Kings, Queens, and Pawns Read online

  Furthermore, she wrote, “much that we regard as fundamental in hospital practice is ignored.” Infection and fever spread throughout the wards, and in one particular hospital a single thermometer was available for sixty typhoid and scarlet fever patients.

  Unsurprisingly for someone whose views on the war were evolving, such graphic descriptions were directed toward her audience at home in a chapter titled “How Americans Can Help.” But it was not just about urging donations of medical supplies:2 Mary Roberts Rinehart also became an early and vocal advocate of American entry into the war on the side of the English, French, and Belgians, both to bring a quick end to hostilities and to deal with the humanitarian crisis they had created and that she had witnessed first-hand. Moreover, she had a sympathetic spirit in her Canada-born publisher George H. Doran, whose ties to England went beyond swearing allegiance to the Crown; in London on that fateful August day in 1914 when England joined the war, he was called upon by the Ministry of Information to do some “publicity” work in the United States.3 He eagerly agreed, and became the Ministry’s conduit for what could only be described as pro-English propaganda. Kings, Queens, and Pawns, though overtly not propagandist, certainly sent the right message.

  But it was not a popular one at the time. America was still largely isolationist in 1915, and even the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine that May was not in itself persuasive. Many Americans were either pro-German or at best neutral, some dismissing as lies the accusation that the Germans were using poison gas. But as the situation in Europe continued to stalemate, sentiment in America started to shift and was solidly in the camp of joining the war effort when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917—in a sense inviting the United States into the war. Upon learning of Germany’s ill-considered offer to help Mexico reclaim Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico in exchange for joining Germany in the fight against the United States, Congress voted to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917.

  Patriotic fervor had by now reached a fever pitch, prompting the editors at the Saturday Evening Post to ask their most esteemed female writer to pen a piece about sacrifice, particularly of the familial kind: in short, they wanted Mary to write about how mothers should allow, if not encourage, their sons to join up and go to war. At first appalled by the idea, she later relented, especially because only recently she and her husband had given Stan Jr. permission to join the army. (Ultimately all four Rinehart men enlisted, including Stan Sr., commissioned as a major in the Army Medical Corps.) After twelve straight, grueling hours, during which she wept continuously, she produced “The Altar of Freedom,” perhaps one of her most influential essays* and one that spoke directly and, in her by now familiar voice, personally to mothers.

  * * * * * * * *

  For Mary Roberts Rinehart, there were to be some rewards from her two months reporting from the front; indeed, it might be said that the experience informed much of the rest of her life. Now recognized as a serious journalist, she was asked to cover the 1916 Democratic, Republican, and Progressive presidential conventions by the Philadelphia Public Ledger Syndicate, during which she met and befriended the “Bull Moose” party candidate Theodore Roosevelt. On a trip to Glacier National Park in 1915 she was introduced to a group of Blackfoot Indians, who were so impressed with this woman who had been to the Great War that they inducted her on the spot into the tribe, bestowing on her the name “Pitamakin,” or “Running Eagle.”5 And following the cessation of hostilities in 1918, George Doran offered Stan Jr. a position in his company, which Mary helped secure with the acquisition of a substantial share of Doran stock—all a prelude to her underwriting the firm of Farrar and Rinehart (later Rinehart and Company before merging with Holt and Winston) ten years later, for which she is seldom given credit.

  “It will take a hundred years to paint this war on one canvas,” Mary Roberts Rinehart writes in the early pages of this chronicle, reprinted here just as it appeared in 1915. Here, then, exactly a century later, is Kings, Queens, and Pawns, brushstrokes on that great canvas.

  Rick Rinehart

  Essex, Connecticut

  July 2015

  Footnotes

  *An article in the January 19, 1946, issue of Publisher's Weekly cited a list developed by Irving Harlow Hart of the Iowa State Teachers College ranking the top one hundred authors of best sellers in fiction from 1895 to 1944. Mary Roberts Rinehart led the list, followed by Winston Churchill. John Steinbeck ranked fifty-fourth, and Ernest Hemingway ninety-sixth.

  *In a perfect example of being careful what you wish for, upon her return to the United States Mary Roberts Rinehart was put in charge of coordinating relief for war-torn Europe, described as “an avalanche of money and supplies.”

  **The Torontonian had moved to New York to reestablish his publishing business in 1909.

  *A piece she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in 1947 was arguably her most widely read and was certainly ground-breaking for its time. “I Had Cancer” detailed her personal ordeal with breast cancer and encouraged women to self-examine, a hitherto forbidden topic of discussion.

  **The Blackfeet were in fact in desperate straits, as the government had failed miserably to transform a tribe of hunters into farmers on barely arable land. Upon her return to Washington, Rinehart went directly to Interior Secretary Lane and demanded relief for the tribe, “pouring out her rage.” Lane acted immediately.

  CONTENTS

  FOR KING AND COUNTRY

  I.TAKING A CHANCE

  II.“SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE”

  III.LA PANNE

  IV.“ ’TWAS A FAMOUS VICTORY”

  V.A TALK WITH THE KING OF THE BELGIANS

  VI.THE CAUSE

  VII.THE STORY WITH AN END

  VIII.THE NIGHT RAID ON DUNKIRK

  IX.NO MAN’S LAND

  X.THE IRON DIVISION

  XI.AT THE HOUSE OF THE BARRIER

  XII.NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES

  XIII.“WIPERS”

  XIV.LADY DECIES’ STORY

  XV.RUNNING THE BLOCKADE

  XVI.THE MAN OF YPRES

  XVII.IN THE LINE OF THE “MITRAILLEUSE”

  XVIII.FRENCH GUNS IN ACTION

  XIX.“I NIBBLE THEM”

  XX.DUNKIRK: FROM MY JOURNAL

  XXI.TEA WITH THE AIR-FIGHTERS

  XXII.THE WOMEN AT THE FRONT

  XXIII.THE LITTLE “SICK AND SORRY” HOUSE

  XXIV.FLIGHT

  XXV.VOLUNTEERS AND PATRIOTS

  XXVI.A LUNCHEON AT BRITISH HEADQUARTERS

  XXVII.A STRANGE PARTY

  XXVIII.SIR JOHN FRENCH

  XXIX.ALONG THE GREAT BETHUNE ROAD

  XXX.THE MILITARY SECRET

  XXXI.QUEEN MARY OF ENGLAND

  XXXII.THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS

  XXXIII.THE RED BADGE OF MERCY

  XXXIV.IN TERMS OF LIFE AND DEATH

  XXXV.THE LOSING GAME

  XXXVI.HOW AMERICANS CAN HELP

  XXXVII.AN ARMY OF CHILDREN

  KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS

  KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS

  FOR KING AND COUNTRY

  MARCH in England is spring. Early in the month masses of snowdrops lined the paths in Hyde Park. The grass was green, the roads hard and dry under the eager feet of Kitchener’s great army. For months they had been drilling, struggling with the intricacies of a new career, working and waiting. And now it was spring, and soon they would be off. Some had already gone.

  “Lucky beggars !” said the ones who remained, and counted the days.

  And waiting, they drilled. Everywhere there were squads : Scots in plaid kilts with khaki tunics ; less picturesque but equally imposing regiments in the field uniform, with officers hardly distinguishable from their men. Everywhere the same grim but cheerful determination to get over and help the boys across the Channel to assist in holding that more than four hundred miles of battle line against the invading hosts of Germany.

  Here in Hyde Park that spring day was all the panoply of war: bands playin
g, the steady tramp of numberless feet, the muffled clatter of accoutrements, the homage of the waiting crowd. And they deserved homage, those fine, upstanding men, many of them hardly more than boys, marching along with a fine, full swing. There is something magnificent, a contagion of enthusiasm, in the sight of a great volunteer army. The North and the South knew the thrill during our own great war. Conscription may form a great and admirable machine, but it differs from the trained army of volunteers as a body differs from a soul. But it costs a country heavy in griefs, does a volunteer army; for the flower of the country goes. That, too, America knows, and England is learning.

  They marched by gaily. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Here and there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men, some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was the same flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosed against the old lion’s foes.

  For King and Country !

  All through England, all through France, all through that tragic corner of Belgium which remains to her, are similar armies, drilling and waiting, equally young, equally eager, equally resolute. And the thing they were going to I knew. I had seen it in that mysterious region which had swallowed up those who had gone before; in the trenches, in the operating rooms of field hospitals, at outposts between the confronting armies where the sentries walked hand in hand with death. I had seen it in its dirt and horror and sordidness, this thing they were going to.

  War is not two great armies meeting in a clash and frenzy of battle. It is much more than that. War is a boy carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close ; war is a woman carrying a child that has been wounded by a shell ; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, torn, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in icy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she has given. For King and Country !

  CHAPTER I

  TAKING A CHANCE

  I STARTED for the Continent on a bright day early in January. I was searched by a woman from Scotland Yard before being allowed on the platform. The pockets of my fur coat were examined; my one piece of baggage, a suitcase, was inspected; my letters of introduction were opened and read.

  “Now, Mrs. Rinehart,” she said, straightening, “just why are you going?”

  I told her exactly half of why I was going. I had a shrewd idea that the question in itself meant nothing. But it gave her a good chance to look at me. She was a very clever woman.

  And so, having been discovered to be carrying neither weapons nor seditious documents, and having an open and honest eye, I was allowed to go through the straight and narrow way that led to possible destruction. Once or twice, later on, I blamed that woman for letting me through. I blamed myself for telling only half of my reasons for going. Had I told her all she would have detained me safely in England, where automobiles sometimes go less than eighty miles an hour, and where a sharp bang means a door slamming in the wind and not a shell exploding, where hostile aëroplanes overhead with bombs and unpleasant little steel darts, were not always between one’s eyes and heaven. She let me through, and I went out on the platform.

  The leaving of the one-o’clock train from Victoria Station, London, is an event and a tragedy. Wounded who have recovered are going back; soldiers who have been having their week at home are returning to that mysterious region across the Channel, the front.

  Not the least of the British achievements had been to transport, during the deadlock of the first winter of the war, almost the entire army, in relays, back to England for a week’s rest. It had been done without the loss of a man, across a channel swarming with hostile submarines. They came in thousands, covered with mud, weary, eager, their eyes searching the waiting crowd for some beloved face. And those who waited and watched as the cars emptied sometimes wept with joy, and sometimes turned and went away alone.

  Their week over, rested, tidy, eyes still eager but now turned toward France, the station platform beside the one-o’clock train was filled with soldiers going back. There were few to see them off; there were not many tears. Nothing is more typical of the courage and patriotism of the British women than that platform beside the one-o’clock train at Victoria. The crowd was shut out by ropes and Scotland Yard men stood guard. And out on the platform, saying little, because words are so feeble, pacing back and forth slowly, went these silent couples. They did not even touch hands. One felt that all the unselfish stoicism and restraint would crumble under the familiar touch.

  The platform filled. Sir Purtab Singh, an Indian prince, with his suite, was going back to the English lines. I had been a neighbour of his at Claridge’s Hotel in London. I caught his eye. It was filled with cold suspicion. It said quite plainly that I could put nothing over on him. But whether he suspected me of being a newspaper writer or a spy I do not know.

  Somehow, considering that the train was carrying a suspicious and turbaned Indian prince, any number of impatient officers and soldiers, and an American woman who was carefully avoiding the war office and trying to look like a buyer crossing the Channel for hats, the whistle for starting sounded rather inadequate. It was not martial. It was thin, effeminate, absurd. And so we were off, moving slowly past that line on the platform, where no one smiled; where grief and tragedy, in that one revealing moment, were written deep. I shall never forget the faces of the women as the train crept by.

  And now the train was well under way. The car was very quiet. The memory of those faces on the platform was too fresh. There was a brown and weary officer across from me. He sat very still, looking straight ahead. Long after the train had left London, and was moving smoothly through the English fields, so green even in winter, he still sat in the same attitude.

  I drew a long breath, and ordered luncheon. I was off to the war. I might be turned back at Folkstone. There was more than a chance that I might not get beyond Calais, which was under military law. But at least I had made a start.

  This is a narrative of personal experience. It makes no pretensions, except to truth. It is pure reporting, a series of pictures, many of them disconnected, but all authentic. It will take a hundred years to paint this war on one canvas. A thousand observers, ten thousand, must record what they have seen. To the reports of trained men must be added a bit here and there from these untrained observers, who without military knowledge, ignorant of the real meaning of much that they saw, have been able to grasp only a part of the human significance of the great tragedy of Europe.

  I was such an observer.

  My errand was primarily humane, to visit the hospitals at or near the front, and to be able to form an opinion of what supplies were needed, of conditions generally. Rumour in America had it that the medical and surgical situation was chaotic. Bands of earnest and well-intentioned people were working quite in the dark as to the conditions they hoped to relieve. And over the hospital situation, as over the military, brooded the impenetrable silence that has been decreed by the Allies since the beginning of the war. I had met everywhere in America tales from both the German and the Allies’ lines that had astounded me. It seemed incredible that such conditions could exist in an age of surgical enlightenment; that, even in an unexpected and unprepared-for war, modern organisation and efficiency should have utterly failed.

  On the steamer crossing the Atlantic, with the ship speeding on her swift and rather precarious journey, windows and ports carefully closed and darkened, one heard the same hideous stories: of tetanus in uncounted cases, of fearful infections, of no bandages—worst of all, of no anæsthetics.

  I was a member of the American Red Cross Association, but I knew that the great work of the American Red Cross was in sending supplies. The comparatively few nurses they had sent to the western field of war were not at the front or near it. The British, French, Belgian and Dutch nursing associations were in charge of the field hospitals, so far as I could discover.
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  To see these hospitals, to judge and report conditions, then, was a part of my errand. Only a part, of course; for I had another purpose. I knew nothing of strategy or tactics, of military movements and their significance. I was not interested in them particularly. But I meant to get, if it was possible, a picture of this new warfare that would show it for the horror that it is; a picture that would give pause to that certain percentage of the American people that is always so eager to force a conservative government into conflict with other nations.

  There were other things to learn. What was France doing? The great sister republic had put a magnificent army into the field. Between France and the United States were many bonds, much reciprocal good feeling. The Statue of Liberty, as I went down the bay, bespoke the kindly feeling between the two republics. I remembered Lafayette. Battle-scarred France, where liberty has fought so hard for life—what was France doing? Not saying much, certainly. Fighting, surely, as the French have always fought. For certainly England, with her gallant but at that time meagre army, was not fighting alone the great war.

  But there were three nations fighting the allied cause in the west. What had become of the heroic Belgian Army? Was it resting on its laurels? Having done its part, was it holding an honorary position in the great line-up? Was it a fragment or an army, an entity or a memory?

  The newspapers were full of details that meant nothing: names of strange villages, movements backward and forward as the long battle line bent and straightened again. But what was really happening beyond the barriers that guarded the front so jealously? How did the men live under these new and strange conditions? What did they think? Or fear? Or hope?

  Great lorries and transports went out from the French coast towns and disappeared beyond the horizon; motor ambulances and hospital trains came in with the grim harvest. Men came and, like those who had gone before, they too, went out and did not come back. “Somewhere in France,” the papers said. Such letters as they wrote came from “somewhere in France.” What was happening then, over there, beyond the horizon, “somewhere in France”?