American Dreams (60 page)

That Sunday 373

'I'll go in by myself.'

'All right. Maybe I'll see you when I get back.'

'Where are you going?'

'Arizona. For a month, maybe more. Ince hired me for a chapter play that doesn't use many horses.'

'Good luck.'

He reached for her arm. 'Fritzi--' She opened the door and ran up the walk.

The Ford puttered off into the night.

Mrs. Hong's rocker creaked. Mr. Hong said, 'Very bad day. You heard news?'

'Yes. Terrible,' Fritzi said, though she meant something entirely different.

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The United States is today exactly in the position Harvard would be if she had about one good football player weighing one hundred pounds and another substitute perhaps turning the scales at one hundred twenty pounds, but rather poorly trained, the first representing the Army and the second the Militia. They know they have got a game ahead with a first-class team trained to the hour and with at least five men for every position. No one knows when the game is coming off, but we know it is coming someday, and what is worse, we know we are not getting ready for it. . . . All of us should do everything possible to wake up the sleeping public, for I assure you that the position is one whose gravity cannot be overestimated.

- General Leonard Wood,

United States Army, 1915

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.

-Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

7J7

68 In Belgium

Hot morning sunshine dappled the trees. Yellow dust hazed the air.

Paul sneezed as he drove the milk cart into a copse where it wouldn't be seen from the road. The old farm nag pulling the cart tossed its head and snorted, as if glad to rest.

Sammy locked the Moy camera onto the tripod; Paul checked the magazine. Both men showed a week's growth of beard and smelled to heaven. Both wore berets and blue smocks. To the wooden shoes common in the countryside Paul had said, 'Absolutely not.'

They'd slept in a barn near a village a few kilometers east. As Sammy settled down for the night, he said, 'That bit of fluff who owns the farm's a looker.7 Paul grunted. He'd hardly noticed; he missed Julie.

At daylight the sound of a motorcar woke him. He ran into the farmyard to find a magnificent tan Bugatti, the chauffeur bargaining for bread and milk with the aforesaid bit of fluff. Paul peered in the open window, discovered an elderly manservant in silver-button livery riding beside his
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employer. He tapped on the glass. The servant cranked the window down.

Speaking French, Paul asked for news of liege.

'Surrendered last night. All the impregnable forts fell. Thousands are coming behind us. Please step back, you're disturbing the countess.'

Now, in the copse, Paul heard the sounds of those refugees. Axles creaked, horses whinnied, chickens cackled, over the steady susurrus of trudging feet and the occasional spit and snarl of a fast car bumping along the shoulder to get around, get ahead, get away.

'You can stay here if you want,' Paul said to Sammy.

'Not on your life, gov. Not every day a chap's in a war big as this 'un.'

Paul hoisted the tripod to his shoulder. 'Let's go, then.'

378

Battlefields

It was Monday of the third week in August. The war was three weeks old.

After August 1, the day the Kaiser went to war against the Czar, the dominoes fell over one after another. On August 3 Germany declared war against France. Next day Britain retaliated with a declaration of war against Germany, and a special tactical force of the German Second Army breached the Belgian border, violating her status of neutrality.

The Germans invested Liege and bombarded the iron and concrete defense forts protecting it. Once Liege fell, the main armies could advance to the capital and on to Paris. It was General Schlieffen's war plan of 1895, executed at last.

Paul kissed Julie and the children goodbye on August 6, Thursday.

That day the transatlantic cables carried the text of Washington's official proclamation on the European war. The United States would maintain strict neutrality. Its citizens could not enlist in the army of any belligerent.

It would not aid in outfitting and arming vessels to serve either side. Paul assumed neutrality would please his Uncle Joe. The General still had strong emotional ties to the fatherland. Paul didn't.

He and Sammy crossed the Channel to Ostend and traveled on to Brussels with no difficulty. On the way they saw elements of King Albert's Belgian army mobilizing. The Belgians were brave but poorly equipped.

Paul filmed a company of machine gunners drilling; the guns were pulled by large dogs. He shot fifty feet and then a Belgian officer threatened to smash the camera unless he moved on.

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In Brussels, the American ambassador, Whitlock, arranged for a laissez passer, an official document allowing unrestricted travel. That and their passports insured Paul and Sammy's safety. Supposedly.

In a cafe in the Boulevard Waterloo, Paul ran into an old colleague, Richard Harding Davis, on the scene with many other correspondents.

Paul said he intended to film the German advance.

'I don't know how they'll take to it,' Dick Davis said. 'Show a camera to any army officer in the world, and he thinks one thing. Spy.' Paul nodded, remembering the machine gun company. Davis pulled a pencil from the breast pocket of his smart linen coat.

'For once I'm happy to be an old-fashioned reporter.' He waggled the pencil. 'You be careful, my friend.'

In Belgium

379

Tall poplars lined both sides of the road, like green, leafy banks of a river.

In the riverbed flowed an unending tide of human misery. Refugees by the hundreds, stretching to the horizon in both directions.

Paul set up his camera facing the oncoming throngs. A few people stared, but no one asked a question or called a greeting. Fear showed on every face. Paul started to crank. Sammy said, 'Cor, what a sight.'

Truly it was; the river carried men, women, and children on foot, riding bicycles with backpacks, driving old market wagons piled high.

A grandmother dragged a dog cart without a dog to pull it. The cart held a small mountain of clothes, cook pots -- the residue of a shattered life.

A black Daimler crept by, trunks and suitcases swaying on its roof.

Anxious white faces peered out. A young girl passed with a flour sack that clanked with the family silver. A farm couple struggled with wooden cages of quacking ducklings and squealing piglets. A sweaty aristocrat in an Alfa Romeo nearly ran down a mother with two infants in her arms. He screamed oaths as he drove past.

An old man with the look of a scholar appeared, half a dozen books secured by a strap slung over his shoulder. Paul shouted, 'How many Germans in Liege?'

'Von Biilow's whole Second Army. Stealing everything from paintings to postcards, the bastards.'

The river of terror flowed on for several hours, then thinned, then dried up altogether. Paul suspected that the German advance was close behind.

He filmed intermittently, but the stricken faces, the pathetic bundles of
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goods, grew repetitive. He and Sammy were sweating and filthy with dust. Two emotions mingled in him -- sadness and anger.

He rested in the shade of a poplar, smoking a cigar. Sammy relieved himself against a bush. In surrounding fields bundles of grain lay waiting for harvesters who would never come. A silver shape floated into sight.

'Zeppelin,' Paul cried, jumping up. Away to his left a massive dust cloud roiled in the sky. 'Here they come.'

Paul drove the old cart horse as fast as he dared toward the village. Twenty minutes after they arrived, the first Germans marched in, making a fearsome noise as their iron-shod boots hit the cobbles in cadence. They goose-stepped, young boys in neat gray-green uniforms, smiling and confident.

Only the villagers were sullen. Paul and Sammy stood among them 380

Battlefields

in the square, stared at but not disturbed. Paul had hidden the camera, fearing confiscation.

A caravan of motor transports passed through, then a detachment of Uhlans riding matched horses. Pennons fluttered on their lances. A woman ran out to greet them, offering yellow flowers. From the crowd someone threw a rock. The smile of the Uhlan officer became a glare.

Infantry with supporting units of cavalry and artillery passed through for over an hour. Occasionally an open staff car drove alongside the column, honking its way through the square before roaring on. Paul's legs and back ached, the effect of sleeping badly and standing for hours, nerves screwed tight. He felt his thirty-six years; he was no longer young.

Another staff car pulled into the square. This one stopped. A colonel stepped down, dusty but otherwise perfectly attired. His pink face shone as he took off his cap. He had red hair, neatly barbered. He shouted for the burgomaster, first in German, then bad French.

'Here, your honor'A plump man scuttled forward, seized the colonel's hand. For a moment Paul thought he was going to kiss the officer's signet ring. People muttered.

The officer began to snap orders at the burgomaster, gesturing, commandeering billets and food. A roughly dressed boy of ten or so ran from the crowd. The boy had a gun carved out of wood. Before his mother could snatch him back, he aimed at the officer and made shooting noises.

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The startled officer frowned. In German he said to his aide, 'We'll have none of that. They must show respect. Get rid of him.'

'At once, Colonel.'

The aide strode toward the boy, unlimbering his service pistol. The boy turned the wooden gun on him, banging away. The boy's mother ran toward him, arms stretched out, screaming. She was still five or six steps away when the aide calmly shot the boy through the head.

Blood and brains splattered the cobbles. The boy twisted and went down like a cloth doll that had lost its stuffing. The aide blew into the muzzle, put his piece away, and gave his superior a smart little salute. The officer nodded crisply. The burgomaster's trousers showed a wet stain.

Paul could hardly breathe. Sammy whispered in a trembling voice, 'Jesus fucking Christ.'

The mother dropped to her knees beside the boy. Flies were settling in the spilled blood. A few villagers with sticks and rocks edged forward, but a wave of the colonel's hand brought out the pistols of three other men in In Belgium

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the staff car. Swaying back and forth, the mother keened, LDieu, Dieu.

Fusillepar les Allemands.1 God, God. Shot by the Germans.

The Germans advanced through the village until the light of the long summer evening faded. Paul was staggered by their numbers, the splendid state of their equipment, all the support units: horse-drawn kitchen wagons with smoking chimneys, hospital wagons, an open truck in which cobblers hammered away resoling boots, even a motorized post office. As the night came down they encamped, singing drinking songs and ''Die Wacht am RheirC in lusty voices. Paul approached a youthful infantry corporal writing a postcard and asked him how long the war would last.

'We'Jl be in Paris by Christmas. Home right after the New Year'

Paul and Sammy left the village in the middle of the night, driving the milk cart with the camera and film magazines still hidden.

Smoke clouds stained the horizons of Belgium. Where the Germans found resistance, they burned houses in retaliation.

Paul and Sammy drove through fields torn up by the iron wheels of caissons. They saw blue cottages with red-tiled roofs, all the windows smashed, doors ripped off the hinges. They saw trampled gardens of hollyhocks, others in which a few red cabbages lay like crushed human heads.

Paul filmed where he could, but the wooden Moy was bulky, easily spotted.

They stayed off main roads to avoid confrontations in which their
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papers might be examined, questioned, even taken away.

Near another village they came upon soldiers working with horses and chains to drag tree trunks from a road. Fallen trees weren't the only roadblocks put up by the Belgians. A little farther on, flames licked around the gutted frame of an auto lying on its side.

Paul and Sammy hid the cart and approached the village on foot. Paul carried the camera, sans tripod, wrapped in a blanket under his arm.

Sammy had an extra magazine.

As they passed a barn and started to cross a fallow field at the edge of the village, Sammy jerked Paul's arm. 'Got to hide, gov.' They ran into the barn and breathlessly climbed to the hayloft. From there Paul watched a squad of soldiers march three men and three women of varying ages into the sunlit field. A young captain strutted in front of the civilians, all of whom had their wrists tied behind them.

382

Battlefields

'Ladies and gentlemen,' the captain said in a loud voice, 'you have placed obstacles in the path of General von Kluck's First Army. 1 refer to the fallen trees, the burned Panhard auto.' He spoke excellent French.

'That kind of resistance can't be tolerated, I trust you appreciate that.

We have our orders. Do you have anything to say before we carry them out?'

One man spat on the ground. A young woman fell to her knees, weeping.

'Spare me the theatrics,' the captain said. 'You can at least take your medicine bravely.'

Paul shoved the camera forward into the hayloft opening, checked the exposure, lined up to be sure his frame included both Germans and Belgians. He cranked, wincing at the racheting noise. Could they hear it in the silence? There was nothing else but the twitter of birds and motors revving on a distant road.

The captain tapped a cigarette on a metal case. 'Sergeant, execute them.'

The sergeant snapped orders. The soldiers raised their rifles. 'No, no, not like that,' the captain said. 'We want a stronger lesson. Bayonets.'

The kneeling woman fell over in a faint. A middle-aged farmer in boots and smock put his arm around his wife. The soldiers looked at one another, hesitant. ""Schnell, schnellj the irritated captain cried, waving his cigarette.