and the unanimous response was that neither officers nor men fed any too well; that the pinch of hunger now afflicting the entire empire has fastened itself as well on the army. * * * As we approached the ruined villages we saw what ghastly hand had been at work. The solid brick and stone walls of the houses were only shells concealing charred ruins. Not only one village is like that, nor a dozen, but every single one of the hundreds that have been liberated has been put to fire and sword, old men, old women, cripples, and children left to await the arrival of their own soldiery to care for them; their able-bodied months ago, their young women and girls herded along with the retreating army to a slavery no one dares to think about without seeing red. And at every village the same message was left behind for the French soldiers when they arrived. Translated, it reads like this: men taken into bondage "You see what we have done here. Well, this is what is going to happen all the way back to the French frontier." Is it any wonder that the French soldier telling me this said between clenched teeth: "There is only one answer to that, my friend. Let them get down on their knees and pray when the French Army crosses the Rhine. We will be taking no prisoners on that day." The Countryside Devastated I The aspect of the villages is sad enough, but the countryside is worse. have seen so much of artillery destruction during this war that I confess I have been rather sated with ruins. A destroyed church, a house ripped clean to its foundations, is only another example of what I have seen dozens of times before. But a countryside that has so little left of it as that one I passed through is a sight that made me want to cry and fight at the same time. It has already been reported how orchards have been destroyed. I rather expected that this had happened just along the roads by which the army retreated. But with field glasses I could see far in on either side of every road for miles and miles; every farm is burned, fields destroyed, every garden and every bush uprooted, every tree sawed off close to the bottom. It was a terrible sight, and seemed almost worse than the destruction of men. Those thousands of trees prone upon the earth, their branches waving in the wind, seemed undergoing death agonies before our eyes. Everything gave its share to the blood lust of hate. Churches gave their organs for their copper, also the brass rails of their altars, even crucifixes upon ruined walls were stripped down and torn asunder. cers. We passed through the remnant of a place called Porquéricourt. An old woman came to a broken doorway. We stopped to talk with her. She smiled at sight of the French uniforms of our offiShe lived on a farm a mile away. The Germans had passed in the night and burned it so that she had come to Porquéricourt to hide in the cellar of a friend. Her husband and brother, both old men, had been killed by the Germans during the retreat, her two sons led off to slavery the year before. One of them had come back, but had been seized again only a few weeks before. Her three daughters had been with her at the farm the night that the Germans retreated. They had fled with her to the house of her friend, from where they saw their own home of a lifetime in flames. The girls were 19, 21, and 24 years old. The Germans had found them in Porquéricourt and had taken them away. That was eight days before. She had · heard nothing of them since. All other young women had likewise vanished that night when the Germans went away. She told her story simply in a low, unfaltering voice. But she suddered as she spoke of her daughters. Cemetery Left Intact We left just at nightfall. On the outskirts we came upon the only thing I can now remember in all that scene on all that day which the Germans did not destroy as they fled. It was a cemetery built by themselves for their soldier dead. It was magnificently made, upon a magnificent site, overlooking a great valley. The graveyards I have seen behind the allied lines cannot compare with it. Instead of wooden crosses and painted names and dates it contained monuments and crosses of engraved marble, done in all the heavy but splendid style of modern Teuton art. The place was organized and carried out with all the perfection of detail and display in which Germany has proved herself. The monuments bore sonorous and lofty mottoes. On one, beneath a helmeted statue in white, was the inscription that there lay a Prince of the house of Mecklenburg, who had died for his country, and on either side, likewise marble, rested all that was mortal of simple German soldiers. I walked down another path, and before a gigantic marble block I halted in surprise. The inscription read: "Here lie French warriors," and over the next grave was the inscription: "Here rests the body of a brave Frenchman." I asked myself what was I to think of these people who should show such respect to French dead and place them in the same place as their own. I knew the French did that in their graveyards, but here I was in a German graveyard, and I had been hating Germans all day. I had failed to find anything about them that was good or could be admired, but here in this graveyard, perhaps, after all I had found some of that spirit of Heine, Goethe, and Schiller. standing by a large monument in the Silently we walked out of the place and "They are inhabitants who can no longer remain; their homes are gone. We cannot feed them there; we are sending them to Paris." He laughed bitterly and pointed back to the statue that loomed white through the darkness. He repeated the inscription on the tablet: "Friend and enemy in death united." He said: "They had the nerve to put that up in France-but it's quite true." I understood and I believed him. In death the Frenchman and the German may be united, but that is the only way I voiced my thought to a French Lieutenant who accompanied me. We were it is ever likely to happen. G Levani Form & Ordered (marchite Military Results of Germany's Move ENERAL VON HINDENBURG was present in person behind the old front in France as late as March 10 and arranged the details for the withdrawal to the new line of fortified defenses, which had been in preparation for months. The orders for devastation of the abandoned territory came through him. Judged purely from the viewpoint of military strategy, what are the advantages of the new situation for Germany? The plans and preliminary stages of the retirement were successfully con be cealed from the Allies for days and von removed safely to their posi- Hill tions and all the main bodies of ated. As a matter of fact the French, especially, performed marvels of swift engineering work, throwing temporary bridges over streams, building pathways around deep craters at crossroads, and deflecting their march through fields where necessary, almost with the speed of an ordinary march. Time after time they came upon the heels of the German rearguards before they were expected. Thus the military purpose of the desolation was a failure. What the Germans Abandoned All those who have looked upon the impregnable positions abandoned by the Germans, especially at Péronne, with Mont St. Quentin on its flank, agree that no new line can equal it in strength. Only dire necessity could have caused the evacuation of the vast barbed wire fortifications and marsh protection at that point. A British correspondent thus describes the abandoned defenses: "Everywhere outside Bapaume and Péronne and Chaulnes and all those deserted places near the front lines one ugly thing stares one in the face-German barbed wire. It is heavier and stronger stuff than the British or French wire, with great crosspieces of iron. They used amazing quantities of it in great wide belts in the three lines of defense before these trench systems and in all sorts of odd places, by bridges and roads and villages, even far behind the trenches, to prevent any sudden rush of hostile infantry or to tear British cavalry to pieces should they break their lines and get through. "The German trenches are deeply dug, and along the whole line from which they have now retreated they are provided with great concreted and timbered dugouts leading into an elaborate system of tunneled galleries, perfectly proof from shell fire, and similar to those which I described often enough in the Somme battlefields. But in addition to these trench systems, they made behind their lines a series of strong posts, cunningly concealed and commanding a wide field of fire, with dominating observation over the British side of the country." The Hindenburg Line A high military official at Berlin explained on March 20 that the new positions which the German Army was taking up were built with the aid of every possible device developed in two and a half years of trench warfare. "The old positions," he said, "were the result of the breaking off of the unfinished offensive toward Paris. Many portions of our positions were held only with the greatest difficulty. The trenches were difficult to maintain and the artillery observation points, so important in this kind of warfare, were few. The new positions are laid out in the best possible locations, with the finest observation points and deep concrete shelters for the battery positions. While the enemy is coming up to them he will be in the greatest possible difficulties himself in the devastated battlefield." To this a British correspondent, who has talked with German prisoners, replies that the people may be deceived by such statements, but not the German soldiers at the front. "They know they have left the strongest positions ever made in warfare by years of labor, and already the fictitious strength of the famous Hindenburg line,' called by the Germans themselves the 'Siegfried line,' has been exposed in its reality to the men who have to hold it." The new German line has already been pierced at several points by both the British and French Armies in the first month of its fiery ordeal. French Heroes of the Air: Daring Deeds at the Front Victor Forbin recently contributed to Les Annales of Paris this romantic yet authentic sketch of the deeds of French military aviators [Translated for CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE] Mastery of the air over the trench lines in France is as necessary for victory as the capture of territory. During the months of the Somme battle the Allies succeeded in gaining almost complete control of the air, and their artillery fire was correspondingly successful, while that of the Germans was blinded. The Germans, however, reported the destruction of 1,002 enemy aircraft between the beginning of the war and Jan. 1, 1917. French military records show that 417 German machines were shot down in the year 1916, besides twenty-nine captive balloons. All figures aside, the fact remains that the Allies have long held a large degree of aerial supremacy, and in the opening days of the new Spring offensive, when their whole air fleet was mobilized to photograph the German positions, they came off with 1,700 photographs. It was a victory, even though it cost from a dozen to a score of airplanes and their brave crews every day until the task was accomplished. The article here presented gives an idea of the perilous nature of the task of these men. of those aviators who have shot down Philologists will be grateful to us for The team that counted such trumps among its cards was bound to win. And the word found favor. In all sports the champions became "aces." It is indispensable to note that the official communiqué takes account only of enemy machines whose destruction is beyond question, whether they fall within our lines or have been seen to fall in flames within the enemy's lines. Our score sheets, therefore, are sincere, while those of Germany are erroneous. To illustrate this difference we will compare the record of our "Prince of aces," Lieutenant George Guynemer, with that of the most brilliant of the German aviators, Captain Boelcke, who was killed on Oct. 28, 1916, probably by a French or British aviator, although his compatriots, who had dubbed him "The Invincible," assert that he was the victim of an accident. The communiqué credits Guynemer (in February, 1917) with the destruction of only thirty machines, though he has certainly shot down thirty-four, of which four fell so far from our lines that it was impossible to get material proof of their destruction. If it were permissible to add to these figures those of enemy machines which he put to flight after having visibly damaged them, the record of Guynemer would exceed forty. Rival Records Compared On Boelcke is officially credited with forty machines, but the editor of La Guerre Aérienne, Jacques Mortane, has revealed several gross errors in the record of the celebrated aviator. For example, the German official communication of April 30, 1916, gives him his fortieth machine, whereas the pilot who steered it-the marshal of the camp, Viallet-returned safe and sound to his aerodrome. March 19 and 20 of that year the German War Office bulletins credited Boelcke with three machines, designating the points in the French lines where they fell. Now, a French communiqué states clearly that in the course of that same month of March only one French airplane was shot down within our lines. Another fact must not be forgotten: Among the forty victories attributed officially to Boelcke eleven have not been mentioned in any bulletin. They are therefore open to suspicion. At the moment of writing this article the "Aces of the War Office bulletins " number twenty-five, a figure which the coming days will modify, for there are numerous aviators with four victories to their credit who are watching impatiently for their fifth machine, a certificate of public fame. Here is the list of the laureates up to Feb. 5, 1917: Second Lieutenant Guynemer, 30 machines; Second Lieutenant Nungesser, 21; Lieutenant Heurteaux, 19; Adjutant Dorme, 17; Second Lieutenant Navarre, 12; Lieutenant Deullin, 10; Sergeant Chainat, 9; Second Lieutenants Chaput, Tarascon, Under Officer Sauvage, 8; Under Officer Viallet, 7; de la Tour, Lufbery, Sayaret, Flachaire, Jailler, Loste, de Bonnefoy, Bloch, Vitalis, Martin, Delorme, Gastin, Hauss, Madon, 5. This list includes only the " aces who are living and in active service. We will complete it with the names of Adjutant Maxime Lenoir, who was made prisoner when he shot down his eleventh machine; Second Lieutenant de Rochefort, who died of wounds after bringing down his sixth enemy; the deeply mourned Pégoud, who died on the field of honor after his sixth airplane; and Second Lieutenant Gilbert, who had scored five aerial victories when he was interned in Switzerland. one A comparison of this list with that of the German "aces" leads to some interesting observations. For example, one of the Germans, Kandulski, received the honor of mention by the War Office for one isolated victory. True, it was of importance; the victim was Pégoud, whom Sergeant Ronserail avenged a few days later by bringing down Kandulski. Of the sixteen German aviators cited in the Berlin bulletins nine were killed in the year 1916, while the French phalanx lost only three units in that year. Laureates of the Air Space is lacking here to sketch the biographies of our francs-tireurs of the air, but a few lines may be given to note their status before the war. Of the twenty-five names on the list just given, the great majority were unknown, even in the sporting world, during the first ten months of the war. A few exceptions may be cited from memory: Second Lieutenant Jean Chaput had distinguished himself in the races of the Racing Club of France; Camp Marshal |