swayed back and forth. 
 
 I, along with several other curiosity-seekers, 
 went over to the ruins of the chateau. It was an 
 immense place, the center of a vast French es- 
 tate. Even yet, about the courtyard and garden, 
 were the remains of trenches and many gruesome 
 relics of the hand-to-hand fighting that had taken 
 place there. One-half of the house and a liberal 
 
94 * ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 portion of the adjoining territory were nothing 
 but a tremendous hole half -filled with greenish 
 water and debris, — the work of a French mine. 
 
 Mining is one of the most hazardous occupations 
 carried on in trenchland. England is fortunate in 
 having a tremendous source of supply in her 
 Welsh coal-miners. These men are extremely 
 quick, and are daring to the point of rashness. 
 
 The mines, or ** saps'' as they are commonly 
 called, are tunneled fifty to tv^o hundred yards. 
 Speed is a necessary requisite in this work. The 
 dirt is carried away on little tramcars far enough 
 back so that suspicion will not be excited on the 
 opposing side. The saps are of varied size. 
 Some are only large enough to crawl into, while 
 others are four or five feet high. In mining the 
 English have very much the edge on the Ger- 
 mans. The Welsh miners work with almost in- 
 credible swiftness, scratching ahead like dogs in 
 a burrow. They seem to have an intuitive knowl- 
 edge of direction and the general nature of the 
 ground through which they are digging. This 
 last is important, because to strike a stone with 
 a pick may disclose the progress of operations 
 to a German listening, his ear to the ground, in a 
 fire-trench or similar sap not many yards away. 
 
 These miners work in shifts, much as they do 
 back under the sea at the tip end of England. 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 95 
 
 The mining of Messines Eidge bears ample tes- 
 timony to their expertness. When a mine is ex- 
 ploded, the earth belches up skj^ward in a great 
 wave. You have doubtless seen pictures of a na- 
 val battle, and you will remember the action of 
 the water when it is struck by a shell. Under 
 the urge of a high-explosive mine, solid earth 
 and rock behave in much the same manner. You 
 can literally see the edges of the earth bend and 
 rush upward into the air. Then, all about the 
 fringe of dirt and smoke, you see the heavier 
 objects dropping down. 
 
 In the mining of the chateau it was a race 
 against time, as both the Germans and French 
 were mining, the Frenchmen under the Germans. 
 The French got there first, and as their mine 
 leaped up into the air report has it that upward 
 of two thousand German reserves, who had just 
 come up from their billets, went west. 
 
 The region about Givenchy had formerly been 
 a mining district, and the fields were bare, except 
 for the houses, wrecks of which cluttered the bat- 
 tle-line for many miles on each side. To our right 
 was the shaft-head of a coal mine slightly behind 
 our lines, and the Germans shelled this constantly 
 to prevent our working it. It was here that I had 
 my first experience with the German minenwerfer, 
 as they ponderously called it. Quick-witted 
 
96 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL^' 
 
 Tommy long ago dubbed this particular shell, 
 * ^ Minnie. ' ' It is about as nasty a thing as I ever 
 had to deal with. The shells that whistle high 
 above your head are directed at the artillery be- 
 hind the lines, and they worry you not at all. But 
 ** Minnie,'' which Fritz shoots from his trench- 
 mortar, is an exceedingly nasty lady. It is a 
 large shell that explodes with a tremendous noise 
 and concussion. I have known men to be killed 
 outright by the concussion alone. The shells trun- 
 dle through the air, and you can actually see 
 them coming. This gives you time to dodge down 
 into a dugout. But familiarity always breeds 
 contempt, and we boys, after a few days' acquaint- 
 ance with them, took to shooting at these ** Min- 
 nies," much as though they were clay pigeons. 
 
 Such familiarity should not be taken to indi- 
 cate the ineffectiveness of the minenwerfer. 
 When one of them lands correctly, which is not 
 very frequently, it means a tremendous lot of pick- 
 and-shovel work for several hours. Where a 
 ** Minnie" hits, the landscape is badly shattered, 
 and a big gap in the trench and parapet must be 
 filled in double-quick time. 
 
 We had been at Given chy but a few hours when 
 the new draft of four hundred and fifty men from 
 England, fresh from a training camp, came up 
 to fill the pitiful gaps in our ranks. With the 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 97 
 
 new draft came new friends, and old friends, too. 
 
 Home! How good it seemed to hear from it 
 again! We were like boys returning to school 
 after a vacation, and we swapped stories of home- 
 and trench-life unceasingly, just as those other 
 veterans, many of whom were now dead, had 
 swapped these same stories with us upon our ar- 
 rival not many months before. 
 
 As luck would have it, a chap whom I had 
 known back home came with this draft. He told 
 me that he had almost given up hope of ever 
 reaching the firing-line, owing to his lack of skill 
 with a rifle. Three times he had been turned 
 down for poor musketry, and he rejoiced at his 
 arrival in trenchdom as though it were a long- 
 postponed theater party. 
 
 Under the spell of the trenches friendships were 
 quickly made, and such friendships bring with 
 them a far deeper and truer fellowship than any 
 friendship formed under less trying circum- 
 stances. There is remarkably little discord either 
 in the trenches or behind the lines. Fellowship 
 reigns supreme. Of course we have our little 
 squabbles, but they are squabbles and nothing 
 more. There is endless bantering, but when the 
 chaffing reaches too white a heat for comfort, more 
 sober heads interpose and stop the gathering 
 storm before it becomes unmanageable. 
 
98 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 After a day or two of rest we advanced to the 
 firing line in the cool of evening. It was a short, 
 uphill walk. Lights were out, there was no talk- 
 ing, and we had strict orders to guard against 
 any clinking of accoutrements. Reserves coming 
 up are a pet bulPs-eye for the Teuton artillery, 
 and the utmost secrecy and quiet must be main- 
 tained for safe-conduct. At five hundred yards, 
 on a quiet night, the noise of one bayonet striking 
 against another may mean the beginning of a bat- 
 tle. Under such circumstances the carelessness 
 of a pal, however slight, becomes a crime of tre- 
 mendous proportions. Your nerves are all atin- 
 gle. You almost fear to breathe. 
 
 That night I had my first spell at listening-post 
 duty. In this sector we had three listening-posts 
 about one hundred yards apart. The first ex- 
 tended out to within seventy-five yards of the Ger- 
 man trench; the second reached to within fifty 
 yards ; and the third was separated from the hun- 
 gry hand of the Hun by scarcely more than thirty 
 yards. 
 
 It was to this third post that I was ordered. 
 Listening-post duty, especially in an advanced po- 
 sition such as mine, is no sinecure. There is some 
 comfort in being in a trench and knowing that 
 you have full permission to fire whenever the 
 spirit so moves, but out in an advanced listening- 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 99 
 
 post you have strict and absolute orders to fire 
 under no circumstances whatsoever. 
 
 There are two men in such a position. One 
 keeps watch, while the other stands ready to run 
 back with any news of an impending attack. My 
 particular listening-post was far out beyond our 
 own barbed wire, and was supposed to be con- 
 cealed. Without exerting myself in the least, I 
 could hear the Germans talking in their trench. 
 It rather amused me that night, the way the pa- 
 trols came up every hour to see that we were on 
 the job and not asleep. I couldn't have slept if 
 my life had hung upon it. 
 
 It was a new sector, and in no-man's-land there 
 still remained a patch of grass here and there 
 and a few ghostlike stalks of waving wheat. Fifty 
 times that night I identified one of these stalks as 
 the advancing German army. I had **Boche 
 fever,'' and I had it right. It really was n't my 
 fault either, because a certain fresh corporal had 
 told me in great confidence that same evening 
 how he had it on good authority that the Germans 
 were going to come over at eleven o'clock. 
 
 Eleven o'clock was my turn to watch and the 
 other fellow's to run back, in case the Germans 
 should come. At such a time, of the two horns 
 of the dilemma, the chap who runs back has the 
 best horn. The one who stays in the advance 
 
100 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 listening-post has 999 chances to 1 of being put 
 on intimate terms with a German bomb or bay- 
 onet. As he is forbidden to fire, no matter what 
 the price of silence, all he can do is to stand his 
 ground and trust that the Germans will overlook 
 him. The Huns, however, are very thorough, and 
 seldom are they guilty of such errors of omission. 
 
 With this story of impending attack churning in 
 my head, you can imagine my sensations as I took 
 my turn and watched my timepiece tick away the 
 hours from eleven o'clock on. But my promised 
 Teuton advance did not materialize, and the cold 
 sweat dried in the chill breeze of morning. 
 
 At three o'clock every one ** stands to." That 
 is, at this hour every one must be up on the firing- 
 step ready for action, with rifle loaded, safety- 
 catch thrown back, and bayonet in place. Three 
 o'clock in the morning has a neck-and-neck race 
 with dusk as the popular moment for German 
 attacks, and cruel experience has taught the Al- 
 lied armies to be ready at this hour. 
 
 The next day came rumors of a proposed trench 
 raid. Trench raids are one means of obtaining 
 information in regard to opposing forces. The 
 raiders sneak out from a sap-head or advance 
 listening-post and, if possible without being dis- 
 covered, endeavor to jump into a section of the 
 opposite trench and drag a luckless Fritz or two 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 101 
 
 back to their own lines. The object of this game 
 is to win without firing a shot. So far as I know 
 this object has never been attained. Either going 
 or coming or in the middle of the raid you are 
 discovered and, as a result, trench raids are a 
 prolific source of casualties. 
 
 Service in such a raid is usually a matter of 
 volunteering, and that evening, when volunteers 
 were called for, I stepped forward and was chosen, 
 along with fifty-two other chaps who were anxious 
 to experience the zenith of trench excitement. 
 
 It was a deucedly rotten night. A nasty, cold 
 drizzle had settled down, and everything was 
 afloat. The tall, dank grass between our lines and 
 the German trenches was wetter than the rain it- 
 self. Occasionally a flare forced its way up 
 through the mist, but it gave little light, owing 
 to the vapor in the atmosphere. On the preced- 
 ing night our patrols had been out and had cut 
 a lane through the German barbed wire that would 
 permit us to go forward about four abreast. 
 
 Since quiet in going, coming, and execution of a 
 raid is essential, few firearms were taken along. 
 Our decorations that evening consisted largely 
 of long, ugly trench-knives and ** knuckle-dusters'' 
 or ** brass knuckles'' as they are known in the 
 parlance of the second-story man. 
 
 Before setting out we were stripped of all marks 
 
102 '* LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 of identification, sucli as regimental insignia, etc., 
 so that the capture of any of us might not disclose 
 information of value to the enemy. 
 
 While the trenches at this point were within 
 seventy-five yards of each other, we took a diag- 
 onal course from one of the sap-heads and had 
 about one hundred yards to go across no-man's- 
 land. Our objective was a German sap-head at 
 which was posted a machine-gun. It was our priv- 
 ilege to enter this sap-head, capture the occupants, 
 and bring them back, along with their machine- 
 gun and, incidentally, ourselves. The prisoners 
 were to be brought back alive, if possible, that 
 they might be subjected to the ** third degree" and 
 any and all information in regard to the opposing 
 forces wrung from them. 
 
 A code of signals had been arranged, so that 
 our progress might be intelligently guided by the 
 officer in command. Such signals consist of taps 
 on the ground. The commanding officer is in the 
 center. One tap means **go forward." This is 
 passed down each side of the line until it reaches 
 the end. It is then passed back. When the offi- 
 cer hears the tap come back, he knows that all 
 are fully informed of the movement. Two taps 
 mean ^^halt after fifty paces," and three taps 
 mean * * go at them. ' ' 
 
 Half way across we halted for a final adjust- 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 103 
 
 ment of our line, and then prepared to rush the 
 trench. 
 
 The machine-gun implacement was just behind 
 the German barbed wire entanglement and ex- 
 tended out from the Teuton line proper about 
 thirty-five yards. As we reached the breach in 
 the barbed wire we halted, took a deep breath, and 
 at a given signal rushed forward as quietly as 
 haste would permit. Dividing to the left and 
 right, some of us jumped into the trench midway 
 between the implacement and the German line. 
 Others jumped into the implacement itself. Here 
 we found three Germans. One of them was bay- 
 oneted, being too unruly for convenient capture. 
 The other two were dragged back without cere- 
 mony to our own lines. Concerning the action at 
 the machine-gun implacement I know little, for I 
 was one of ten who jumped into the sap in order 
 to prevent the German lines from sending assist- 
 ance to their men at the sap-head. 
 
 Of course the raid was overheard in the quiet 
 of the evening, and no sooner had the first shot 
 been fired than all of no-man's-land became a liv- 
 ing hell of bullets and almost as bright as day with 
 a multitude of flares from the German trenches. 
 
 I vaguely remember two Germans — ^the trenches 
 permit but two men to advance abreast — rushing 
 down upon us two Scottish, who stood between the 
 
104 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 Germans and their friends at the machine-gun 
 implacement. We did not know what was going 
 on behind us. It was our duty to fend off all rein- 
 forcements from the firing line. I braced myself 
 for the shock of attack. Somebody threw a bomb, 
 and the blackness in front of me collapsed and 
 sank down. Behind him came a towering mass 
 of onrushing, helmeted forms — myriads of them, 
 apparently — and I lunged forward blindly with 
 my bayonet. 
 
 If I should describe the action of the next two 
 minutes, I would be lying, because I do not know 
 exactly what did happen. I remember lunging 
 repeatedly, missing sometimes and sometimes not. 
 There was no room or time for conscious parry- 
 ing, but when the signal came for us to retreat the 
 four of us who survived the action in the sap- 
 trench sprang over the edge and crawled back 
 for our trenches, like snakes bound for their holes 
 at the break of day. 
 
 On our return we found our objective had been 
 gained — two German prisoners were there, big as 
 life. But they proved expensive luxuries, for 
 of the fifty-three who went out on this trench raid, 
 only nine returned. Some thirty-five had been 
 wounded or killed, and the others had been cap- 
 tured. Five or six of the boys lay out in no- 
 
THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 105 
 
 man ^3-land for twenty-four hours before our 
 stretcher-bearers could reach them. 
 
 Yet with all its dangers a trench raid has a rare 
 element of excitement. The danger comes not so 
 much in the raid itself, as on the return journey. 
 In going over and in the actual attack you have 
 the element of surprise in your favor. Fritz in 
 his sap-head may be dozing. At best, he is far 
 outnumbered. The moments of real action are 
 few and short. In fact, the entire raid from 
 start to finish does not consume more than two 
 or three minutes, but it is two or three minutes 
 of the most intense fighting, where individual 
 initiative comes in for its own and just reward. 
 
 I imagine that your American troops will be 
 particularly successful at trench-raid work. I am 
 sure that they will far outshine Fritz, who is a 
 methodical being as a rule and little given to in- 
 dividual thought, apparently. When he has or- 
 ders to guide him, he runs like some automaton; 
 he is uncanny. But in trench raids, when it is 
 man for man and the devil take the hindmost, 
 Fritz is rather stunned by the suddenness of it all 
 and is more than likely to be captured without 
 much show of resistance, in which, perhaps, he is 
 wise. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MR. FINDLEY's grave — TRENCH LIFE — NICHOLS GOES 
 
 WEST 
 
 VERY shortly our battalion was ordered back 
 to Bethune. 
 
 We set off late one night and covered the twelve 
 kilometers by early dawn of the following day. 
 There we found the billets to which we had been 
 assigned were chock full of sleeping soldiery. 
 Our commanding officer and the officer in charge 
 of the billet exchanged numerous uncomplimen- 
 tary remarks as a result of the mixup. But in 
 war, as in peace, possession is nine points of the 
 law, and we had to seek other billets elsewhere. 
 
 By the best of good fortune we located one of 
 those old French barns which are two or three 
 times as large as the barn with which you are 
 familiar. The floors are tile, and along the sides 
 are great beams covered with hay. These hay- 
 covered beams are at a premium among the boys, 
 and the first-comers invariably clamber up to 
 them and usurp them for their own. 
 
 Little time was spent in sleeping, however, for 
 
 106 
 
MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 107 
 
 we were once more near to civilization. Accom- 
 panied by six or eight of my comrades, I drew 
 what pay was coming to me and went into Bethune 
 proper, where my $2.50 quickly disappeared into 
 the outstretched hands of the genial French popu- 
 lace. 
 
 After a brief but cheering hour of fellowship at 
 an estaminet, we started across town with the 
 avowed intention of finding Mr. Findley's grave. 
 The last we had seen of Mr. Findley had been 
 at the battle for Lille. We knew that he had been 
 buried in the military cemetery at Bethune. Fol- 
 lowing directions, we went through the town and 
 out on the far side, where in the distance we saw 
 the civilian cemetery stretching out before us. 
 
 The old caretaker at the gate examined us se- 
 verely, but after much gesticulation our mission 
 was explained to him, and he swung back the 
 heavy bronze gateway as though it were a duty 
 second only in importance to that of the Premier. 
 
 This was my first sight of a French cemetery, 
 and I was struck with the simple, unpretentious 
 manner in which the French decorate the graves 
 of their dead. Humble little marble crosses were 
 everywhere. Occasionally a more pretentious 
 vault loomed up. Pictures of Christ were all 
 about. On the more humble graves were bouquets 
 of waxed flowers under glass cases. 
 
108 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 Through this depressing scene we strode, real- 
 izing full well how our costumes jangled with the 
 peaceful surroundings. On the far side the mili- 
 tary cemetery adjoined the civilian cemetery. 
 There was no mistaking it, for, as we came to 
 the edge of the formal civilian plot, God's mili- 
 tary acre stretched out before us on either side 
 as far as the eye could reach, mute testimony to 
 the efficiency of kultur. 
 
 The military cemetery was a sharp contrast to 
 the civilian resting-place we had left behind us. 
 Row on row of plain deal crosses swept away into 
 the distance and over the slight rise of ground, 
 apparently endlessly. 
 
 To our right were a number of rows of newly- 
 dug graves. To the reader not familiar with 
 war, or unhardened to its practical side, the 
 method of burying even our honored dead will 
 come with something of a shock. Very few of 
 them have a single grave. Instead, long trenches 
 are dug, the sides stepping up like mammoth 
 steps on the Pyramids of Egypt. In the lowest 
 trench rests a single rough casket; on top of it 
 and on each side, on the next higher step, are 
 other caskets ; and so on upward until the trench 
 is filled. 
 
 In quiet times, when there is little fighting, these 
 trenches are dug in preparation for the sterner 
 
MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 109 
 
 days to come, and you will always see the ends of 
 a pile of rough boxes jutting out into daylight, 
 awaiting new arrivals before the earth is thrown 
 over them. 
 
 Yet in all its immensity this cemetery repre- 
 sented only a fraction of our Allied dead. It is 
 only those who reach the hospital to die who are 
 formally buried in such a cemetery. Those who 
 are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to die a 
 sudden death out in no-man's-land, or in trench- 
 land, are hastily buried in a shallow scooped-out 
 grave hard by, and lucky, indeed, are they if so 
 much as a plain cross decorates their last resting- 
 place. 
 
 It was down row after row of these polygamous 
 graves that we strode, hunting for that little cross 
 which would mark the grave of our Mr. Findley. 
 We knew that we would recognize it, for we had 
 been told that it was set apart from its fellows 
 by the red Saint Andrew's Cross of Scotland. 
 And so at last we came upon it. 
 
 At such moments nothing is said and nothing 
 is done. Man and life and all life 's petty vicissi- 
 tudes become as little things in the face of the 
 grim reaper. About Mr. Findley 's grave we 
 stood, hatless and wordless, silent tributes to this 
 great Christian of war's making and to the cause 
 for which he fought and gave his all. 
 
110 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 Then, instinctively, we bent and each gathered 
 a handful of pebbles. With them we outlined 
 the approximate boundaries of Mr. Findley's 
 grave, not knowing then whether he rested di- 
 rectly underneath or two or three layers down. 
 But it seemed only right that a man who had 
 given so much, both in life and in death, should 
 have his grave set apart, if only by a little, from 
 those surrounding him. 
 
 We finished our work of reverence and de- 
 parted, walking silently through the military cem- 
 etery and then on through the civilian cemetery 
 by which we had entered. As we passed, we 
 met a company of French women. There were 
 five of them. One was evidently the mother, while 
 the others may have been her daughters or near 
 of kin. They were of the peasant class, roughly 
 dressed, with wooden sabots. The old mother 
 cried incessantly, while the younger women busied 
 themselves nervously in decorating one of the 
 graves with the simple offerings afforded by their 
 scanty income. An ordinary little jam-pot was 
 upturned. Within it was an inscription, scrib- 
 bled, perhaps, by the village padre, awaiting only 
 the time when the family's savings would be suf- 
 ficient to warrant a more pretentious record of 
 their loved one's life and death. 
 
 And over it all, like the bass notes of a great 
 
MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 111 
 
 organ, played the roar of distant gun-fire, an 
 incessant salute to those who had gone on never 
 to return. 
 
 Saddened by our grim mission of the afternoon, 
 we felt in need of another visit to an estaminet 
 on our return journey. By pooling our resources 
 we managed to collect sufficient funds for a brief, 
 a very brief, stay. One of the boys, who was 
 more familiar with the estaminets of Bethune 
 than the rest of us, led the way to one where 
 he assured us the most beautiful woman in France 
 waited on table. In my estimation his judgment 
 was nearly correct, but, after all, when you have 
 been in the trenches for three or four weeks, a 
 feminine face takes on a charm never seen in 
 civilian life. Unquestionably, however, this little 
 waitress was of no ordinary clay. She was a 
 petite little thing, fully experienced in the proper 
 handling of British soldiery. Though we had but 
 little, we spent our last cent. If we had had ten 
 times as much, she and her wily ways would have 
 won it all from us just as easily. 
 
 I am in much accord with Mark Twain, who 
 says that the French do not understand their own 
 language. Certainly, in ordering a meal the 
 French have no more idea of what we Britishers 
 desire than have we of the proper word to de- 
 scribe it. The usual order at a French estaminet 
 
112 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'» 
 
 is the French for * * four-egg omelet. ' ' This pref- 
 erence for omelets, and particularly for a **four- 
 egg omelet," will be understood when I tell you 
 that the French phrase sounds much like ** omelet 
 with a cat roof.'' When all else fails, by a sim- 
 ple process of memory ** omelet with a cat roof 
 brings the desired results. Hence it has become 
 the standard meal of the British soldier seeking 
 a change of diet at a French estaminet. 
 
 While returning to the billet we met a com- 
 pany of troops coming from the living hell at 
 Ypres. Like all troops, they were ** grousing" 
 and complaining about everything, from the stars 
 above to the earth beneath. They were leaving 
 the hottest part of the line for one of the more 
 quiet sections. This they felt to be ample cause 
 for complaint. I do not know, but probably their 
 rations had been unusually good, their officers 
 unusually considerate, and the mail service from 
 home unusually liberal; hence nothing remained 
 worth complaining about except this very satis- 
 factory transfer. They made the most of it. 
 
 Immediately upon our return to Bethune that 
 afternoon our battalion was transferred to a posi- 
 tion nearer the firing-line. As we marched out of 
 the town the last bakery shop was bought out of 
 all supplies, and we marched on, laden down 
 
MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 113 
 
 equally with equipment and delicacies of French 
 concoction. 
 
 It may seem odd to you that we could spend all 
 our money at a French estaminet and yet have 
 more for the luxury of a French bakery. This 
 is easily understood when I explain that one sol- 
 dier's credit on leaving a town is perfectly good 
 for another. Neither may ever return, and hence 
 money on the way up to the firing-line is one of 
 the most valueless of all possessions. When 
 leaving the firing-line, however, and when ap- 
 proaching a town, money takes on added stature 
 and girth. It so happened that we were leaving 
 the luxuries of life for the stern realities of the 
 trench, and those with money about them found 
 it valueless, since there was nothing on which 
 to spend it. Therefore they much preferred to 
 lend it and thereby provide for a rainy day to 
 come, — should that day ever arrive. 
 
 Up to the extreme right of the British line we 
 went, replacing a number of French troops who 
 had been withdrawn in preparation for a drive in 
 the Champagne district, a prelude to the Battle 
 of Champagne and later to Verdun. 
 
 It was now dark as the proverbial coal-hole. 
 About a mile or a mile and a half back of the line 
 proper we entered the connnunication trench, and 
 
114 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 for seemingly endless hours we tramped on, turn 
 after turn, endlessly and always. A mile and 
 a half as the crow flies is likely to be three miles 
 or more in a communication trench. 
 
 Coming back all the time were men laden down 
 with this or that, and others were going to relieve 
 them or to replace them, for no man can leave the 
 front line without another coming to take his 
 place. The front line must always be filled. 
 
 As we drew nearer and nearer, occasional flares 
 which shot up higher than their brothers gave 
 us a vague hint of our general direction, but when 
 they went out the night seemed blacker than 
 before, and east and west and north and south 
 became mere figures of speech. Under a huge 
 chateau we went, like New Yorkers on their way 
 to work. Here the trench branched out to the left 
 and to the right, and, owing to the darkness, part 
 of our battalion lost touch with the balance and 
 wound its way down the left-hand trench. 
 
 We did not discover this until we were almost 
 at the front line, when we had to return and find 
 our lost brethren. We located them swearing 
 away in the left-hand trench, which, after endless 
 plodding, they had discovered to be a blind alley. 
 
 Fifty yards from the front line we encountered 
 the French regiment returning. No more foreign- 
 looking body of men have I ever seen. They were 
 
MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 115 
 
 laden down with odd-shaped packs that, in the 
 darkness, gave them a wholly unnatural size and 
 shape. Their excitement over leaving the danger 
 zone was childlike; their impetuosity was in 
 marked contrast to the stolid advance of us Brit- 
 ishers. We were perfectly content to be hemmed 
 in by trench-walls ; but not so the Frenchmen. As 
 each turn in the trench was reached, a dozen or 
 more of them would explode with impatience and 
 bound up to the top of the trench, to run across 
 the open country unimpeded on their homeward 
 path. 
 
 Our officers had been up to this trench the day 
 before and were thoroughly familiar with it and 
 its contour. Before leaving we had been informed 
 of our individual duties and of the general lay 
 of the land. Hence, on entering this strange 
 trench, we were comparatively at home and 
 quickly settled down into the ordinary routine of 
 trench-life. 
 
 The line was quiet at this time. By ** quiet ^' I 
 mean that there was no particular ** drive'' going 
 on. Of course the Germans have a hatred for ab- 
 solute quiet, and so, at carefully predetermined 
 occasions, they send over their ** coal-boxes " and 
 their ** Jack Johnsons,'' with an occasional minen- 
 werfer to punctuate the silence. At hours estab- 
 lished in their code of battle they tune up their 
 
116 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 **Hymn of Hate/' but generally this is directed 
 more at the batteries in the rear than at the front 
 line. After weeks of familiarity with the German 
 brand of hate, it becomes nothing more than a 
 method of setting one's watch, so regular is it in 
 its appearance. 
 
 One night, shortly after dusk, a despatch-rider 
 wound his way up through the trench and came 
 running to the dugout of the 0. C. The arrival 
 of a despatch-rider is not an everyday occurrence, 
 and his appearance usually forms the basis for a 
 tremendous amount of discussion and conjecture 
 as to the possible contents of his message. 
 
 So it was to-night. The 0. C. took the envelope 
 from him, read the despatch hastily, and imme- 
 diately the news spread down the trench that Italy 
 had entered the war and had already mobilized 
 and taken the field. 
 
 This news was received with astonishment by 
 our troops, for you must understand that the man 
 in the trenches knows little that is going on, ex- 
 cept within a radius of two or three hundred 
 yards. National politics, international intrigues, 
 and the events of which you read, are ancient his- 
 tory before he ever hears of them. Oftentimes he 
 will receive papers, but always they are three to 
 six days old, and in these stirring times a three- 
 day-old newspaper is as ancient as the Book of 
 
MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 117 
 
 Exodus. When boundary lines change overnight, 
 when history is being written with every passing 
 moment, even a **last edition'' is likely to be 
 moldy. Hence it is not to be wondered at that 
 the entrance of Italy into the lists came as a 
 distinct surprise, but none the less a welcome 
 one. 
 
 Such an unusual event was reckoned worthy of 
 a fitting celebration. Much discussion ensued as 
 to the proper method of signaling the arrival of 
 so gallant an ally. By a burst of inspiration our 
 commanding ofiScer suggested that the Boches be 
 appraised of their newest enemy through the med- 
 ium of three rounds of rapid fire and three cheers, 
 followed by an immediate plunge for the nearest 
 dugout on the part of the celebrants. 
 
 This suggestion received the unanimous ap- 
 proval of the entire battalion, and forthwith three 
 rounds of lead and three rounds of cheers were 
 sent over with equal enthusiasm and despatch. 
 The idea was accepted as a standard method of 
 celebration throughout the line, and from the far 
 right of the British line on across France and Bel- 
 gium three mighty cheers rang out as a welcome 
 to Italy. 
 
 Such exuberance from British troops was diag- 
 nosed by the Germans as a preliminary to an at- 
 tack, and we had hardly made the dugouts when 
 
118 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 the roar of German machine-guns echoed our 
 cheers to the horizon. 
 
 Perhaps at this point I might dispel one or two 
 illusions which apparently exist in minds not fa- 
 miliar with life in trenchdom. You hear a great 
 deal about a man being **on'' for one hour and 
 **off for four. **0n'' means that he is **on 
 watch," while ^*o£f means that he is off watch 
 but on the job. There are no union hours in the 
 front line or behind it. While your mechanics are 
 arguing over the necessity for an eight-hour day ; 
 while the I. W. W. are striking and rioting to gain 
 themselves a softer seat or a more comfortable 
 job; while Nihilists and Reds of more attractive 
 name, but equally traitorous desires, are holding 
 long meetings and giving vent to windy speeches, 
 your man in the front line is working twenty-four 
 hours a day, and the only thing that keeps him 
 from working longer is the arrival of another day. 
 
 Sleep in the front line is a fictitious quantity. 
 There is no such thing. When there are no ra- 
 tions to be carried, there are bombs to be carried ; 
 when there are no bombs required, ammunition for 
 the omnivorous machine-guns is urgently neces- 
 sary; when the machine-gun has its pantry full, 
 there are sand-bags to be filled or communication 
 trenches to be dug. The man in the front line has 
 neither sleep nor holiday. True, he may drop 
 
MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 119 
 
 down in his tracks for an hour or two, but he does 
 not sleep. His eyes are closed, he is unconscious, 
 but he does not sleep. Over him always broods 
 the possibility of a Hun invasion. His dreams 
 are riotous; he fights and dies a hundred times 
 during that hour; and he rises only slightly re- 
 freshed, only a little more ready to do his **bit,'* 
 as some of you please to call it. 
 
 As you review the incessant duties of the front 
 line, you will understand why it is that night loses 
 its meaning, and day likewise. The stand-to or- 
 der at 3 A. M. does not inconvenience as it would 
 were you a civilian accustomed to rising at six and 
 retiring at ten. There is no conscious day or 
 night when you are in the front line. Each day 
 is just twenty-four indistinguishable hours of in- 
 terminable toil. Is it any wonder, therefore, that 
 the soldier returns to his rest-billet to drop down 
 absolutely unconscious, blissfully at peace, to 
 sleep for twelve or sixteen hours at a stretch 
 without so much as moving a muscle 1 
 
 There are no favorites in the front line. It is 
 turn and turn about. The battalion roster shows 
 a record of each man's duties throughout a period 
 of time, and if a man does not volunteer for any 
 particular task, he is assigned whatever task may 
 arise. A daily chore is the ration fatigue. This 
 means bringing up cheese, biscuits, bread, and the 
 
120 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 nightly jar of rum, or the big ** dixies'' smoking 
 with a soup concocted from vegetables, meat, etc. 
 There is also the inevitable and much-dreaded jar 
 of jam. 
 
 One ration fatigue in which I engaged stands 
 out very clearly in my mind, since it was my first 
 formal introduction to the German gas attack. 
 Gas attacks to-day have lost some of their initial 
 horror. We have learned how to deal with them. 
 To-day the front line listening-posts are on the 
 lookout for such attacks, and when that greenish 
 horror — as innocent in appearance as any cloud, 
 but as deadly as the fumes of old Vesuvius — ap- 
 pears in the foreground, electric-horns blare out 
 their warning to the front line, and on back and 
 back to ten or fifteen miles behind the trenches. 
 
 Brassiers are also used along the trenches at a 
 distance of twenty or thirty yards. The upflung 
 current of air from these little fires causes the 
 gas to rise and float on and over, without harming 
 those underneath. But in the early days of which 
 I speak, a gas attack was an unknown quantity. 
 Gas shells were a dreaded horror, and gas masks 
 were the most rudimentary affairs imaginable. 
 
 We were returning to the front line with our ra- 
 tions, and had almost reached our goal, when there 
 came the scream of a shell, a blinding flash, and 
 then a deafening explosion but a little way ahead 
 
MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 121 
 
 of us. It was fifteen or twenty feet away, I should 
 say. Our column of ration-carriers stopped like 
 a man who has been hit a solar-plexus blow. I 
 saw a few of the fellows up front plunge forward 
 or topple over and sink down, as though their 
 legs had been made of putty. A sweet, apple- 
 cider-like smell wafted its way to my nostrils. At 
 first I did not recognize it and took a deeper 
 breath. Instantly I felt as though a giant hand 
 held my lungs. Gradually these hands tightened, 
 and my muscles contracted. I was not suffocat- 
 ing for want of air, but for want of strength to 
 breathe it. 
 
 I flung down my load of biscuits and grabbed 
 my gas mask, made only of a piece of medicated 
 cotton and a veil. But it was too late. This 
 grim chlorine giant who held my lungs merely 
 tightened his grasp, and I bounded to the top of 
 the trench and sped away as fast as my legs and 
 a reeling earth would let me. Over to the dress- 
 ing-station I went, where the medical officer, be- 
 tween spells of violent coughing and spitting of 
 greenish phlegm, dosed me with a vile licorice 
 compound that somewhat eased my intense dis- 
 comfort. 
 
 All that night I spent under his care, along with 
 three or four other fellows who had likewise man- 
 aged to stumble over to the station. Shortly af- 
 
122 * ^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 terward four others were brought in. They were 
 too far gone to travel without aid. These boys 
 brought word that four of the fellows had been 
 put out entirely by shell-shock, while six had been 
 thoroughly gassed and were even now hovering on 
 the brink of death. 
 
 After the immediate effects of the slight gassing 
 had worn off, I returned to the front line, but for 
 many days thereafter I was intensely weak, and 
 my eyesight was badly dimmed. As a rude warn- 
 ing against future attacks, we filled bully-beef 
 cans with stones and hung them up and down the 
 trench, where a watch could shake them and an- 
 nounce the approach of any sort of gas attack, be 
 it by shell or cloud. 
 
 After our spell of duty in the front line we 
 returned to the rest-billets, where the rumble of 
 cartwheels told us that the post was arriving. 
 The carts were piled mountain high with mail- 
 bags such as you use in your country, each marked 
 for a certain platoon. Immediately there was ju- 
 bilation. The sergeant distributed the parcels 
 and letters, and cares and troubles vanished forth- 
 with. Cakes, candy, cocoa, coffee, cheese, butter, 
 books, magazines, and papers were all forthcom- 
 ing, and how welcome they were I Some poor 
 chaps, perhaps not such good correspondents as 
 the rest of us, were forgotten by the home folks, 
 
International Film Service Inc. 
 
 After the day's work 
 A bagpiper entertaining his comrades behind the lines 
 
MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 123 
 
 and they stole off into lonesome corners to take 
 what empty cheer they could from the random 
 bits of cake and candy given them by sympathiz- 
 ing comrades. 
 
 Let me beseech you never to send a man in the 
 fighting line a case of jam, or even a jar of jam. 
 Jam and mud are synonymous terms in the minds 
 of fighting men. They are fed up on jam. What 
 they want is some of this ready-prepared cocoa or 
 chocolate to which one need only add hot water. 
 Butter is at a premium. Cheese, likewise, is a 
 luxury. Sweet biscuits, hard enough to stand the 
 rough journey, are rare and welcome delicacies. 
 Helmets, trench mirrors, and similar personal ac- 
 cessories are always received with open arms. 
 
 The arrival of any packet from home is an event 
 of importance, so don ^t forget the boys whom you 
 know, when they are on the firing line. The re- 
 ceipt of a letter means as much to them as a trip 
 to the theater does to you. A package full of deli- 
 cacies — well, do you remember what a package 
 from home meant to you when you were away at 
 school? Multiply that keen joy ten-fold, add to it 
 the urgent need for all such things, and you will 
 have a vague conception of the good that you are 
 doing when you send one of your boys in khaki 
 a little package bearing the brief but welcome 
 sign, *^Made in the U. S. A.'V 
 
124 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 Back in the billet our principal duty was the 
 digging of sundry communication trenches in and 
 about the line. I remember that one nig^it a num- 
 ber of us were engaged in digging through an old 
 German trench and enlarging it so that it might 
 better serve our needs. It was awfully hard 
 work, because the straw-thatched dugouts had 
 partially fallen in and matted down in a mass that 
 was almost shovel-proof. Hence it was no sur- 
 prise to me when my pick struck and stuck fast 
 in what appeared to be a log. I remember kicking 
 away at it, and finally, after loosening it a trifle, 
 I leaned over to remove the offending timber. 
 Locking my hands firmly around it, I braced my 
 feet, gave a giant pull, and tumbled over flat on 
 my back. 
 
 But it was no log in which I had imbedded my 
 pick, neither was it a log that I held in my hand. 
 I had a German's boot, and then some besides. 
 The balance of that German was back there under 
 the thatched straw. The horribleness of it, plus 
 the rotten stench, filled me with an ague, and, to- 
 gether with my comrades, I ran back down the 
 trench, where we met the sergeant. He grufiQy 
 inquired the reason for our haste. We directed 
 him to follow his nose to the bend, where the 
 reason for our speed would be self-evident. He 
 
MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 125 
 
 did as directed, and shortly returned to order us 
 to another part of the line where this most awful 
 reality of the battle-field would not obtrude itself 
 upon our eyes and nostrils. 
 
 Returning to the billet that night, after five 
 hours' steady and fatiguing work, we flung our- 
 selves down, tired to the very marrow of our 
 bones. The billet was quiet, except for the oc- 
 casional snore of a sleeping fighter. Next to me 
 lay a man who had been eternally and everlast- 
 ingly bragging of his freedom from * ' seam-squir- 
 rels,*' as we had come to call the crawlers. This 
 name was due to their great preference for the 
 seams of our kilts. As I lay down I noticed this 
 braggard twitching nervously. The twitch grew 
 into a vast convulsion that shook him from head 
 to foot. Suddenly he sat up, looked about fur- 
 tively, stared at me, and then, thinking that I 
 slept, he clandestinely removed his outer and up- 
 per garments and gave way to a luxurious scratch- 
 ing. 
 
 The ** seam-squirrels" had caught him at last, 
 and in my intense joy at his discomfort — for he 
 had boasted most gloriously of his freedom from 
 attack — I awakened the balance of the company to 
 view his discomfiture. Their joy equalled mine, 
 but only for a little time. There is something 
 
126 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 about the sight of a man scratching, and taking 
 a keen satisfaction in it, that is contagious. I had 
 not been watching the object of our mirth for more 
 than two minutes before I felt every *'seam- 
 squirreP' on my body. They wriggled, they 
 squirmed, they crawled, and they bit. The itch 
 spread over the entire billet, and for the next 
 half hour the night was given over to a revelry 
 of scratching. 
 
 Then back to the line we went, and Nichols 
 and I volunteered for advance listening-post duty. 
 At nine o^clock that night we went out. The ad- 
 vance listening-post at this section of the line was 
 fifty yards from the German trench. From one 
 o'clock until two was my time to watch, and it 
 was during this period that Nichols was supposed 
 to sleep. Along about half -past twelve, however, 
 during his watch, the line to our left became 
 ** windy,'' which is trench parlance for nervous 
 and a trifle frightened. 
 
 The * * windiness ' ' spread from left to right, un- 
 til the entire line was in an uproar and the Ger- 
 mans were being severely pelted with small-arm 
 fire. The ** windiness" reached its cold finger out 
 into our listening-post, and when it came my turn 
 to watch, Nichols told me that he was going to 
 stand with me, since he was too excited to rest in 
 the bottom of the trench. So we stood up there 
 
MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 127 
 
 together, with our eyes just over the top of the 
 sand-bags. 
 
 We had been standing there together, shoulder 
 to shoulder for a scant ten minutes, when Nichols 
 slid along the bank toward me and leaned heavily 
 against me. At first I thought he had gone to 
 sleep from exhaustion, and I turned around to 
 push him upright once more. As I withdrew the 
 support of my body, Nichols collapsed like a 
 straw-man and rolled down into the muddy bot- 
 tom of the trench. 
 
 Even then I did not realize what had happened. 
 I leaned over and lifted his head in my hands. 
 Just then a star-shell shot high up in the heavens 
 above our little hole in the ground, and I saw 
 why Nichols was *^ exhausted." 
 
 Right in the temple he had it, and down his 
 cheek and upon my hand flowed his blood. I 
 watched it like a man in a stupor, so slowly it 
 oozed out dark and warm. Nichols was going 
 west. He opened his eyes a trifle, the lids flut- 
 tered, the star-shell went out, and with it went 
 old friend Nichols. He had been my pal from 
 the battle for Lille until this cold wet night out 
 in the front-line listening-post of Vermelles. 
 
 I called softly to him, hoping that perhaps he 
 would arouse, if only long enough to say good- 
 bye. But Nick was gone. I covered him with 
 
128 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 his waterproof sheet and stood up on the firing- 
 step once more. From half -past one until relief 
 arrived I watched there beside Nichols in the sap- 
 head, with the Teuton army only fifty yards away. 
 
 They carried him away on a stretcher, and 
 when I returned I went to our captain and asked 
 for a decent burial for Nick. Next morning six 
 of us took him back on the same stretcher on 
 which they had carried him out from his duty. 
 No casket awaited Nick. Only a rough shroud of 
 sacking and a Union Jack. Back to Vermelles 
 we bore him. There we dug a little grave — God, 
 but it was a shallow one! — and lifted old Nick 
 down into it. We stood about with bowed heads 
 for a little while, and that was the only tribute 
 that poor Nichols had. 
 
 Then I hurried away, for I could not bear to 
 see the earth, cold and wet, shoveled over that 
 figure which stood for one of the best friends 
 a man ever had, and one of the truest patriots that 
 ever breathed the breath of London's streets or 
 fought in the battle for democracy. 
 
 As I wound my way up through the communi- 
 cation trench to the front line, the sport of war 
 was gone, and I swore a solemn oath to avenge 
 Nichols and to make the bullet that sent him west 
 take its quadrupled toll of Germans. 
 
MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 129 
 
 I immediately volunteered for sniper *s service, 
 for which I was fitted by my record as a marks- 
 man at the training camp. I was accepted, and 
 entered upon my career as a free-for-all sniper in 
 the ranks of his Majesty the King. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 SNIPING — THE TRAITOR AT BETHUNE — WHAT 
 . HAPPENED AT LILLE 
 
 ON receiving my credentials as a sniper, the 
 freedom of our section of the trench was 
 given to me, and the sniper ^s insignia of crossed 
 rifles was emblazoned on my left coat-sleeve. 
 
 Owing to the critical and delicately nervous 
 work of the sniper, he is freed from the irksome 
 round of trench duties that are the lot of com- 
 mon soldiery. The day and the night are his to 
 do with as he pleases. His association with the 
 commanding officer is close, much closer than here- 
 tofore. He does not even live in the trench, but 
 back a little ways, where the intense strain of con- 
 stant and watchful waiting may not wear upon his 
 marksmanship. 
 
 I had been a sniper for about one week, and had 
 the layout of our section of the trench and of the 
 opposing lines well in mind, when one afternoon 
 our captain, Mr. MacKenzie, came to me and told 
 me of work definitely cut out for us. Our task 
 was to locate and silence a Boche machine-gun 
 
 130 
 
SNIPING 131 
 
 which had been proving its effectiveness through- 
 out the previous week. 
 
 That night, soon after darkness fell, ten of us 
 crawled out into no-man's-land until we were 
 within one hundred yards of the German trench. 
 Here we divided into five parties of two each, and 
 each party dug itself into a hole. By two o 'clock 
 our work was finished, and the dirt we had dug up 
 was spread about over a wide area, so as not to 
 attract the attention of watchful eyes in the op- 
 posing trench. In front of our five little holes 
 we had transplanted some of the dank grass which 
 sometimes springs up in no-man's-land under the 
 influence of heavy rain and hot sunshine. 
 
 By two o 'clock we had finished and had jumped 
 into our burrows, with a sniper and an observer 
 in each burrow. On my rifle I had a telescopic 
 sight and a silencer, the latter making firing prac- 
 tically inaudible. The telescopic sight is one of 
 the devilish ingenuities of modern warfare. It 
 brings the man at the business end of the gun 
 to within almost reaching distance of you. You 
 can pick out any place upon his body, and be- 
 tween the crossed hairlines on the sight you can 
 almost snip the buttons off his coat, if you so 
 wish. 
 
 Between our five holes we had strung a string, 
 so that the one who first located the offending 
 
132 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 machine-gun could signal its exact location to the 
 others. Beforehand we had agreed upon a defi- 
 nite code, and by sun-up we were well along to- 
 ward locating the object of our endeavors. 
 
 By careful listening, combined with the trained 
 eye of our observers, who were aided by their 
 binoculars, we located our gun in a concrete em- 
 placement to the extreme right of our sector of 
 the trench. The sniping officer gave an order 
 that only the snipers on the right of our line of 
 dugouts were to seek out the men behind the 
 Teuton gun. 
 
 This gun was very carefully concealed by an 
 elaborate, concrete structure, carefully draped 
 with moss, leaves, and debris, but in the middle 
 of it was a slot about a foot high and two or three 
 feet long. It was through this slot, at a distance 
 of about five hundred yards, that we were to send 
 our shots. Behind it we could see nothing. We 
 had to trust to the guiding instrument of justice 
 to seek out that machine-gun crew. 
 
 I presume that I had fired not more than 
 twelve shots when the rat-a-tat-tat which had orig- 
 inally revealed it to us died away, to appear no 
 more that day. Perhaps some of our shots 
 reached their mark. Of course I cannot tell and 
 will never know. 
 
 Hardly had the machine-gun been silenced, how- 
 
SNIPING i33 
 
 ever, when the usual scream of overhead shells 
 changed their tune, and they began dropping woe- 
 fully close to us. Perhaps we had been located, or 
 perhaps a German observation-balloon, away off 
 to the left, had picked us up. In any event, we 
 dropped down into our dugouts and disappeared 
 completely from the range of vision, but not before 
 two of our boys on the extreme left had been killed 
 by a w^ell-directed Teuton shell. Aeroplanes, too, 
 had been going overhead, unimpeded by any Eng- 
 lish machines, and in all probability our position 
 had become the public property of the German 
 gunners. 
 
 Throughout the balance of that day our lives 
 were a nightmare of expectation, for we did not 
 know when one of those shells would drop into 
 the narrow confines of our individual dugout, and, 
 believe me, there are much more comfortable bed- 
 fellows than the German ** Jack Johnson." 
 
 At the first opportunity after nightfall we 
 sneaked across and over into our own sap-head 
 again, and returned to the rear. On the way back, 
 as we came to a corner of the road, we stumbled 
 over a prone figure, apparently in a dead stupor. 
 The man was drunk. There was no denying it, 
 for you could whiff the odor of rum for many 
 feet about him. He had been sent back for the 
 usual daily rum-ration, and on the return journey 
 
134 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 had succumbed to the wholesale temptation on 
 his shoulder. Of course our officer had to report 
 him, and as he was an old offender, he was placed 
 under arrest, subject to a drumhead court-martial. 
 
 Army life has many punishments, but one of the 
 most extreme is the first-class field punishment 
 which was meted out to this habitual drunk- 
 ard. It consists in tying a man, with his hands 
 held high over his head, to a convenient tree, door- 
 post, or artillery wheel for two hours each day — 
 one hour in the morning and one hour in the after- 
 noon. This is what is known as the ^* spread 
 eagle,'' and it is usually imposed for a period of 
 seventy-two days, at the end of which time any 
 sane man will hurry back to the straight and nar- 
 row path of rectitude. 
 
 The attitude of the soldiery toward a man so 
 strung up is one of intense hatred and derision. 
 The trained soldier realizes that his life and the 
 lives of all his fellows depends primarily on strict 
 discipline. A man condemned to first-class field- 
 punishment is generally a violator of discipline, 
 and as such well merits the wrath of his entire 
 regiment." 
 
 During this period of our stay the German lines 
 were about six hundred yards away, and the soil 
 — typical of all soil in this sector — was chalky. 
 During the hot days of summer the heat radiated 
 
SNIPING 135 
 
 from the ground as though it were a hot stove-lid, 
 and this made it doubly difficult to do any accurate 
 firing, owing to mirage. It therefore became our 
 daily duty to fire **test shots" from various lis- 
 tening-posts — shots directed at each foot and each 
 yard of the opposing trenches — in order to keep 
 our marksmanship up to the minute and to accus- 
 tom ourselves to the annoying mirage that is 
 prevalent during the summer. 
 
 Foot by foot we would sweep down the German 
 line, our observers meanwhile watching carefully 
 for the splash of chalk-like smoke that indicated 
 a hit. The necessary corrections, range, and ad- 
 justment would be marked down upon a sheet, and 
 so, after a few days of such experiments, we had 
 our entire sector of six hundred yards thoroughly 
 tabulated. 
 
 Then we settled down to await the need for our 
 services. 
 
 Our preparations had been none too soon, for 
 a German sniper was reported to be giving trou- 
 ble. He had already hit six of our officers, and 
 his depredations continued unabated. 
 
 This German sniper was one of the daredevil 
 variety. I suspect that he must have been a cir- 
 cus clown or a loop-the-loop rider before his en- 
 trance into military life. Instead of hiding him- 
 self, as is the sniper's custom, this chap would 
 
136 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 carelessly arise on the parapet, sometimes with 
 a preliminary yell to attract our attention, and 
 then would fire his rifle with exasperating aban- 
 don. We came to know him as ^ * Jack-in-the- 
 Box." He would bob up at odd intervals in dif- 
 ferent sections of the trench. In the morning he 
 might be on the extreme right, in the afternoon 
 on the extreme left, and toward evening in the 
 center. His very daring seemed to be in his fa- 
 vor, because for over a week we worked on him 
 without success. In the meantime he had ac- 
 counted for four more of our men. He made a 
 specialty of officers, though, as became one of his 
 daring. 
 
 Our corps of snipers quickly fell into bad re- 
 pute. We dared not enter a trench, unless we 
 cared to take a verbal ** strafing'' that had the 
 sting of truth behind it. Day after day we waited 
 for him, but always fruitlessly. 
 
 One night we snipers got together and agreed 
 upon a definite plan of campaign to wipe out this 
 annoying fellow — and with him the unsavory rep- 
 utation that had fallen upon our heads. 
 
 The following morning the ten of us set out — 
 each taking as his own a prearranged section of 
 the German trench. We watched all that day, 
 meanwhile revising our ranges and firing adjust- 
 ments until I personally felt confident that I could 
 
SNIPING 137 
 
 split a match, should it be lifted above the Teuton 
 parapet. During our preparations, our friend 
 across the way kept remarkably silent, and we 
 prayed soulfully to ourselves that some random 
 bullet had reached its mark. 
 
 But no. On the second afternoon, on the ex- 
 treme right of the line, we heard the familiar crack 
 of a German rifle. A German rifle makes a differ- 
 ent noise than does the English Lee-Enfield. The 
 English gun sounds like the bang of a door, 
 whereas the German rifle makes a noise like the 
 crack of a giant whip — sharp, stinging, and bale- 
 ful. 
 
 Word was passed down the line that ** Jack-in- 
 the-Box' ' was up to his old tricks. He had bagged 
 another officer, and a snarl of derision slipped 
 down the trench to me at the extreme left. As 
 the minutes passed, our German dare-devil, as per 
 his usual custom, paraded down his sector of the 
 line and at odd intervals jumped up to taunt us or 
 to fling a shot across. Closer and closer he came 
 to my end of the line. 
 
 Just opposite to me was a slight bend in the 
 German trench. I figured that the Teuton sniper 
 would appear here, as it brought him a trifle closer 
 to our line and gave him an opportunity to prac- 
 tise his pet trick of enfilade, or cross-fire. With 
 the assistance of my observer I sought out every 
 
138 ^* LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 foot of this parapet with my experimental shots. 
 I next adjusted my elevation so that future shots 
 would clear the parapet by a scant six inches. 
 Then I waited. 
 
 It was a remarkably fine day for sniping. The 
 air was as clear as a bell and there was little mi- 
 rage to annoy one. Far up to the right I saw the 
 fellow bob up and down, and I figured that my 
 section of the line would be his next appearance. 
 At a word from my observer, I peered through 
 my sight and saw the top of his head moving along 
 the chosen sector of the German parapet. He was 
 playing into my hands for a surety. Evidently, 
 from the motion of his head, he was conversing 
 with some one just below, but hardly enough of 
 his anatomy showed itself as yet to warrant my 
 risking a shot. I had him well covered, and in 
 the powerful telescopic sight I could almost see 
 every hair on his head, for, with typical bravado, 
 he had not bothered to protect himself with the 
 usual gray-colored cap of a Hun sniper. 
 
 Gradually, across the hair-line of my sight, his 
 face appeared, and then his chest. He rested his 
 rifle with his usual debonair flourish, sighted it 
 very carefully, and then apparently the dandy's 
 collar hurt him, for he made a motion as though 
 to stretch his neck and release his Adam's apple 
 from uncomfortable pressure. Through my rifle- 
 
SNIPING 139 
 
 sight the whole action was as clear as though it 
 were ten feet away, and I smiled quietly as I 
 pulled the trigger. 
 
 There was a crack, my observer shouted, and I 
 could see our friend, the Boche jack-in-the-box, 
 flop forward across the Teuton parapet like a be- 
 headed chicken. The honor of the snipers' corps 
 had been retrieved, and my old friend Nichols had 
 been avenged. 
 
 Within a week we moved out of Vermelles to 
 within about five kilometers of Bethune. Our 
 billets were in a wee bit of a village, which for 
 some reason the Germans had marked for shell- 
 fire. Throughout our stay there we were under 
 constant punishment, and the business of dodging 
 shells became an obsession with us. I remember 
 that this town, despite its popularity with the 
 German artillery, boasted six untouched estam- 
 inets. I was in one of them one afternoon when 
 the steady screeching of the shells overhead 
 turned to a more livid scream, and we knew that 
 they were coming our way. 
 
 Two blocks away we heard one. Then came an 
 explosion outside that stopped our hearts and 
 pulled the breath out of our lungs. We counted 
 heads, and the twelve of us were still drinking our 
 chocolate unharmed. But not so next door. The 
 shell had fallen in the back-yard of the adjoining 
 
140 ^'LADIES FROM HELL'^ 
 
 house, and debris and splinters, flying through 
 the windows, had laid low two of our company. 
 By some stroke of misfortune the two who had 
 gone west through the ministrations of this ran- 
 dom shell, directed far behind the line, had been 
 with us unharmed since the very beginning. The 
 Battle of the Marne and the horrors before Lille 
 had left them unscathed. Such is the luck of war- 
 fare. 
 
 From here we moved back to Bethune, where 
 report had it that a spy was located. Through 
 some means he had been directing the Teuton ar- 
 tillery-fire with uncanny accuracy. 
 
 The first morning that I was down in the busi- 
 ness district near the railroad yard, I and my com- 
 rades noticed what others had already noticed, 
 namely, an unholy number of locomotive-whistles 
 coming from the switching-yard behind the depot. 
 We also noticed that several minutes after each 
 whistle-blast a German shell came over and sought 
 out some particularly vulnerable spot, such as a 
 cross-roads or a warehouse. 
 
 We were not the only ones who marked this 
 strange coincidence, and immediately a watch was 
 set upon the railroad yard. Persistent search 
 among the puffing locomotives betrayed the fact 
 that a certain engineer was doing far more than 
 his share of whistle-tooting. Once suspicions 
 
SNIPING 141 
 
 were aroused, it was easy to imagine that its toots 
 ran perilously near a code. Furthermore, regard- 
 less of where the shells hit, this locomotive seemed 
 always to be at a distant place. In war-time a 
 little suspicion is ample and sufficient ground for 
 action. One does not have to blow up an ammuni- 
 tion-depot in order to be called before a court- 
 martial as a spy. The engineer of the suspected 
 locomotive was taken into custody and subjected 
 to the * * third degree, ' ' which is about ten degrees 
 hotter than the * * third degree ' ' of a police depart- 
 ment. 
 
 After sufficient persuasion this engineer, who, 
 by the way, was a Frenchman, admitted that he 
 had been working under the orders of a certain 
 alderman or other dignitary of Bethune, who like- 
 wise was a Frenchman. He admitted that his 
 whistles had been arranged according to a prede- 
 termined code, this code being changed each day. 
 
 A daily change of code meant a daily and close 
 communication with the German lines. The 
 means of communication adopted by this traitor- 
 ous Frenchman was far closer than you might 
 imagine. He had a private telegraph-wire run- 
 ning underground to German headquarters. Over 
 this he had been conversing for some time in a 
 most leisurely and carefree manner. 
 
 We need not go into detail as to what happened 
 
142 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 to these two ** patriots." It is sufficient to say- 
 that they will not bother Bethune again. I tell 
 this incident as an indication of the fact that Ger- 
 man intrigue does not stop with your lowly peas- 
 ant working in the fields of Flanders, but aspires 
 to higher offices and more noble heads. 
 
 At this point in my career one incident stands 
 out with vivid clearness. This was our first bath 
 since coming to the firing-line. Outwardly we 
 were as clean and polished as any diplomat, for 
 such are the rules and regulations of the British 
 army. They say that if you peel away but a gen- 
 eration from a Goorkha, you will have the original 
 stone-age man. I will stand sponsor for the state- 
 ment that if you peel away the clothing of a sol- 
 dier who has been in the trenches for six weeks, 
 you will find ample proof of the old adage that 
 all is not gold that glitters. Your Tommy's face 
 will shine like Shakespeare's school-boy; above 
 the collar he will be as scrupulously clean as the 
 kitchen floor of a Holland hausfrau; but below 
 that collar's dead-line — or shall I call it dirt-line? 
 — the description can best be left unsung. What 
 you do not know cannot hurt you. 
 
 You can imagine that a bath was something of 
 an event. It stands out much more clearly in my 
 mind than does many a trench raid. We bathed 
 in groups of one battalion every few minutes. 
 
SNIPING 143 
 
 There was none of your lazy Sunday-morning 
 bathing. We entered a long room where twenty- 
 five or thirty showers, each in a little private stall, 
 were spouting steam and profanity. At a whistle 
 from the end of the room the showers cast forth 
 twenty-five or thirty fairly presentable Tommies, 
 and another twenty-five or thirty men took their 
 places. The contrast in color between those en- 
 tering and those leaving was marked. 
 
 Three minutes was the time allowed for bath- 
 ing. The water started off hot. After about a 
 minute and a half it cooled. When it became cold 
 you knew you had about fifteen seconds remain- 
 ing for your ablutions. 
 
 Three minutes is mighty scant time in which 
 to remove the accumulated filth of weeks. Con- 
 stant practice in the art of bathing by order did 
 not enable me to complete my toilet in the proper 
 manner. I always had to finish it in the drying 
 room, where we were handed a towel which also 
 performed the offices of a scrub brush. 
 
 By this time in its military career our regiment 
 had saddled itself with a reputation. We had 
 been particularly successful in many minor un- 
 dertakings, and had become known as good men 
 to call upon when something had to be done and 
 done quickly. Our officers invariably volunteered 
 for all sorts of unwelcome duties, and while we 
 
144 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 gloried somewhat in our reputation, we likewise 
 found it very irksome. Hence it was not with 
 great joy that we received the call to build a road. 
 
 Over in your country I believe they sometimes 
 use convicts to build roads. Certainly no self- 
 respecting laboring man would stoop so low. But 
 when you are in the army you do what you are 
 told and consider yourself amply rewarded if you 
 come out alive. Mere fatigue is nothing more 
 than an everyday occurrence. Hence the build- 
 ing of a road called forth little more than the ordi- 
 nary amount of grumbling. 
 
 Four hundred of us went out, armed with picks 
 and shovels, and started digging about three kilo- 
 meters outside of Bethune, in order to enable the 
 military trucks to avoid the town and the detour 
 and shell-fire that it meant. 
 
 We had hardly set to work when a German 
 aeroplane appeared away off in the distance — 
 about five kilometers, I should say. It was 
 headed in our direction. When about three kilo- 
 meters away, it circled up to about three thousand 
 feet and then swung in a wide ring above our 
 heads. Three men were set to watch it, for even 
 in those days German aeroplanes were not the 
 most welcome visitors to an unarmed body of sol- 
 diers. 
 
 Eeport of its arrival was flashed to our aerial 
 
SNIPING 145 
 
 squadron, and two of our doughty fighters were 
 sent up to meet it. The German saw them com- 
 ing and bored straight down upon them. Faintly 
 we could hear his machine-gun ripping out its song. 
 He missed and shot upward again. Our two 
 planes followed suit, and the battle drifted away 
 into the distance, where the nationality of the 
 planes was lost. But we could still see them 
 gyrating like crazy bugs before an arc-light. Up 
 and down, back and forth, they went. At times 
 a head-on collision seemed imminent. But at 
 last our Teuton friend volplaned downward in a 
 long arc that marked him as either hit or fleeing 
 with all speed toward friendly quarters. 
 
 Returning to town, we passed a house which 
 had already become familiar to me as the home of 
 Therese. Therese was a French girl who was 
 living with relatives in Bethune. Her former 
 home had been in Lille, and she had been there 
 during the time of the German occupation. I had 
 come to know her very well, and had often called 
 there to pass the time of day and to enjoy some 
 of her family's cooking and good cheer. In fact, 
 I had been taken in as almost a member of the 
 family, and, though my French was extremely 
 weak and their English even weaker, we got on in 
 jolly good fashion. 
 
 As I passed that evening, she and her relatives 
 
146 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 were sitting out in front of their house enjoying 
 the cool of coming night, so I called out a rather 
 broken invitation to take a walk. To this she 
 heartily assented. It was during this walk that 
 she told me some of her first-hand experiences dur- 
 ing the German occupation of Lille. 
 
 It seems that Therese had been living with her 
 aged grandparents, her father and mother, and 
 a younger brother and sister. The Germans ' first 
 move, on entering Lille, had been to ransack the 
 entire town. Her grandfather, an old warrior 
 and a fighter still, despite his years, had come 
 upon one of his friends being brutally beaten by 
 a German officer in the street. Therese told me 
 that her grandfather was not familiar with the 
 German order concerning fire-arms, and had im- 
 mediately rushed into his home and taken a pot- 
 shot at the officer from the window. The sound 
 of the shot brought a horde of Germans from all 
 directions, and the entire household was hauled 
 into the street for ** examination, ' ' as the officer 
 in charge was pleased to call it. 
 
 This * * examination ' ' consisted of brutally mal- 
 treating the womenfolk and lining the menfolk of 
 the household up before them for immediate de- 
 spatch by a firing-squad. The latter was made up 
 of practically the entire company of Germans, all 
 
SNIPING 147 
 
 of whom appeared insanely anxious to prove their 
 marksmanship at twenty yards. 
 
 The women were then brought to headquarters. 
 Therese's mother and grandmother were sent in 
 opposite directions, and Therese was detained. 
 Fortunately she had not been put under heavy 
 guard, and had been able to procure a peasant 
 boy's outfit of clothing. This she donned and, 
 traveling by night, managed to pierce the Ger- 
 man lines and to reach our own lines in safety, 
 as an itinerant peddler. 
 
 This much Therese told me of her own experi- 
 ences. She said little of the actions of the Ger- 
 mans toward herself, though from that little one 
 could gather much. The Teutons had ransacked 
 every home in Lille, and of those who stayed, many 
 were shot for imaginary or entirely fictitious 
 causes. Everything in the city had been carried 
 away. Pictures fastened to the walls were 
 slashed so as to utterly destroy their value. 
 Every bit of iron, steel, copper, and lead had dis- 
 appeared. All families had been utterly separ- 
 ated. The men had been sent away in one di- 
 rection and the women in another. 
 
 I say that the women were sent away. The 
 women were not all sent away. As fast as the 
 Germans could operate, the men of Lille were 
 
148 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 taken to one end of the town and all the women 
 to the other. Here the younger women were 
 separated from the older, and the older women 
 were sent away to goodness knows where. The 
 younger women were taken before the command- 
 ing officer. I need not carry the story further. 
 Enough has already been written about German 
 methods. Let me merely add that little bits which 
 I pieced together from Therese's story added a 
 mighty weight to all that now rings in our ears 
 as samples of German kultur. 
 
 In speaking of the Germans' treatment of the 
 womenfolk, Therese seldom spoke of the private 
 German soldier. It was usually the officers. In 
 recording this, however, I do not feel that I hang 
 any laurels on the virtue of the Teuton private. 
 He never had a chance at the womenfolk. Ger- 
 man orders are, ** officers first." 
 
 Before the war I have heard of the unspeak- 
 able boorishness of the German officer. I know 
 enough of the German officer's attitude toward 
 womenfolk in peace-time to imagine what his atti- 
 tude would be toward hostile, defenseless women 
 in war-time. But my imagination has proven a 
 weak and effeminate thing. Therese 's tale of 
 German tortures, reinforced by other and equally 
 authoritative tales that I heard, allows me to 
 know beyond peradventure of a doubt that the 
 
SNIPING 149 
 
 German creed to-day reads, **Kill, but enjoy even 
 as you kill.'* 
 
 That evening reinforced our friendship, and her 
 recitation of the troubles she had undergone 
 brought Therese closer to me. We agreed to ex- 
 change lessons in French and English. These 
 had progressed only a little way, however, when 
 we were again ordered away, and, as a parting 
 jest, I asked her to write to my mother, saying 
 that I did not have the opportunity to write her 
 before leaving. Therese took my jest in earnest, 
 however, and my mother treasures to-day a four- 
 page letter from this little French girl who had 
 been through the horrors of Lille, but still had 
 heart enough to write a British Tommy's mother 
 that he was well and happy, and, like all the Eng- 
 lish, was doing *^his bit." 
 
 There is one phase of ** doing your bif of which 
 you hear but little. That is the **Blue Funk,'' or 
 * * Firing Squad. ' ' In the armies of your laboring 
 men the man who does not do his earnest best is 
 discharged. The man who disobeys orders is sub- 
 ject to nothing worse than a reprimand. But 
 **over there," as you please to call it, we get no 
 reprimand, and the man who does not do his earn- 
 est best meets nothing weaker than a court-mar- 
 tial. 
 
 Our own regiment never found it necessary to 
 
150 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 have a **Blue Funk Squad.'' Plainly, tlie duty 
 of such a squad is to execute those guilty of in- 
 subordination or cowardice. Cowardice is the 
 commonest of trench troubles. To feel cowardice 
 is no crime, but to show cowardice is punishable 
 by death. A good friend of mine, an officer, told 
 me that all the firing squads in kingdom come 
 could not have held him in the front line during 
 a heavy shelling. He said that only the fear of 
 losing the respect of his men kept him with them. 
 This statement from an officer who is now dec- 
 orated for bravery will give you some indication 
 of the fear that very naturally prevails in the 
 front-line trenches during an attack. 
 
 "Fear of the firing squad, in all probability, keeps 
 few men from showing cowardice. I honestly be- 
 lieve that the honor of the regiment and the fear 
 of what other men will think holds more men to 
 their duty in the face of danger than does any 
 firing squad in Flanders. Oftentimes I will 
 vouch for the fact that a sudden and sure death 
 is far preferable to the hellish waiting. I believe 
 that before Lille some of us would have run back, 
 firing squad or no, had not the honor of the regi- 
 ment been at stake. It is the honor of the regi- 
 ment, reinforced by stern discipline, which holds 
 you in your place. 
 
 Once more let me emphasize to all American 
 
SNIPING 151 
 
 troops the need for rigid obedience to discipline. 
 You may not receive war's real discipline while 
 training in America, or even while training in 
 France, but when you get up into the front line 
 discipline must he observed. 
 
 It is one of the million things which will win 
 the war for democracy. It is so rigidly inf orced 
 among English troops that a man who does not 
 return on time from leave in London is shot after 
 only a very formal court-martial. Cowardice 
 gives no opportunity to plead an alibi. Lateness 
 from leave permits you to plead extenuating cir- 
 cumstances. But believe me, my friend, little 
 short of drugging or a blackjack on the head in 
 a dark alley will prove sufficient alibi for a stern 
 military court-martial. 
 
 Therefore I say, respect your officers, respect 
 them not only as men, but as the representatives 
 of that central and unifying intelligence by which 
 alone this war will be won. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FAEM-HOUSE BETWEEN THE LINES — **SEND US 
 MOEE ammunition'* — THE SPY AT HEADQUAR- 
 TERS 
 
 FROM Bethune we were again sent up to the 
 firing-line twelve kilometers distant. On the 
 way, as we neared the front, we encountered dug- 
 outs filled with reserve soldiery. This was a new 
 system recently adopted by the British, and dis- 
 placed the old method of quartering reserves far 
 behind the line. It made them more mobile and 
 enabled a given sector to be handled by fewer 
 troops. 
 
 No sooner had we reached the front-line trench 
 than word was passed to us to be on the lookout 
 for a German machine-gun emplacement which 
 had been so carefully hidden by the Germans that 
 it had clicked its toll of death for over ten days 
 without being located. 
 
 It fell to the lot of McKenzie and myself that 
 evening to stand watch at a listening-post about 
 fifty yards from the German front line. It was 
 a peculiarly nasty evening ; a fine rain pelted down, 
 
 152 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 153 
 
 and a cold breeze that belonged more in March 
 than in June chilled one to the marrow. Hardly 
 had we taken our places when word reached us 
 that a bombing-party of Germans might be ex- 
 pected at any moment. This same bombing-party 
 had made itself thoroughly obnoxious for three 
 nights running, and it was to be expected that it 
 would continue its depredations until interrupted 
 by the sudden demise of its members. 
 
 With this reassuring news to cheer us on, we 
 took our places on the fire-step. At eleven o ^clock 
 I went on duty. As is the custom, T came off duty 
 one hour later and stretched myself out at the 
 bottom of the dugout, while McKenzie stood 
 watch. 
 
 At 12:30 a sergeant came running out to the 
 sap-head. He asked us if we had heard any sus- 
 picious noises. Upon receiving a negative reply, 
 he explained that our machine-gun emplacement, 
 which commanded a neighboring road, had been 
 entirely wiped out by the German bombing-party 
 but three minutes before. Hardly were the words 
 out of his mouth when our entire line burst forth 
 into a blaze of flares and musketry, and, clearly 
 outlined in the middle of no-man's-land, we could 
 see the German party scurrying across, like rats 
 in an open field. 
 
 Immediately an enfilading fire from our ma- 
 
154 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 chine-guns reached out for them. It wavered for 
 a moment to their right, and then it swept across 
 them, clung to them, and another German bomb- 
 ing-party was wiped out. 
 
 But still the obnoxious Teuton machine-gun em- 
 placement remained a mystery, and it became the 
 duty of six of us, under the command of an offi- 
 cer, to go out the following evening and put a 
 quietus upon this obstreperous gun. 
 
 We went about ten o'clock, armed only with 
 trench-knives and revolvers. Between us was 
 stretched a rope, much after the fashion of Alpine 
 climbers. The usual code of signals had been 
 arranged so that the lieutenant in front could in- 
 form any or all of us of his intentions. It was 
 our little job to locate the exact position of the 
 machine-gun emplacement. It had already been 
 partially located, but to make doubly sure we were 
 to send up a flare at the precise point in the Ger- 
 man line where this machine-gun held forth. 
 
 It is a comparatively simple and safe matter, 
 barring accidents, to merely investigate the op- 
 posing front line, but to send up a flare within a 
 few yards of the opposing line is to beard the 
 lion in his den. Yet this was part and parcel of 
 our duty, and we went at it morally certain that 
 few, if any, of us would return to our own lines. 
 Three of the boys had bombs, and before leav- 
 
THE FAEM-HOUSE 155 
 
 ing we all wrote letters home and made our last 
 will and testament. These we left in charge of 
 our comrades, for it looked like certain death. 
 
 Out to the nearest sap-head we went. This was 
 about six hundred yards from our approximate 
 objective. With final instructions to the men in 
 the sap-head, we set out. No-man's-land at this 
 point was as bare as the top of a billiard-table, 
 except here and there where a shell-hole punctu- 
 ated the landscape or a bit of stubble remained, 
 cut down close to the ground by the machine-gun- 
 fire of the opposing lines. 
 
 What few flares there were gave but little light, 
 owing to the high wind and the misty, driving rain. 
 Half way across there came a tremendous tug at 
 the rope, and we all fell flat on our faces. Not 
 twenty yards away, against the horizon, we could 
 see the outlines of a German working-party. It 
 was investigating our lines, repairing barbed wire, 
 or doing some other duty of a sort peculiar to no- 
 man's-land. 
 
 Flat on our faces we remained for the better 
 part of ten minutes, until it was accurately de- 
 termined that the German working-party had re- 
 tired to its own trenches. Then, with infinite 
 pains, we worked our way up, half -crawling, half- 
 standing, to the very front of the German barbed 
 wire. We could hear the Teutons talking and 
 
156 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 laughing, but the outlines of their machine-gun 
 emplacement remained hidden. 
 
 Up and down in front of the Teuton line we 
 crawled, watching for any break in the parapet 
 or any change of coloring which might disclose the 
 object of our search. At last three jerks from 
 our officer brought us to attention, and in response 
 to his code directions we dimly discerned the 
 vague outlines of an emplacement, carefully hid- 
 den by debris and withered stubble. 
 
 According to previously arranged plans, our 
 bombers took up a position about ten yards to the 
 right and left of the emplacement. Our officer 
 then gave a signal, and our flare shot up into the 
 night but a scant fifteen yards from the German 
 front-line trench. 
 
 You may wonder why it was necessary to set 
 off the flare so close to the Hun stronghold. It 
 was only by so doing that the lookouts in our sap- 
 head could obtain the angle of fire necessary to 
 reach the suspected machine-gun. Had we gone 
 back and depended only upon our sense of direc- 
 tion for the location of this emplacement, it would 
 have remained a mystery indefinitely. But by 
 drawing a sight from the listening-post on the 
 right and left, we were enabled to accurately mark 
 its position and to wipe it out on the following 
 day. 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 157 
 
 But to return to the moment in which the flare 
 hissed its way up through the driving rain. It 
 had hardly left the revolver of the officer in 
 charge, when the bombers hurled their charges 
 full into the German trench and the whole line, 
 both Teuton and British, sprang to its feet in an 
 ecstasy of nerves. No-man's-land swam in a 
 ghostly, yellow light. Machine-guns on both sides 
 began to sing their lay, and over a thousand yards 
 along the front a miniature battle immediately 
 sprang into being. 
 
 It was through this cross-fire that we of the 
 observation party were expected to make our re- 
 turn. By taking advantage of every scratch and 
 shell-hole upon the surface of the ground, five of 
 the six of us managed to drag ourselves back to 
 our sap-head. Only one remained out in no- 
 man's-land, and the next morning we saw him 
 there, still close to the Teuton front line. 
 
 During this period of my duty on the front 
 line there was little, if any, heavy firing, but con- 
 siderable scout-work was necessary as a prelimi- 
 nary to an offensive at a somewhat later date. 
 The location of the above German machine-gun 
 emplacement was but a small part of the work in 
 the preparation for a big attack. Before any at- 
 tack of importance is undertaken it is necessary 
 to know the opposing line as well as the Teuton 
 
158 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 himself does. Each machine-gun, each field- 
 piece, each trench-mortar and even each sap-head 
 must be carefully plotted and marked. 
 
 One of the many strategic points of this sector 
 was an old farm-house lying midway between the 
 German and the British line. The opposing 
 trenches were approximately eight hundred yards 
 apart, and between them, a mere wreck, stood 
 this old shambles of a house. One hundred and 
 fifty yards from its doorway, in the direction of 
 our trenches, stood a pump. Here we had been 
 accustomed to obtain some of the most delicious 
 well-water that I have ever tasted, and it had 
 become one of the duties of the ration-party to 
 secure a liberal quantity from this well, even 
 though it was done at a considerable risk to them- 
 selves. 
 
 The Germans, however, early discovered our 
 fondness for the well, and it was not long before 
 they had thoroughly poisoned it and spoiled it 
 for several generations to come. Not content with 
 this, however, they had a way of sneaking into 
 the farm-house with snipers and a portable ma- 
 chine-gun, and from this point would direct a 
 nasty fire up and down our sector of the line. 
 
 Occasionally we would return the compliment, 
 but as we knew nothing of the casualties caused 
 by our own snipers and knew only what the Ger- 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 159 
 
 mans had done to us from the same location, it 
 was determined that the next German party to 
 take possession of this house would get its just 
 deserts. 
 
 We had not long to wait. That very evening, 
 just at dusk, the song of a German machine-gun 
 piped out from the second-story window of the 
 house. A call went back to our artillery to be- 
 stow a few pieces of high explosive in the gen- 
 eral direction of the farm-house. But the reply 
 was that they had no ammunition to waste on 
 such small trifles. This was early in the war, 
 when the Germans were easily throwing two shells 
 to our one, and even at that we were carefully 
 husbanding our scant supply. 
 
 Since the artillery refused to aid us, it became 
 our pleasure to do the job alone. Twelve of us 
 volunteered for this service. I was one of the 
 twelve. We waited until dark, and then set out 
 across the four hundred yards that separated us 
 from the house. 
 
 In the meantime the Germans had been ex- 
 tremely quiet, and we began to suspect that they 
 had escaped us. But they were only biding their 
 time. 
 
 As we reached the well they evidently sighted 
 us, or sighted a suspicious movement, and the 
 machine-gun spat at us from its usual window 
 
160 ' 'LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 just above the doorway. There was nothing to 
 do but fall flat and scuttle up to the house as best 
 we could. When we came within fifty yards there 
 was no mistaking the fact that the Germans had 
 spotted us. Both the machine-gun and the snipers 
 were doing their best to beat us in our race for 
 the house. Our officer shouted out the command : 
 * ^ Six to the back ; and six to the front ! ' ' I hap- 
 pened to be one of the six who went to the front. 
 
 We found the door barricaded, and above us 
 was the machine-gun and four very accurate and 
 skilful snipers. One by one the boys about me 
 slipped down to their knees, victims of the fire 
 from the upper window. I emptied the chambers 
 of my revolver without any apparent effect, and 
 then found myself alone, sheltered only by the 
 scanty protection of the portal of the door. I 
 silently thanked a hard-working ancestry who had 
 made me as thin as the proverbial rail. A fat 
 man would have found my position about as much 
 protection as a dollar umbrella. 
 
 Here I stood for a minute or two, with five of 
 my comrades at my feet. Every one of them 
 had been victims of the snipers' bullets. Then 
 I heard the racket of the party that had gone to 
 the rear. Trusting to sheer luck and to the fact 
 that the same noise would be heard by the Ger- 
 mans, who would then be drawn from the window, 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 161 
 
 I made a run for it. Thus I managed to get 
 around the corner of the house without attracting 
 the Teuton fire. 
 
 At the back I found the boys just breaking into 
 the house. Up the stairs the seven of us rushed 
 as one man. The Germans were barricading the 
 door of the room, but the scanty furniture that 
 remained in the house afforded little material for 
 their purpose. Presently we burst into their quar- 
 ters, after only trifling work with an old chair 
 which served us as an improvised, but effective, 
 battering-ram. 
 
 Instead of being greeted by a volley of shots, 
 as we had expected, we found ^ve Germans on 
 their knees, with hands uplifted, and the words 
 ^'Kamerad! Kamerad! il/erci//'' spouting from 
 their lips like some well-rehearsed chorus. 
 
 It was the same old piffle that you hear from 
 every German when you have him cornered, and 
 it met with a cold reception at our hands. Our 
 officer took the floor and replied : 
 
 ** Little enough mercy you showed us a few 
 weeks ago down by Lille! You had plenty of 
 time to cry for mercy when we were coming across 
 that last five yards. When mercy is yours to 
 give, you never give it. You cut my paPs throat 
 like some porker; you blinded our lieutenant! 
 Mercy? Hell!'' 
 
162 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 With that the bayonets in our hands got busy, 
 and there were five less Germans to wear the 
 Iron Cross that night. 
 
 I do not believe I am telling anything amiss 
 when I say that since the battle for Lille we Scot- 
 tish have taken few, if any, prisoners. You will 
 remember how the Black Watch went over the top 
 and at the German trenches. You will remember 
 how some thirty of them reached the Teuton lines, 
 and how they returned, stripped of all accoutre- 
 ments, to be shot down like rats. With such a 
 picture ever before us, do you wonder that the 
 Scottish do not find it in their hearts to take Ger- 
 man prisoners! Do you blame us men, who saw 
 in those five Germans an opportunity to demon- 
 strate that Jcultur can work both ways? There 
 are those who prate loudly of turning the other 
 cheek. I suspect, however, that these same 
 pacifists, were the Germans entrenched at Sche- 
 nectady or Buffalo, would find scant chance to 
 turn the other cheek. Give a German an inch, 
 and he will take a mile. The only cure for the 
 German atrocity is to fight fire with fire. The 
 man who can see his own pal and comrade shot 
 down in cold blood, as we had seen the Germans 
 shoot down our Black Watch, is not a man, if he 
 can refrain and hold back his hand from avenging 
 such slaughter. 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 163 
 
 From this work we went back to Vermelles 
 again, to our rest-billets. Vermelles at this time 
 was known to the Germans as one of our main 
 arteries, and hence it was subject to a constant 
 shelling which waxed intense at specified hours 
 of the day. 
 
 Eunning along beside our billet was an old 
 trench which had seen service in the early days. 
 It ran almost without interruption to the very 
 door of an estaminet about half a mile distant. 
 This trench afforded ideal protection to the hun- 
 gry soldier, except for a scant one hundred and 
 fifty yards of its length, where it crossed a meadow 
 and became merely a hollow depression in the sur- 
 face of the ground. The Germans had this spot 
 carefully marked and sighted, and to cross it was 
 to flirt with death with a vengeance. Neverthe- 
 less the lure of the estaminet drew our whole com- 
 pany across this one hundred and fifty yards once 
 or twice or even three times a day, when oppor- 
 tunity and the O. C. permitted. Of course the 
 practice was frowned upon, although no formal 
 order had been given forbidding us to go. 
 
 One afternoon, while off duty, with some dozen 
 or more of my fellows I broke the unwritten law 
 and made a dash across the open ground without 
 fatalities. Reaching the estaminet in safety, we 
 sat down on its little porch. We were sipping our 
 
164 *^ LADIES FROM HELL^' 
 
 grenadine when the usual German ** strafing'' of 
 Vermelles began. 
 
 The bombardment of a town is one of the most 
 spectacular sights. It is beautiful in a terrible 
 way, if observed from a generous distance. From 
 our refuge we could watch it without fear of be- 
 coming active participants in the destruction. 
 
 You would hear a German gun boom, there 
 would be a scream overhead, and then, after a 
 pause, a terrific explosion, just close enough to 
 make it interesting and to observe the effect ac- 
 curately. As each shell hit — the Germans were 
 using high explosives liberally that day — a geyser 
 of dirt and red brick-dust shot up into the air, like 
 some tremendous oil-gusher. So violent was the 
 shelling that afternoon that the entire town of 
 Vermelles seemed covered by a haze of black and 
 red. Interspersed with the fumes and dust, oc- 
 casional little cotton-puffs of shrapnel appeared. 
 At intervals a house would slide out of sight, the 
 victim of concussion. Through binoculars we 
 could see whole dwellings lifted into the air, as 
 if they had been toys, to be cast down as mere 
 piles of smoking ruins. 
 
 The German shelling lasted for about an hour 
 without drawing fire from our artillery. At its 
 conclusion, however, our observation balloon, in 
 conjunction with our aeroplanes, had located and 
 
THE FAEM-HOUSE 165 
 
 sighted a German brewery considerably behind 
 their lines. In the cupola of this brewery the 
 Teutons had installed a machine-gun which had 
 been traversing up and down our lines for two 
 or three days. 
 
 No sooner did we sight this brewery than an 
 urgent plea went forth to our artillery to direct 
 their efforts upon it, and particularly upon the 
 waspish occupant of the cupola. Word came back 
 that they could afford but five shells. An aero- 
 plane went up to check the observation and to 
 make doubly sure of the accuracy of our aim. 
 The first shell fell short, the second crept up just 
 a trifle, and the third hit the cupola about ten 
 feet below its base and exploded. Cupola, Ger- 
 mans, and machine-gun jumped into the air, an 
 indiscriminate mass of dust and smoke. 
 
 To incapacitate a German machine-gun is an 
 insult ; to incapacitate a German machine-gun in 
 a brewery is a triple insult. Immediately the 
 wrath of the Germans was reawakened, and for 
 two hours Vermelles and all the intervening ter- 
 ritory bore up under a tremendous shelling from 
 practically every field-gun on the Teuton front. 
 Our own guns were silent, of necessity, a neces- 
 sity created partly from fear of being located and 
 partly because of their scant supply of ammuni- 
 tion. 
 
166 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 And right here let me put in a plea for ammuni- 
 tion. 
 
 You workers in the shops and factories, how 
 little do you realize the intense need of the front 
 line! We boys out here work, yes, we slave, for 
 twenty-four hours a day, Sundays and holidays, 
 rain or shine. You in your comfortable homes, 
 with all the conveniences and luxuries of modern 
 city life, just remember us out here and give us 
 all you 've got. 
 
 The man who stays at home to make shells or 
 to make any of the munitions of war, or, for that 
 matter, any of the tools which go to make these 
 munitions, is not a ** slacker." We need him; we 
 need hundreds and thousands of him. But the 
 man who stays at home to make munitions and 
 then takes every opportunity to lay off or to cut 
 his time is a ** slacker.'' He is worse than a 
 ** slacker," for not only does he keep from us the 
 fruits of his own efforts, but he keeps from us the 
 fruits of another man's efforts, a man who might 
 give us all he had. 
 
 When we are up on the front line and read news- 
 paper accounts of munition-workers striking or 
 complaining, it brings a smile, a wry smile, to our 
 lips. We can't help comparing your position with 
 ours. We can't help thinking of the few cents 
 per day that we receive for giving everything 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 167 
 
 we 've got, including our lives, perhaps. We can't 
 help comparing our offering with the security, the 
 peace, and the comfort which you receive in re- 
 turn for your skill and handicraft. If every mu- 
 nition-worker, if every worker on tools or acces- 
 sories that go to make up munitions could only 
 spend a short half -hour in a front-line trench, there 
 would be little cause for the cry that echoes back 
 from Flanders : 
 
 *'Send us shells, and shells, and more shells !" 
 
 I remember hearing the story of a visit of mu- 
 nition-workers to the front-line trench. It will 
 tend to prove my statement. 
 
 Word was passed up the line that a deputation 
 from the English Munition-Workers was coming 
 to see if we actually needed more shells. Those 
 boys back home evidently did n 't care to take our 
 word for it. They knew that they were making 
 hundreds, yes, thousands, of shells every day, and 
 it probably appeared to them as the height of 
 waste that we could use them all and still be de- 
 manding more. 
 
 When word reached us that their committee was 
 about to visit us, a gurgle of anticipation ran down 
 the trench, for here indeed was an opportunity to 
 demonstrate the horrors of war to those most in 
 need of a demonstration. 
 
 Our officer, although he said little, managed to 
 
168 ** LADIES FROM HELL'^ 
 
 egg us on in our plans for deviltry, and lie went 
 back to meet the deputation of munition-workers 
 with a sardonic smile on his face. 
 
 They stepped out of a staff automobile, wearing 
 Prince Albert coats and tall silk hats. Unques- 
 tionably they were a stunning spectacle, a striking 
 contrast, incidentally, to the grim khaki uniform 
 seen everywhere along the front. 
 
 Our commanding officer, instead of leading them 
 through the usual communication-trenches, which 
 were only about ankle-deep in mud, chose to lead 
 them through a main drain-trench. A main drain- 
 trench is somewhat similar to an intercepting 
 sewer. It is designed to carry off the mud and 
 water from some several hundred yards of trench. 
 This particular drain-trench happened to be 
 waist-deep in slimy silt. Three feet of this ob- 
 noxious mud was the introduction of our diplo- 
 mats from London to the horrors and inconven- 
 iences of war. 
 
 When word reached us that they were in our 
 midst, our artillery, rising to the occasion, sent a 
 salvo of fire over into the German lines. Never 
 before had this failed to bring back a triple dose 
 of German steel, but to-day, for some unaccount- 
 able reason, no such reply came. The artillery 
 tried its luck once more, and spent a dozen more 
 of its precious shells, but still no reply came back. 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 169 
 
 The quiet became embarrassing. Not a ma- 
 chine-gun spoke; not a sniper's rifle cracked across 
 at us. Something had to be done, for the situa- 
 tion was growing desperate. 
 
 A non-commissioned officer had an inspiration, 
 — or perhaps it had all been planned beforehand. 
 In any event, dugouts were ransacked and every 
 available bomb was prepared for action. As the 
 munition-workers slowly plowed their way down 
 the drain-trench, every one took an armful of 
 bombs and, with rifles pointed in air and machine- 
 guns directed anywhere, began a little battle of 
 their own, a ** personally conducted'' battle, so to 
 speak. 
 
 Never was there a more realistic duplication 
 of the front line when a big drive is on. 
 
 Bear in mind that the munition-workers were 
 waist-deep in mud. Their progress was slow, and 
 they were hidden from our front line and our lit- 
 tle comedy by a parapet. 
 
 For about thirty minutes our boys staged one 
 of the most complete and harmless battles of the 
 war. As no word came to desist, it became ap- 
 parent that their efforts were meeting with the 
 appreciation of the commanding officer. They re- 
 doubled them. Blood-curdling yells and shrieks 
 combined with the noise and smoke of exploding 
 grenades, until hell itself seemed to have been 
 
170 ^^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 turned loose in this particular sector of the trench. 
 
 All the ^\me the Germans had been serenely 
 quiet, although a demonstration such as this on 
 any other day would have called forth the se- 
 verest reprimand in the shape of a bombardment 
 of an hour or more. 
 
 To our left at this time was a bridge, known 
 among the boys as * * London Bridge. ' ' It spanned 
 a little stream which ran across no-man's-land 
 between the German and English lines. No one, 
 to date, had been able to cross this bridge alive, 
 and you can imagine our astonishment when we 
 saw our officer lead the deputation of munition- 
 workers to the bridge-head and invite them to 
 cross. 
 
 This seemed to be carrying the farce a little 
 too far, but the officer evidently knew his busi- 
 ness, for very graciously and politely he invited 
 them to cross first, saying that he would follow 
 them. 
 
 To our horror, they started across, graphic il- 
 lustrations of the old adage that *^ ignorance is 
 bliss." We fully expected to see them wiped out 
 before they had gone ten feet, but not only did 
 they go ten feet, but half way across, and then 
 loitered on the edge and viewed the scenery there- 
 abouts. 
 
 Not a shell or rifle-shot came over from the 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 171 
 
 German lines. They were as quiet as a tomb. 
 After a brief conference in the center of the bridge, 
 the bedraggled, mud-soaked deputation moved on, 
 followed by our commanding officer on the run. 
 He had hardly made the crossing when a German 
 high-explosive shell screamed after him. By 
 sheer luck it alighted only a hundred yards from 
 the munition-workers. Three of our boys gave 
 up their lives to this shell, but never have lives 
 been given to better advantage. The munition- 
 workers were tremendously impressed. They 
 told our commanding officer that they had long 
 desired to see a tremendous battle, and now that 
 they had seen one and had tasted the horrors of 
 war, they were going to return and do their ut- 
 most to double and triple Britain's output of 
 shells. They also announced that, as they had a 
 tremendous amount to do that day, they would 
 like to hurry away. Back they went, firmly con- 
 vinced that the front line does need ** shells, and 
 shells, and more shells." 
 
 You may wonder why the Teutons were so quiet. 
 We wondered, too, until a few days later a Ger- 
 man spy, serving in the capacity of interpreter 
 at our headquarters, was captured and given the 
 usual punishment meted out to such gentry. The 
 coming of these ammunition-workers had been 
 common talk about headquarters for days, and 
 
172 '* LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 their contemplated arrival had been duly for- 
 warded to the Germans. With their usual clever- 
 ness, the latter had forecast the result of absolute 
 quiet, and so withheld their fire in the hope that 
 the munition-workers would be influenced and that 
 as a result our supply of shells would diminish, 
 rather than increase. 
 
 It may interest you to know that this same spy 
 had been intimately connected with the failure of 
 our attack at Lille. He was the man who warned 
 the Germans of the impending assault. I have 
 since heard prisoners say that the Germans ex- 
 pected us three days before we struck. They ad- 
 mitted this very frankly, when captured. As a 
 matter of fact, the battle for Lille was planned for 
 a Thursday. You will remember that it didn't 
 take place until the following Sunday. It had 
 been postponed at the last minute. 
 
 This same spy had also been connected with our 
 cordial hostess who had the friendly pup who 
 wore a hollow collar. It was through the medium 
 of this dog that he forwarded despatches to the 
 German lines, and it was by his efforts that they 
 were advised of the old lady's arrest. With his 
 arrest and confession many peculiar ** coinci- 
 dents" were cleared up and vanquished for all 
 time. 
 
 While returning from watching the bombard- 
 
THE FAEM-HOUSE 173 
 
 ment of Vermelles I inadvertently allowed myself 
 to be observed by a German sausage-balloon, or 
 by some company of snipers, and became the re- 
 cipient of a cordial dose of shrapnel and musketry 
 fire. I needed no second invitation to hasten my 
 pace, and bounded around the corner of my billet, 
 only to run head-on into my officer. He spun 
 round like a top, and fell on the back of his neck 
 with a resounding thud. 
 
 Springing to his feet in a rage, he roundly 
 abused me, first as a ruffian, and then, as sober 
 judgment returned to him, as a man who had dis- 
 obeyed orders by going down the communication- 
 trench to the estaminet. Partly as punishment 
 for disobeying orders, and partly as a handy vent 
 for his spleen, he sentenced me to an extra fatigue. 
 This consisted in carrying wire and other engi- 
 neering tools up to the front line to repair barbed- 
 wire fences and to aid in similar work. 
 
 My duties were to begin immediately. At night- 
 fall, with a company of about fifteen others who 
 were loaded down with tools and accessories of 
 all sorts, I crawled along *' Shrine Road,'' so 
 called because of the little shrine set up at 
 its intersection with the communication-trench. 
 ** Shrine Eoad" ran parallel to the German lines 
 and was often subject to heavy shell- and mus- 
 ketry-fire. It so happened on this evening that 
 
174 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 the moon was at our back. We must have been 
 neatly outlined to German snipers, for we had 
 hardly set out when the entire surrounding terri- 
 tory jumped up in little puffs of dust, each mark- 
 ing the landing-place of a German bullet. 
 
 We immediately took to the ditch and dragged 
 our heavy tools to the communication-trench. 
 But, even so, we were still observed and were sub- 
 jected to a heavy machine-gun fire, which swept 
 across at a nasty angle and bagged three of the 
 boys. 
 
 Our line at this point bent back from the Ger- 
 man line in a great half -circle. Thus to command 
 it required practically double the number of men. 
 It was the work of this evening to straighten this 
 bend and so release the men there for service 
 elsewhere. 
 
 As soon as darkness fell we went over the top 
 from a listening-post. There were about one hun- 
 dred and fifty of us on the job. The German lines 
 were about five hundred yards away. Five hun- 
 dred yards is not a great distance when there is 
 nothing between you and the German fire. But 
 fortunately our occupation was not discovered, 
 and we spread out across no-man's-land in a 
 ragged line and began to scratch ourselves in with 
 the enthusiasm of a bull-pup seeking a long-buried 
 bone. 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 175 
 
 At frequent intervals we would hear across the 
 stillness of the night the preliminary hiss of a 
 flare, and, from a forest of bobbing heads, no- 
 man's-land became as vacant as a cemetery, to all 
 outward appearances, at least. 
 
 We were barely well started on our work, when 
 our outposts' screen, about thirty feet in front 
 of us, reported a strong German working-party 
 coming our way. Rifles were hurriedly secured 
 and loaded, and available protection was at a pre- 
 mium. By good fortune, however, the working- 
 party drifted in the opposite direction, and before 
 the first streaks of dawn crept up over the horizon 
 a neat trench had been prepared. The dirt had 
 been evenly distributed over several yards, so that 
 even from the German observation-balloon our 
 new position was not apparent. 
 
 This shortening of the line and all the prelim- 
 inary work in plotting the machine-guns of the 
 opposing forces was merely the prelude to a local 
 attack. This took place one evening shortly after 
 dusk, when five hundred yards of our line went 
 over the top and at the Bavarians, who com- 
 manded the Teuton trench at this sector. 
 
 The Bavarians have a reputation as veritable 
 fire-eaters. On this occasion they did not live up 
 to their repute. The previous evening our scouts 
 had cut long lanes through the German barbed 
 
176 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'^ 
 
 wire, and, preceded by our bombers, we rushed 
 across no-man ^s-land without preliminary artil- 
 lery preparation, depending largely on surprise 
 for success. 
 
 The surprise was not total, although it was 
 sufficient for the purpose. We were almost up to 
 the German barbed wire before their lookouts 
 scented our approach. Two minutes later five 
 hundred of us jumped down as one man into their 
 trench. Considering the suddenness of the at- 
 tack, the Germans were fairly well-prepared. I 
 remember that my leap carried me squarely upon 
 the back of a stalwart Teuton, who jabbed upward 
 at me with his bayonet as I plunged down. The 
 shock of my arrival on his shoulders diverted his 
 aim and likewise scattered us both over several 
 yards of trench. He recovered himself first. 
 With a guttural oath, he drew back his rifle — it 
 looked as big as a telegraph pole — as a prelim- 
 inary to running me through. 
 
 Up to this time I had regarded tales of one's 
 last moments as being largely of a mythological 
 nature. I had heard that in the last few seconds 
 of a man's existence his entire life runs through 
 his brain like a panorama. I now had good cause 
 to repent of my ridicule, for every little detail of 
 my twenty-two summers flashed upon me in inti- 
 mate retrospect. 
 
THE FARM-HOUSE 177 
 
 The German ^s gleaming blade, seemingly with 
 infinite slowness, crept down upon me. But it 
 never reached me, thanks to my commanding offi- 
 cer, who was just behind me. There was the 
 crack of a revolver, and the German pitched for- 
 ward on top of me, his rifle spinning out of his 
 hand and over the top of the trench. My fear- 
 bound muscles relaxed, and I sprang to my feet, 
 recovered my rifle, and rushed for a communica- 
 tion-trench, which by this time was crowded with 
 a milling mass of Teuton and Scottish soldiers. 
 
 As I plunged around the corner I ran plump 
 into a six-foot specimen of a Bavarian. He 
 loomed up out of the night like an ox. There is 
 no mistaking these chaps, even in the dark. Their 
 outlines are different, their helmets are shaped 
 differently, and their packs are placed differently. 
 I think my arrival was as much a surprise to him 
 as his arrival was to me. Our rifles, bayonet 
 first, went back over our heads like one, but I was 
 quicker on recovering. I lunged forward, forget- 
 ful of all the instructions of our bayonet-tutor back 
 in England. But perhaps I did remember them 
 subconsciously, for my bayonet found its mark 
 neatly under the chin of the Bavarian. At the 
 time I felt no special anxiety about his future con- 
 duct, for he collapsed with a grunt. I pulled 
 my rifle cut — it had been almost jerked from my 
 
178 ^^LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 hand by his weight — and rushed on to assist my 
 comrades in the communication-trench. 
 
 By this time the Bavarians were in full retreat 
 back to their second line. Some of our boys in 
 their eagerness had followed them across the 
 open ground above the trench. This was unfor- 
 tunate, for all of these lost their lives, owing to 
 the fire of our machine-guns which were directed 
 indiscriminately toward the fleeing Germans. 
 
 With the winning of the last yard of trench, we 
 each pulled from our belt three sandbags, and 
 the communication-trenches were barricaded and 
 fully covered by enfilading machine-guns. It was 
 only then that we had time to cool off and review 
 the evening's work. Probably the entire attack 
 and the completion of our barricade had not taken 
 more than half an hour at the outside, but, as we 
 sifted back into the trench proper and the heat 
 of battle left us, some of the horror of it took pos- 
 session of us. 
 
 There were Germans all around, and there were 
 some of our boys, too. One group still flashes up 
 before me in the night. It was a German and a 
 Scotty, locked in each other's arms. Each had 
 run the other through with his bayonet at pre- 
 cisely the same instant, and they had closed in 
 death's embrace, to remain there until we pulled 
 them apart. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE BKITISH AIR SERVICE BECOMES STRONGER — THE 
 REFUGEE FROM LILLE — WE FIND OUR WOUNDED 
 SERGEANT 
 
 IN the face of the many accounts of aeroplane 
 fights with which we are regaled to-day, any of 
 the little aeroplane battles which I observed in the 
 beginning of the struggle seem puny and weak. 
 You must remember that in 1915 the aeroplane 
 was in its infancy. Indeed, at that date, even 
 though the Germans had few planes, — they pre- 
 ferred the Zeppelin — their aerial forces gener- 
 ally held dominance over those of the English. 
 Both sides used extensively what planes they had, 
 but the battle-plane was in its cradle, and a sin- 
 gle type of plane often served as observation-, 
 scout-, and battle-plane in one. This made the 
 struggle of opposing planes none the less interest- 
 ing, however, although considerably rarer than 
 to-day. 
 
 At some time in your experience in the front 
 line you are likely to be appointed to aero-scout- 
 duty. In this capacity you are instructed to keep 
 an eagle eye out for any approaching Tauhes and 
 
 J79 
 
180 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 to sound two shrill blasts on a whistle as an an- 
 nouncement of their approach. 
 
 At such times every one had iron-clad orders to 
 seek cover immediately. There must be no de- 
 lay, the idea being to impress the German observer 
 with the absolute bareness of the landscape and 
 to hide from him any troop movements. 
 
 Outside Vermelles I remember seeing one of 
 the prettiest battles between an aeroplane and 
 our anti-aircraft guns that it has ever been my 
 privilege to observe. It was one of those won- 
 derfully clear June days, ideally adapted to aero- 
 plane observation. The sun had just swung up 
 over the horizon, when through my binoculars I 
 caught the approach of a German Taube, with its 
 characteristic black cross on the under wing. 
 
 I announced the fact to our anti-aircraft gun- 
 ners, and they immediately wheeled their guns 
 into position, in order to reach the German when 
 he was practically overhead. He swung about in 
 wide, cautious circles for five or ten minutes, and 
 then, at a word from the commander of the anti- 
 aircraft guns, there came the ripping crash, 
 thrice repeated, of a three-barreled rifle. 
 
 Perhaps you have observed a display of fire- 
 works from across a lake or a field. You will 
 remember the sharp crack of the mortars, the 
 long wait, and then the burst of multicolored stars 
 
THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 181 
 
 liigh up in the heavens, followed by the crackle 
 of distantly exploding rockets. The bombard- 
 ment of an aeroplane affords much the same spec- 
 tacular display. There is the sharp boom — boom 
 — boom of the anti-aircraft gun, and then the wait 
 while the shells spin their way upward. Pres- 
 ently there are three splashes of cotton, which 
 spray out in jagged lines across the heavens, and 
 from far off comes the ominous crackle of the 
 exploding shrapnel. 
 
 We had quite a force of anti-aircraft guns con- 
 centrated on the German, and he turned his nose 
 upward in order to escape the deluge. But we 
 got him. The gunner to our left reached up and 
 apparently crippled his engine or punctured his 
 gasoline-tank. In any event, either his engine 
 or his control was badly shattered, for he spun 
 like a top, righted himself, and then staggered 
 first one way and then the other, like a drunken 
 bat. 
 
 You could not help admiring the fellow and the 
 skill which he exhibited. In long, inebriated vol- 
 planes he slid down and down, until he was only 
 about a thousand feet above us, when he appar- 
 ently exerted every effort to obtain control over 
 his staggering craft. But it was of no avail. 
 High above our heads he plunged backward, and 
 then shot down like a comet to the ground. 
 
182 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 Of course, since the early days of the war we 
 have heard more or less of atrocities. In your 
 country I have seen and talked with people who 
 hold the opinion that atrocities are a myth. That 
 no war has ever been fought withou*t the occur- 
 rence of some atrocities is true. A thousand or a 
 million men cannot be gathered together without 
 some of them overstepping commands and de- 
 cency. But from all corners of the line word 
 kept seeping in to us of peculiarly horrible muti- 
 lations practiced by the German troops. 
 
 I have heard it said that such atrocities are 
 practiced under orders of the German High Com- 
 mand. I will take no issue with this fact. I 
 have heard the German High Command blamed 
 for all atrocities. Neither will I argue this point. 
 I only know that the man who commits the atrocity 
 is the German private. He may be acting under 
 orders, but the blood is on his hands, though the 
 legal blame may reach higher. 
 
 I myself place full blame upon the German 
 trooper, the private, for the atrocities which I 
 know to have been practiced. Whether he is act- 
 ing under orders or not does not influence my de- 
 cision. I only know that if our officers — or yours 
 — asked their men to practice the brutalities so 
 common among German troops, those officers 
 would either be accidentally ( ?) shot or openly dis- 
 
THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 183 
 
 obeyed. The only possible alibi I can see for 
 the German trooper's actions and his obedience 
 to orders from higher up is the propaganda which 
 has been pumped into him from earliest child- 
 hood. He has been **fed up'' on the beauties of 
 lust and blood. He has been taught that God 
 smiles on the German murderer. Any man who 
 is fool enough to believe this sort of slime has no 
 excuse, in my eyes, for his obedience. 
 
 There has been considerable talk in your coun- 
 try of exaggeration, of falsification, in reporting 
 German atrocities. Therefore it is with great 
 caution that I pen my own experiences and my 
 own observations along this liae. Some of them 
 I witnessed personally and can vouch for with 
 my own eyes. Others came to me directly, in a 
 manner which I cannot doubt in the slightest par- 
 ticular. I have eliminated from the following in- 
 cidents any and all reports which might savor in 
 the least of rumor or exaggeration. 
 
 At Bethune there was an estaminet, kept by an 
 old French woman and her two daughters. She 
 had assisting her a young French girl of about 
 eighteen years, who had one arm missing from 
 the elbow down. This girl was strangely taciturn, 
 and our boys dubbed her **The Silent Partner," 
 in derision of her shyness and quiet. 
 
 I had come to realize, however, that many of 
 
184 ** LADIES FROM HELL*' 
 
 these French peasants who talk little, know much, 
 and I made it my business to get better acquainted 
 with this girl. Gradually, piece by piece and 
 little by little, I won her story from her. 
 
 She, too, had been at Lille during the German 
 occupation. Her younger brother, her father, and 
 her mother had lived with her in one of the middle- 
 class sections of the town. Her father, it seems, 
 had hurried home from his shop upon the Ger- 
 man occupation, and had found the Germans at- 
 tempting to break into his home. He argued with 
 them and then, with bare hands, attempted to 
 drive them off. He had hardly lifted his arm 
 against them before he was overpowered, and the 
 entire family — mother, brother, and father — ^were 
 taken out and shot in cold blood upon their own 
 doorstep. 
 
 The girl was brought before the commanding 
 oJQficer, who passed her on to the officers' mess. 
 Here, in a drunken orgy, they maltreated her un- 
 til she swooned away. As she regained con- 
 sciousness, she tried weakly to raise herself, 
 and in so doing grasped hold of the door-knob. 
 One of the drunken wolves, who had been a leader 
 in the deviltry, picked up a chair and crashed it 
 down upon her outstretched arm, splintering the 
 bone in several places. Whether or not the sub- 
 sequent amputation was necessary, I do not know. 
 
THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 185 
 
 In any event, her arm was amputated, and until 
 her escape from Lille she was forced to lead a 
 harlot's life among the German troops. 
 
 This was the tale I coaxed from the lips of a 
 reticent French girl who had been through a Ger- 
 man occupation. She told it not willingly or with 
 braggadocio, but as a story coming from the heart 
 and one too awful to spread broadcast. 
 
 Another case comes to my mind, the case of 
 one of our men who escaped from the Germans 
 and returned to our lines. He had been shot 
 through the hand. This, in itself, is an incon- 
 siderable wound, and on showing it to the Ger- 
 man surgeon he had expected nothing more than 
 a casual bandage. The German, however, told 
 him that an operation would be necessary, and 
 they lifted him upon the operating table without 
 further ado. 
 
 ''You will give me an anesthetic, of course, 
 won't you?'' said my friend. 
 
 ''What!" replied the German surgeon. "An 
 anesthetic for a schwinehundf and forthwith the 
 operation continued, while my friend was held 
 down by a group of grinning Teuton soldiers. 
 
 What do you suppose that German surgeon did 
 for a simple shot through the hand? In the first 
 place he cut all the tendons of my friend's hand. 
 Then he removed the bone from the middle finger 
 
186 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 in such a manner that the entire hand became ab- 
 solutely useless and might as well have been en- 
 tirely removed. 
 
 In one of the minor advances in which we en- 
 gaged we returned without our sergeant. The fol- 
 lowing day, in a second attempt to retake the cov- 
 eted ground, we came upon him. He had been 
 captured, evidently while in a dazed condition 
 from a shell-wound in the head. A rifle-bullet had 
 grazed the front of his skull above the eyebrow, 
 making nothing more than a flesh wound, but 
 probably rendering him senseless or dazed for a 
 considerable period. 
 
 What treatment do you think the Teutons gave 
 this wounded soldier? I do not know. I only 
 know that I, with my own eyes, found him trans- 
 fixed through the chest with a bayonet, the point 
 of which had been shoved into a barn-door. 
 There he hung, mute testimony to the German 
 treatment of wounded prisoners. 
 
 One of the boys coming down to us from a neigh- 
 boring sector told of an advance there in which 
 they captured one of the small villages whose 
 name now escapes me. He told me that as they 
 entered the village — this was a surprise attack — 
 they came upon twelve women, three of them wan- 
 dering about crazed beyond all recall. Eight 
 others were lying dead upon the public square. 
 
THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 187 
 
 all naked as Mother Eve, victims of German bru- 
 tality. 
 
 Another story comes to my mind which for 
 sheer hideous inhumanity exceeds all imagination. 
 One of our boys had been party to an attack upon 
 a village some fifteen or twenty miles distant. 
 There he came upon an old French woman living 
 in a little hut to the rear of her former home, 
 which had been burned to the ground when the 
 Germans retired. She was the sole survivor of a 
 family of five. Her soldier sons had been con- 
 nected with the regiment which defended the vil- 
 lage. As the Germans swept through, the French 
 retired, leaving their dead and wounded behind 
 them. She followed the Germans and came upon 
 her boy lying beside the road, fatally wounded 
 and dying. 
 
 By this time the French troops had been rein- 
 forced and were sweeping the Germans back 
 through the town. The Germans came upon the 
 mother and her son by the roadside. As they re- 
 treated, the Germans poured oil upon the houses 
 and lit them, and one of these companies of incen- 
 diaries stumbled across the pitiful scene of the 
 mother and her dying son. 
 
 It seems hardly possible that any man could not 
 be touched by such a sight. The mother had a 
 little flask of wine which she was administering 
 
188 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 to her son in the vain hope of reviving him, if 
 only for a moment. But the Germans saw in this 
 scene only another opportunity to demonstrate 
 their lack of human sensibility, and over this 
 wounded soldier they poured their oil. Then 
 with a rough jest and an oath they touched the 
 flaming torch to him. 
 
 I believe that the Eev. Newell Dwight Hillis 
 speaks of this story, and I believe that he has 
 photographs to demonstrate its absolute truth. 
 
 I might go on and continue to rehearse tale 
 after tale, all awful, almost unbelievable, were 
 you not intimately familiar with the beast who 
 breeds these horrors. Perhaps you in America 
 will never believe them, until they come back to 
 you on the lips of your own sons, but there is 
 gradually sifting over to you some graphic demon- 
 strations of the truth of the tales which you hear. 
 
 Little Belgian children are being adopted now 
 and then by philanthropic Americans, and it was 
 two of these children whom I met one day upon 
 the railroad platform at Schenectady, New York. 
 Their odd, half-familiar dress attracted me to 
 them, and I asked them, first in English and then 
 in French, whither they were bound. They did 
 not answer me, but a station attendant came up 
 and said that they were Belgian children. I 
 asked him why, if this was true, they did not 
 
THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 189 
 
 speak French, and he informed me that the chil- 
 dren's tongues had been cut out. Yet more. As 
 they pulled their little arms from their muffs, they 
 pulled only the stumps, for their hands had like- 
 wise been cut otf . 
 
 It would do much to awaken you people in 
 America to the real nature of the beast which 
 knocks at your door if you could have moving- 
 pictures brought to you of that sergeant of ours, 
 hanging limp and lifekss, nailed to the barn-door 
 with his own bayonet. It might make the word 
 ** atrocity'* mean something to you if you could 
 see the three crazed women of whom my friend 
 told me, running up and down the village streets, 
 hopeless maniacs for the rest of their lives. Per- 
 haps you would be less gentle with your German 
 propagandists, spies, and thugs, if you had seen 
 those two little tongueless, handless, Belgian 
 children on the platform at Schenectady, or if 
 you had talked with the little servant-girl at 
 Bethune whose arm was gone and whose life was 
 blasted. Then, perhaps, you would be a little 
 less ready to forgive the German people, and a 
 little more ready to take up arms against not only 
 their government, but those brutes and imbeciles 
 who make that government, possible. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH — ^A ** SEAM-SQUIRREL ' * 
 RETURNS TO ITS HOME — BACK TO BLIGHTY AND 
 THE HOSPITAL 
 
 1 MIGHT go on telling of German atrocity after 
 atrocity. I might sketch the picture of the 
 old gray-headed blacksmith in a sector of our 
 trench known as **Plug Street,'' who was found 
 with his hands chained to his anvil, quite dead. 
 His wrists had been pulverized, and a bayonet 
 transfixed them like a skewer. On the end of the 
 bayonet was stuck this terse statement, in a 
 scrawling, German hand, **You will never shoe 
 another horse." 
 
 I might tell you of retaking trenches by counter- 
 attack, and of finding our wounded with their 
 throats cut from ear to ear, disemboweled, or ter- 
 ribly lacerated. 
 
 Even in those early days there was ample and 
 sufficient material for an entire book about Ger- 
 man atrocities. As week after week goes by new 
 chapters are written, and, when the last chapter 
 on this war is finally penned, the subject of Ger- 
 
 190 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 191 
 
 man atrocities will fill several large and grue- 
 some volumes. 
 
 But you Americans are already hearing many 
 of them, and a mere rehearsal of their terrible 
 details would not bring them any closer to you. 
 Even a graphic word-picture is not one-millionth 
 as terrible as the original scene itself. It would 
 be absolutely futile for me to attempt to describe 
 the awful scenes which I myself have witnessed, 
 or their duplicates which are common rumor in 
 the trench. 
 
 Therefore I will turn to a rather humorous 
 incident. 
 
 It was during the usual eleven o'clock **Hymn 
 of Hate'' that one of my comrades and myself 
 were standing in the trench. For some reason or 
 other I stepped away from him some fifteen or 
 twenty feet, and I turned! around to call to him 
 just as a shell screamed overhead. It exploded 
 about a f odt above the parapet, and the fragments 
 sprayed down into the trench. 
 
 At precisely this instant my friend felt the un- 
 mistakable nip of a *^ seam-squirrel" who was 
 making merry about his waistband. Just as the 
 scream of the shell signaled its approach, he bent 
 over, and the rain of shrapnel-bullets sped by 
 over his head. Had he been standing in his nor- 
 mal position, they would have caught him fairly 
 
192 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 and squarely. When at last he did straighten up, 
 he had the **seam-squirreP' in his hand. For a 
 moment he held it thus and surveyed the course 
 of the shrapnel, as indicated by the new-born 
 holes in the opposite bank. Then he addressed 
 himself to the bothersome rodent : 
 
 ** Feller,'' said he, **you 're the chap that saved 
 my life, and I 'm just going to put you back home 
 and let you have a square meal," and back into 
 the luxurious folds of his kilt he deposited the 
 *^ seam-squirrel" who had innocently been his 
 preserving angel. 
 
 On my last trip from our rest-billet in Bethune 
 we started at high noon and directed our march 
 toward Vermelles, where we arrived at six o 'clock 
 that evening. 
 
 All the way to Vermelles intense and unusual 
 action of both infantry and artillery was notice- 
 able. Heretofore Vermelles had been one of the 
 more quiet sections of the line. It had been re- 
 garded as a vacation to be sent there. Recently, 
 however, this same sector had become one of the 
 most unpopular. Owing to its proximity to the 
 trenches, increased fire was being focussed on it 
 by the Germans. 
 
 At this time the French were preparing for a 
 somewhat elaborate advance, and the preliminary 
 trench-raids and minor attacks had a tendency to 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 193 
 
 excite the entire German line in that vicinity and 
 to direct German wrath at French and English 
 indiscriminately. As a result, from a place of 
 peace and quiet, Vermelles had become a scene 
 of intense and constant action, and our troops, 
 knowing this state of affairs, expressed them- 
 selves very pessimistically as we marched away 
 toward Vermelles. 
 
 Here I again assumed my duties as a sniper, 
 and immediately upon our arrival in the trench 
 I took up the usual round of trench warfare as the 
 sniper sees it. 
 
 Owing to the tenseness prevalent up and down 
 the line at this point, the night was hardly less 
 bright than the day. Star-shells were constantly 
 shooting up, blinking, and going out. As I stood 
 in a dugout on a little rise of ground I could see, 
 away off to the right, the ebb and flow of battle 
 as the French advanced upon the Germans or re- 
 treated before them, and I subconsciously won- 
 dered how much longer it would be before our 
 lines would be illuminated by a flood of similar 
 party-colored lights that would indicate action, 
 intense action. 
 
 On our left were the Goorkhas. I have already 
 described the ungovernable tendencies of these 
 chaps to revert to primeval man. Since my days 
 in the front line I believe that most of them have 
 
194 '^LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 been sent to the Egyptian front, where the nerv- 
 ous waiting of trench warfare does not wear upon 
 them, and where their natural inclination for 
 open, man-to-man fighting is given a better oppor- 
 tunity to display itself. 
 
 In trench warfare the Goorkhas are inclined to 
 be extremely nervous and to fire upon the slight- 
 est provocation. The best disciplined troops 
 never fire without a definite object in view, but 
 the Indians have a way of letting fly at mere 
 myths and shadows. As a result, close prox- 
 imity to them is likely to be a warm sector of 
 the trench, for they keep things humming, re- 
 gardless of the necessity therefor. 
 
 Impelled by sheer nervousness, the Goorkhas 
 on our left started up a stream of machine-gun- 
 fire directed into the shadows of the night, and 
 their excitement spread down the trench until our 
 whole sector was in an uproar. Our own boys, 
 however, since we heard no firing from our alarm- 
 posts, held out against the nervousness of the 
 position until almost midnight, when our front 
 line listening-post succumbed to pressure and cut 
 loose. 
 
 Immediately our entire line was on the firing- 
 step, throwing everything we had in the direction 
 of the German trench, which immediately replied 
 in kind and with equal enthusiasm. 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 195 
 
 By three or four o'clock, however, it became 
 apparent that we were all firing at a mirage, and 
 the line quieted down, but not until a German 
 raiding-party, taking advantage of the noise and 
 excitement, had successfully put one of our 
 machine-guns out of commission. 
 
 This was reported to us about six o'clock that 
 morning, and ^ve of us were detailed to go down 
 near the machine-gun and do what sniping work 
 we could in retaliation for the German escapade. 
 
 All day we spent in that sector of the line, 
 taking pot-shots at a nest of Teuton snipers some 
 four hundred yards away, who were neatly pro- 
 tected by a clump of charred and jagged stumps. 
 
 Of course I do not know whether we did them 
 any harm. Our object was to keep the Germans 
 **on edge" so far as possible; that is, to keep 
 them nervous. Only incidentally was it our de- 
 sire to do them harm in a physical way. 
 
 That night MacFarland asked for six volun- 
 teers to go out into no-man's-land to reconnoiter 
 in preparation for a trench-raid on the following 
 night. It was to be our duty to make a thorough 
 investigation of the German outer defenses, and 
 to find out as much as we could concerning the 
 strength of the opposing forces. 
 
 Of course we took with us only the usual tools 
 for a trench-raid — our revolvers and trench- 
 
196 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 knives. Before going, MacFarland indicated to 
 us that this was no ordinary raid on which we 
 were bound, and after explaining what he had in 
 mind he gave any or all of us a chance to back out. 
 
 But none of us withdrew, and so, toward mid- 
 night we set out from a sap-head that brought 
 us within two hundred yards of the German 
 barbed wire. 
 
 Across no-man's-land we snaked, dodging flares 
 and doing our utmost to become an intimate part 
 of the scenery. About twenty-five yards ahead 
 of us loomed the German wire, when off to our 
 right we saw twelve Germans advancing toward 
 us. Flat upon our stomachs we went, and by 
 gradual degrees worked ourselves into conven- 
 ient shell-holes in the vicinity. 
 
 By the best of good fortune, and it was only 
 good fortune, the Germans had not seen us, and 
 they passed within three feet of my head. 
 
 After giving them ample time to put distance 
 between us, we crawled up to the German barbed 
 wire at a point which we judged would be in the 
 vicinity of their advanced listening-post. Here 
 we pulled out our wire-cutters and snipped a neat 
 path through it to the sap-head at which our 
 efforts were to be directed. 
 
 As we came in front of it two close-clipped, 
 blond heads bobbed leisurely about back of the 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 197 
 
 parapet, so we knev/ that our attack was as yet 
 unannounced. At a predetermined signal we 
 split up into parties of two. A pair of us went 
 to the right of the parapet, two went to the left, 
 and the officer and myself made for the sap-head 
 itself. 
 
 Of course we had no desire to repeat the expe- 
 rience of our former raiding -party, when we had 
 attracted the entire strength of the German 
 machine-guns by the firing of a flare. This raid 
 was to be as quiet and inconspicuous as we could 
 possibly make it. Therefore, instead of taking 
 our revolvers by the butt, we took them by the 
 barrel and trusted to deliver a silent dispatch to 
 any German who came our way. 
 
 At a signal from the officer we plunged forward 
 and did away with the Germans in the sap-head, 
 making absolutely no noise. One of them re- 
 ceived the butt of my revolver on the top of his 
 head before he even knew that we were within 
 fifty yards, and the other was strangled by the 
 officer without so much as a peep out of him. 
 
 Such luck seemed almost too good to be true, 
 but we made the most of it, and the six of us 
 dashed down the narrow sap-trench into an ad- 
 vanced firing-trench which, fortunately for us, 
 was not properly a part of the German line at 
 this point. 
 
198 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 Into this firing-trench we went at full speed, 
 and on coming around a corner of it I ran head-on 
 into a German peacefully puffing away at his pipe. 
 Again the butt of my revolver came down just 
 above his ear, and he collapsed with little more 
 than a grunt. 
 
 While I was finishing this little job to my per- 
 sonal satisfaction, making sure that this particu- 
 lar German would not return to haunt us, the rest 
 of the fellows ran on and obtained a rather com- 
 plete mental map of the surroundings. This 
 finished, and our efforts still remaining undiscov- 
 ered, we were emboldened to try for the lookouts 
 in another sap-head. 
 
 Two abreast, we dashed out toward it. We 
 were only half way to the sap-head, when word 
 somehow reached the German line that there was 
 trouble out front. We could hear them coming 
 up through the communication-trenches, and at 
 the same time the entire German line burst into 
 a roar of machine-gun racket that made the night 
 sound like the interior of a boiler-shop. 
 
 This was no time to try our skill on the Germans 
 in the second listening-post. We hopped up over 
 the parapet and endeavored to dash across to our 
 own listening-posts as fast as our legs could carry 
 us. But our progress was slow. As each flare 
 hissed up into the sky, we had to fall flat or roll 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 199 
 
 into a convenient shell-hole. We had made scant 
 progress in this way for the best part of a half 
 hour, when MacFarland, who was with me, ex- 
 claimed, ''My God, they We got me !'' and grasped 
 his arm in an ecstasy of pain. 
 
 I managed to get him behind a little rise of 
 ground, where we discovered that his wound was 
 hardly more than a flesh-wound in the arm, al- 
 though extremely painful. I bound him up as 
 besit I could, and we settled ourselves in an un- 
 usually luxuriant shell-hole, hoping that the line 
 would quiet down. 
 
 By this time the entire sector had become thor- 
 oughly aroused, and no-man 's-land was alive with 
 everything from rifle-bullets to larger stuff. As 
 we were discussing the matter and the prospects 
 for our getting out alive, another of our fellows 
 rolled into our shell-hole with a nasty wound in 
 his chest. Later a fourth made his way into the 
 same cover. Those of us who were still able to 
 navigate volunteered to help get the wounded 
 back to our line, but both of them refused all 
 assistance and declared that it was up to every 
 man to fend for himself as best he could. 
 
 After waiting for fully an hour, the firing 
 lulled a little. I stuck my head over the edge of 
 the shell-hole to see how things looked. Not 
 fifteen feet away I could see the outlines of the 
 
200 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 same working-party that had nearly found us on 
 our journey up to the German trench earlier in 
 the evening. 
 
 By this time a driving rain had set in and the 
 definite outlines of the party were not distinctly 
 visible. Our wounded oflficer, however, found the 
 opportunity too good to miss, and, raising himself 
 on his elbow, he fired at the nearest German, 
 whose appearance seemed to indicate that he, too, 
 might be an officer. Evidently he got him, be- 
 cause the German fell with a resounding flop and 
 a tremendous curse. The rest of the party then 
 seemed to disappear entirely, and we were just 
 congratulating ourselves on bagging the officer 
 when we found sudden cause to regret our impet- 
 uosity. 
 
 Evidently our officer's shot, flashing out from 
 no-man 's land, had attracted the German gunners. 
 After a lull of a minute or two they f ocussed their 
 fire in our direction. ** Typewriter-fire ' ' is what 
 we call it — ^fifty or sixty shots in one shell-hole 
 and then fifty or sixty more in another, and so on 
 until all the shell-holes in that vicinity have been 
 searched out. But fortunately they failed to 
 locate our particular hiding-place, protected as it 
 was by a meager rise of ground, and toward morn- 
 ing we were able to sneak back to our listening- 
 post, where we reported to our colonel. 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 201 
 
 Four of the boys had **got theirs^' that night. 
 None of the wounds were serious, however, though 
 three of them were sufficient to send the victims 
 to Blighty. The fourth had received a **cushey'' 
 wound in the fleshy part of his leg, and a few 
 weeks in one of the neighboring hospitals would 
 bring him around 0. K. 
 
 For the next two or three days nothing of any 
 particular importance happened, and we went 
 about our usual round of snipers' duties, but al- 
 ways wifli the feeling that something was com- 
 ing. The entire sector was extremely nervous, 
 and the constant action of the neighboring French 
 continued .to keep us on our toes. 
 
 I remember how one morning — it was on a 
 Wednesday — about two o'clock I was aroused 
 by a particularly heavy bit of shelling, and I 
 hastened from my quarters up to the front line 
 to find out what the trouble might be. The shells 
 were not directed at the front line, but at the bat- 
 teries to the rear, and they seemed to be scream- 
 ing overhead in a solid sheet. 
 
 As 2 :30 drew near, we could hear them coming 
 closer and closer. They seemed to h-ave shifted, 
 and were now sweeping the communication- 
 trenches just to the rear of the front line. 
 
 At three o'clock came the usual ** stand-to" 
 order, and every one jumped on the firing step, 
 
202 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 thoroughly convinced that a German attack was 
 scheduled for the immediate future. From three 
 to four o^clock we paced nervously up and down 
 the trench, awaiting the signal from our listening- 
 post. At four o'clock we heard the rattle of mus- 
 ketry-fire out on our front, and immediately every 
 one was on the alert. 
 
 I hurriedly made my way to a little rise in the 
 trench, while the rest of the snipers ran back to 
 previously prepared positions about fifty yards 
 to the rear, where they calculated on becoming a 
 nasty menace to the Germans in our trench, should 
 they succeed in getting into it. 
 
 From my chosen vantage-point I could indis- 
 tinctly see about two hundred and fifty yards in 
 each direction, and the horizon within this radius 
 gave the appearance of being alive. In the semi- 
 misty darkness of early morning I could sense the 
 Germans coming, although I could not see them 
 with any degree of exactness. But as the min- 
 utes passed, the horizon assumed a steadier posi- 
 tion, and just under it I could see the Germans 
 coming on at a slow trot, massed shoulder to 
 shoulder as far as the eye could reach in either 
 direction. 
 
 Our boys held their fire until the oncoming line 
 was plainly visible, and then we cut loose. Mean- 
 while word had been telephoned to the artillery 
 
KAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 203 
 
 to give us all the help they could, but in those 
 days artillery help, at the most, was usually about 
 ten or fifteen shells, so that it fell to us to seek 
 our salvation through our rifle-sights. 
 
 By this time the Germans were plainly visible, 
 and individuals stood out and ceased to be merely 
 a part and parcel of a moving, heaving line. On 
 they came, until they were about thirty-five yards 
 from our front line. By that time extra machine- 
 guns had been brought up from the second-line 
 trench, and we were letting them have the full 
 benefit of two weeks of nervous waiting. 
 
 Twenty-five yards away from us, and the full 
 effect of our fire became apparent. There were 
 huge gaps in the German line, and the closer they 
 came, the wider grew the gaps. Another ten 
 yards, and the result was in the balance. The 
 Germans halted. At this psychological moment, 
 by some stroke of fortune, we seemed able to di- 
 rect an extra stream of fire at them, and they 
 fell back to their own trenches. But at least two- 
 thirds of them were left behind, out in no-man's- 
 land. 
 
 Following this, everything was quiet for fifteen 
 or twenty minutes. But then, apparently in re- 
 taliation for their defeat, the Germans started a 
 heavy shelling of our front line. 
 
 Ten of us were congregated in the trench at the 
 
204 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 mouth of two dugouts. One of these ran out 
 under no-man's-land, while the other ran back 
 toward the rear. I was standing at the mouth of 
 the one that ran toward the rear and was dis- 
 cussing the attack with four or five of the fellows 
 who were with me. We could hear the German 
 shells sweeping up and down about two hundred 
 yards to our right. Then, little by little, they 
 crept up toward us. One in advance of all the 
 others hit about fifty yards to our left; then an- 
 other — this time in direct line with us — ^hit some 
 seventy-five yards to the rear. 
 
 At this juncture my guardian angel came down 
 and whispered in my ear, and for no reason what- 
 ever I stepped over to the entrance of the dugout 
 just opposite to the one at w^hich I had been stand- 
 ing. I had hardly reached its doorway when 
 there came a scream like an express-train in a 
 tunnel, next a terrific flash that blotted out every- 
 thing, and then I felt myself engulfed as by a 
 mighty blanket which weighed down upon me with 
 tons of weight. There was no pain, in fact, there 
 was no active sensation at all. Everything 
 seemed simply blotted out. 
 
 When I came to, a sorry sight met my eye. 
 The shell, almost grazing my head in its flight, 
 had buried itself in the threshold of the dugout 
 that I had just left. The force of the ensuing 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 205 
 
 explosion had catapulted the earth under my feet 
 into the air, and with this earth went myself and 
 the dugout in front of which I stood. The entire 
 terrain thereabouts had come down upon ** yours 
 truly,'* and the main beam of the dugout rested 
 snugly in the small of my back. I was flat on my 
 stomach, and my face was buried almost up to my 
 eyes in mud. 
 
 But at that I wasn't nearly as badly off as 
 some of the other boys. The four who had been 
 standing in the dugout opposite me had been en- 
 tirely wiped out of existence. Within three feet 
 of my head Porky Pete 's feet stuck out. The rest 
 of him was buried under the debris which held me 
 down. 
 
 Even as I took this in, I became aware of ter- 
 rific pain. It felt as though a great knife had 
 ripped from the sole of my foot up to the nape of 
 my neck. At intervals this died away entirely, 
 and I became convinced that my entire body had 
 been shot away. I remember wondering vaguely 
 if a man could live without his body, and then all 
 worry about my body ceased as I found that I 
 was totally incapable of moving my arms. Imme- 
 diately I conjured up terrible pictures of how I 
 would look without my arms. 
 
 Until daylight I lay there helpless. The Ger- 
 mans continued a terrific shelling, and it would 
 
206 ''LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 have been utterly impossible for any of my com- 
 rades to reach me. The entire trench had been 
 destroyed. The parapet for several yards in 
 either direction was gone, and any one attempting 
 to rescue me would have faced certain death. 
 
 At last, however, three of the fellows managed 
 to dig a shallow trench, which partially covered 
 them and enabled them to reach the collapsed dug- 
 out. Fortunately for me, I was in a direct line 
 with their trench, and by seven o'clock they had 
 me out; but the rest of the poor devils who had 
 been with me when the shell hit were not taken 
 out until noon, or later, of the same day. Of the 
 ten in that laughing group before the two dug- 
 outs, only three of us remained alive. 
 
 I was hurried from the dugout to a dressing- 
 station slightly to the rear, where the medical 
 officer told me that he thought I was good for 
 Blighty. I had no notion of what was the matter 
 with me. I was dazed from shell-shock, and per- 
 sisted in believing that my entire body had been 
 shot away and that only my head was being car- 
 ried about. At intervals I found considerable 
 amusement in observing myself in this sad pre- 
 dicament. 
 
 During a lucid interval I saw a chap next to 
 me whose condition was infinitely worse than 
 mine and whose fortunes were no better. He had 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 207 
 
 come over in one of the late drafts and had heen 
 in a front-line trench but two hours when a shrap- 
 nel, exploding near him, gave him a jagged wound 
 and sent him back for a period of weeks. On his 
 return he had been in the trench but a scant half- 
 hour when another shrapnel picked him up, and 
 this time he was pretty badly done up. 
 
 With this fellow and three others who had '*got 
 theirs'' during the attack or the bombardment, I 
 was carried back through the communication- 
 trench to a little Ford ambulance that chattered 
 by the roadside. I happened to be placed on the 
 bottom layer of stretchers. Just above me was a 
 chap with his entire shoulder and head swathed 
 in bandages. He must have been badly wounded, 
 for the blood kept dripping down and hitting my 
 stretcher just alongside my ear. Try as I would, 
 I couldn't move my head, and all the way to Be- 
 thune I heard this poor chap call for water and 
 felt the constant tap-tap-tap of his blood beside 
 me. 
 
 In Bethune I was put to bed in a convent, await- 
 ing further diagnosis by the physician in charge. 
 On my right was a pale, wide-eyed chap, who from 
 time to time reached under his mattress to pull 
 out a tiny, tin tobacco-box from which he took a 
 pinch of something. 
 
 Believing it to be his duly prescribed medicine, 
 
208 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 I thought nothing of it. But as he continued his 
 excursions under ^the mattress, I noticed that he 
 endeavored to take his little dose without being 
 observed by the orderlies or doctor. Medicine 
 requires no such f-urtiveness. Immediately my 
 suspicions were aroused. 
 
 When the medical officer came up to him, he 
 said: 
 
 **Well, young fellow, what seems to be the 
 trouble with youT' 
 
 **I don't know, sir," replied the pale, wide- 
 eyed individual, **but I think I have heart- 
 failure. ' ' 
 
 Thereupon the medical officer felt his pulse, 
 listened to his heart, and passed on. 
 
 The orderlies gossiped openly about the ter- 
 rific pulse of this otherwise apparently normal 
 young fellow. Somehow I could n 't help connect- 
 ing his tin tobacco-box with his pulse, although I 
 had no reason for doing so. 
 
 Toward evening the M. O. in charge came in 
 and made directly for this same young chap. But 
 this time, instead of asking him what ailed him or 
 how he felt, he lifted the mattress and pulled out 
 the little tin box which had awakened my suspi- 
 cions. Then, with a muttered oath and a dis- 
 gusted look on his face, he turned to the orderly 
 and said: 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 209 
 
 ** Another one of those cordite-eaters! Send 
 him along and give him two or three weeks of 
 rest. Then back to the front for him!" 
 
 Cordite is little more than gun-cotton, or nitro- 
 glycerine in solid form, and of course is easily- 
 obtainable near the front. It is likewise a very- 
 active heart-stimulant, and as such I believe it is 
 often given prior to or following operations. 
 This wide-eyed young wiseacre, knowing this fact, 
 had partaken liberally of the substance, and as a 
 result his heart pounded like a twelve-cylinder 
 motor. Such symptoms, however, are becoming 
 well known to medical ofl&cers, and as a result 
 * ^ heart failure ' ' on the front line is becoming con- 
 siderably less prevalent than in the early days of 
 the war. Cordite-eaters are given scant encour- 
 agement, I may add. 
 
 After the incident of the cordite-eater another 
 load of wounded was brought in, and a Goorkha 
 was put down at my left. Hardly had he arrived 
 when my nostrils quivered under the most haunt- 
 ingly familiar, yet unfamiliar, odor. What was 
 it? Where was it? I could answer neither ques- 
 tion. As the minutes dragged along, it became 
 unbearable. I turned my head and scrutinized 
 the Indian. Certainly he was dirty enough to 
 create a stench, but not such a stench as this. At 
 last I could stand it no longer. 
 
210 *' LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 *'What smells soT' I asked the Goorkha. 
 
 His teeth gleamed, and in reply he shot out a 
 mixture of English and native jargon. About all 
 I could understand was a word that sounded 
 strangely like ** souvenirs. " For half an hour I 
 pondered. Souvenirs? Odor? I could see no 
 connection between the two. 
 
 In a fit of anger, I at length called the orderly. 
 He agreed with me that no odor like that belonged 
 in a hospital, and, like myself, he suspected the 
 Indian. But in reply to his questions,, only an 
 excited medley of impossible English was forth- 
 coming. At last, in sheer desperation, I said, 
 '*Look in his pack." 
 
 The orderly opened it, and recoiled in horror. 
 The Goorkha sat up, reached over, and pulled out 
 a string of six or eight human ears, purloined 
 from dead Germans. 
 
 *' Souvenirs," he cackled delightedly. ** Sou- 
 venirs ! ' ' 
 
 I presume that his family back home would re- 
 quire some physical proof of his prowess, and he, 
 poor savage, inspired perhaps by his peep into the 
 ways of enlightened kultur, thought that his 
 string of awful ** souvenirs" would be his best 
 and most modern answer to them. 
 
 That evening the physician in charge, a major, 
 and a captain came in to diagnose my case and 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 211 
 
 to settle my future disposition. They looked me 
 over, but as yet I was unable to find out from 
 them what ailed me. I heard them discussing my 
 troubles, however, and gathered that they would 
 not operate here, but that I would be passed on 
 to Blighty. 
 
 Immediately thereafter I was tagged and loaded 
 into an ambulance which took me to Lillers, where 
 we were pushed into a hospital-train bound for 
 Boulogne. 
 
 All this time I had been in a semi-dazed condi- 
 tion from shell-shock. It was only at intervals 
 that I seemed to regain my full and normal fac- 
 ulties, but the hospital-train brought me to com- 
 plete consciousness with a delightful shock. 
 
 If there is anything wonderful in the world, it 
 is a hospital-train. Here, for the first time since 
 I had come to France, I rested snugly between 
 sheets. And the springs! They were real 
 springs that rode you comfortably, without jolt- 
 ing, as the train bumped over frogs and crossings. 
 Then there were nurses, every one of them a beau- 
 tiful angel. The doctors, even though gruff and 
 hurried, seemed like no ordinary mortals. It was 
 the first time that I had not had to shift for my- 
 self, and I thoroughly enjoyed the luxury of being 
 wounded. 
 
 The food was wonderful, too. I don't remem- 
 
212 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 ber what we ate or how it was served, but I shall 
 never taste food as good as I did upon that hos- 
 pital-train. It all seemed like a dream at the 
 time, and I remember wondering vaguely when I 
 would awaken and find myself again in the front 
 line. 
 
 One of the nurses told me that we were bound 
 for the train-head of a sector some distance out- 
 side of Ypres. As we approached the town I 
 could distinctly hear the heavy shelling which has 
 damned Ypres since early in the war. Here we 
 were switched about, and finally, after only a little 
 delay, we were off for Boulogne. 
 
 At Boulogne hosts of ambulances met us, and 
 as mine was adjudged a serious case, I was de- 
 spatched to the hospital at Wimereux. This 
 hospital, however, was full to overflowing, and 
 we new arrivals were placed in tents. These 
 were huge aifairs, almost as large as your circus- 
 tents. Here heaven itself reached down to us 
 again. It was early evening, and we went 
 through the luxury of a real bath, with warm 
 water and soap. Immediately following the bath, 
 I drowsed off. My cot happened to be near the 
 door, and as the orderlies and nurses went back 
 and forth constantly, I found it hard to sink into 
 real, solid slumber. 
 
 At last, through the exercise of will power, I 
 
One of our guardian angels 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 213 
 
 did drop off completely, and immediately I was in 
 the front line wrestling with a husky German. 
 Through the darkness came a woman's voice. It 
 was urging me to stop, and I felt strong hands 
 upon my shoulder. I hung on to the German for 
 dear life, and endeavored to plant my teeth in his 
 leg. But still that woman 's voice kept coming out 
 of the dark at me. It bothered me. It didn't 
 belong; it was incongruous; and I awakened to 
 find myself on the floor, with both arms wrapped 
 around the leg of an orderly and my teeth buried 
 in the flap of his trousers. Even in my sleep I 
 still fought Germans, and I believe that my jaws 
 would have been locked in that orderly 's trousers 
 to this day, had not the strange voice of a nurse 
 awakened me. 
 
 My nurse was a veteran of the Boer War, and 
 when I told her that I was a member of the Lon- 
 don Scottish, she took an extra interest in me and 
 told me that she would see if she could n't get me 
 home to Blighty. The following morning they 
 held a consultation over me, and I discovered for 
 the first time that there was a kink or a jolt or 
 something the matter with my spinal cord, which 
 affected my right leg. It was considerable of a 
 comfort to know that I had something definitely 
 the matter with me. 
 
 After the conference an orderly brought all my 
 
214 '^LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 stuff to the side of my cot and broke the news to 
 me that I was bound for Blighty. I was loaded 
 into an ambulance and moved to the wharf, where 
 a white hospital-ship was being rapidly loaded 
 with hundreds of similar inert shapes on 
 stretchers. 
 
 Still it all seemed like a dream to me. The 
 transfer from the tense excitement of fighting to 
 the intense, almost oppressive quiet of a hospital- 
 ship seemed absolutely unreal. I actually kept 
 pinching myself in an endeavor to prove it all, 
 and all at once, either a dream or a reality. 
 
 The bed with a mattress and springs, dozens of 
 nurses, the smell of the water, and the inevitable 
 noises of a dock helped to bring me around to a 
 full realization that at last I was bound for 
 Blighty and for home. 
 
 I had just inhaled a breath of true exaltation 
 when the grim specter, Worry, again reached out 
 after me. Suppose the Huns should pick this 
 hospital-ship as a target for one of their torpe- 
 does! I dreaded to think of starting at all, and 
 seriously contemplated a request to be returned 
 to some hospital in France. While I was con- 
 sidering the advisability of so doing, the screw 
 began to churn and I resigned myself to my fate. 
 My mind was fully made up that mine was to be a 
 watery grave. Almost in tears, I confided to the 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 215 
 
 nurae that I could not swim. She laughing^ly 
 assured me that there would be no occasion for 
 such an accomplishment. 
 
 That night I counted each revolution of the 
 screw. Every time that it hesitated or spun out 
 of the water in one of the huge channel-seas I was 
 thoroughly convinced that we were taking our last 
 plunge for Davy Jones' locker. Not a dram of 
 sleep passed my eyes, and I refused to believe 
 myself safe until I heard the nurse say that South- 
 ampton was only ten minutes away. 
 
 Here we were again loaded on stretchers, and 
 as I came down the gang-plank, feet first, I saw 
 the most beautiful sight that ever greeted the eyes 
 of man. It was home ! It was the Southampton 
 that I knew in real life! Those spires were no 
 mirage ; those taxicabs were real ; the horses were 
 not drawing artillery caissons. 
 
 Stretched out before me in long rows were am- 
 bulances by the hundreds, apparently, and what 
 looked like thousands of stretcher-bearers 
 marched in endless trains to and from the ship. 
 In the background were six or eight hospital- 
 trains and, earnestly desiring to be put in a hos- 
 pital as near home as possible, I called to one of 
 the officers, who was in charge of the loading of 
 the trains. I told him a sad tale of woe, but he 
 neatly and curtly informed me that I ought to be 
 
216 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 thankful to be home at all, and that I should not 
 be so forward as to attempt to pick my own hos- 
 pital. 
 
 But perhaps his bark was worse than his bite, 
 for I was loaded on a train bound for the hospital 
 that I most desired, the one at Cardiff. 
 
 Three hours later we were unloaded from the 
 train under the eyes of half the town. Cheer 
 after cheer was given, and we were packed into 
 ambulances which rolled with wonderful smooth- 
 ness to the immense hospital. 
 
 Here my uniform was removed, and in its place 
 I received the usual blue hospital-uniform and a 
 *^ nighty.'' I hated to see my Scottish kilts leave 
 me, and, although it was strictly contrary to 
 orders, my nurse was kind enough to rescue them 
 and preserve them for me until my release. 
 
 Soon after our arrival Major Brooks, who was 
 one of the foremost surgeons in England, came in, 
 looked me over, and told me that he would oper- 
 ate on the following Wednesday. I asked the 
 nurse to wire my mother. She arrived on Mon- 
 day. 
 
 As I saw her coming through the door, I knew 
 for a surety that I was really at home. Then I 
 knew that it was all over, at least for the time. 
 My mother was extremely brave. I do not know 
 whether she knew the seriousness of my injury, 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 217 
 
 but she gave no outward signs of worry. With 
 both arms clasped around me, she kissed me re- 
 peatedly, and I, baby that I was, broke down and 
 cried like a three-year-old, while she did her 
 utmost to comfort me. 
 
 Next to my bed stood that of a poor chap named 
 Gilroy. My mother immediately made friends 
 with Mrs. Gilroy. The mothers or wives of all 
 the seriously wounded are permitted to spend the 
 entire day with them. All of Cardiff ^s homes 
 have become boarding-houses for the duration of 
 the war, and the hospital kept a complete list of 
 these boarding-houses and constantly referred the 
 relatives of patients to them. 
 
 These houses, although they are not in any way 
 under government control, make no attempt what- 
 ever to profit from the misfortunes of their 
 boarders. Their prices are moderate, and all the 
 comforts of home-life are extended to the men 
 and women who stay therein. 
 
 In comparison with Gilroy, I was the luckiest 
 of men. Poor fellow, he had it right. A shrap- 
 nel bullet had penetrated just below his eye, to 
 come out at the back of his neck, and he was one 
 of the seven wonders of the hospital world at that 
 time. But he seemed to be in the best of spirits, 
 although constantly living under the great shadow. 
 When I arrived he had already been operated 
 
218 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 upon ^ve times, and both his nostrils and his 
 throat were plugged. He fed and breathed 
 through silver tubes, and to laugh was tempting 
 death. 
 
 Although our ward was devoted to the seri- 
 ously wounded cases, there was considerable mer- 
 riment, and as we grew accustomed to the luxury 
 of illness, we fell back upon our old habit of 
 grousing. The orderlies were a fruitful field for 
 our criticism. They were never there when most 
 wanted. They were usually out in the courtyard 
 shooting craps. 
 
 I remember how one day, when one of the boys 
 down the room had shouted a particularly laugh- 
 able jest at a departing orderly, a jest that seemed 
 to tickle Gilroy immensely, he laughed as best a 
 man can laugh who has a silver tube for a throat. 
 Then he stopped suddenly and became white as a 
 sheet. 
 
 **It 's coming on again,'' he mumbled, and all 
 of us boys began calling at once for nurses and 
 orderlies, for we knew that poor Gilroy was in 
 the process of having a hemorrhage. 
 
 The nurses came running, and the red screens 
 that stood for danger-signals were drawn around 
 poor Gilroy 's bed. Nurses and doctors hurried 
 to and fro. None of us slept that night, despite 
 orders to lie back and forget it all. It was not 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 219 
 
 until morning that I myself dropped off. When 
 I awoke, my first question was for Gilroy. 
 
 *^0h, he ^s all right/* the nurse told me. 
 *'They expected to take him to the morgue last 
 night, but they didn't have to.'' 
 
 Poor Gilroy seemed to have as many lives as 
 the proverbial cat. I last heard from him about 
 a year ago. He had survived nine operations and 
 had lived two years, despite all the Germans had 
 done to wipe him out. 
 
 Wednesday, the day set for my operation, 
 came around swiftly enough. I was all dressed 
 up like an Egyptian mummy and carried down to 
 a big white room that was directly underneath our 
 ward. The smell of ether was no stranger to me. 
 Indeed, it floated up from the operating-room into 
 our windows and constantly made us drowsy. 
 
 The operating-room might have been a factory 
 in full blast, so swiftly were they rolling men in 
 and out. One chap came out singing, **It 's a 
 Hot Time in the Old Town To-night." He had 
 lost a leg about three minutes before. Another 
 one kept shouting something about **the damned 
 Germans," and all the way down the corridor we 
 could hear him cursing the Germans and every- 
 thing Teutonic. 
 
 Amid such encouraging scenes I was wheeled in, 
 transferred to the operating table, and strapped 
 
220 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 down. Then some sunlight, filtering through a 
 window, struck a neat case of knives. The order- 
 lies were polishing and sterilizing them. They 
 glistened like no knives that I have ever seen be- 
 fore or since. I didn't have much time to con- 
 template them, however, for a chap with nothing 
 but eyes clapped the ether-cone over my head and 
 told me to do the impossible — breathe naturally. 
 
 I took three or four breaths, choked, took an- 
 other and a deeper breath, and once again I was 
 at the front, fighting the Germans in a hand-to- 
 hand conflict in no-man's-land. 
 
 That night about ten o'clock I regained con- 
 sciousness. I would have borne up bravely under 
 the pain, had not the nurse, in a moment of f orget- 
 fulness, told me that I could have a nice chicken 
 dinner the next day. After an anesthetic, even a 
 chicken dinner is not alluring. The mere thought 
 of food proved the straw to break my stomach's 
 back, and for the next two or three hours I went 
 through all the throes of hospital nausea. 
 
 I shall not attempt to describe the pain and 
 nervous exhaustion that followed my operation. 
 My operation would be of no interest to you, and 
 your operation would be of no interest to me, al- 
 though I am thoroughly convinced that my opera- 
 tion and everything that followed it was the most 
 interesting operation in the world. 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 221 
 
 I found, on discussing operations with other 
 chaps in the hospital, that no one agreed as to the 
 most dangerous variety or the most aggravating 
 or most painful. One chap had had three toes re- 
 moved on account of ** trench-foot, " and he was 
 loud in his protestations that the removal of three 
 toes was a terrific operation and unquestionably 
 the most interesting amputation in the category 
 of medical science. Poor Gilroy, who probably 
 could speak with more knowledge than any one 
 else, merely smiled a wan, feeble smile and gur- 
 gled something like **Wait until you have gone 
 through five of them, and then you can talk ! ' ' 
 
 For many long weeks I was forced to lie with 
 my leg in a little coop, much like some petted pup. 
 Occasionally they let me up on crutches, to wander 
 about like a lost soul. Whenever I went out to 
 get any air or sunshine, I was placed on a wheeled 
 table. 
 
 One of the blessings of an English hospital is 
 the weekly concert. I remember one of these par- 
 ticularly well, for Phyllis Dare, the soprano, was 
 scheduled, and I happened to have known her very 
 well in London. 
 
 All of the chaps who were able to stand it, were 
 wheeled out on the lawn, and I rested alongside of 
 a poor fellow whose arms and legs were both gone. 
 We were in the front row. He was to give her a 
 
222 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 bouquet, as a token of the hospital's appreciation 
 of her entertainment. 
 
 A sadder sight I have never seen. Miss Dare 
 finished her part of the program and walked 
 over to the chap who was to present her with the 
 flowers. She took them off his chest, bent down 
 and kissed him, smiled, and then, womanlike, burst 
 into a flood of tears, running away behind a clump 
 of bushes to hide her confusion. 
 
 But, on the whole, such concerts did much to 
 cheer the fellows and to make the endless weeks 
 of routine in the hospital a little more bearable. 
 
 That night, however, the cheering effect of the 
 concert was blasted by the departure of old 
 *^ Shaggy" Grimes. ** Shaggy" was a street- 
 urchin in his early days, and to the end he re- 
 mained one of the wittiest soldiers I have ever 
 known. He seemed possessed of an indomitable 
 pluck. A shell had shattered his shoulder, and 
 gangrene had set in. They had taken his arm off 
 at the elbow first, and then at the shoulder. 
 Finally they had given him up as hopeless. But 
 *^ Shaggy" bore up under it with remarkable for- 
 titude. 
 
 Day by day he grew weaker and weaker, until 
 he was too far gone to go out and hear the concert 
 of Miss Dare. When they wheeled us back into 
 the ward, *^ Shaggy" was lying half -propped up 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 223 
 
 on pillows and vaguely whistling an indetermi- 
 nate tune to himself. In answer to our chaffing 
 he replied not a word, but continued this endless, 
 tuneless tune. Suddenly he stopped, braced him- 
 self in the bed, and called for a cigarette. It was 
 immediately forthcoming. Somehow we sus- 
 pected that *' Shaggy" was on the last lap of his 
 journey to the Great Beyond. He finished the 
 cigarette, carefully brushed the ashes from his 
 fingers, and then called out: 
 
 ** Fellows, I 'm going; and I 'm going fast." 
 
 The next morning '* Shaggy 's" bed was empty. 
 *^ Shaggy" had gone west. 
 
 '^Visitors' Day" was another punctuation in 
 the hospital sentence. Our ward was particularly 
 fortunate on these days, because we had a number 
 of **arm cases." **Arm cases" are chaps who 
 have their legs and so can walk. It is their duty 
 on ** Visitors' Day" to straggle out into the cor- 
 ridor, look lonesome, and corral any and all pos- 
 sible visitors. The richer a ward is in **arm 
 cases," the greater the number of ** solicitors" it 
 is likely to have in corridors, and the greater the 
 number of visitors it is assured of having. 
 
 Our visitors were almost always complete 
 strangers to us, although usually there were about 
 fifty per cent, of them who came every ** Visitors' 
 Day, ' ' and so became familiar to us. There were 
 
224 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL^' 
 
 poor people and rich people, and they all brought 
 their little gifts and delicacies for their wounded 
 soldiers. 
 
 Different ones would pick out certain soldiers 
 and thereafter focus their attentions on them to 
 the exclusion of all others. A little six-year-old 
 girl picked me out and called me her **beau." 
 She used to bring me magazines and newspapers, 
 and, although she could hardly spell a word, she 
 endeavored to * ^ read " to me by the hour. At first 
 it was excruciatingly funny, but it grew monoto- 
 nous as the poor child spelled out word after 
 word, so slowly that I entirely lost the context of 
 a sentence before she half -finished it. 
 
 I have often had people ask me if the battle- 
 front does not make God seem a nearer, more per- 
 sonal being. Be that as it may, I do know that 
 Communion in a hospital is one of the most im- 
 pressive sights I have ever witnessed. It is not 
 uncommon to see either a priest or a minister giv- 
 ing Communion to the wounded. The little red 
 screens would be drawn about the bed, and some- 
 how it did not seem at all out of place. Chaps, 
 who in their former life would rather lose a finger 
 than admit that they ever went to church, saw 
 nothing amiss in taking Communion in view of 
 the entire ward. 
 
 I remember how one Sunday morning the Rev- 
 
EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 225 
 
 erend Bailey came in, and how he held Communion 
 for us, while my mother knelt by my bedside. I 
 wept as only a wounded soldier can weep when 
 he finds himself through it all, done and com- 
 pletely finished. Yes, the battle-front, though it 
 be near hell itself, is mighty close to God. 
 
 I might continue on indefinitely with detailed 
 descriptions of hospital life, of its sad and humor- 
 ous sides, for it has many of both. But, at best, 
 hospitals are good things to forget; hence I will 
 pass on and over the monotonous weeks of con- 
 valescence, until I was transferred to light duties 
 in London. 
 
 I had read of Zeppelin attacks in the London 
 papers, but I hardly thought that my first visit 
 to London after my return from the front would 
 be signalized by Herr Zeppelin and his doughty 
 cohorts. 
 
 I had just left the train at the depot and had 
 taken the 'bus. It was about ten o 'clock at night. 
 Suddenly, as I was passing the War Office, the 
 anti-aircraft gun on the roof crashed out into the 
 night, and far up in the sky I could hear that fa- 
 miliar, thrice-repeated plop of distantly exploding 
 shrapnel. 
 
 Simultaneously with the explosion, myriads of 
 search-lights shot up into the night and wavered 
 
226 ''LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 back and forth like long, lean, accusing fingers. 
 Gradually they converged, and five of them at 
 once focused on a great sausage-like object, which, 
 under the blast of light, became illuminated until 
 it shone like silver. 
 
 In a great curve the Zeppelin swung over Lon- 
 don. I alighted from the 'bus at the Nelson Mon- 
 ument, the better to observe the raid. No one 
 seemed particularly frightened. Perhaps we 
 would have been if we had known how close we 
 were to the danger-point. I had hardly been at 
 the base of the monument for more than three 
 minutes when there came a terrific explosion and 
 a rush of air from about one hundred yards to my 
 right. With the crash came a jet of blue flame 
 that seemed to leap almost as high as the Zeppe- 
 lin. They had dropped an incendiary bomb which 
 had set off the gas-main, and only the ready action 
 of the London fire-department saved the city from 
 a nasty conflagration at this time. 
 
 After a shivering half-hour of expectation, the 
 horrible failed to happen and the raid was re- 
 ported to be over. As usual, little or no military 
 damage had been done, and London settled back 
 into the humdrum harness of its usual tasks. 
 
 After serving for some time in the lighter jobs 
 libout headquarters, I was finally given my dis- 
 
RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 227 
 charge, as it soon became apparent that I could 
 not stand either long marches or much standing, 
 owing to a badly injured tendon in my foot and 
 calf. And so, on January 21, 1916, I embarked 
 for America. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 WHO WILL WIN THE WAR — ^AND HOW 
 
 1 ARRIVED in America some little time before 
 your country entered the war. 
 
 During the past year or more, as an ex-soldier, 
 I have been called upon to travel about consider- 
 ably, and have had an opportunity to talk with 
 many and to observe widely. With the battle- 
 front ever fresh in my mind, I cannot help con- 
 trasting militant America with war-time London. 
 
 In the course of my travels I am asked the same 
 old question a dozen times a day. It is always 
 this: 
 
 ''When will the war stop, and how will it stopT' 
 
 Here are really two questions which only a fool 
 would pretend to answer. Anything that I may 
 say will be only my personal opinion, and my only 
 authority will be my experience on the firing-line 
 and my close intimacy with America and her 
 people. 
 
 There is not one iota of doubt in my mind as to 
 who will win this war. There was no doubt in my 
 mind as to the ultimate winner from the moment 
 
 228 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 229 
 
 that the news flashed back to London of the won- 
 derful stand taken by our London Scottish on 
 Hallowe'en Night. Ultimately the Allies — and 
 you are one of us — will win, and it will be no 
 ** Peace without Victory/* 
 
 Immediately the pessimists — we need pessi- 
 mists in order to keep our proper mental bal- 
 ance — will arise and sketch a picture something 
 after this fashion : 
 
 ** Germany is to-day the winner. Territorially 
 she has gained twice, yes, thrice as much as was 
 originally called for by her ambitious program 
 of militarism. To-day Germany controls a vast 
 and fertile territory which is far preferable to 
 her and far more precious than her malaria-ridden 
 colonies in Africa and elsewhere.'' 
 
 Yes, I will agree that to-day Germany is a win- 
 ner in so far as territorial aggrandizement is con- 
 cerned. But the war has only begun. It has only 
 passed through the first two of its three phases. 
 Back when I knew the smell of smoke and powder 
 we were nearing the end of the first phase, the 
 phase of retreat, of ** strategical retreat" made 
 famous and ludicrous by Hindenburg. During 
 this period England and France were gather- 
 ing their forces and were exercising their muscles 
 in preparation for the struggle to come. 
 
 Then came the second phase, when these new- 
 
230 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 found muscles tightened and the line held, and 
 Germany stopped advancing. We are now in the 
 last stages of the second phase. We now know 
 that those bands of men and steel which surround 
 Germany can hold her indefinitely, forever, if 
 necessary. 
 
 The third and final stage of the war is approach- 
 ing, when the strength which we have been build- 
 ing up during these years will be expended in a 
 mighty spring that will stop little short of Berlin 
 itself. 
 
 This third stage may continue as long or longer 
 than the first two stages combined, but it is near, 
 and Germany knows it is near. 
 
 I have said that I knew the ultimate winner 
 from the beginning. I knew it far better after I 
 had fought the German and tested his spirit. 
 What wins a war? It is the spirit of the fighter, 
 reinforced by the spirit of the people back home 
 and by the mechanical aids of your munition fac- 
 tories. The German fighter is lacking in this 
 spirit. 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. The German is a 
 splendid, a tremendous fighter, but only when he 
 is fighting en masse. Individually, he is a coward 
 at heart, and has none of the righteous anger be- 
 hind him that inspires the Allied soldiers. He 
 fights because he is ordered to fight, because he 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 231 
 
 will face certain death if he does not fight. His 
 arm is not steeled by the cry of humanity nor by 
 the cries of murdered women and children. 
 
 It is because the German does not fight for the 
 love of righteous fighting, but because he is or- 
 dered to fight, that I know we Allies will win. It 
 is not in the book that the Germans shall come out 
 victorious. It was not in the book when a mere 
 handful of British stood off the German hosts at 
 the Battle of Mons. 
 
 The ultimate victor in this war was forecast 
 when the French forced back the German hordes 
 at the Mame. When the Germans made their 
 drive on Calais and failed, the victor of this strug- 
 gle was again foretold. When the Belgian ports 
 failed to fall into German hands through Ypres, 
 the ultimate victor was once more prophesied. 
 
 Germany's early drive through Russia failed; 
 at Verdun she failed ; in Italy she failed. Always 
 she falls short. And why? 
 
 Germany to-day fights as a machine, and ma- 
 chines have their limitations. Germany's sol- 
 diers fight as machines. There is none of the 
 spirit in the German soldier to drive him on 
 against tremendous odds. Had there been this 
 spirit at the Marne, at the Mons, at Verdun, or 
 at Calais, Germany would have been the vic- 
 tor to-day, and England, France, Italy, and 
 
232 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 America, too, would at this moment be out- 
 stretched in prayer before the feet of Wilhelm der 
 Grosse. 
 
 Germany to-day is in a steel cage, and the bars 
 are slowly closing round her, as did the walls of 
 Poe ^s horrid chamber. Behind those walls, push- 
 ing them closer and closer, stand the upraised 
 hands of all civilized humanity. These hands are 
 steeled by necessity, for, should the Germans win 
 by fluke or otherwise, the world from that day 
 forward would become a tool, an abased tool, of 
 German treachery and bribe. 
 
 The civilized world, whether or not it has for- 
 mally enlisted on the side of the Allies, realizes 
 this to-day. England must fight on, because, 
 should she stop and should Germany become the 
 ultimate victor, England's sea-power would be 
 taken away. With it would go England. Com- 
 mercially, she would be subjected to the point of 
 extinction. France is steeled by dire necessity, 
 for, should Germany win, there would be no more 
 France. 
 
 And you Americans? Why will you fight on 
 and on when your time comes, as we are now 
 fighting? Because, should Germany win, you 
 know as well as I where her greedy eyes would 
 gaze. She does not want crowded England. She 
 would be amply repaid, were England merely 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 233 
 
 forced to pay tribute to her iron lieel of the future. 
 Germany wants a place in which she may expand, 
 where her people may grow and grow, until by 
 sheer force of numbers der Deutschland covers 
 the earth. She cannot grow in England. There 
 is none too much space in France or in any sunny 
 spot in Europe. But no one knows better than 
 you the colossal opportunities for growth and 
 advancement in your own America. 
 
 South America, by evasion of the Monroe Doc- 
 trine, has already become thoroughly Germanized 
 commercially and to a large extent educationally. 
 Germany can absorb South America without South 
 America becoming cognizant of the fact. Until 
 this war and the resultant hatred which it en- 
 gendered, Germany could foresee in the near fu- 
 ture the domination, the absorption of South 
 America practically, if not politically. 
 
 The only spot remaining on this earth worth 
 the seeking is your own land, and you may rest 
 assured that, should Germany win the war, it will 
 be at your fertile fields and teeming cities that the 
 kaiser will point his Judas 's finger. 
 
 Of course you know all this. I have merely 
 been rehearsing an old, old story. But you do 
 not realize it in its full truth and strength. Like 
 the descriptions of a city in your geography of 
 school-days, it is nothing but black type. It lacks 
 
234 ^* LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 the life and truth which an actual visit to that 
 city would bring. Some day, perhaps, when your 
 first casualties come across to you in terrific num- 
 bers, when war reaches its hand into your home 
 and your neighbor's home, perhaps then you will 
 realize the full truth of what I have been saying 
 and the possibilities that await you should Ger- 
 many prove the ultimate victor. Only when you 
 realize this will America be in the war as Eng- 
 land is, as France is, as Italy is — in the war until 
 our soldiers address their mail, *^ Somewhere in 
 Germany. ' ' 
 
 Who will win the war? 
 
 Let me answer the question in this way. Place 
 yourselves in the grandstand of a race-course. 
 Before you stretch two tracks, one smooth and 
 straight, the other tortuous, filled with rubbish 
 and debris, cross-hatched with ditches. On the 
 smooth track runs a sleek horse, trained to the 
 last minute, with a handicap of a quarter of a 
 mile in its favor. That horse is Germany. On 
 the other track runs a black horse, driven by an 
 amateur. At the start the dark horse is a quarter 
 of a mile behind its sleek antagonist, but grad- 
 ually, despite the disadvantages, it decreases the 
 distance between itself and its competitor until 
 at the half-mile post the horses are neck and neck. 
 Which is the better horse? 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 235 
 
 Germany, with forty years of preparation and 
 training, after four years of war finds herself 
 only neck and neck with her amateur antagonist 
 who is running the race amid the pitfalls and 
 perils of the struggle itself. Under these con- 
 ditions which is the better horse, the one with 
 forty years of training or the dark horse, driven 
 by an amateur, who has equaled the record of its 
 antagonist at only the half-mile post? Which is 
 the better horse, and on which horse will you place 
 your money? 
 
 It is because we Allies are beating Germany at 
 her own game, despite untold difficulties in our 
 path, that I unquestionably predict the ultimate 
 victory of the Allied armies. This victory will 
 come through no collapse of the German nation. 
 Ultimate victory will be won, in all probability, by 
 sheer force of arms. 
 
 Germany to-day is surrounded by her armies, 
 concreted into trenches that stretch for miles and 
 miles behind her front line. We will have to blast 
 them back, sometimes inch by inch. 
 
 To-day, so I am reliably informed, there is a 
 gun — and by this I do not mean a rifle, but a 
 machine-gun or one of larger caliber — every nine 
 feet along the Allied front. Before this war can 
 be won these mouths of steel must lock their 
 wheels and stretch from Calais almost to Con- 
 
236 ** LADIES FEOM HELL" 
 
 stantinople, a solid line of protest against the 
 dream of Attila. 
 
 All this will take time. All this will take am- 
 munition in abundance. To guide and direct the 
 fire of this steel-tongued line will take the aid of 
 hundreds, yes, hundreds of thousands of aero- 
 planes. To build them and to train the aviators 
 will take time. To build up reserve stores of 
 ammunition, fitted for days and weeks of solid 
 shelling, will take time. 
 
 But in the meantime Germany is growing 
 weaker. Father Time is on the side of the Allies. 
 Meanwhile Germany is the losing winner. She 
 cannot advance, and she faces an ultimate defeat 
 as slow, but as certain, as death itself. 
 
 Her submarine, which she has held up to her 
 believing and gullible populace, will shortly gasp 
 out its last flickering breath of life. It may cling 
 to existence tenaciously, it may linger on indefi- 
 nitely, but its weight in the scales of victory will 
 become ever more negligible. Germany ^s subma- 
 rine hopes were built on a false conception. At 
 first she thought that by torpedoing ships she 
 would frighten the seamen from their duty. In 
 this belief she erred. Then by sinking sperlos 
 versinkt, or ^^ without leaving any trace,'' she 
 thought to reinforce the horror of her submarine 
 and to inspire in all seafaring men such a terror 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 237 
 
 of her '*frightfulness'' that they would refuse to 
 man the ships. England would thus be starved, 
 and America would be cut off from all participa- 
 tion in the war. In this belief she likewise erred, 
 but not without extending **frightfulness'' to its 
 uttermost limits. 
 
 Can you Americans imagine anything more hor- 
 rible than sinking a peaceful, neutral ship laden 
 with inoffensive men and women? Germans can. 
 They can sink such a ship, and then the subma- 
 rine commander can climb out upon his little con- 
 ning-tower and direct the life-boats to gather to- 
 gether and to link themselves with rope, so that 
 he may the better * * tow them nearer land. ' ' Then 
 the German submarine commander can tie one end 
 of this hawser to his damnable craft and submerge 
 for fifty or one hundred feet, towing the entire 
 company down to an icy depth below the billows 
 of the North Sea. 
 
 But even this hell-born program failed, and 
 to-day the submarine is gasping out its life. It 
 is proving merely a tonic to recruiting in Eng- 
 land and in your country. It is proving a boom- 
 erang to Germany. It has aroused the world 
 against Germany as nothing else could, and it will 
 ultimately go the way of the Zeppelin, a proven 
 failure so far as military effectiveness is con- 
 cerned. 
 
238 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 There are those who would like to see the end of 
 this war come quickly through a Germany starved 
 into subjection.. I, too, would like to hold out 
 this hope, but I cannot. Germany to-day has un- 
 der cultivation, with truly Teutonic eflSciency, a 
 tremendous acreage of land. This is being culti- 
 vated by her womenfolk, whom she has trained 
 through generations of hard labor to withstand 
 the rigors of agricultural work. Her transporta- 
 tion facilities, while somewhat weakened by the 
 enormous strain of war, are still able to carry 
 sufficient sustenance to keep her people breathing 
 and working. Germany can, and probably will, 
 fight on until her people realize the utter idiocy 
 of it all. 
 
 But will they ever realize it? That brings to 
 mind the eternal question, ''Will Germany become 
 a democracy? *' I believe that she will, but not 
 until this war is over. The force that will de- 
 mocratize Germany will be the flash of bayonets 
 in Berlin, Allied bayonets. You need not look 
 for an insurrection in Germany until that hour. 
 
 To-day the German people are doped with a 
 hypodermic of egotism. They have no more idea 
 of their losses than has a native of the Fiji Isles. 
 No black clothing or crape is permitted to be 
 worn in Germany, for the wearing thereof would 
 disclose the losses, and the Teuton War Office 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 239 
 
 does not care to have the people know how heav- 
 ily they are suffering. 
 
 Germany does not publish a list of her dead 
 and wounded. If you have a relative or a friend 
 in the German army, you must go to a *' bureau'* 
 and inquire privately to ascertain his fate. The 
 aborted brain which planned this war took good 
 care to see that its cost should be hidden from the 
 people. And not its cost in men alone, but in 
 money, likewise, for the German system of financ- 
 ing this war is based on a clear scheme of robbing 
 Peter to pay Paul, and then robbing Paul to pay 
 Peter back again. Both robberies are accom- 
 plished with the utmost skill and despatch, so 
 that the victim never realizes it and remains 
 dreaming as pleasantly as the Chinese opium 
 smoker. 
 
 You need look for no insurrection in Germany, 
 because the German people do not know what is 
 happening to-day. My sister was governess to 
 the children of Count von Biilow. She was in Ger- 
 many until six months after the declaration of 
 war, and when she returned she was tremendously 
 surprised to see that London was not a mass of 
 ashes. She was also agreeably shocked to learn 
 that the English fleet had not been wiped out, as 
 she and the German people had been led to sup- 
 pose. 
 
240 ^* LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 Germans to-day believe that they are the un- 
 questioned victors, and they cannot understand 
 why the Allies persist so eternally. Can you 
 blame them, when they think that London is gone, 
 that the British fleet is vanquished, that England 
 is subjected? 
 
 When my own kith and kin believed these things 
 after only a few months in Germany, what must 
 the true native-born German believe, who has fed 
 upon this Teuton camouflage since babyhood? 
 
 Furthermore, there is no one within the German 
 Empire to start an insurrection. Bare hands can- 
 not push back bayonets, and as long as the Teu- 
 ton army remains loyal through habit or terror, 
 so long will Germnay remain an autocracy. 
 
 Germany combats disloyalty in her army by 
 shifting troops back and forth so rapidly from 
 one front to another that no spirit of dissension 
 has a chance to spring up and thrive. Any spo- 
 radic mutinies are but chance happenings, and I 
 am frank to admit that they might occur in almost 
 any army or navy, except one whose men fight not 
 for a fetish of militarism, but for a great, good, 
 and just cause. 
 
 But when the German army discovers that Lon- 
 don is not a smouldering heap of ashes, that the 
 English fleet is not covered with barnacles at the 
 bottom of the North Sea, that the band of steel 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 241 
 
 which now surrounds them has tightened until 
 their own cities are at stake, they will at the same 
 time awaken to the fact that they have been 
 drugged and misguided by a self-seeking aris- 
 tocracy. Then Germany, all Germany, will turn 
 like wolves at bay, and democracy will replace 
 autocracy, perhaps with the suddenness and en- 
 thusiasm that characterized the same change in 
 Russia. 
 
 In the meantime, with all due respect to your 
 President, I would like to take issue with his state- 
 ment that we are fighting not the German people, 
 but the German ruling class. Permit me to use 
 a homely simile and to ask a homely question. If 
 you were walking down a street and a dog ran out 
 to bite you, and did bite you, would you vent your 
 spleen solely on the owner of the dog, or would 
 you turn your hatred on the dog itself? 
 
 The German people to-day are the dogs, and 
 they are playing the part of the dog. It is the 
 frightfulness of the people that kills us. It may 
 have been conceived in the Wilhelmstrasse or 
 among the pleasant forests of the kaiser ^s own 
 preserves, but, mark you, it is the German people 
 who perpetrate the atrocities. It is the common, 
 middle-class women of Germany who delight in 
 holding a cup of water to the parched lips of a 
 wounded Ally soldier, only to dash it away and 
 
242 * 'LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 spit in his face in derision. It is the German 
 people who cut our soldiers^ throats from ear to 
 ear and who give no mercy, though they beg for 
 it so vehemently when cornered. 
 
 Our problem to-day may be to wipe out German 
 autocracy, but the only way to do it is to march 
 straight through solid columns of autocracy-drunk 
 troops, the German people, sodden with years of 
 training under German propaganda. 
 
 My experience in the trenches would indicate 
 that we need worry little about Kaiser Wilhelm 
 or his sons. They are safe, far to the rear. It 
 is the people of Germany who gave me my wound, 
 and it is the people whom we must first extermi- 
 nate before junkerdom will fall. 
 
 Only because the Germans have proven them- 
 selves such willing victims of the propaganda of 
 the Wilhehnstrasse can you blame them. Even 
 here in America, in your own United States, you 
 see the willingness of some Germans to lay aside 
 all rules of war and love in their mad efforts to 
 further the progress of autocracy. You hear a 
 great deal about pro-Germans in your country to- 
 day, and you worry much about them. Person- 
 ally, I feel sorry for any man who may rightly 
 be called a pro-German. 
 
 The pro-German to-day is a man without a coun- 
 try. In your land he is detested, and in Germany 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 243 
 
 he is hated with a hatred that knows no bounds, 
 for he failed to deliver your country, bound hand 
 and foot, into the outstretched palms of the kaiser. 
 The pro-German failed to give Germany sufficient 
 funds with which to carry on the war. Not only 
 that, but there are other crimes laid against him. 
 He failed to enlist in the German army, as he 
 should have done, and he failed to send his sons 
 to enlist. Then, last and most terrible of all, he 
 failed to split your United States asunder. All 
 this he should have done, had he been a true Ger- 
 man. But he proved false to his trust, and, like 
 Judas of old, he is hated for his falsity by every 
 true German. 
 
 Therefore, the man who calls himself a pro- 
 German is a fool. He is not wanted in any civil- 
 ized land to-day. When this war is over there 
 will be no land big enough to hold him. His own 
 country will disown him, and every other country 
 on the face of the globe will brand him with the 
 mark of Cain. The pro-German of to-day had 
 best get on the winning side, not only openly and 
 in public, but in his own chamber as well. If 
 for no other reason than a selfish one, he will find 
 it wise to align himself with the forces of de- 
 mocracy. 
 
 I have said that we Allies will win the war. 
 Let me carry that one step farther. Every build- 
 
244 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 
 
 ing, no matter how huge, has its foundation and 
 corner-stone, and the foundation and corner-stone 
 of an Allied victory is not your man in the trench, 
 your picturesque flag-bearer, nor your gilded gen- 
 eral. It is the unromantic, toil-stained, oil-bespat- 
 tered laboring man back home. 
 
 In Washington to-day they say that six and 
 one half men are required to support each fight- 
 ing man. This being the case, when you get your 
 five million men over on the fighting-line, you will 
 require some thirty-two and one half million men 
 to support them. In other words, thirty-eight 
 million men will be withdrawn from normal pur- 
 suits. 
 
 There are in your country, I believe, only forty- 
 five million men between the ages of 18 and 45. 
 With thirty-eight million of them devoting their 
 energies to war-time industry, you will have but 
 seven million to carry on the petty affairs of peace- 
 ful times. In short, some eighty per cent, of your 
 laboring men will be directing their energies 
 trenchward, and it will require all their energies 
 throughout every moment of the day. 
 
 You have no idea, — you who have tasted of war 
 so lightly, — of the tremendous demands of a mod- 
 ern ** drive." Only a short time ago we British- 
 ers, on a twenty-mile front during a four-day of- 
 fensive, fired more than eleven million shells. 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 245 
 
 Compare to-day's struggle in its hugeness with 
 your own great battles of the Civil War. Your 
 General Sherman, during his famous march from 
 Atlanta to the sea, carried as his total supply of 
 ammunition only as many rounds for each field- 
 piece as a modern French ** seventy-five ' ' would 
 fire away in some seven minutes. 
 
 Perhaps you will glean from this some little 
 inkling of the enormity of the front-line's appe- 
 tite. And every one of these requirements come 
 from the hands of the unromantic laboring man. 
 He is the one who holds the balance of victory to- 
 day. 
 
 The side, irrespective of right or wrong, which 
 can longest keep her laboring men working at 
 their mightiest, will be the side to win. Germany 
 to-day would be much farther back than she is, 
 had there been a sufficient supply of shells at our 
 command, and we will not blast her forces back- 
 ward until our supply of shells and artillery is 
 doubled, tripled, yes, quadrupled. 
 
 All this spells only one thing — labor. It is the 
 laboring man who must decide to-day whether or 
 not he pleases in the future to serve as the tool 
 of German autocracy or as the free servant of a 
 free democracy. It is the laboring man, and he 
 alone, who will put us in Berlin. Our air fleets, 
 our ship-building programme, our everything, 
 
246 ^ ^LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 hang upon his beck and nod. Will he prove true 
 to this mighty trust ! He can make his bed as he 
 wills — to-day. 
 
 And here I must risk your displeasure by criti- 
 cism. But before I do so let me say that I know 
 you will find the solution of the problem that now 
 besets you. We had the same problem in Eng- 
 land and throughout the British Empire at the 
 beginning of the war. But we solved it ; Germany 
 helped us with her **Zepps.'^ To-day you face 
 the selfsame problem; to-day you are only ** mud- 
 dling through. ' ' 
 
 In England at this moment there is hardly a soul 
 who is not keenly alive to the tremendous impor- 
 tance of labor. You already know that over a 
 million women are working in our munition-fac- 
 tories, but do you know that these women are not 
 ** working women '^ in the ordinary sense of the 
 word. They are women of the middle, yes, the 
 higher classes. Some work eight hours a day; 
 others leave their babies at kindergartens and 
 work for three or four hours before returning to 
 feed their children, and then return to work again. 
 In the department-stores, in all walks of life, you 
 find society-women working as waitresses, as 
 clerks, and as stenographers. There is hardly a 
 woman in Great Britain to-day who is shameless 
 enough to say that she does not work for her liv- 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 247 
 
 ing. I know of men high up in the commercial 
 life of our land, men who before the war had un- 
 numbered automobiles and whose houses are pa- 
 latial mansions, who to-day take it as a matter of 
 course that their wives and daughters should 
 work either in their own offices or in the stores or 
 shops of England. 
 
 In short, every soul in England to-day is alive 
 to the tremendous necessity for conserving labor 
 and for making the utmost of every hour of the 
 day. Every energy in England is devoted toward 
 only one thing — ^the winning of the war. 
 
 Those fur-clad women who go down at nine in 
 the morning to serve as clerks in the department- 
 stores of London do not do it for sweet charity's 
 sake. They do not brag melodiously of the num- 
 ber of sweaters they have knitted or the number 
 of socks they have presented to our soldiers. All 
 that is taken for granted ; it is only natural. They 
 do not even brag of the fact that they work. It 
 is only the natural and normal thing to do in 
 England to-day. 
 
 Contrast this with your country. I am a little 
 amused at times to hear your women — and your 
 men, too — teU of their mighty deeds of valor. 
 Can you blame me? I come from a land where 
 every nerve is strained to its utmost to win the 
 war. I come to a land where the uttermost 
 
248 '* LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 bounds of patriotism seem to be the purchase of 
 Liberty Bonds or the knitting of socks. Wait 
 until you get into it, my good friends, and then 
 you will know why I smile a little sadly to myself 
 as I compare England of to-day with your own 
 United States. It is an unfair comparison, per- 
 haps, and, anyway, you are not to be blamed. 
 You are at war only diplomatically and to a cer- 
 tain extent physically. You are not at war spir- 
 itually, and for this you are in no way at fault. 
 
 There are a number of reasons for your pres- 
 ent state of coma. In the first place, you never 
 really went to war. You just drifted warward. 
 You just oozed into the war. You were told be- 
 fore you declared war that you were *^ drifting 
 into a world aflame.'' But so slowly did you 
 progress from peace to war that the process occa- 
 sioned you no discomfort or mental torture en 
 route. 
 
 Furthermore, the war is a long way off from 
 you. Its horrors are as yet unreal. They are a 
 thing apart from you, just as they were in Eng- 
 land at first. Some day war will become a stern 
 reality to you. It will burst in on you, and then 
 the purchase of a Liberty Bond or the knitting 
 of a sweater will cease to be the apex of your 
 patriotism. 
 
 There is still another reason why your people 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 249 
 
 are not yet fully cognizant of this war. You 
 lacked a psychological moment for its declaration. 
 Every war which you have had to date has been 
 declared when some incident has aroused your 
 imagination and stung your fury. In 1898 you 
 had your Maine, and behind your armies, surging 
 southward, rose the battle-cry, ** Remember the 
 Maine!'' In 1861 you had your Sumter and 
 your Bull Run, and the mob was stung by the in- 
 sult to their flag. Even your Revolutionary fore- 
 fathers had their little ** Tea-Party'* down in Bos- 
 ton. 
 
 In short, if you will scan the horizon of demo- 
 cratic wars, you will usually find some incident 
 which has set off the bombshell of popular wrath 
 and goaded your nation into action. 
 
 But this war had no such psychological mo- 
 ment, no such bombshell to fire the public pulse. 
 When the Lusitania sank was the one large and 
 thriving psychological moment. But for per- 
 fectly legitimate reasons you postponed action at 
 that time. Had you declared war then, I fully 
 believe that one hundred million raving maniacs 
 would have risen up, and only a little heat, ap- 
 plied at intervals, would have kept you fighting 
 hot while your swords were being forged from 
 plowshares. 
 
 But you did not declare war then, and in the in- 
 
250 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 tervening time your righteous anger petered away 
 and left you cold and calloused to the lesser shocks 
 that ensued. Then, when you did declare war, 
 you declared it long after the psychological mo- 
 ment for its declaration had passed. You had 
 lost interest in the thing, and, as a result, to this 
 day you are at war only mentally and diplomat- 
 ically. You are not at war spiritually. You are 
 not willing to give and give and keep on giving. 
 Your emotions still need to be aroused, for the 
 emotions of a people are not negligible assets; 
 they are not valueless. NO ! 
 
 What was it stood off the Teuton hordes at 
 Mons, at the Marne, and at Verdun? Was it the 
 scanty stream of shells and shrapnel*? It was 
 not. It was the emotions of the men in our 
 trenches. It was the emotions of the men back 
 home. It was the emotions of the women who 
 gave the men. 
 
 What America needs to-day is what England 
 needed during the first months of the war — some- 
 thing to fire the imagination, to arouse the popu- 
 lar fury. What America needs above all else is 
 some one who will snatch a brand from the fire 
 across the sea and pass it on to the hands and 
 hearts and homes of the American nation. Such 
 a man will do more good than he who builds a 
 hundred ships or makes a hundred thousand shells, 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 251 
 
 for he will make America fighting mad, from boot- 
 black to banker, and resolved to do her utmost, 
 utterly regardless of the price. 
 
 I criticize, though I realize full well that to- day- 
 there are those who look upon the critic as close 
 kin to the pro-German. Your country has been 
 besieged with critics. You have had so many of 
 them that they have deafened your ears to all 
 criticism, be it constructive or destructive. This 
 is not the right condition. Your great republic 
 was built upon the rock of public criticism, and 
 the man who silences criticism to-day is strangling 
 the very thing that gave your nation birth. 
 
 But no nation, least of all your own, in times 
 such as these has room for the critic who brings 
 no constructive suggestion with him. I hope to 
 extricate myself from this class, not alone for 
 selfish reasons, but because I hope to bring just 
 a wee message to America, a message culled from 
 my knowledge of England and the Allied fighting- 
 line. 
 
 To-day I think you will agree with me when I 
 repeat that few of you are at war in aught but a 
 diplomatic and physical sense. You are not at 
 war emotionally. In your saner moments you 
 frankly admit it, and you are inclined to smile 
 with me at your conceit. You have not as yet be- 
 gun to pool your selfish interests for the common 
 
252 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 
 
 good. Your workmen, even those eng'aged di- 
 rectly in war-time industries, feel free to strike. 
 Your silk-stockinged aristocracy — some of them — 
 do not blush at profiteering. You let your irre- 
 sponsible rabble tie up the production of timber 
 for aeroplanes and ships. Negligence or inexpe- 
 rience ties up the production of war materials. 
 There is no crime in that, perhaps. The crime 
 rests on you, on you who calmly sit and knit and 
 give from your surplus to liberty loans, on you 
 who do nothing and then like to say that you are 
 ** suffering all the privations of war.'' 
 
 But you are not. You know you are not. The 
 war has not stretched its ghastly finger into your 
 homes. You are not really at war. What you 
 need is some awful shock to arouse you from your 
 justifiable lethargy. What you need is a bomb- 
 shell dropped blazing into your land. What you 
 need is a salesman to sell this war to you. 
 
 Wars have to be sold to a free and democratic 
 country. Usually they are automatically sold on 
 the declaration, as was your Spanish-American 
 War, your Civil War, and your Revolution. But 
 this war, let me repeat, owing to the circumstances 
 surrounding its declaration, had no such bomb- 
 shell connected with your declaration, and the re- 
 sult is that some one must go at the job of selling 
 this war to the hearts of the American people in 
 
WHO WILL WIN THE WAE 253 
 
 the same thorough manner in which you have gone 
 at the job of selling the war to the heads of the 
 American people. 
 
 America is not **sold'' to-day. The educated 
 minority are * ' sold ' ' to a certain extent. But how 
 about the man in the street, the laboring man, the 
 vast bulk of your population, the man upon whom 
 the fate of this war and the fate of America now 
 hangs? Go out and talk with the man in the 
 streets, and then form your opinion as to whether 
 or not America is willing to give her all. 
 
 It will take an appeal to your emotions to con- 
 summate the sale of this war. Emotions are the 
 factors which bring about every sale, be it for 
 house-paint, automobiles, or wars. Wars are 
 fought by men, machines, and money, but wars 
 are won by the emotions which actuate those men, 
 by the emotions which actuate those machines and 
 
 that money. 
 
 My hope and prayer to-day is that America will 
 not have to wait until the clouds of war hang low 
 over her streets. I pray that she will not have to 
 wait until her avenues stream with maimed and 
 crippled men. Before that time comes I hope that 
 some master salesman, some human engineer, will 
 rise up and touch the spark that will set your emo- 
 tional fires to burning. Before that time comes 
 I hope that America will awaken to the very utter- 
 
254 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 
 
 most fiber of her soul, and will steel herself with 
 the wrath of a nation aroused to a fighting pitch. 
 
 For when your boys go over the top they '11 
 want to know that they have behind them not just 
 the cold, insensate money of the American people ; 
 they '11 want to know that they have behind them 
 the heart and soul of the American people. 
 They '11 want to know that the American people 
 are going, over the top with them, and that they 
 are fighting mad and resolved to do their utmost, 
 regardless of the cost. 
 
 We — all of us — ^want America to be an ally with 
 strong, hot pulses, and not just the pulsing of 
 shallow, shoddy sympathies, because when the 
 history of this war is written we want America's 
 finger to reach down into every line. We want 
 your impress on the book of German fate. 
 
 If you are to be an ally, we want you to be an 
 ally fired with the emotions which fire Great Brit- 
 ain, the emotions which fire poor, shattered 
 France. We want you to be an ally at war not 
 with your men, not with your money, not with 
 your machines. NO ! We want you to be an ally 
 at war with your emotions, at war with your 
 hearts, at war with your inmost and uttermost 
 souls! 
 
 THE END 
 

 .»* 
 
 ■1- 
 
 
 
 
 '■', 
 
 V; 
 
 "■^.^ 
 
 /■■- 
 
 \V ./^ 
 
 .>■ •/'. 
 
 
 ..^^■ 
 
 / 
 
 "*. 
 
 
 
 >• '^, 
 
 '■^-v. ' * -S* 
 
 
 
 .V 'o '^ 
 
 ^^. - r .^^ 
 
 
 
 v^" -^ce. 
 
 ^^> ,^v 
 
 
 
 \' 
 
 
 ^A V* ■'bo'' : 
 
 ct-. ._ . .. . . _ ."■ oV -^^ ' .. _ . 
 
 
 
 ■ * 
 
 .x^ 
 
 
 >^^ 
 
 :/^ 
 
 
 
 ^p.' 
 
 
cT'^^ '..^^--' 
 
 .V 
 
 
 
 
 1? 'c^. 
 
 
 
 -';:. J'..^ 
 
 "*'< -'^■'^^5*';."^ 
 
 
 "'' ' '"^^ "^" '■ .\ 
 
 
 <=^^ 4 -7*. ' * \0 ^