an Old Campaigner Goes to War for the Last Time
- ‘Villiers, His Five Decades of Adventure’
- by Frederic Villiers, 1920
- Chapter XIX :1914
Stranded war correspondents—Paris during mobilization—The last of the Contemptibles—After the Marne—Like rabbit-shooting—The Prussian debacle—Tramping it—A shift in a furniture van—The Crown Prince and champagne—The battle of the Aisne—/ am taken for a spy—A score for my paper—Early- and latter-day trenches—The Red Tabbies— The British War Office and its way "peculiar"—/ exhaust the Western front of dramatic incidents—/ seek fresh fields and pastures new—/ try East Africa-Mesopotamia without success and find incident for my sketchbook on the northwest frontier of India—TheMohmands at war—Armored cars, airplanes, and electricity surprise the hillmen.
The train steamed in to the Gare du Nord on time, though it was the first day of the mobilization. Everything was moving smoothly; there was no bustle nor any untoward excitement. Little groups of men were reading the evening papers at street corners and occasionally a fiacre would pass by with a few enthusiastic youths waving flags and shouting their satisfaction at the news. There were none of the hilarious demonstrations of '71, or shouts of "a Berlin; a has les Preussiens." I was rather astonished, for it was not at all like the Paris of old; the citizens were taking things very seriously and for once were not underrating their enemy.
When I arrived at my hotel I was rather elated at what I had seen en route. France was possibly-going to pull through, for I knew she could count on England's lending her a helping hand directly the fat was in the fire. Through the night troops were marched to the railway depots and entrained before the dawn; and at the first glimmer of the sun there came through my open window the distant martial strains of the Marseillaise, wafted on the summer breeze across the slumbering city as the trains with their drafts steamed out of the station.
The next morning I went to the Quai d'Orsay to ask for my permits and was told by the officials that there would be little difficulty in my case in procuring the necessary papers to go with the French army, for the General Staff knew my record as well as did the war officials in England. I returned to my hotel much elated over the prospect.
For a few days Englishmen were not looked upon with much favor by the Parisians. "Perfidious Albion, what is she going to do; will her people leave us in the lurch after all?" was the unexpressed query in the eyes of every Frenchman as he passed you. It became more unpleasant for us every day till, one evening there was an electric change— England had come into the hazard. I had for days been wandering about the streets with much dejection, and it was a great relief to be able to hold myself erect once more, look our allies straight in the face, and grasp their hands in comradeship. The crisis was over, for we were, too, proud to fight.
I received a note the next morning requesting me to call at the Foreign Office. When I arrived I was delighted to hear that in two days I was to receive my passes, signed by General Joffre, to join the French army. Later on I called at the British Embassy, and the First Secretary came to me with a letter and said, "This is from the British War Office; you are in touch with the correspondents here, and His Excellency would like you to tell them that they will not be allowed to go with the French armies into the field."
This was a great blow to me, for we had all been waiting anxiously to begin work and the first fighting had already commenced. However, this extraordinary farce was kept up for months, until the authorities were at last compelled to change their attitude, when certain correspondents were accredited to each army.
In the meantime I had to do something for my paper; so I became a tramp—a refugee—and saw probably more of the picturesque end of the war in this guise than if I had been properly accredited to the forces. At first it was an irksome business dodging those gentlemen in khaki with red tabs and patches upon their caps and collars; but at last it became a joy to circumvent the "red tabbies," as one of our party christened them.
Eventually I was allowed by the French to join their army and I rilled my paper with the doings of the French. But at times I resented being so scurvily treated by my own folk, when through forty years of British warfare I had been persona grata with generals like Wolseley, Roberts, Methuen, Browne and Buller.
Time and again during the early days of the war I called at the War Office in London to ask for an explanation of this extraordinary fiat against the artists, but with a shrug the officials told me there was no explanation. The only reason that I could find to account for the silly restriction was that the War Office itself was trying to make a corner in pictures, for it eventually produced some wonderful films. They could hardly have entertained the idea that our work might be a "give away" to the enemy, for the press censors were lively enough to see to that, and everybody at the front knew that the Germans were always well acquainted with our movements without the assistance of English war artists. So well were the Germans posted regarding all our actions that it was a common thing when we put some fresh regiment into a section of the front line to hear a voice shout from the opposing trench: "What oh! Bedfords [or Manchesters], how do you like your new quarters?"
Their espionage system always knocked spots out of ours. On my return to London from France I was often questioned by inquisitive persons as to the number of our troops at the front; and I always replied that I did not know, and if I did it was my duty not to tell; but if they really wanted to know they could get the most accurate information by asking the Germans.
There was much joy and enthusiasm when General French arrived in Paris on his way to the front, and I took the opportunity, as I knew him quite well, to tell him through his secretary that I would join his command later on if he would allow me. How foolish of me to entertain the idea, knowing the policy of the War Office! It seemed a great pity, however, to let that wonderful epic of the Great War, the retreat from Mons, go unrecorded. That heroic deed of those estimable "Con-temptibles" has never been pictured by any artist. When I met Field Marshal Lord French again sometime after the first battle of the Marne, he told me that it was not his fault that no one representing the pictorial press was present; he would have been glad to have me with him, but it was the question of the War Office. I told him that as a tramp I had seen something of it, but that I had since been taken up by the French army and had plenty of exciting work to do. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, "But you ought to have been with us."
In spite of the many restrictions much good work was done in the tramping stage of the war by men like George Adam of the London Times, Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle and the Times of New York, Milligan of the Morning Post, and Gordon Smith of the Herald, who tramped with me, picking up copy in Flanders during the early days. Philip Gibbs is one of the bunch who has distinguished himself by sticking to his arduous work all through the four years of the terrible struggle.
After seeing a few of the dramatic incidents of the retreat I was still tramping it when the great rally of the French army gave the Hun his first setback. The highways and byways were littered with the dead of the Marne and the patches of woods about Epernay resounded with shots as the peasants potted at odd Prussians who had sought shelter in the underbrush. It was just like rabbit-shooting: an excited woman would rush along the . road and shout, all breathless with her exertions, "I saw him go in there!" Then her menfolk would cautiously stalk into the brush. Presently came the sound of the cracking of twigs, a scuffle and then, "le voila!" Sometimes it became quite uncomfortable for us in the road, as shots seemed to come in all directions from excited villagers who had taken up the hunt.
Gordon Smith and I had decided to tramp together. He had his bag full of canned goods and I carried one of Pike's spirit stoves and a water bottle, so we could always get a warm meal. He spoke both German and French fluently, and my French was of such a nondescript kind it might be easily taken for a Belgian's. So our little camouflage, that we were looking for friends and relatives in certain towns (which we never wanted to get to), seemed to work well.
On foot one could very often dodge the police, but by automobile or wagon it was a different matter. At last, however, we had to take the risk and travel by cart, for we were footsore and weary. We managed to get a lift in a furniture van which, with several others, was making its way to Epernay. I settled down in the straw behind a woman and her two children, who were seated on a chair, so as to be hidden from the view of any gendarmes patroling the roads.
We had started at dawn from the town of Vertus. At about half past eight the carts suddenly stopped. I anxiously peered through the straw to see what was the matter, when a motor drove up and a voice said, "Is there an Englishman in there?" I thought to myself, "Well, it's all up." A man had just got out of the motor and on seeing me said: "I hear you are an Englishman traveling to Epernay. Come into my car; we shall be there many hours before my vans. You are in one of them now: so come on."
I made a clean breast of it to him that I was hiding from gendarmes, and he replied: "Have no fear; they all know me. I'll see you get through all right." When I was comfortably seated, my host said, "If you are not in a hurry I want to call on some people en route." I told him that I was at his disposal so long as I got into Epernay that afternoon.
We first stopped at a small chateau and my new acquaintance said, "This man is a champagne grower, we will taste some of his stuff." I don't generally start my morning's work with champagne or any other wine at the hour of nine; but feeling a bit exhausted with days of short commons and considerable fatigue, I thought I would break through my early abstinence this once, anyway. It was certainly very refreshing, and when we left, our host told us not to forget to call on another grower outside the town—one upon whom the German Crown Prince forced his unwelcome presence while his army was marching on Paris. The owner of this vineyard told us that the Prince emptied many of his bins of the best vintage and shot his coverts clean, till Von Kluck suddenly stopped his direct march on Paris. Then one morning the Crown Prince left the chateau in a hurry, but had time to say to him, "My troops will not molest the people of this wonderful wine country. We want to be friends, for after the war we shall annex all this district; so not good-by, but au revoir." We had a bottle of the Crown Prince's choice, and I must say that, whatever mistakes he may have made in conducting his campaign, there was no error in his taste for champagne.
Of course, directly we arrived in Epernay the Mayor was notified, and after a charming luncheon, where we were regaled with the vin du pays, we motored to the Town Hall. M. Pol Roger, the Mayor, was the hero of the hour; for he had been ordered to be shot by the Germans, and had managed not only to escape the death penalty, but even to save the city from pillage by paying an enormous cash indemnity. To make things easier for the inhabitants he then issued paper currency in denominations as low as twenty-five centimes— less than a five-cent piece—one of which he gave me as a souvenir. About midnight I was disturbed in the little estaminet in which my friend and I lodged by the noise of cannon-fire. Every hour the guns seemed to growl louder and oftener, till just before dawn they roared incessantly.
This made us very restless; so we dressed and hunted the town for some kind of vehicle to take us toward the guns, and to our joy found a one-horse carriage whose proprietor agreed to take us into the fighting zone. We soon came up with refugees driven in by the Germans from the river Aisne. Here the Boches had evidently made a stand after their retreat from the Marne, for on arriving on the outskirts of the forest of Reims we found the whole panorama of the beautiful valley of the Aisne and the famous city of Reims in a storm of shot and shell.
As soon as I saw that view and the position the Germans held, including the famous Fort Nogent and the high ground it dominated, I said to my companion, "The Germans are practically beaten in spite of that wonderful position, for a phase of the campaign opens with this battle which is entirely contrary to all the calculations of their High Command. It is the beginning of siege warfare and the end of Germany. It will take at least a year to turn them out of those trenches; but they have lost the initiative. From this time on it will be a war of attrition, and if I can gauge the spirit of my countrymen and the stern resolve of France, we can last the longer at that game.
From that day till the armistice I never doubted that the Allies would eventually be successful in spite of all the terrible losses and setbacks during the subsequent four years—even to the very last, when the United States came in and hastened matters to an end. I felt certain that even without the help of America's splendid legions, France and England could have hung on and won, though beaten to their knees.
On the return to our quarters that evening we were dead tired. Refugees were still pouring through the town and our little estaminet was overcrowded. I was awakened in the middle of the night by a loud knocking at the door of my room. I knew it was not my friend, for his deep snoring on the floors above told me that he was asleep.
The knocking grew faster and louder. I turned over and said to myself, "It's only some refugees trying to get into my room." But the noise continued, so I shouted that the room was full up, and to stop making that beastly row. But this seemed only to increase the fury of the rapping, and presently there was such a thunder at the door with fists, kicks, and sticks that I jumped out of my bed and, hastily sticking my sketches in my boots, threw open the door.
The scene on the head of the stairs was truly dramatic and picturesque. An old town guard stood in front of me with a leveled revolver in his hand. The light from a candle held aloft by another guard, glinting along the barrel of the pistol, lit up the malevolent eyes of two frowzy-looking civilians standing in the background who were pointing their lean and dirty fingers at me. The group looked so like a Rembrandt—so weird in effect, with the strong side lights and somber background—that I could not help thinking what a wonderful study in black and white it would make, and I was just about to say: "Don't move, please. Keep like that while I get my sketchbook," when the revolver was suddenly thrust at my right temple.
It wabbled so erratically in the nervous grasp of the old guard that I was compelled to say as I threw up my arms: "You silly old ass, if you don't take care the thing will go off and you will hurt some one. What the devil do you want with me?"
He answered never a word, and I stepped backward into the room as he pressed forward. Then he said, "Dress and come with us."
"Why should I dress?" said I, "and why have you entered my room in this manner?"
With a fury that startled me in its intensity all four cried, "You are a German spy!" "A German what?" I gasped. "You make a great mistake. I am an Englishman, and no spy. I came to see your Mayor this afternoon and to taste his famous champagne." "It's no use," he growled, "I have two witnesses here who overheard you speaking German to another man in a cafe this evening, so throw on your clothes and come along."
Three spies had been summarily shot that morning in Epernay. I was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable, when a series of groans and gurgles came from my snoring friend on the floor above. It flashed on me in a moment that upon leaving the cafe that night he had used a few Hunnish words to emphasize an argument. I almost laughed for joy.
"Mon brave," I cried, turning to the old guard, "vous faites erreur—you have come to the wrong number, you want numero sept., deuxieme Hage; that's the man you want. Ecoute, listen."
The snoring had ceased, then came a deep sigh with, "Jess a wee dock undorous." "Why, you can hear him talking German in his sleep. Go and bother him with your wretched revolver and leave me alone." My bluff, however, was of no avail; I was the man they had fixed on. I showed them all my papers and everything of a nature to prove my identity and emptied my pockets, but it was all of no use until they discovered in my purse the little twenty-five centime banknote which was given to me by their Mayor that afternoon. Why, I do not know, but that little note seemed to satisfy them, and after an entente cordiale shake all round they tumbled down the rickety stairs out into the street.
My sketches of the battle of the Aisne I would not trust to the courier, but carried them myself to London; and they were the only pictures of that phase of the war yet published. The other illustrated papers, I believe, made complaints to the War Office that the Illustrated London News should be thus favored; but our officials had nothing to do with the matter. I was happily with the French army, and what a relief it was not to be unnecessarily interfered with!
When I asked a French officer whether I might sketch a certain battery, he would say, "Why, yes, if you don't put that road in or that clump of trees. They might be a give-away to the enemy." But, ye gods! just imagine making such a request of one of the red-tabbed gentry. He would have foamed at the mouth with indignation at the audacity of the thing and would probably have put me under arrest.
The powers at the War Office were so sour with their own countrymen of the "fourth estate" that even after the ban was raised and we were allowed to go to the front, I have seen Englishmen sent back by the escorting officer while foreign representatives of the press were given extended time in the war zone. The only correspondent allowed at first with the British fleet was a foreigner. Everything that could be done to annoy, irritate, and delay English correspondents in the execution of their duty in the early days of the campaign was done by the War Office officials.
The utterly illogical attitude of some of these people was beyond comprehension. For instance, ten full pages of war subjects had been passed by the censor in London and published in my paper in a single issue. The next morning a notice came from the War Office to say that instead of being censored in the metropolis, in future all pictures must be sent to St. Omer for examination. I happened to be in London when the new order arrived, so I went up to the War Office and asked for an explanation; but this, of course, was not forthcoming.
"Well," said I, "you have allowed ten full pages of my pictures to be published in my paper this week. What is the cause of this double vigilance? Now I have a sketch here I want censored. It's a most innocuous picture and can't possibly give any information to the enemy. It represents a British soldier watering a patch of daffodils at the back of his log hut with a perforated jam tin. Shall I have to send that all the way to St. Omer to be examined?"
He gravely looked at it and said, "I will submit it to my chief," and away he bustled. When I had exhausted my small stock of cigarettes he returned shaking his head ominously.
"I am afraid this must go to St. Omer," said he. I saw that further talk was useless or I might have told him that if the jam pot was a give-away to the enemy, I could easily camouflage it as a beer mug.
After sketching for nearly two years all the dramatic incidents of the war on the Western front—for in that period I had seen the fighting from the sea to the Argonne and Verdun—I thought I would seek "fresh fields and pastures new"; so I started on a lecture tour round the world, and in the course of my wanderings shunted off to any battle area I could find along my route.
Arrived in Egypt, I saw Allenby's cavalry preparing for their raid through Palestine. In South Africa I tried to get with General Smuts in the East, but on reaching Durban I found such superhuman difficulties in the way of getting my mail back to England that I dropped the idea. Then I sailed for India and attempted to get into Mesopotamia, but unfortunately it was at a time when things were going badly there. I applied to the Commander-in-Chief just at the moment when the administration was about to be handed over by the Indian government to the British.
The campaign was being conducted under the British War Office. I applied for form's sake; but I knew they would shut down on any proposition of mine. So, finding there was fighting on the northwest frontier, I set out in that direction. There was no difficulty in getting there. There was no attempt to make a secret of the matter in India: indeed they thought, as I did, that it was somewhat of a feather in the cap of the British Empire that her soldiers should be fighting on something like sixteen different fronts and still holding their own. However, not one of my sketches was allowed to be published after they arrived in England. This closed chapter of the war I have since been able to open. I have had the satisfaction of showing the world a little of the strenuous work that was done by our troops on the frontier of India.
The Germans had been spreading propaganda throughout the Afghan tribes by stating that their Emperor had taken up the cudgels for Islam. As the British were fighting the Mohammedans in Turkey and Egypt and as he was defending their cause, it was the psychological moment for them to do their little bit by invading India. Many hunters and travelers, ostensibly out for sport, holding passports of a neutral country, passed through the northwest territory spreading this propaganda, but, luckily for us, only one tribe immediately responded to the call.
When I arrived at Peshawar I found that the Mohmands had been at war with us for nearly two years, thereby preventing a considerable number of white troops from augmenting our overworked armies in Mesopotamia. This part of the frontier is especially arid and wild; the rifts in the hills during most of the year are dried-up water courses filled with stones and huge boulders, without a vestige of herbage, but scrubwood and dwarf palms sprinkled over the rocky heights which hem them in. The gloomy country looks as if it had once suffered a holocaust and had never recovered from the roasting. In these forbidding, dreary mountains the Mohmands with whom we were at war lived with their herds of lean sheep and goats, a gaunt, swarthy, semiwhite people whose features and side locks suggested the possibility of the legend that they were one of the lost tribes of Israel. However, for centuries they have been .denied that which most Israelites crave, the opportunity to sell something to some one, so they mostly lived by cutting one another's throats and occasionally raiding the British frontiers, slaughtering the villagers, and carrying ofF their goods and chattels to the mud forts and caves in their rocky defiles. Luckily for us we had but twenty-five miles of the Swat valley frontier to defend. Nevertheless, there was a grave danger of the other hillmen throwing in their lot with the Mohmands, who numbered 18,-ooo fighting men out of a population of 65,000. We had along this twenty-five-mile stretch several strong stone forts, linked up with barbed-wire entanglements, and a live wire running the whole span, which considerably upset the calculations of the enemy.
When at first they came across this up-to-date mode of warfare they were much annoyed. They swarmed down to their first attack quite ready to negotiate the barred fence; but when they were held up by the live wire, those who survived retired, a little disconcerted, and consulted their mullahs. These worthy gentlemen suggested that books of the holy Koran should be carried in front, that they might exorcise the evil influence of the new and terrible device; but this Koran literature only added the smell of burnt paper to that of charred flesh as the limp bodies of its bearers shriveled up on the wire.
Then their comrades became fairly indignant, and sent in a note of remonstrance to the British general asking why his soldiers did not come out and fight in the open like men, as in the good old days, instead of skulking behind this red-hot device of the devil and behaving no longer as sportsmen. This remarkable paper ended with the threat that, even if the wire was not taken away, it would not stop them from getting under.
They eventually began to burrow of a night and many succeeded in getting through; but as General Dunsterville, in command of the forces, told me, "It did not much matter, for when the few who succeeded were beaten back, in the excitement of the fray they had no time to go the way they came and forgot the live wire. They were hung up on it on our side of the fence instead of the other—that was the only difference."
The airplane was another new factor which the enemy thought unfair, for when the Mohmands would collect together in the hills preparatory to an attack these beastly "white eagles"—so they called them—would pepper them so unmercifully with bullets that they had to break for the shelter of their stony lairs. But there was one novel device at which they more or less snapped their fingers' that was the armored car which we called the "tank of the northwest." The three cars which we had on this front were of the Rolls Royce make, and at times offered real sport to the enemy. Indeed it was difficult to entice the wary hillmen down from their lairs to be shot at by any other means. When we wanted a field-day the three cars with a cavalry squadron were sent out to draw the enemy, who would seldom miss the opportunity of trying to cut them off, and then sometimes our horsemen would get a chance for a charge and scatter the foe back to their fastness in the hills.
I went out one afternoon to see this tantalizing maneuver. One of the hills was soon alive with white-robed Mohmand sportsmen waving their knives. As my car emerged from a fold in the ground the enemy suddenly stopped their advance; they had evidently caught sight of the other two cars coming up in support and did not feel strong enough to attack all three, so we returned unmolested to camp.
There was, however, one field-day when the hillmen strode down from their lairs in such numbers that the three cars were kept busy for many hours and at last were compelled to retire. There was a stream on the enemy's side over which the cars had to come by a plank bridge. The Mohmands chased the three cars back to this bridge. Two had passed over when the planks gave away and the third had to find a crossing by trundling along the bank. Her crew kept the enemy at bay until they struck some shallows and eventually crossed the stream in safety. A young wag of our party said, as he placed his pane in his eye, "My dear Villiers, by Jove! it's probably the first time that a Rolls Royce was ever reduced to a Ford."
For two years there had been fierce fighting on this frontier and at one time we had such a dressing down that the 21st Lancers (which years ago I saw cutting its way through the Dervish ranks at Omdurman) was compelled to sacrifice a considerable number of men in saving one of our flanks in a kick-up with the Mohmands.
I stood for a moment on the very spot where their beloved commander met his fate, leading his troopers on that occasion in as gallant a manner as he had led them in that more conspicuous opportunity in Sudan just seventeen years before.
After my trip to the Mohmand frontier I returned south, making my way through the various provinces and eventually crossing the "ferry" to Ceylon. I therefore saw the whole Indian Empire from top to toe, and I came to the conclusion that it was no longer a Sahib's country. I found everywhere a very different attitude toward Europeans from that of a quarter of a century ago. The natives seemed to be sullen and gloomy, and as they looked at you there was often a gleam of insolent defiance in their eyes. Servants were mostly indolent, inattentive, drunken, and dishonest. It was altogether a different country from that of the days of Lytton's rule.
What had caused the change, I wondered? Was it the result of a succession of weak and sentimental viceroys, or had the natives come to feel the difference between the suburban, bourgeois state of society that now exists in administrative circles— crazy with bridge, ragtime, and flirtation—and that of the sedate Sahib and Mem-sahib regime of years ago, and to resent the change? Whatever the cause, I felt that we were losing our grip on India and that the glory of our great eastern empire was much less brilliant than when I first visited it in the year 1879.