TRENCH SUPERSTITIONS

IT is told in the chronicles of “The White Company” how the veteran English archer, Samkin Aylward, was discovered by his comrades one foggy morning sharpening his sword and preparing his arrows and armor for battle. He had dreamed of a red cow, he announced.

“You may laugh,” said he, “but I only know that on the night before Crécy, before Poitiers, and before the great sea battle at Winchester, I dreamed of a red cow. To-night the dream came to me again, and I am putting a very keen edge on my sword.”

Soldiers do not seem to have changed in the last five hundred years, for Tommy Atkins and his brother the poilu have warnings and superstitions fully as strange as Samkin’s. Some of these superstitions are the little beliefs of peace given a new force by constant peril, such as the notion common to the soldier and the American drummer that it is unlucky to light three cigars with one match; other presentiments appear to have grown up since the war began. In a recent magazine two poems were published dealing with the most dramatic of these – the Comrade in White who appears after every severe battle to succor the wounded. Dozens have seen him, and would not take it kindly if you suggested they thought they saw him. They are sure of it. The idea of the “call” – the warning of impending death – is firmly believed along the outskirts of No Man’s Land. Let us quote some illustrations from the Cincinnati Times:

“I could give you the names of half a dozen men of my own company who have had the call,” said Daniel W. King, the young Harvard man, who was transferred from the Foreign Legion to a line regiment; just in time to go through the entire battle of Verdun. “I have never known it to fail. It always means death.”

Two men were quartered in an old stable in shell-range of the front. As they went to their quarters one of them asked the other to select another place in which to sleep that night. It was bitterly cold and the stable had been riddled by previous fire, and the army blanket under such conditions seems as light as it seems heavy when its owner is on a route march.

“Why not roll up together?” said the other man. “That way we can both keep warm.”

“No,” said the first man. “I shall be killed to-night.”

The man who had received the warning went into the upper part of the stable, the other pointing out in utter unbelief of the validity of a call that the lower part was the warmer, and that if his friend were killed it would make no difference whether his death chamber were warm or cold. A shell came through the roof at midnight. It was a “dud” – which is to say that it did not explode. The man who had been warned was killed by it. If it had exploded the other would probably have been killed likewise. As it was he was not harmed.

A few days ago the chief of an aeroplane section at the front felt a premonition of death. He was known to all the army for his utterly reckless daring. He liked to boast of the number of men who had been killed out of his section. He was always the first to get away on a bombing expedition and the last to return. He had received at least one decoration – accompanied by a reprimand – for flying over the German lines in order to bring down a Fokker.

“I have written my letters,” he said to his lieutenant. “When you hear of my death, send them on.”

The lieutenant laughed at him. That sector of the line was quiet, he pointed out. No German machine had been in the air for days. He might have been justified in his premonition, the lieutenant said, on any day of three months past. But now he was in not so much danger as he might be in Paris from the taxicabs. That day a general visited the headquarters and the chief went up in a new machine to demonstrate it. Something broke when he was three thousand feet high and the machine fell sidewise like a stone.

It is possible, say the soldiers, to keep bad fortune from following an omen by the use of the proper talisman. The rabbit’s foot is unknown, but it is said that a gold coin has much the same effect – why, no one seems to know. A rabbit’s foot, of course, must be from the left hind leg, otherwise it is good for nothing, and according to a poilu the efficacy of the gold piece depends upon whether or no it puts the man into touch with his “star.” It is said in the New York Sun:

Gold coins are a mascot in the front lines, a superstition not difficult to explain. It was at first believed that wounded men on whom some gold was found would be better looked after by those who found them, and by degrees the belief grew up, especially among artillery, that a gold coin was a talisman against being mutilated if they were taken prisoners, whether wounded or not.

The Government’s appeals to have gold sent to the Bank of France and not to let it fall into enemy hands in case of capture has since reduced the amount of gold at the front, but many keep some coins as a charm. Many men sew coins touching one another in such a way as to make a shield over the heart.

“Every man has his own particular star,” a Lyons farm hand said to Apollinaire, “but he must know it. A gold coin is the only means to put you in communication with your star, so that its protecting virtue can be exercised. I have a piece of gold and so am easy in my mind I shall never be touched.” As a matter of fact he was seriously wounded later.

Perhaps he lost his gold-piece!

The Sun relates another story which indicates the belief that if the man does not himself believe that he had a true “call” he will be saved. It is possible to fool the Unseen Powers, to pull wool over their eyes. To dream of an auto-bus has become a token of death, attested by the experience of at least four front-line regiments. And yet a sergeant succeeded in saving the life of a man who had dreamed of an auto-bus by the use of a clever ruse – or lie, if you prefer. As the anecdote is told in The Sun:

A corporal said he had dreamed of an auto-bus. “How can that be,” the sergeant asked, “when you have never been to Paris or seen an auto-bus?” The corporal described the vision. “That an auto-bus!” declared the sergeant, although the description was perfect. “Why, that’s one of those new machines that the English are using. Don’t let that worry you!” He didn’t, and lived!

A regiment from the south has the same belief about an automobile lorry.

But, unfortunately for the scientifically minded, a disbelief in omens does not preserve the skeptic from their consequences. On the contrary, he who flies in the face of Providence by being the third to get a light from one match is certain of speedy death. The Sun continues:

Apollinaire tells how he was invited to mess with a friend, Second Lieutenant François V – , how this superstition was discussed and laughed at by François V – , and how François V – happened to be the third to light his cigaret with the same match.

The morning after, François V – was killed five or six miles from the front lines by a German shell. It appears that the superstition is that the death is always of this nature, as Apollinaire quotes a captain of a mixed tirailleur and zouave regiment as saying:

“It is not so much the death that follows, as death no longer is a dread to anyone, but it has been noticed that it is always a useless form of death. A shell splinter in the trenches or, at best, in the rear, which has nothing heroic about it, if there is anything in this war which is not heroic.”

IN THE TRAIL OF THE HUN

WAR has become so much a part of the life of the French peasants that they have little fear under fire. Frenchmen over military age and Frenchwomen pursue their ordinary avocations with little concern for exploding shells. To be sure, it is something of a nuisance, but children play while their mothers work at the tub washing soldier clothing. And as the Allied armies advance, wresting a mile or two of territory from the enemy at each stroke, the peasant follows with his plow less than a mile behind the lines. War has become a part of their lives. Newman Flower, of Cassell’s Magazine, has been “Out There,” and he thus records some of his impressions in the trail of the war:

The war under the earth is a most extraordinary thing. In the main, the army you see in the war zone is not a combatant army. It is the army of supply. The real fighters you seldom set eyes on unless you go and look for them. And, generally speaking, the ghastliness of war is carried on beneath the earth’s level.

Given time, the Boche will take a lot of beating as an earth delver. At one spot on the Somme I went into a veritable underground town, where, till the British deluge overtook them, three thousand of the toughest Huns the Kaiser had put into his line lived and thrived. They had sets of compartments there, these men, with drawing-rooms complete, even to the piano, kitchen, bathroom, and electric light, and I was told that there was one place where you could have your photograph taken, or buy a pair of socks! Every visitor down the steps – except the British – was required to turn a handle three times, which pumped air into the lower regions. If you descended without pumping down your portion of fresh air you were guilty of bad manners.

Anything more secure has not been invented since Adam. But this impregnable city fell last year, as all things must fall before the steady pressing back of British infantry.

The writer tells of discovering in an old French town that was then under fire a shell-torn building on which were displayed two signs reading “First Aid Post” and “Barber Shop.” He says:

When I dived inside I saw one man having his arm dressed, for he had been hit by a piece of shell in the square, and in a chair a few yards away a Tommy having a shave. Coming in as a stranger, I was informed that if I didn’t want a haircut or a shave, or hadn’t a healthy wound to dress, this was not the Empire music hall, so I had better “hop it.”

It was in “hopping it” that I got astride an unseen fiber of British communication. I went into the adjoining ruins of a big building. A single solitary statue stood aloof in a devastation of tumbled brick and stone. Then, as I was stepping from one mound of rubble to another, as one steps from rock to rock on the seashore, I heard voices beneath me. The wreckage was so complete, so unspeakably complete, that human voices directly under my feet seemed at first startling and indefinite. Moreover, to add to my confusion, I heard the baa-ing of sheep, likewise under the earth. But I could see no hole, no outlet.

With the average curiosity of the Britisher I searched around till I discovered a small hole, a foot in diameter, maybe, and a Tommy’s face framed in it laughing up at me.

“Hello!” he said.

I pulled up, bewildered, and looked at him.

“What in Heaven’s name are you doing in there?” I asked.

“We’re telephones… Got any matches?”

“I heard sheep,” I informed him.

“And what if you did? Got them matches?”

I tossed him a box. He dived into darkness, and I heard him rejoicing with his pals because he’d found some one who’d got a light. It meant almost as much to them as being relieved.

So here was a British unit hidden where the worst Hun shell could never find it, and, what was more, here was the food ready to kill when, during some awkward days, the Boche shells cut off supplies.

Then look on this picture of a war-desolated country where nature has been stupidly scarred by Teuton ruthlessness, and rubble-heaps are marked by boards bearing the name of the village that had stood there:

The desert was never more lonely than those vast tracts of land the armies have surged over, and this loneliness and silence are more acute because of the suggestions of life that have once been there. It is impressive, awe-inspiring, this silence, like that which follows storm.