Behind the Scenes in Warring GermanyFox, Edward Lyell
History
Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany
Fox, Edward Lyell
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
The leader of the Belgians was Lulu; but the Turks had a handsome
gentleman who looked as if he would cut your throat for two cents, who
answered to the name of Jumbo. Like Lulu, Jumbo was very proud of the
two yellow stripes sewn on his arm. It was Lulu who posed his comrades
for the photographer, arranging them with a nice sense of values. And
when I looked the length of that line, glanced from one brutish face to
another, I need no other confirmation of the statement that out of two
hundred Turcos at the Zossen camp one in every four had been captured
with ghastly trophies in his possession. The same charge of savagery has
been made against the Turk, but from everything I can learn about the
Turkish soldier--and here in Berlin I have talked to three American
correspondents who have traveled with Turkish armies--there is a vast
difference between the German trained Turkish soldier, and the French
Turco.
Presently we selected a grinning, black villain and the most dapper
Frenchman in the camp. All his comrades roared with laughter when they
understood, and the whole procession came up the camp street as if they
were going to a workman's Sunday picnic. Nicely posed, they made a
splendid picture, which provoked the Baron's _"Allies!"_ and roars of
deep-throated Germanic laughter.
Possibly with a stage-manager's instinct to relieve the setting, the
Captain walked us a short distance to a model little hospital camp in
the pine woods. The surgeon in charge amazed us by saying that fifty per
cent. of the captured French soldiers were tubercular. After walking
with the wounded through the pines, we returned to the camp. We passed
Frenchmen busy at landscape gardening. It seemed incredible. On every
camp street they had made a long box design of evergreen and lettered to
read the name of the company and the regiment.
It was then that I saw the man who had been making the paper flowers
leave his shed and cross the street. Remembering what he had told me
that the flowers were made for the chapel, I suggested that we go
there. Following the soldier, we found ourselves in an anteroom at one
end of a scrupulously clean shed. From the anteroom a door opened into a
long unpainted room, at the far end of which I saw a crude altar. I
noticed a square of red cloth of some cheap material, half covering the
wall, and against this, in white and gold relief stood different figures
of worship, candles, crucifixes, a host covered with a roughly cut piece
of the same red muslin, and surmounting it all, high on the wall, an
Almighty crown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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