that had fallen into the trenches of the Bois-le-Pretre, together with French answers to them, would be telephoned to headquarters. The soldier in charge of the telephone was an instructor in Latin in a French provincial university, a tall, stoop- shouldered man, with an indefinite, benevolent smile curiously framed on thin lips. Probably very much of a scholar by training and feeling, he had accepted his military destiny, and was as much a poilu as anybody. During his leisure hours he was busy writing a “Comparison of the Campaign on the Marne and the Aisne with Caesar’s battles against the Belgian Confederacy.” He had a paper edition of the Gallic Wars which he carried round with him. One day he explained his thesis to me. He drew a plan with a green pencil on a piece of paper.
“See, mon ami,” he exclaimed, “here is the Aisne, Caesar’s Axona; here is Berry-au-Bac; here was Caesar, here were the invaders, here was General French, here Foch, here Von Kluck. Curious, isn’t it–two thousand years afterward?” His eyes for an instant filled with dreamy perplexity. A little while later I would hear him mechanically telephoning. “Poste A–five ‘seventy-seven’ shells, six mines, twelve trench shells; answer–ten ‘seventy-five’ shells, eight mines, eighteen trench shells; Poste B–two ‘seventy-seven’ shells, one mine, six grenades; answer–fifteen ‘seventy-five’ shells; Poste C–one ‘two hundred and ten’ shell, fifty mines; answer–sixty mines; Poste D–“
At Dieulouard I had entered the shell zone; at Pont-a-Mousson, I crossed the borders of the zone of quiet; at Montauville began the last zone–the zone of invisibility and violence. Civilian life ended at the western end of the village street with the abruptness of a man brought face to face with a high wall. Beyond the village a road was seen climbing the grassy slope of Puvenelle, to disappear as it neared the summit of the ridge in a brown wood. It was just an ordinary hill road of Lorraine, but the fact that it was the direct road to the trenches invested this climbing, winding, silent length with extraordinary character. The gate of the zone of violence, every foot of it bore some scar of the war, now trivial, now gigantic–always awesome in the power and volition it revealed. One passed from the sight of a brown puddle, scooped in the surface of the street by an exploding shell, to a view of a magnificent ash tree splintered by some projectile. It is a very rare thing to see a sinister landscape, but this whole road was sinister. I used to discuss this sinister quality with a distinguished French artist who as a poilu was the infirmier, or medical service man, attached to a squad of engineers working in a quarry frequently shelled. In this frightful place we discussed la qualite du sinistre dans l’art (the sinister in art) as calmly as if we were two Parisian critics sitting on the benches of the Luxembourg Gardens. As the road advanced into the wood, there was hardly a wayside tree that had not been struck by a shell. Branches hung dead from trees, twigs had been lopped off by stray fragments, great trunks were split apart as if by lightning. “Nature as Nature is never sinister,” said the artist; “it is when there is a disturbance of the relations between Nature and human life that you have the sinister. Have you ever seen the villages beyond Ravenna overwhelmed by the bogs? There you see the sinister. Here Man is making Nature unlivable for Man.” He stroked his fine silky beard meditatively–“This will all end when the peasants plant again.” As we talked, a shell, intended for the batteries behind, burst high above us.
Skirting the ravine, now wooded, between Puvenelle and the Bois-le-Pretre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon the high plateau of La Woevre; the last kilometre being in full view of the Germans entrenched on the ridge across the rapidly narrowing, rising ravine. Along this visible space the trees and bushes by the roadside were matted by shell fire into an inextricable confusion of destruction, and through the wisps and splinters of this ruin was seen the ridge of the Bois-le-Pretre rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At length the forest of Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Pretre ended together in a rolling sweep of furzy fields cut off to the west and north by a vast billow of the moor which, like the rim of a saucer, closed the wide horizon. Continuing straight ahead, the Puvenelle road mounted this rise, dipped and disappeared. Halfway between the edge of the forest of Puvenelle and this crest stood an abandoned inn, a commonplace building made of buff-brown moorland stone trimmed with red brick. Close by this inn, at right angles to the Puvenelle road, another road turned to the north and likewise disappeared over the lift in the moor. At the corner stood a government signpost of iron slightly bent back, bearing in gray-white letters on its clay-blue plaque the legend–Thiaucourt, 12 kilometres Metz, 25 kilometres.
There was not a soul anywhere in sight; I was surrounded with evidences of terrific violence–the shattered trees, the shell holes in the road, the brown-lipped craters in the earth of the fields, the battered inn; but there was not a sign of the creators of this devastation. A northwest wind blew in great salvos across the mournful, lonely plateau, rippling the furze, and brought to my ears the pounding of shells from behind the rise. When I got to this rim a soldier, a big, blond fellow of the true Gaulois type with drooping yellow mustaches, climbed slowly out of a hole in the ground. The effect was startling. I had arrived at the line where the earth of France completely swallows up the army. This disappearance of life in a decor of intense action is one of the most striking things of the war. All about in the surface of the earth were little, square, sooty holes that served as chimneys, and here and there rectangular, grave-like openings in the soil showing three or four big steps descending to a subterranean hut. Fifty feet away not a sign of human life could be distinguished. Six feet under the ground, framed in the doorway of a hut, a young, black-haired fellow in a dark-brown jersey stood smiling pleasantly up at us; it was he who was to be my guide to the various postes and trenches that I had need to know. He came up to greet me.
“Better bring him down here,” growled a voice from somewhere in the earth. “There have been bullets crossing the road all afternoon.”
“I am going to show him the Quart-en-Reserve first.”
The Quart-en-Reserve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of the Bois-le-Pretre which, because of its situation on the crest of the great ridge, had been the most fiercely contested. We crept up on the edge of the ridge and looked over. An open, level field some three hundred yards wide swept from the Thiaucourt road to the edges of the Bois-le-Pretre; across this field ran in the most confused manner a strange pattern of brown lines that disappeared among the stumps and poles of the haggard wood to the east. To the northwest of this plateau, on the road ahead of us, stood a ruined village caught in the torment of the lines. Here and there, in some twenty or thirty places scattered over the scarred plateau, the smoke of trench shells rose in little curling puffs of gray-black that quickly dissolved in the wind.
“The Quart is never quiet,” said my guide. “It is now half ours, half theirs.”
Close to the ground, a blot of light flashed swifter than a stroke of lightning, and a heavier, thicker smoke rolled away.
“That is one of ours. We are answering their trench shells with an occasional ‘one hundred and twenty.”
“How on earth is it that everybody is not killed?”
“Because the regiment has occupied the Quart so long that we know every foot, every turn, every shelter of it. When we see a trench shell coming, we know just where to go. It is only the newcomers who get killed. Two months past, when a new regiment occupied the Quart during our absence en repos, it lost twenty-five men in one day.”
The first trench that I entered was a simple trench about seven feet deep, with no trimmings whatsoever, just such a trench as might have been dug for the accommodation of a large water conduit. We walked on a narrow board walk very slippery with cheesy, red-brown mire. From time to time the hammer crash of a shell sounded uncomfortably near, and bits of dirt and pebbles, dislodged by the concussion, fell from the wall of the passage. The only vista was the curving wall of the long communication trench and the soft sky of Lorraine, lit with the pleasant sunlight of middle afternoon, and islanded with great golden-white cloud masses. My guide and I might have been the last persons left in a world of strange and terrible noises. The boyau (communication trench) began to turn and wind about in the most perplexing manner, and we entered a veritable labyrinth. This extraordinary, baffling complexity is due primarily to the fact that the trenches advance and retreat, rise and fall, in order to take advantage of the opportunities for defense afforded by every change in the topography of the region. I remember one area along the front consisting of two round, grassy hills divided by a small, grassy valley whose floor rose gently to a low ridge connecting the two heights. In this terrain the defensive line began on the first hill as a semicircle edging the grassy slopes presented to the enemy, then retreated, sinking some forty feet, to take advantage of the connecting link of upland at the head of the ravine, and took semicircular form again on the flat, broad summit of the second hill. In the meadows at the base of these hills a brook flowing from the ravine had created a great swamp, somewhat in the shape of a wedge pointing outward from the mouth of the valley. The lines of the enemy, edging this tract of mire, were consequently in the shape of an open V. Thus the military situation at this particular point may be pictorially represented by a salient semicircle, a dash, and another salient semicircle faced by a wide, open V. Imagine such a situation complicated by offensive and counter-offensive, during which the French have seized part of the hills and the German part of the plain, till the whole region is a madman’s maze of barbed wire, earthy lines, trenches,–some of them untenable by either side and still full of the dead who fell in the last combat,–shell holes, and fortified craters. Such was something of the situation in that wind-swept plain at the edge of the Bois-le-Pretre. I leave for other chapters the account of an average day in the trenches and the story of the great German attack, preferring to tell here of the general impressions made by the appearance of the trenches themselves. Two pictures stand out, particularly, the dead on the barbed wire, and the village called “Fey au Rats” at night.
“The next line is the first line. Speak in whispers now, for if the Boches hear us we shall get a shower of hand-grenades.”
I turned into a deep, wide trench whose floor had been trodden into a slop of cheesy, brown mire which clung to the big hobnailed boots of the soldiers. Every foot or so along the parapet there was a rifle slit, made by the insertion of a wedge-shaped wooden box into the wall of brownish sandbags, and the sentries stood about six feet apart. The trench had the hushed quiet of a sickroom.
“Do you want to see the Boches? Here; come, put your eye to this rifle slit.”
A horizontal tangle of barbed wire lay before me, the shapeless gully of an empty trench, and, thirty-five feet away, another blue-gray tangle of barbed wire and a low ripple of the brownish earth. As I looked, one of the random silences of the front stole swiftly into the air. French trench and German trench were perfectly silent; you could have heard the ticking of a watch.
“You never see them?”
“Only when we attack them or they attack us.”
An old poilu, with a friendly smile revealing a jagged reef of yellow teeth, whispered to me amiably:–
“See them? Good Lord, it’s bad enough to smell them. You ought to thank the good God, young man, that the wind is carrying it over our heads.”
“Any wounded to-day?”
“Yes; a corporal had his leg ripped up about half an hour ago.”
At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of a rifle box. No Man’s Land had widened to some three hundred feet of waving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind passed as over the surface of the sea. About fifty feet from the German trenches was a swathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five stout, wooden posts. So thickly was the wire strung that the eye failed to distinguish the individual filaments and saw only the rows of brown-black posts filled with a steely purple mist. Upon this mist hung masses of weather-beaten blue rags whose edges waved in the wind.
“Des camarades” (comrades), said my guide very quietly.
A month later I saw the ruined village of Fey-en-Haye by the light of the full golden shield of the Hunters’ Moon. The village had been taken from the Germans in the spring, and was now in the French lines, which crossed the village street and continued right on through the houses. “The first village on the road to Metz” had tumbled, in piles and mounds of rubbish, out on a street grown high with grass. Moonlight poured into the roofless cottages, escaping by shattered walls and jagged rents, and the mounds of debris took on fantastic outlines and cast strange shadows. In the middle of the village street stood two wooden crosses marking the graves of soldiers. It was the Biblical “Abomination of Desolation.”
Looking at Fey from the end of the village street, I slowly realized that it was not without inhabitants. Wandering through the grass, scurrying over the rubbish heaps, running in and out of the crumbling thresholds were thousands and thousands of rats.
Across the bright sky came a whirring hum, the sound of the motors of aeroplanes on the way to bombard the railroad station at Metz. I looked up, but there was nothing to be seen. The humming died away. The bent signpost at the corner of the deserted moorland road, with its arrow and its directions, somehow seemed a strange, shadowy symbol of the impossibility of the attainment of many human aspirations.
Chapter V
The Trenches In The “Wood Of Death”
So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlessly tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war more interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, than as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife. There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the continuous and multitudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a thousand channels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of the zone of violence.
By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being, admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties, organizations, and inventions–trench warfare. The principal element of this modern warfare is lack of mobility.
The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since the establishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of either combatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities. The fierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions, averaging a mile each way behind No Man’s Land. This stationary character has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all its ancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun, and has turned it into the national business. I dislike to use the word “business,” with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I intend rather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds–the idea of a great intricate organization with a corporate volition. The war of to-day is a business, the people are the stockholders, and the object of the organization is the wisest application of violence to the enemy.
To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, special narrow-gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the railroad station at the edge of the shell zone to the artillery positions. To this end the trenches have been gathered into a special telephone system so that General Joffre at Chantilly can talk to any officers or soldiers anywhere along the great swathe. The food, supplies, clothing, and ammunition are delivered every day at the gate of the swathe, and calmly redistributed to the trenches by a sort of military express system.
Only one thing ever disturbs the vast, orderly system. The bony fingers of Death will persist in getting into the cogs of the machine.
The front is divided, according to military exigencies, into a number of roughly equal lengths called secteurs. Each secteur is an administrative unit with its own government and its own system adapted to the local situation. The heart of this unit is the railroad station at which the supplies arrive for the shell zone; in a normal secteur, one military train arrives every day bringing the needed supplies, and one hospital train departs, carrying the sick and wounded to the hospitals. The station at the front is always a scene of considerable activity, especially when the train arrives; there are pictures of old poilus in red trousers pitching out yellow hay for the horses, commissary officers getting their rations, and artilleurs stacking shells.
The train not being able to continue into the shell zone, the supplies are carried to the distributing station at the trenches in a convoy of wagons, called the ravitaillement. Every single night, somewhere along the road, each side tries to smash up the other’s ravitaillement. To avoid this, the ravitaillement wagons start at different hours after dark, now at dusk, now at midnight. Sometimes, close by the trenches on a clear, still night, the plashing and creaking of the enemy’s wagons can be heard through the massacred trees. I remember being shelled along one bleak stretch of moorland road just after a drenching December rain. The trench lights rising over The Wood, three miles away, made the wet road glow with a tarnished glimmer, and burnished the muddy pools into mirrors of pale light. The ravitaillement creaked along in the darkness. Suddenly a shell fell about a hundred yards away, and the wagons brought up jerkily, the harnesses rattling. For ten minutes the Germans shelled the length of road just ahead of us, but no shell came closer to us than the first one. About thirty “seventy-seven” shells burst, some on the road, some on the edges of the fields; we saw them as flashes of reddish-violet light close to the ground. In the middle of the melee a trench light rose, showing the line of halted gray wagons, the motionless horses, and the helmeted drivers. The whole affair passed in silence. When it was judged that the last shell had fallen, whips cracked like pistol shots, and the line lumbered on again.
The food came to us fresh every day in a freight car fitted up like a butcher’s shop, in charge of a poilu who was a butcher in civilian life. “So many men–so many grammes,” and he would cut you off a slice. There was a daily potato ration, and a daily extra, this last from a list ten articles long which began again every ten days, and included beans, macaroni, lentils, rice, and cheese. The French army is very well and plenteously fed. Coffee, sugar, wine, and even tea are ungrudgingly furnished. These foods are taken directly to the rear of the trenches where the regimental cooks have their traveling kitchens. Once the food is prepared, the cooks–the beloved cuistots–take it to the trenches in great, steaming kettles and distribute it to the men individually. As for clothing, every regiment has a regimental tailor shop and supply of uniforms in the village where they go to repos. I have often seen the soldier tailor of one of the regiments, a little Alsatian Jew, sewing up the shell rents in a comrade’s greatcoat. He had his shop in a pleasant kitchen, and used to sit beside the fire sewing as calmly as an old woman.
The sanitary arrangements of the trenches are the usual army latrines, and very severe punishments are inflicted for any fouling.
If a man is wounded, the medical service man of his squad (infirmier), or one of the stretcher-bearers (brancardiers), takes him as quickly as possible to the regimental medical post in the rear lines. If the trench is getting heavily shelled, and the wound is slight, the attendant takes the man to a shelter and applies first aid until a time comes when he and his patient can proceed to the rear with reasonable safety. At this rear post the regimental surgeon cleans the wound, stops the bleeding, and sends for the ambulance, which, at the Bois-le-Pretre, came right into the heart of the trenches by sunken roads that were in reality broad trenches. The man is then taken to the hospital that his condition requires, the slightly wounded to one hospital, and those requiring an operation to another. The French surgical hospitals all along the front are marvels of cleanliness and order. The heart of each hospital is the power plant, which sterilizes the water, runs the electric lights, and works the X-ray generator. Mounted on an automobile body, it is always ready to decamp in case the locality gets too dangerous. You find these great, lumbering affairs, half steamroller, half donkey-engine, in the courtyards of old castles, schools, and great private houses close by the front.
The first-line trenches, in a position at all contested, are very apt still to preserve the hurried arrangement of their first plan, which is sometimes hardly any plan at all. It must be admitted that the Germans have the advantage in the great majority of places, for theirs was the first choice, and they entrenched themselves, as far as possible, along the crests of the eastern hills of France, in a line long prepared for just such an exigency. It has been the frightfully difficult task of the Allies, these two years, not only to hold the positions at the foot of these hills, in which they were at a tactical disadvantage, all their movements being visible to the Boches on the crests above them, but also to attack an enemy entrenched in a strong position of his own choosing. To-day at one point along the line, the French and Germans may share the dominating crest of a position, at another point, they may be equally matched, and at another, such as Les Eparges, the French, after fearful losses, have carried the coveted eminence. One phase of the business of violence is the work of the military undertaker attached to each secteur, who writes down in his little red book the names of the day’s dead, and arranges for the wooden cross at the head of each fresh grave. Every day along the front is a battle in which thousands of men die.
The eastern hills of France, those pleasant rolling heights above Rheims, Verdun, and old, provincial Pont-a-Mousson, have been literally gorged with blood. It being out of the question to strengthen or rectify very much the front-line trenches close to the enemy, the effort has taken place in the rear lines. Wherever there is a certain security, the rear lines of all the important strategic points have been converted into veritable subterranean fortresses. The floor plan of these trenches is an adaptation of the military theory of fortification–with its angles, salients, and bastions–to the topography of the region. The gigantic concrete walls of the bomb-proof shelters, the little forts to shelter the machine guns, and the concrete passages in the rear-line trenches will appear as heavy and massive to future generations as Roman masonry appears to us. There are, of course, many unimportant little links of the trench system, upon whose holding nothing depends and for whose domination neither side cares to spend the life of a single soldier, that have only an apology for a second position. The war needs the money for the preparation of important places. At vital points there may be the tremendously powerful second line, a third line, and even a fourth line. The region between Verdun and the lines, for instance, is the most fearful snarl of barbed wire, pits, and buried explosives that could be imagined. The distance would have to be contested inch by inch.
The trench theory is built about the soldier. It must preserve him as far as possible from artillery and from an infantry attack. The defenses begin with barbed wire; then come the rifles and the machine guns; and behind them the light artillery, the “seventy-fives,” and the heavy artillery, the “one hundred and twenties,” “two hundred and twenties,” and, now, an immense howitzer whose real caliber has been carefully concealed. To take a trench position means the crossing of the entanglements of No Man’s Land under fire from artillery, rifles, and machine guns, an almost impossible proceeding. An advance is possible only after the opposing trenches have been made untenable by the concentration of artillery fire. The great offensives begin by blowing the first lines absolutely to pieces; this accomplished, the attacking infantry advances to the vacated trenches under the rifle fire of those few whom the terrible deluge of shells has not killed or crazed, works toward the strong second position under a concentrated artillery fire of the retreating enemy as terrible as its own, fights its way heroically into the second position, and stops there. The great line has been bent, has been dented, but never broken. An offensive must cover at least twenty miles of front, for if the break is too narrow the attacking troops will be massacred by the enemy artillery at both ends of the broken first lines. If the front lines are one mile deep, the artillery must put twenty-five square miles of trenches hors de combat, a task that takes millions of shells. By the time that the first line has been destroyed and the troops have reached the second line, the shells and the men are pretty well used up. A great successful offensive on the western front is theoretically possible, given millions of men, but practically impossible. Outside of important local gains, the great western offensives have been failures. Champagne was a failure, the Calais drive was a failure, Verdun was a failure, and the drive on the Somme has only bent the lines. The Germans may shorten their lines because of a lack of men, but I firmly believe that neither their line nor the Allies’ line will ever be broken. What will be the end if the Allies cannot wrest from Germany, Belgium and that part of northern France she is holding for ransom–to obtain good terms at the peace congress? Is Germany slowly, very slowly going under, or are we going to witness complete European exhaustion? Whatever happens, poor, mourning, desolated France will hold to the end.
In localities where no great offensive is contemplated, and the business of violence has become a routine, the object of the commander is to keep the enemy on the qui-vive, demoralize him by killing and wounding his soldiers, and prevent him from strengthening his first lines. Relations take on the character of an exchange; one day the French throw a thousand mines (high-explosive trench shells) into the German lines, and the next day the Germans throw a thousand back. The French smash up a village where German troops are en repos; while it is being done, the Germans begin to blow a French village to pieces. In the trenches the individual soldiers throw grenades at each other, and wish that the whole tiresome business was done with. They have two weeks in the trenches and two weeks out of them in a cantonment behind the lines. The period in the trenches is divided between the first lines and the rear lines of the first position. Often on my way to the trenches at night I would pass a regiment coming to repos. Silent, vaguely seen, in broken step the regiment passed. Sometimes a shell would come whistling in.
There was one part of the Bois-le-Pretre region upon which nothing depended, and the war had there settled into the casual exchange of powder and old iron that obtains upon two thirds of the front. At the entrance to this position, in the shadow of a beautiful clump of ash trees, stood the rustic shelters of the regimental cooks. From behind the wall of trees came a terrifying crash. The war-gray, iron field kitchen, which the army slang calls a contre-torpilleur (torpedo-boat destroyer), stood in a little clearing of the wood; there was nothing beautiful to the machine, which was simply an iron box, two feet high and four feet square, mounted on big wheels, and fitted with a high oval chimney. A halo of kitcheny smell floated about it, and the open door of its fire-box, in which brands were burning furiously, and a jet of vapor from somewhere, gave it quite the appearance of an odd steam engine. Beside the contre-torpilleur stood the two cooks, both unusually small in stature. One was about thirty-two or three years old, chunky, and gifted with short, strong, hairy arms; the other was much slighter, younger, and so juvenile of face that his downy mustache was almost invisible. I knew these men very well; one, the older, was a farmhand in a village of Touraine, and the other, an errand boy in a bookbinding works at Saint-Denis. The war had turned them into regimental cooks, though it was the older man who did most of the cooking, while the boy occupied himself with gathering wood and distributing the food. The latter once confessed to me that when he heard that Americans were coming to the Bois-le-Pretre, he had expected to see Indians, and that he and his comrades had joked, half in jest, half in earnest, about the Boches going to lose their scalps. The other was famous for an episode of the July attacks: cornered in the trench by a Boche, he had emptied his kettle of hot soup over the man’s head and finished him off with a knife. They waved friendlily at me. The farmhand, in particular, was one of the pleasantest fellows who ever breathed; and still fond, like a true good man of Touraine, of a Rabelaisian jest.
The road now entered the wood, and continued straight ahead down a pleasant vista of young ash trees. Suddenly a trench, bearing its name in little black, dauby letters on a piece of yellow board the size of a shingle, began by the side of the forest road, and I went down into it as I might have gone down cellar. The Boyau Poincare–such was its title–began to curve and twist in the manner of trenches, and I came upon a corner in the first line known as “Three Dead Men,” because after the capture of the wood, three dead Germans were found there in mysterious, lifelike attitudes. The names of trenches on the French front often reflect that deep, native instinct to poetry possessed by simple peoples–the instinct that created the English ballads and the exquisite mediaeval French legends of the saints. Other trench names were symbolic, or patriotic, or political; we had the “Trench of the Great Revenge,” the “Trench of France,” the “Trench of Aristide” (meaning Briand), and the “Boulevard Joffre.”
Beyond “Les Trois Morts,” began the real lines of the position, and as I wound my way through them to the first lines, the pleasant forest of autumnal branches thinned to a wood of trees bare as telegraph poles. It had taken me half an hour to get from the cook’s shelters to the first lines, and during that time I had not heard one single explosion. In the first trench the men stood casually by their posts at the parapet, their bluish coats in an interesting contrast to the brown wall of the trench. Behind the sentries, who peered through the rifle slits every once in a while, flowed the usual populace of the first-line trench, passing as casually as if they were on a Parisian sidewalk, officers as miry as their men, poilus of the Engineer Corps with an eye to the state of the rifle boxes, and an old, unshaven soldier in light-brown corduroy trousers and blue jacket, who volunteered the information that the Boches had thrown a grenade at him as he turned the corner “down there”–“It didn’t go off.” So calm an atmosphere pervaded the cold, sunny, autumnal afternoon that the idea “the trenches” took on the proportions of a gigantic hoax; we might have been masqueraders in the trenches after the war was over. And the Germans were only seventy-five feet away, across those bare poles, stumps, and matted dead brown leaves!
“Attention!”
The atmosphere of the trench changed in a second. Every head in sight looked up searchingly at the sky. Just over the trees, distinctly seen, was a little, black, cylindrical package somersaulting through the air. In another second everybody had calculated the spot in which it was about to land, and those whom it threatened had swiftly found shelter, either by continuing down the trench to a sharp turn, running into the door of an abri (shelter), or simply snuggling into a hole dug in the side of the trench. There was a moment of full, complete silence between the time when everybody had taken refuge and the explosion of the trench shell. The missile burst with that loud hammer pound made by a thick-walled iron shell, and lay smoking in the withered leaves.
“It begins–it begins,” said an old poilu, tossing his head. “Now we shall have those pellets all afternoon.”
An instant after the burst the trench relaxed; some of the sentries looked back to see where the shell had fallen, others paid no attention to it whatsoever. Once again the quiet was disturbed by a muffled boom somewhere ahead of us, and everybody calculated and took refuge exactly as before. The shells began to come, one on the heels of the other with alarming frequency; hardly had one burst when another was discovered in the air. The poilus, who had taken the first shells as a matter of course, good-naturedly even, began to get as cross as peevish schoolboys. It was decidedly too much of a good thing. Finally the order was given for every one except the sentinels, who were standing under the occasional shelters of beams and earth bridged across the trench, to retire to the abris. I saw one of the exposed sentinels as I withdrew, a big, heavily built, young fellow with a face as placid as that of a farm animal; his rifle leaned against the earth of the trench, and the shadow of the shelter fell on his expressionless features. The next sentinel was a man in the late thirties, a tall, nervous soldier with a fierce, aggressive face.
The abri to which we retired was about twenty-five feet long and eight feet wide, and had a door at either end. The hut had been dug right in the crude, calcareous rock of Lorraine, and the beams of the roof were deeply set into these natural walls. Along the front wall ran a corridor about a foot wide, and between this corridor and the rear wall was a raised platform about seven feet wide piled with hay. Sprawled in this hay, in various attitudes, were about fifteen men, the squad that had just completed its sentry service. Two candles hung from the massive roof and flickered in the draughts between the two doors, revealing, in rare periods of radiance, a shelf along the wall over the sleepers’ heads piled with canteens, knapsacks, and helmets. In the middle of the rock wall by the corridor a semicircular funnel had been carved out to serve as a fireplace, and at its base a flameless fire of beautiful, crumbling red brands was glowing. This hearth cut in the living rock was very wonderful and beautiful. Suddenly a trench shell landed right on the roof of the abri, shaking little fragments of stone down into the fire on the hearth. The soldiers, who sat hunched up on the edge of the platform, their feet in the corridor, gave vent to a burst of anger that had its source in exasperation.
“This is going too far.”–“Why don’t they answer?”–“Are those dirty cows (the classic sales vaches) going to keep this up all afternoon?”
“Really, now, this is getting to be a real nuisance.” Suddenly two forms loomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom I have spoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier. Voices murmured in the obscurity, “Who is wounded?”–“Somebody wounded?” And dreamy-eyed ones sat up in the straw. The stolid one–he could not have been much over twenty-one or two–sat down on the edge of the straw near the fireplace, his face showing no emotion, only a pallor. He had a painful but not serious wound; a small fragment of iron, from a shell that had fallen directly into the trench, had lodged in the bones of his foot. He took off his big, ugly shoe and rested the blood-stained sock on the straw. Voices like echoes traveled the length of the shelter–“Is it thou, Jarnac?”–“Art thou wounded, Jarnac?” “Yes,” answered the big fellow in a bass whisper. He was a peasant of the Woevre, one of a stolid, laborious race.
“The lieutenant has gone to the telephone shelter to ring up the batteries,” said the infirmier. “Good,” said a vibrant, masculine voice somewhere in the straw.
A shell coming toward you from the enemy makes a good deal of noise, but it is not to be compared to the noise made by one’s own shells rushing on a slant just over one’s head to break in the enemy’s trenches seventy-five feet away. A swift rafale of some fifty “seventy-five” shells passed whistling like the great wind of the Apocalypse, which is to blow when the firmament collapses. Looking through the rifle slit, after the rafale was over, I could see puffs of smoke apparently rising out of the carpet of dead leaves. The nervous man, the other sentry, held up his finger for us not to make the slightest noise and whispered,–
“I heard somebody yell.”
“Where?”
“Over there by that stump.”
We strained our ears to catch a sound, but heard nothing.
“I heard the yell plainly,” replied the sentry.
The news seemed to give some satisfaction. At any rate, the Germans stopped their trench shells. The quiet hush of late afternoon was at hand. Soon the cook came down the trench with kettles of hot soup.
Five months have passed since I last saw the inhabitants of this abri, the tenants of the “Ritz-Marmite.” How many are still alive? What has happened to this fine, brave crowd of Frenchmen, gentlemen all, bons camarades? I have seen them on guard in a heavy winter snowstorm, when the enemy was throwing grenades which, exploding, blew purplish-black smudges on the snow; I have seen them so bemired in mud and slop that they looked like effigies of brownish earth; I have watched them wading through communication trenches that were veritable canals. And this is the third year of the war.
The most interesting of the lot mentally was a young Socialist named Hippolyte. He was a sous-lieutenant of the Engineers, and had quarters of his own in the rear of the trenches, where one was always sure to find books on social questions lying round in the hay. When the war began he was just finishing his law course at the University of Montpellier. A true son of the South, he was dark, short, but well proportioned, with small hands and feet. The distinguishing features of his countenance were his eyes and mouth–the eyes, eloquent, alert, almost Italian; the mouth, full, firm, and dogmatic. The great orators of the Midi must have resembled him in their youth. He was a Socialist and a pacifist a outrance, continuing his dream of universal fraternity in the midst of war. His work lay in building a tunnel under the Germans, by which he hoped to blow part of the German trenches, Teutons and all, sky-high.
The tunnei (sape) began in the third line, at a door hi the wall of the trench strongly framed in wooden beams the size of railroad ties. At occasional intervals along the passage the roof was reinforced by a frame of these beams, so that the sape had the businesslike, professional look of a gallery in a coal mine. Descending steeply to a point twelve feet beyond the entrance, it then went at a gentle incline under No Man’s Land, and ended beneath the German trenches. It was the original intention to blow up part of the German first line, but it being one day discovered that the Germans were building a tunnel parallel to the French one, it was decided to blow up the French safe so that the explosion would spend its force underground, and cause the walls of the German tunnel to cave in on its makers. I happened to see the tunnel the morning of the day it was blown up. The French had stopped working for fear of being overheard by the Germans. It was a ticklish situation. Were the Germans aware of the French tunnel? If so, they would blow up their own at once. Were they still continuing their labor? The earth of the French might burst apart anyminute and rain down again in a dreadful shower of clods, stones, and mangled bodies.
Alone, quiet, at the end of the passage under the German lines sat an old poilu, the sentinel of the tunnel. He was an old coal miner of the North. The light of a candle showed his quiet, bearded face, grave as the countenance of some sculptured saint on the portico of a Gothic church, and revealed the wrinkles and lines of many years of labor. The sentinel held a microphone to his ears; the poles of it disappearing into the wall of damp earth separating us from the Boches.
Hippolyte whispered, “You hear them?”
The old man nodded his head, and gave the microphone to his officer. I saw Hippolyte listen. Then, without a word, he handed it to me. All that I could hear was a faint tapping.
“The Boches,” whispered Hippolyte.
The French blew up the sape early in the afternoon, at a time when they felt sure the Germans were at work in their tunnel. I saw the result the next day. A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five feet in diameter, and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No Man’s Land. Even the stumps of two trees had sunk and tilted.
It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity. I once talked the matter over with him. He became at once intense, Latin, doctrinaire.
“How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have to do?”
“I do not have to reconcile my theories to my office; I am furthering my theories.”
“How so?”
“By combating the Boches. Without them we might have realized our idea of universal peace and fraternity. Voila l’ennemi! The race is a poisonous race, serpents, massacreurs! I wish I could smother as many of them every day as I did yesterday.”
During my service I did not meet another soldier whose hatred of the Germans was comparable to that of this advocate of universal love.
I left the trenches just at dusk. Above the dreadful depression in No Man’s Land shone a bronzy sky against which the trees raised their haggard silhouettes. There was hardly a sound in the whole length of The Wood. A mist came up making haloes round the rising winter stars.
Chapter VI
The Germans Attack
The schoolmaster (instituteur) and the schoolmistress (institutrice) of Montauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on the second story of the schoolhouse. The kitchen of this fiat had been struck by a shell, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and glass, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of a copper saucepan still hanging on the wall. In one of the rooms, else quite bare of furniture, was an upright piano. Sometimes while stationed at Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the trenches in playing this instrument.
It was about nine o’clock in the morning, and thus far not a single call had come in. The sun was shining very brightly in a sky washed clear by a night of rain, the morning mists were rising from the wood, and up and down the very muddy street walked little groups of soldiers. I drew up the rickety stool and began to play the waltz from “The Count of Luxembourg.” In a short time I heard the sound of tramping on the stairs voices. In came three poilus–a pale boy with a weary, gentle expression in his rather faded blue eyes; a dark, heavy fellow of twenty-five or six, with big wrists, big, muscular hands, and a rather unpleasant, lowering face; and a little, middle-aged man with straightforward, friendly hazel eyes and a pointed beard. The pale, boyish one carried a violin made from a cigar box under his arm, just such a violin as the darkies make down South. This violin was very beautifully made, and decorated with a rustic design. I stopped playing.
“Don’t, don’t,” cried the dark, big fellow; “we haven’t heard any music for a long time. Please keep on. Jacques, here, will accompany you.”
“I never heard the waltz,” said the violinist; “but if you play it over for me once or twice, I’ll try to get the air–if you would like to have me to,” he added with a shy, gentle courtesy.
So I played the rather banal waltz again, till the lad caught the tune. He hit it amazingly well, and his ear was unusually true. The dark one had been in Canada and was hungry for American rag-time. “‘The Good Old Summer Time’–you know that? ‘Harrigan’–you know that?” he said in English. The rag-time of “Harrigan” floated out on the street of Montauville. But I did not care to play things which could have no violin obligato, so I began to play what I remembered of waltzes dear to every Frenchman’s heart–the tunes of the “Merry Widow.” “Sylvia” went off with quite a dash. The concert was getting popular. Somebody wanted to send for a certain Alphonse who had an occarina. Two other poilus, men in the forties, came up, their dark-brown, horseshoe beards making them look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on the sunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, who turned out to be a Norman, played a solo–some music-hall fantasy, I imagine. The next number was the ever popular “Tipperaree,” which every single poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind of English. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than the “Merry Widow.” I thanked Heaven that I was not called on to translate it, a feat frequently demanded of the American drivers. The song is silly enough in the King’s English, but in lucid, exact French, it sinks to positive imbecility.
“You play, don’t you?” said the violinist to the small bearded man.
“A little,” he replied modestly.
“Please play.”
The little man sat down at the piano, meditated a minute, and began to play the rich chords of Rachmaninof’s “Prelude.” He got about half through, when Zip-bang! a small shell burst down the street. The dark fellow threw open the French window. The poilus were scurrying to shelter. The pianist continued with the “Prelude.”
Zip-bang! Zip-bang! Zshh–Bang–Bang. Bang-Bang!
The piano stopped. Everybody listened. The village was still as death. Suddenly down the street came the rattle of a volley of rifle shots. Over this sound rose the choked, metallic notes of a bugle-call. The rifle shots continued. The ominous popping of machine guns resounded. The village, recovering from its silence, filled with murmurs. Bang! Bang! Bang I Bang! went some more shells. The same knowledge took definite shape in our minds.
“An attack!”
The violinist, clutching his instrument, hurried down the stairs followed by all the others, leaving the chords of the uncompleted “Prelude” to hang in the startled air. Shells were popping everywhere–crashes of smoke and violence–in the roads, in the fields, and overhead. The Germans were trying to isolate the few detachments en repos in the village, and prevent reinforcements coming from Dieulouard or any other place. To this end all the roads between Pont-a-Mousson and the trenches, and the roads leading directly to the trenches, were being shelled.
“Go at once to Poste C!”
The winding road lay straight ahead, and just at the end of the village street, the Germans had established a tir de barrage. This meant that a shell was falling at that particular point about once every fifty seconds. I heard two rafales break there as I was grinding up the machine. Up the slope of the Montauville hill came several of the other drivers. Tyler, of New York, a comrade who united remarkable bravery to the kindest of hearts, followed close behind me, also evidently bound for Poste C. German bullets, fired wildly from the ridge of The Wood over the French trenches, sang across the Montauville valley, lodging in the trees of Puvenelle behind us with a vicious tspt; shells broke here and there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Reserve, throwing the small rocks of the road surfacing wildly in every direction. The French batteries to our left were firing at the Germans, the German batteries were firing at the French trenches and the roads, and the machine guns rattled ceaselessly. I saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of the slope of the Bois-le-Pretre–vague masses of moving blue on the brown ways. A storm of shells was breaking round certain points in the road and particularly at the entrance to The Wood. I wondered what had become of the audience at the concert. Various sounds, transit of shells, bursting of shells, crashing of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! of mitrailleuses played the treble to a roar formed of echoes and cadences–the roar of battle. The Wood of Death (Le Bois de la Mort) was singing again.
That day’s attack was an attempt by the Germans to take back from the French the eastern third of the Quart-en-Reserve and the rest of the adjoining ridge half hidden in the shattered trees. At the top of the plateau, by the rise in the moorland I described in the preceding chapter, I had an instant’s view of the near-by battle, for the focus was hardly more than four hundred yards away. There was a glimpse of human beings in the Quart–soldiers in green, soldiers in blue–the very fact that anybody was to be seen there was profoundly stirring. They were fighting in No Man’s Land. Tyler and I watched for a second, wondering what scenes of agony, of heroism, of despair were being enacted in that dreadful field by the ruined wood.
We hurried our wounded to the hospital, passing on our way detachments of soldiers rushing toward The Wood from the villages of the region. Three or four big shells had just fallen in Dieulouard, and the village was deserted and horribly still. The wind carried the roar of the attack to our ears. In three quarters of an hour, I was back again at the same moorland poste, to which an order of our commander had attached me. Montauville was full of wounded. I had three on stretchers inside, one beside me on the seat, and two others on the front mudguards. And The Wood continued to sing. From Montauville I could hear the savage yells and cries which accompanied the fighting.
Half an hour after the beginning of the attack, the war invaded the sky, with the coming of the German reconnoitering aeroplanes. One went to watch the roads leading to The Wood along the plateau, one went to watch the Dieulouard road, and the other hovered over the scene of the combat. The sky was soon dotted with the puffs of smoke left by the exploding shells of the special anti-aircraft “seventy- fives.” These puffs blossomed from a pin-point of light to a vaporous, gray-white puff-ball about the size of the full moon, and then dissolved in the air or blew about in streaks and wisps. These cloudlets, fired at an aviator flying along a certain line, often were gathered by the eye into arrangements resembling constellations. The three machines were very high, and had a likeness to little brown and silver insects.
The Boche watching the conflict appeared to hang almost immobile over the Quart. With a striking suddenness, another machine appeared behind him and above him. So unexpected was the approach of this second aeroplane that its appearance had a touch of the miraculous. It might have been created at that very moment in the sky. The Frenchman–for it was an aviator from the parc at Toul, since killed at Verdun, poor fellow–swooped beneath his antagonist and fired his machine gun at him. The German answered with two shots of a carbine. The Frenchman fired again. Suddenly the German machine flopped to the right and swooped down; it then flopped to the left, the tail of the machine flew up, and the apparatus fell, not so swiftly as one might expect, down a thousand feet into The Wood. When I saw the wreckage, a few days afterwards, it looked like the spilt contents of a waste-paper basket, and the aviators, a pilot and an observer, had had to be collected from all over the landscape. The French buried them with full military honors.
Thanks to the use of a flame machine, the Germans succeeded in regaining the part of the ridge they had lost, but the French made it so hot for them that they abandoned it, and the contested trenches now lie in No Man’s Land. All that night the whole Wood was illuminated, trench light after trench light rising over the dark branches. There would be a rocket like the trail of bronze-red powder sparks hanging for an instant in the sky, then a loud Plop! and the French light would spread out its parachute and sail slowly down the sky toward the river. The German lights (fusees eclairantes), cartridges of magnesium fired from a gun resembling a shotgun, burned only during their dazzling trajectory. At midnight the sky darkened with low, black rain clouds, upon whose surface the constant cannon fire flashed in pools of violet-white light. Coming down from the plateau at two in the morning, I could see sharp jabs of cannon fire for thirty miles along the front on the other side of the Moselle.
Just after this attack a doctor of the army service was walking through the trenches in which the French had made their stand. He noticed something oddly skewered to a tree. He knocked it down with a stone, and a human heart fell at his feet.
The most interesting question of the whole business is, “How do the soldiers stand it?” At the beginning of my own service, I thought Pont-a-Mousson, with its ruins, its danger, and its darkness, the most awful place on the face of the earth. After a little while, I grew accustomed to the decor, and when the time came for me to leave it, I went with as much regret as if I were leaving the friendliest, most peaceful of towns. First the decor, growing familiar, lost the keener edges of its horror, and then the life of the front–the violence, the destruction, the dying and the dead–all became casual, part of the day’s work. A human being is profoundly affected by those about him; thus, when a new soldier finds himself for the first time in a trench, he is sustained by the attitude of the veterans. Violence becomes the commonplace; shells, gases, and flames are the things that life is made of. The war is another lesson in the power of the species to adapt itself to circumstances. When this power of adaptability has been reinforced by a tenacious national will “to see the thing through,” men will stand hell itself. The slow, dogged determination of the British cannot be more powerful than the resolution of the French. Their decision to continue at all costs has been reached by a purely intellectual process, and to enforce it, they have called upon those ancient foundations of the French character, the sober reasonableness and unbending will they inherit from Rome.
And a new religion has risen in the trenches, a faith much more akin to Mahomet than to Christ. It is a fatalism of action. The soldier finds his salvation in the belief that nothing will happen to him until his hour comes, and the logical corollary of this belief, that it does no good to worry, is his rock of ages. It is a curious thing to see poilus–peasants, artisans, scholars–completely in the grip of this philosophy. There has been a certain return to the Church of Rome, for which several reasons exist, the greatest being that the war has made men turn to spiritual things. Only an animal could be confronted with the pageant of heroism, the glory of sacrifice, and the presence of Death, and not be moved to a contemplation of the fountain-head of these sublime mysteries. But it is the upper class which in particular has returned to the Church. Before the war, rationalist and genial skeptic, the educated Frenchman went to church because it was the thing to do, and because non-attendance would weaken an institution which the world was by no means ready to lay aside. This same educated Frenchman, brought face to face with the mystery of human existence, has felt a real need of spiritual support, and consequently returned to the Church of his fathers.
The religious revival is a return of upper-class prodigals to the fold, and a rekindling of the chilled brands of the faith of the amiably skeptical. The great mass of the nation has felt this spiritual force, but because the mass of the nation was always Catholic, nothing much has changed. I failed to find any trace of conversions among the still hostile working men of the towns, and the bred-in-the-bone Socialists. The rallying of the conservative classes about the Cross is also due to the fact that the war has exposed the mediocrity and sterile windiness of the old socialistic governments; this misgovernment the upper classes have determined to end once they return from the trenches, and remembering that the Church of Rome was the enemy of the past administrations, cannot help regarding her with a certain friendliness. But this issue of past misgovernment will be fought out on purely secular grounds, and the Church will be only a sympathizer behind the fray. The manner in which the French priests have fought and died is worthy of the admiration of the world. Never in the history of any country has the national religion been so closely enmeshed in the national life. The older clergy, as a rule, have been attached to the medical services of the front, serving as hospital orderlies and stretcher-bearers, but the younger priests have been put right into the army and are fighting to-day as common soldiers. There are hundreds of officer-priests–captains and lieutenants of the regular army.
But the real religion of the front is the philosophy of Mahomet. Life will end only when Death has been decreed by Fate, and the Boches are the unbelievers. After all, Islam in its great days was a virile faith, the faith of a race of soldiers.
Chapter VII
The Town In The Trenches
At the beginning of the war the German plan of campaign was to take France on the flank by marching through Belgium, and once the success of this northern venture assured, strike at the Verdun-Belfort line which had baffled them in the first instance. Had they not lost the battle of the Marne, this second venture might have proved successful, for the body of the French army was fighting in the north, and the remaining troops would have been discouraged by the capture of Paris. On the eve of the battle of the Marne the campaign seeming to be well in hand in the north, a German invasion of Lorraine began, one army striking at the defenses of the great plateau which slopes from the Vosges to the Moselle, and the other attempting to ascend the valley of the river. It was this second army which entered Pont-a-Mousson.
Immediately following the declaration of hostilities the troops who had been quartered in the town were withdrawn, and the town was left open to the enemy who, going very cautiously, was on his way from Metz. For several weeks in August, this city, almost directly on the frontier, saw no soldiers, French or German. It was a time of dramatic suspense. The best recital of it I ever heard came from the lips of the housekeeper of Wisteria Villa, a splendid, brave French woman who had never left her post. She was short, of a clear, tanned complexion, and always had her hair tightly rolled up in a little classic pug. She was as fearless of shells as a soldier in the trenches, and once went to a deserted orchard, practically in the trenches, to get some apples for Messieurs les Americains. When asked why she did not get them at a safer place, she replied that she did not have to pay for these apples as the land belonged to her father! Her ear for shells was the most accurate of the neighborhood, and when a deafening crash would shake the kettles on the stove and rattle the teacups, she could tell you exactly from what direction it had come and the probable caliber. I remember one morning seeing her wash dishes while the Germans were shelling the corner I have already described. The window over the sink opened directly on the dangerous area, and she might have been killed any minute by a flying eclat. Standing with her hands in the soapy water, or wiping dry the hideous blue-and-white dinner service of Wisteria Villa, she never even bothered to look up to see where the shells were landing. Two “seventy-sevens” went off with a horrid pop; “Those are only ‘seventy-sevens,'” she murmured as if to herself. A fearful swish was next heard and the house rocked to the din of an explosion. “That’s a ‘two hundred and ten’–the rogues–oh, the rogues!” she exclaimed in the tone she might have used in scolding a depraved boy.
At night, when the kitchen was cleared up, she sat down to write her daily letter to her soldier son, and once this duty finished, liked nothing better than a friendly chat. She knew the history of Pont-a-Mousson and Montauville and the inhabitants thereof by heart; she had tales to tell of the shrewdness of the peasants and diverting anecdotes of their manners and morals. These stories she told very well and picturesquely.
“The first thing we saw was the President’s poster saying not to be alarmed, that the measures of military preparation were required by circumstances (les evenements) and did not mean war. Then over this bill the maire posted a notice that in case of a real mobilization (une mobilisation serieuse) they would ring the tocsin. At eleven o’clock the tocsin rang, oh, la la, monsieur, what a fracas! All the bells in the town, Saint-Martin, Saint-Laurent, the hotel de ville. Immediately all our troops went away. We did not want to see them go. ‘We shall be back again,’ they said. They liked Pont-a-Mousson. Such good young fellows! The butcher’s wife has heard that only fifty-five of the six hundred who were here are alive. They were of the active forces (de l’active). A great many people followed the soldiers. So for two weeks we were left all alone, wondering what was to become of us. And all the time we heard frightful stories about the villages beyond Nancy. On the nth of August we heard cannon for the first time, and on the 12th and the 14th we were bombarded. On the 4th of September, at five o’clock in the evening, the bells began to ring again. Everybody ran out to find the reason. Les Allemands–they were not then called Boches–were coming. Baoum! went the bridge over the Moselle. Everybody went into their houses, so that the Germans came down streets absolutely deserted. I peeked from my window blind. The Boches came down the road from Norroy, les Uhlans, the infantry–how big and ugly they all were. And their officers were so stiff (raide). They were not like our bons petits soldats Francais. In the morning I went out to get some bread.
“‘Eh la, good woman’ (bonne femme), said a grand Boche to me.
“‘What do you want?’ said I.
“‘Are there any soldats francais in the town?’ said the Boche.
“‘How should I know?’ I answered.
“‘You do not want to tell, good woman.’
“‘I do not know.’
“‘Are there any francs-tireurs (civilian snipers) in this town?’
“‘Don’t bother me; I’m going for some bread.’
“During the night all the clocks had been changed to German time. Many of the Boches spoke French. There were Alsatians and Lorrains who did not like the fracas at all. Yes, the Boches behaved themselves all right at Pont-a-Mousson–there were some vulgarities (grossieretes). One of the soldiers, a big blond, went down the street wearing an ostrich feather hat and a woman’s union suit and chemise. It was a scandale. But uncle laughed to kill himself; he was peeping out through the blinds. Right in front of my door were ten cannon, and all the street was full of artillery. Well we had four days of this, hearing never a word from the French side.
“On the night of the 9th I heard a good deal of noise, and somebody woke up the Boches sous-officiers who were quartered in a house across the street. I saw lights and heard shouts. I was peeping out of my window all the time. The dark street filled with soldiers. I saw their officers lashing them to make them hurry. They harnessed the artillery horses to the guns, and at four o’clock in the morning there was not a single Boche in Pont-a-Mousson. They had all gone away in the night, taking with them the German flag on the city hall. You know, monsieur, on the night of the 9th they received news of the battle of the Marne.
“For five days more we saw neither Francais nor Boches. Finally some French dragoons came down the road from Dieulouard, and little by little other soldiers came too. But, helas, monsieur, the Boches were waiting for them in the Bois-le-Pretre.”
Such was the way that Pont-a-Mousson did not become Mussenbruck. The episode is an agreeable interlude of decency in the history of German occupations, for that atrocities were perpetrated in Nomeny, just across the river, is beyond question. I have talked with survivors. At Pont-a-Mousson everything was orderly; six miles to the east, houses were burned over the heads of the inhabitants, and women and children brutally massacred.
I best remember the little city as it was one afternoon in early December. The population of 17,000 had then shrunk to about 900, and only a little furtive life lingered in the town. My promenade began at the river-bank by the wooden footbridge crossing from the shore to the remaining arches of the graceful eighteenth-century stone bridge blown up in September, 1914. There is always something melancholy about a ruined bridge, perhaps because the structure symbolizes a patient human victory over the material world. There was something intensely tragic in the view of the wrecked quarter of Saint-Martin, seen across the deep, greenish, wintry river, and in the great curve of the broad flood sullenly hurrying to Metz. At the end of the bridge, ancient and gray, rose the two round towers of the fifteenth-century parish church, with that blind, solemn look to them the towers of Notre Dame possess, and beyond this edifice, a tile-roofed town and the great triangular hill called the Mousson. It was dangerous to cross the bridge, because German snipers occasionally fired at it, so I contented myself with looking down the river. Beyond the Bois-le-Pretre, the next ridge to rise from the river was a grassy spur bearing the village of Norroy on its back. You could see the hill, only four kilometres away, the brown walls of the village, the red roofs, and sometimes the glint of sunlight on a window; but for us the village might have been on another planet. All social and economic relations with Norroy had ceased since September, 1914, and reflecting on this fact, the invisible wall of the trenches became more than a mere military wall, became a barrier to every human relation and peaceful tie.
A sentry stood by the ruined bridge, a small, well-knit man with beautiful silver-gray hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks; his uniform was exceptionally clean, and he appeared to be some decent burgher torn from his customary life. I fell into conversation with him. He recollected that his father, a veteran of 1870, had prophesied the present war.
“‘We shall see them again, the spiked helmets (les casques a pointe),’ said my father–‘we shall see them again.’
“‘Why?’ I asked him.
“‘Because they have eaten of us, and will be hungry once more.'”
The principal street of the town led from this bridge to a great square, and continued straight on toward Maidieres and Montauville. The sidewalks around this square were in arcades under the houses, for the second story of every building projected for seven or eight feet over the first and rested on a line of arches at the edge of the street. To avoid damage from shells bursting in the open space, every one of these arcades, and there were perhaps a hundred all told, had been plugged with sandbags, so that the square had an odd, blind look. A little life flickered in the damp, dark alleys behind these obstructions. There was a tobacco shop, kept by two pretty young women whom the younger soldiers were always jollying, a wineshop, a tailorshop, and a bookstore, always well supplied with the great Parisian weeklies, which one found later in odd corners of shelters in the trenches. Occasionally a soldier bought a serious book when it was to be found in the dusty files of the “Collection Nelson”; I remember seeing a young lieutenant of artillery buying Segur’s “Histoire de la Grande Armee en 1812,” and another taking Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple.” But the military life, roughly lived, and shared with simple people, appears to make even the wisest boyish, and after a while at the front the intellect will not read anything intellectual. It simply won’t, perhaps because it can’t. The soldier mind delights in rough, genial, and simple jokes. A sergeant, whom I knew to be a distinguished young scholar in civilian life, was always throwing messages wrapped round a stone into the German trenches; the messages were killingly funny, amiably indecent, and very jejune. Invariably they provoked a storm of grenades, and sometimes epistles in the same vein from the Boches. In spite of the vicious pang of the grenades, there was an absurd “Boys-will-be-boys” air to the whole performance. Conversation, however, did not sink to this boyish level, and the rag-tag and bob-tail of one’s cultivation found its outlet in speech.
At the end of this street was the railroad crossing, the passage a niveau, and the station in a jungle of dead grass and brambles. Like the bridge, its rustiness and weediness was a dreadful symbol of the cessation of human activity, and the blue enamel signpost lettered in white with the legend, “Metz–32 kilometres,” was another reminder of the town to which the French aspired with all the fierce intensity of crusaders longing for Jerusalem. It was impossible to get away from the omnipresence of the name of the fated city–it stared at you from obscure street corners, and was to be found on the covers of printed books and post-cards. I saw the city once from the top of the hill of the Mousson; its cathedral towers pierced the blue mists of the brown moorlands, and it appeared phantasmal and tremendously distant. Yet for those towers countless men had died, were dying, would die. A French soldier who had made the ascent with me pointed out Metz the much desired.
“Are you going to get it?” I asked. “Perhaps so,” he replied gravely. “After so many sacrifices.” (Apres tant de sacrifices.) He made no gesture, but I know that his vision included the soldiers’ cemetery at the foot of the Mousson hill. It lay, a rust-colored field, on the steep hillside just at the border of the town, and was new, raw, and dreadful. The guardian of the cemetery, an old veteran of 1870, once took me through the place. He was a very lean, hooped-over old man with a big, aquiline nose, blue-gray eyes framed in red lids, and a huge, yellowish-white mustache. First he showed me the hideous picture of the civilian cemetery, in which giant shells had torn open the tombs, hurled great sarcophagi a distance of fifty feet, and dug craters in the rows of graves. Though the civilian authorities had done what they could to put the place in order, there were still memories of the disturbed dead to whom the war had denied rest. Coming to the military cemetery, the guardian whispered, pointing to the new mounds with his rustic cane, “I have two colonels, three commandants, and a captain. Yes, two colonels” (deux colonels). Following his staff, my eye looked at the graves as if it expected to see the living men or their effigies. Somewhat apart lay another grave. “Voila un colonel boche,” said the sexton; “and a lieutenant boche–and fifty soldats boches.”
The destroyed quarter of Pont-a-Mousson lay between the main street and the flank of the Bois-le-Pretre. The quarter was almost totally deserted, probably not more than ten houses being inhabited out of several thousand. The streets that led into it had grass growing high in the gutters, and a velvety moss wearing a winter rustiness grew packed between the paving-stones. Beyond the main street, la rue Fabvrier went straight down this loneliness, and halted or turned at a clump of wrecked houses a quarter of a mile away. Over this clump, slately-purple and cold, appeared the Bois-le-Pretre, and every once in a while a puffy cloud of greenish-brown or gray-black would float solemnly over the crests of the trees. This stretch of la rue Fabvrier was one of the most melancholy pictures it was possible to see. Hardly a house had been spared by the German shells; there were pock-marks and pits of shell fragments in the plaster, window glass outside, and holes in walls and roofs. I wandered down the street, passing the famous miraculous statue of the Virgin of Pont-a-Mousson. The image, only a foot or two high and quite devoid of facial expression, managed somehow to express emotion in the outstretched arms, drooping in a gesture at once of invitation and acceptance. A shell had maculated the wall on each side and above the statue, but the little niche and canopy were quite untouched. The heavy sound of my soldier boots went dump! clump! down the silence.
At the end of the road, in the fields on the slope, a beautiful eighteenth-century house stood behind a mossy green wall. It was just such a French house as is the analogue of our brick mansions of Georgian days; it was two stories high and had a great front room on each side of an entry on both floors, each room being lighted with two well-proportioned French windows. The outer walls were a golden brown, and the roof, which curved in gently from the four sides to central ridge, a very beautiful rich red. The house had the atmosphere of the era of the French Revolution; one’s fancy could people it with soberly dressed provincial grandees. A pare of larches and hemlocks lay about it, concealing in their silent obscurity an artificial lake heavily coated with a pea-soup scum.
Beyond the house lay the deserted rose-garden, rank and grown to weeds. On some of the bushes were cankered, frozen buds. In the center of the garden, at the meeting-point of several paths, a mossy fountain was flowing into a greenish basin shaped like a seashell, and in this basin a poilu was washing his clothes. He was a man of thirty-eight or nine, big, muscular, out-of-doors looking; whistling, he washed his gray underclothes with the soap the army furnishes, wrung them, and tossed them over the rose-bushes to dry.
“Does anybody live in this house?”
“Yes, a squad of travailleurs.”
A regiment of travailleurs is attached to every secteur of trenches. These soldiers, depending, I believe, on the Engineer Corps, are quartered just behind the lines, and go to them every day to put them in order, repair the roads, and do all the manual labor. Humble folk these, peasants, ditch-diggers, road-menders, and village carpenters. Those at Pont-a-Mousson were nearly all fathers of families, and it was one of the sights of the war most charged with true pathos to see these gray-haired men marching to the trenches with their shovels on their shoulders.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Oh, yes. We live very quietly. I, being a stonemason and a carpenter, stay behind and keep the house in repair. In summer we have our little vegetable gardens down behind those trees where the Boches can’t see us.”
“Can I see the house?”
“Surely; just wait till I have finished sousing these clothes.”
The room on the ground floor to the left of the hallway was imposing in a stately Old-World way. The rooms in Wisteria Villa were rooms for personages from Zola; this room was inhabited by ghosts from the pages of Balzac. It was large, high, and square; the walls were hung with a golden scroll design printed on ancient yellow silk; the furniture was of some rich brown finish with streaks and lusters of bronzy yellow, and a glass chandelier, all spangles and teardrops of crystal, hung from a round golden panel in the ceiling. Over a severe Louis XVI mantel was a large oil portrait of Pius IX, and on the opposite wall a portrait head of a very beautiful young girl. Chestnut hair, parted in the fashion of the late sixties, formed a silky frame round an oval face, and the features were small and well proportioned. The most remarkable part of the countenance were the curiously level eyes. The calm, apart-from-the-world character of the expression in the eyes was in interesting contrast to the good-natured and somewhat childish look in the eyes of the old Pope.
“Who lived here?”
“An old man (un vieux). He was a captain of the Papal Zouaves in his youth. See here, read the inscription on the portrait–‘Presented by His Holiness to a champion (defenseur) of the Church.'”
“Is he still alive?”
“He died three months ago in Paris. I should hate to die before I see how the war is going to end. I imagine he would have been willing to last a bit longer.”
“And this picture on the right, the jeune fille?”
“That was his daughter, an only child. She became a nun, and died when she was still young. The old man’s gardener comes round from time to time to see if the place is all right. It is a pity he is not here; he could tell you all about them.”
“You are very fortunate not to have been blown to pieces. Surely you are very near the trenches.”
“Near enough–yes, indeed. A communication trench comes right into the cellar. But it is quiet in this part of The Wood. There is a regiment of old Boches in the trenches opposite our territorials, fathers of families (peres de familles), just as they are. We fire rifles at each other from time to time just to remember it is war (c’est la guerre). We share the crest together here; nothing depends on it. What good should we do in killing each other? Besides it would be a waste of shells.”
“How do you know that the Boches opposite you are old?”
“We see them from time to time. They are great hands at a parley. The first thing they tell you is the number of children they have. I met an old Boche not long ago down by the river. He held up two fingers to show that he had two children, put his hand out just above his knee to show the height of his first child, and raised it just above his waist to show the height of the second. So I held up five fingers to show him I had five children, when the Lord knows I have only one. But I did not want to be beaten by a Boche.”
A sound of voices was heard beneath us, and the clang of the shovels being placed against the stone walls of the cellar.
“Those are the travailleurs. The sergeant will be coming in and I must report to him. Good-bye, American friend, and come again.”
A melancholy dusk was beginning as I turned home from the romantic house, and the deserted streets were filling with purplish shadows. The concussion of exploding shells had blown almost all the glass out of the windows of the Church of St. Laurent, and the few brilliant red and yellow fragments that still clung to the twisted leaden frames reminded me of the autumn leaves that sometimes cling to winter-stricken trees. The interior of the church was swept and garnished, and about twenty candles with golden flames, slowly waving in the drafts from the ruined windows, shone beneath a statue of the Virgin. There was not another soul in the church. A terrible silence fell with the gathering darkness. In a little wicker basket at the foot of the benignant mother were about twenty photographs of soldiers, some in little brassy frames with spots of verdigris on them, some the old-fashioned “cabinet” kind, some on simple post-cards. There was a young, dark Zouave who stood with his hand on an ugly little table, a sergeant of the Engineer Corps with a vacant, uninteresting face, and two young infantry men, brothers, on the same shabby finger-marked post-card. Pious hands had left them thus in the care of the unhappy mother, “Marie, consolatrice des malheureux.”
The darkness of midnight was beginning at Pont-a-Mousson, for the town was always as black as a pit. On my way home I saw a furtive knife edge of yellow light here and there under a door. The sentry stood by his shuttered lantern. Suddenly the first of the trench lights flowered in the sky over the long dark ridge of the Bois-le-Pretre.
Chapter VIII
Messieurs Les Poilus De La Grande Guerre
The word “poilu,” now applied to a French soldier, means literally “a hairy one,” but the term is understood metaphorically. Since time immemorial the possession of plenty of bodily hair has served to indicate a certain sturdy, male bearishness, and thus the French, long before the war, called any good, powerful fellow–“un veritable poilu.” The term has been found applied to soldiers of the Napoleonic wars. The French soldier of to-day, coming from the trenches looking like a well-digger, but contented, hearty, and strong, is the poilu par excellence.
The origin of the term “Boche,” meaning a German, has been treated in a thousand articles, and controversy has raged over it. The probable origin of the term, however, lies in the Parisian slang word “caboche,” meaning an ugly head. This became shortened to “Boche,” and was applied to foreigners of Germanic origin, in exactly the way that the American-born laborer applies the contemptuous term “square-head” to his competitors from northern Europe. The word “Boche” cannot be translated by anything except “Boche,” any more than our word “Wop,” meaning an Italian, can be turned into French. The same attitude, half banter, half race contempt, lies at the heart of both terms.
When the poilus have faced the Boches for two weeks in the trenches, they march down late at night to a village behind the lines, far enough away from the batteries to be out of danger of everything except occasional big shells, and near enough to be rushed up to the front in case of an attack. There they are quartered in houses, barns, sheds, and cellars, in everything that can decently house and shelter a man. These two weeks of repos are the poilus’ elysium, for they mean rest from strain, safety, and comparative comfort. The English have behind their lines model villages with macadam roads, concrete sidewalks, a water system, a sewer system, and all kinds of schemes to make the soldiers happy; the French have to be contented with an ordinary Lorraine village, kept in good order by the Medical Corps, but quite destitute of anything as chic as the British possess.
The village of cantonnement is pretty sure to be the usual brown-walled, red-roofed village of Lorraine clumped round its parish church or mouldering castle. In such a French village there is always a hall, usually over the largest wineshop, called the “Salle de Fetes,” and this hall serves for the concert each regiment gives while en repos. The Government provides for, indeed insists upon, a weekly bath, and the bathhouse, usually some converted factory or large shed, receives its daily consignments of companies, marching up to the douches as solemnly as if they were going to church. Round the army continues the often busy life of the village, for to many such a hamlet the presence of a multitude of soldiers is a great economic boon. Grocery-shops, in particular, do a rushing business, for any soldier who has a sou is glad to vary the government menu with such delicacies as pates de foie gras, little sugar biscuits, and the well- beloved tablet of chocolate.
While the grocery-man (l’epicier) is fighting somewhere in the north or in the Argonne, madame l’epiciere stays at home and serves the customers. At her side is her own father, an old fellow wearing big yellow sabots, and perhaps the grocer’s son and heir, a boy about twelve years old. Madame is dressed entirely in black, not because she is in mourning, but because it is the rural fashion; she wears a knitted shoulder cape, a high black collar, and moves in a brisk, businesslike way; the two men wear the blue-check overalls persons of their calling affect, in company with very clean white collars and rather dirty, frayed bow ties of unlovely patterns. Along the counter stand the poilus, young, old, small, and large, all wearing various fadings of the horizon blue, and helmets often dented. “Some pate de foie gras, madame, s’il vous plait.” “Oui, monsieur.” “How much is this cheese, maman?” cries the boy in a shrill treble. In the barrel-haunted darkness at the rear of the shop, the old man fumbles round for some tins of jelly. The poilu is very fond of sweets. Sometimes swish bang! a big shell comes in unexpectedly, and shopkeepers and clients hurry, at a decent tempo, to the cellar. There, in the earthy obscurity, one sits down on empty herring-boxes and vegetable cases to wait calmly for the exasperating Boches to finish their nonsense. There is a smell of kerosene oil and onions in the air. A lantern, always on hand for just such an emergency, burns in a corner. “Have you had a bad time in the trenches this week, Monsieur Levrault?” says the epiciere to a big, stolid soldier who is a regular customer.
“No, quite passable, Madame Champaubert.”
“And Monsieur Petticollot, how is he?”
“Very well, thank you, madame. His captain was killed by a rifle grenade last week.”
“Oh, the poor man.”
Crash goes a shell. Everybody wonders where it has fallen. In a few seconds the eclats rain down into the street.
“Dirty animals,” says the voice of the old man in the darkest of all the corners.
Madame Champaubert begins the story of how a cousin of hers who keeps a grocery-shop at Mailly, near the frontier, was cheated by a Boche tinware salesman. The cellar listens sympathetically. The boy says nothing, but keeps his eyes fixed on the soldiers. In about twenty minutes the bombardment ends, and the bolder ones go out to ascertain the damage. The soldier’s purchases are lying on the counter. These he stuffs into his musette, the cloth wallet beloved of the poilu, and departs. The colonel’s cook comes in; he has got hold of a good ham and wants to deck it out with herbs and capers. Has madame any capers? While she is getting them, the colonel’s cook retails the cream of all the regimental gossip.
These people of Lorraine who have stayed behind, “Lorrains,” the French term them, are thoroughly French, though there is some German blood in their veins. This Teuton addition is of very ancient date, being due to the constant invasions which have swept up the valley of the Moselle. This intermingling of the races, however, continued right up to 1870, but since then the union of French and German stock has been rare. It was most frequent, perhaps, during the years between 1804 and 1850, when Napoleon’s domination of the principalities and states along the Rhine led to a French social and commercial invasion of Rhenish Germany, an invasion which ended only with the growth of German nationalism. The middle classes in particular intermarried because they were more apt to be engaged in commerce. But since 1870, two barriers, one geographic –annexed Lorraine, and one intellectual–hatred, have kept the neighbors apart. The Lorrain of to-day, no matter what his ancestors were, is a thorough Frenchman. These Lorrains are between medium height and tall, strongly built, with light, tawny hair, good color, and a brownish complexion.
The poilus who come to the village en repos are from every part of France, and are of all ages between nineteen and forty-five. I remember seeing a boy aged only fourteen who had enlisted, and was a regular member of an artillery regiment. The average regiment includes men of every class and caste, for every Frenchman who can shoulder a gun is in the war. Thus the dusty little soldier who is standing by Poste A, may be So-and-So the sculptor, the next man to him is simple Jacques who has a little farm near Bourges, and the man beyond, Emile, the notary’s clerk. It is this amazing fraternity that makes the French army the greatest army in the world. The officers of a regiment of the active forces (by l’armee active you are to understand the army actually in the garrisons and under arms from year to year) are army officers by profession; the officers of the reserve regiments are either retired officers of the regular army or men who have voluntarily followed the severe courses in the officers’ training-school. Thus the colonel and three of the commandants of a certain regiment were ex-officers of the regular army, while all the other officers, captains, lieutenants, and so forth, were citizens who followed civilian pursuits. Captain X was a famous lawyer, Captain B a small merchant in a little known provincial town, Captain C a photographer. Any Frenchman who has the requisite education can become an officer if he is willing to devote more of his time, than is by law required, to military service. Thus the French army is the soul of democracy, and the officer understands, and is understood by, his men. The spirit of the French army is remarkably fraternal, and this fraternity is at once social and mystical. It has a social origin, for the poilus realize that the army rests on class justice and equal opportunity; it has a mystical strength, because war has taught the men that it is only the human being that counts, and that comradeship is better than insistence on the rights and virtues of pomps and prides. After having been face to face with death for two years, a man learns something about the true values of human life.
The men who tramp into the village at one and two o’clock in the morning are men who have for two weeks been under a strain that two years of experience has robbed of its tensity. But strain it is, nevertheless, as the occasional carrying of a maniac reveals. They know very well why they are fighting; even the most ignorant French laborer has some idea as to what the affair is all about. The Boches attacked France who was peacefully minding her own business; it was the duty of all Frenchmen to defend France, so everybody went to the war. And since the war has gone on for so long, it must be seen through to the very end. Not a single poilu wants peace or is ready for peace. And the French, unlike the English, have continually under their eyes the spectacle of their devastated land. Yet I heard no ferocious talk about the Germans, no tales of French cruelty toward German prisoners.
Nevertheless, a German prisoner who had been taken in the Bois-le-Pretre confessed to me a horror of the French breaking through into Germany. Looking round to see if any one was listening, he said in English, for he was an educated man–“Just remember the French Revolution. Just remember the French Revolution. God! what cruelties. You remember Carrier at Nantes, don’t you, my dear sir? All the things we are said to have done in Belgium–” But here the troop of prisoners was hurried to one side, and I never saw the man again. An army will always have all kinds of people in it, the good, the bad, the degenerate, the depraved, the brutal; and these types will act according to their natures. But I can’t imagine several regiments of French poilus doing in little German towns what the Germans did at Nomeny. The backbone of the French army, as he is the backbone of France, is the French peasant. In spite of De Maupassant’s ugly tales of the Norman country people, and Zola’s studies of the sordid, almost bestial, life of certain unhappy, peasant families, the French peasant (cultivateur) is a very fine fellow. He has three very good qualities, endurance, patience, and willingness to work. Apart from these characteristics, he is an excellent fellow by himself; not jovial, to be sure, but solid, self-respecting, and glad to make friends when there is a chance that the friendship will be a real one. He does not care very much for the working men of the towns, the ouvriers, with their fantastic theories of universal brotherhood and peace, and he hates the depute whom the working man elects as he hates a vine fungus. A needless timidity, some fear of showing himself off as a simpleton, has kept him from having his just influence in French politics; but the war is freeing him from these shackles, and when peace comes, he will make himself known: that is, if there are any peasants left to vote.
Another thing about the peasantry is that trench warfare does not weary them, the constant contact with the earth having nothing unusual in it. A friend of mine, the younger son of a great landed family of the province of Anjou, was captain of a company almost exclusively composed of peasants of his native region; he loved them as if they were his children, and they would follow him anywhere. The little company, almost to a man, was wiped out in the battles round Verdun. In a letter I received from this officer, a few days before his death, he related this anecdote. His company was waiting, in a new trench in a new region, for the Germans to attack. Suddenly the tension was relieved by a fierce little discussion carried on entirely in whispers. His soldiers appeared to be studying the earth of the trench. “What’s the trouble about?” he asked. Came the answer, “They are quarreling as to whether the earth of this trench would best support cabbages or turnips.”
It is rare to find a French workman (ouvrier) in the trenches. They have all been taken out and sent home to make shells.
The little group to which I was most attached, and for whose hospitality and friendly greeting I shall always be a debtor, consisted of Belin, a railroad clerk; Bonnefon, a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; Magne, a village schoolmaster in the Dauphine; and Gretry, proprietor of a butcher’s shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Belin and Magne had violins which they left in the care of a cafe-keeper in the village, and used to play on them just before dinner. The dinner was served in the house of the village woman who prepared the food of these four, for sous-officiers are entitled to eat by themselves if they can find any one kind enough to look after the cooking. If they can’t, then they have to rely entirely on the substantial but hardly delicious cuisine of their regimental cuistot. However, at this village, Madame Brun, the widow of the local carpenter, had offered to take the popotte, as the French term an officer’s mess. We ate in a room half parlor, half bedchamber, decorated exclusively with holy pictures. This was a good specimen menu–bread, vermicelli soup, apple fritters, potato salad, boiled beef, red wine, and coffee. Of this dinner, the Government furnished the potatoes, the bread, the meat, the coffee, the wine, and the condiments; private purses paid for the fritters, the vermicelli, and the bits of onion in the salad. Standing round their barns the private soldiers were having a tasty stew of meat and potatoes cooked by the field kitchen, bread, and a cupful of boiled lentils (known in the army as “edible bedbugs”), all washed down with the army pinard, or red wine.
This village in which the troops were lodged revealed in an interesting way the course of French history. Across the river on a rise was a cross commemorating the victory of the Emperor Jo vin over the invading Germans in 371, and sunken in the bed of the Moselle were still seen lengths of Roman dikes. The heart of the village, however, was the corpse of a fourteenth-century castle which Richelieu had dismantled in 1630. Its destiny had been a curious one. Dismantled by Richelieu, sacked in the French Revolution, it had finally become a kind of gigantic mediaeval apartment house for the peasants of the region. The salle d’honneur was cut up into little rooms, the room of the seigneur became a haymow, and the cellars of the towers were used to store potatoes in. About twenty little chimneys rose over the old, dilapidated battlements. A haymow in this castle was the most picturesque thing I ever saw in a cantonment. It was the wreck of a lofty and noble fifteenth-century room, the ceiling, still a rich red brown, was supported on beautiful square beams, and a cross-barred window of the Renaissance, of which only the stonework remained, commanded a fine view over the river. The walls of the room were of stone, whitewashed years before, and the floor was an ordinary barn floor made of common planks and covered with a foot of new, clean hay. In the center of the southern wall was a Gothic fireplace, still black and ashy within. On the corners of this mantel hung clusters of canteens, guns were stacked by it, and a blue overcoat was rolled up at its base. An old man, the proprietor of the loft, followed us up, made signs that he was completely deaf, and traced in the dust on the floor the date, 1470.
The concerts were held in the “Salle de Fetes,” a hall in which, during peace time, the village celebrates its little festivals. It was an ugly, bare shed with a sloping roof resting on iron girders painted clay white, but the poilus had beautified it with a home-made stage and rustic greenery. The proscenium arch, painted by Bonnefon, was pearl-gray in color and decorated with panels of gilt stripes; and a shield showing the lictor’s rods, a red liberty cap and the letters “R. F.” served as a headpiece. The scenery, also the work of Bonnefon, represented a Versailles kind of garden full of statues and very watery fountains. There was no curtain. Just below the stage a semicircle of chairs had been arranged for the officers of the regiment, and behind these were wooden benches and a large space for standing room. By the time the concert was supposed to begin, every bench was filled, and standing room was at a premium. Suddenly there were cries of “Le Colonel,” and everybody stood up as the fine-looking old colonel and his staff took their places. The orchestra, composed of a pianist, a few violinists, and a flute-player, began to play the “Marseillaise.” When the music was over, and everybody decently quiet, the concert began.
“Le Camarade Tollot, of the Theatre des Varietes de Paris will recite ‘Le Dernier Drapeau,'” shouted the announcer. Le Camarade Tollot walked on the stage and bowed, a big, important young man with a lion’s mane of dark hair. Then, striking an attitude, he recited in the best French, ranting style, a rhymed tale of a battle in which many regiments charged together, flags flying. One by one the flags fell to the ground as the bearers were cut down by the withering fire of the enemy; all save one who struggled on. It was a fine, old-fashioned, dramatic “will-he-get-there-yes-he-will-he-falls” sort of thing. “Il tombe,” said le Camarade Tollot, in what used to be called the “oratorical orotund”–“il tombe.” There was a full pause. He was wounded. He rose staggering to his feet. All the other flags were down. He advanced–the last flag (le dernier drapeau) reached the enemy–and died just as his comrades, heartened by his courage, had rallied and were charging to victory. A tremendous storm of applause greeted the speaker, who favored us with the recital of a short, sentimental poem as an encore.
The next number was thus announced: “Le Camarade Millet will sound, first, all the French bugle-calls and then the Boche ones.” Le Camarade Millet, a big man with a fine horseshoe beard, stood at the edge of the stage, said, “la Charge francais” and blew it on the bugle; then “la Charge boche,” and blew that. “La Retraite francais–La Retraite boche,” etc. Another salvo of applause was given to le Camarade Millet.
“Le Camarade Roland.”
Le Camarade Roland was about twenty-one or two years old, but his eyes were old and wise, and he had evidently seen life. He was dark-haired and a little below medium height. The red scar of a wound appeared just below his left ear. After marking time with his feet, he began a kind of patter song about having a telephone, every verse of which ended, “Oh, la la, j’ai le telephone chez moi” (I’ve a telephone in my house). “I know who is unfaithful now–who have horns upon their brow,” the singer told of surprising secrets and unsuspected affaires de coeur. The silly, music-hall song may seem banal now, but it amused us hugely then. “Le Camarade Duclos.”
“Oh, if you could have seen your son, My mother, my mother, Oh, if you could have seen your son, With the regiment”–sang Camarade Duclos, another old-eyed youngster. There was amiable adventure with an amiable “blonde” (oh, if you could have seen your son); another with a “jolie brune” (oh, ma mere, ma mere); and still another lecon d’amour. The refrain had a catchy lilt to it, and the poilus began humming it.
“Le Camarade Salvatore.”
The newcomer was a big, obese Corsican mountaineer, with a pleasant, round face and brown eyes. He advanced quietly to the side of the stage holding a ten-sou tin flute in his hand, and when he began to play, for an instant I forgot all about the Bois-le-Pretre, the trenches, and everything else. The man was a born musician. I never heard anything more tender and sweet than the little melody he played. The poilus listened in profound silence, and when he had finished, a kind of sigh exhaled from the hearts of the audience.
There followed another singer, a violinist, and a clown whose song of a soldier on furlough finished with these appreciated couplets:–
“The Government says it is the thing To have a baby every spring; So when your son Is twenty-one, He’ll come to the trenches and take papa’s place. So do your duty by the race.”
In the uproar of cheers of “That’s right,” and so on, the concert ended.
The day after the concert was Sunday, and at about ten o’clock that morning a young soldier with a fluffy, yellow chin beard came down the muddy street shouting, “le Mouchoir, le Mouchoir.” About two or three hundred paper sheets were clutched tightly in his left hand, and he was selling them for a sou apiece. Little groups of poilus gathered round the soldier newsboy; I saw some of them laughing as they went away. The paper was the trench paper of the Bois-le-Pretre, named the “Mouchoir” (the handkerchief) from a famous position thus called in the Bois. The jokes in it were like the jokes in a local minstrel show, puns on local names, jests about the Boches, and good-humored satire. The spirit of the “Mouchoir” was whole-heartedly amateur. Thus the issue which followed a heavy snowfall contained this genuine wish:–
“Oh, snow, Please go, Leave the trench Of the French; Cross the band Of No Man’s Land To where the Boche lies. Freeze him, Squeeze him, Soak him, Choke him, Cover him, Smother him, Till the beggar dies.”
This is far from an exact translation, but the idea and the spirit have been faithfully preserved. The “Mouchoir” was always a bit more squeamish than the average, rollicking trench journal, for it was issued by a group of medical service men who were almost all priests. Indeed, there were some issues that combined satire, puns, and piety in a terrifying manner. Its editors printed it in the cellar of the church, using a simple sheet of gelatine for their press.
I wandered in to see the church. The usual number of civilians were to be seen, and a generous sprinkling of soldiers. Through the open door of the edifice the sounds of a mine-throwing competition at the Bois occasionally drifted. The abbe, a big, dark man of thirty-four or five, with a deep, resonant voice and positive gestures, had come to the sermon.
“Brethren,” said he, “in place of a sermon this morning, I shall read the annual exposition of our Christian faith” (exposition de la foi chretienne). He began reading from a little book a historical account of the creation and the temptation, and so concise was the language and so certain his voice that I had the sensation of listening to a series of events that had actually taken place. He might have been reading the communique. “Le premier homme was called Adam, and la premiere femme, Eve. Certain angels began a revolt against God; they are called the bad angels or the demons.” (Certains anges se sont mis en revolte contre Dieu; il sont appelles les mauvais anges ou les demons.) “And from this original sin arrives all the troubles, Death to which the human race is subjected.” Such was the discourse I heard in the church by the trenches to the accompaniment of the distant chanting of The Wood.
Going by again late in the afternoon, I saw the end of an officer’s funeral. The body, in a wooden box covered with the tricolor, was being carried out between two files of muddy soldiers, who stood at attention, bayonets fixed. A peasant’s cart, a tumbril, was waiting to take the body to the cemetery; the driver was having a hard time con-trolling a foolish and restive horse. The colonel, a fine-looking man in the sixties, came last from the church, and stood on the steps surrounded by his officers. The dusk was falling.
“Officiers, sous-officiers, soldats.
“Lieutenant de Blanchet, whose death we deplore, was a gallant officer, a true comrade, and a loyal Frenchman. In order that France might live, he was willing to close his eyes on her forever.”
The officer advanced to the tumbril and holding his hand high said:–
“Farewell–de Blanchet, we say unto thee the eternal adieu.”
The door of the church was wide open. The sacristan put out the candles, and the smoke from them rose like incense into the air. The tumbril rattled away in the dusk. My mind returned again to the phrases of the sermon,–original sin, death, life, of a sudden, seemed strangely grotesque.
It would be hard to find any one more courteous and kind than the French officer. A good deal of the success of the American Ambulance Field Sections in France is due to the hospitality and bon acceuil of the French, and to the work of the French officers attached to the Sections. In Lieutenant Kuhlman, who commanded at Pont-a-Mousson, every American had a good friend and tactful, hard-working officer; in Lieutenant Maas, who commanded at Verdun, the qualities of administrative ability and perfect courtesy were most happily joined.
The principal characteristic of the French soldier is his reasonableness.
Chapter IX
Preparing The Defense Of Verdun
Every three months, if the military situation will allow of it and every other man in his group has likewise been away, the French soldier gets a six days’ furlough. The slips of paper which are then given out are called feuilles de permission, and the lucky soldier is called a permissionnaire. When the combats that gave the Bois-le-Pretre its sinister nickname began to peter out, the poilus who had done the fighting were accorded these little vacations, and almost every afternoon the straggling groups of joyous permissionnaires were seen on the road between the trenches and the station. The expression on the faces was never that of having been rescued from a living hell; it expressed joy and prospect of a good time rather than deliverance.
When I got my permission, a comrade took me to the station at a certain rail-head where a special train started for Paris, and by paying extra I was allowed to travel second class. I shall not dwell on the journey because I did not meet a single human being worth recording during the trip. At eight at night I arrived in Paris. So varied had been my experiences at the front that had I stepped out into a dark and deserted city I should not have been surprised. The poilu, when he sees the city lights again, almost feels like saying, “Why, it is still here!” Many of them look frankly at the women, not in the spirit of gallant adventure, but out of pure curiosity. In spite of the French reputation for roguish licentiousness, the sex question never seems to intrude very much along the battle-line, perhaps because there is so little to suggest it. Certainly conversation at the front ignores sex altogether, and speech there is remarkably decent and clean. Of course, when music-hall songs are sung at the concerts, the other sex is sometimes more than casually mentioned. It is the comic papers which are responsible for the myth that the period of furlough is spent in a Roman orgy; this is, of course, true of some few, but for the great majority the reverse rules, and une permission is spent in a typically French way, paying formal calls to the oldest friends of the family, being with the family as much as possible, and attending to such homely affairs as the purchase of socks and underclothes. In the evening brave Jacques or Georges or Francois is visited by all his old cronies, who gather round the hero and ask him questions, and he is solemnly kissed by all his relatives. One evening is sure to be consecrated to a grand family reunion at a restaurant.
I determined to observe, during my permission, the new France which has come into being since the outbreak of the war, and the attitude of the French toward their allies. I knew the old France pretty well. Putting any ridiculous ideas of French decadence aside, the France of the last ten years did not have the international standing of an older France. The Delcasse incident had revealed a France evidently untaught by the lesson of 1870, and if the Moroccan question ended in a French victory, it was frankly won by getting behind the petticoats of England. The nation was unprepared for war, torn by political strife, and in a position to be ruthlessly trampled on by the Germans. The France of 1900-13 is not a very pleasant France to remember.
For one thing, the bitter strife aroused by the breaking of the Concordat and the seizure of the property of the Church was slowly crystallizing into an icy hatred, the worst in the world, the hatred of a man who has been robbed. The Church Separation Law may have been right in theory, and with the liberal tendencies of the reformers one may have every sympathy, but the fact remains that the sale and dispersion of the ecclesiastical property passed in a storm of corruption and graft. Properties worth many thousands of dollars were juggled among political henchmen, sold for a song, and sold again at a great profit. Even as the Southerners complain of the Reconstruction rather than of the Civil War, so do the French Catholics complain, not of the law, but of its aftermath. The Socialist- Labor Party exultant, the Catholic Party wronged and revengeful, and all the other thousand parties of the French Government at one another’s throats, there seemed little hope for the real France. The tragedy of the thing lay in the fact that this disunion and strife was caused by the excess of a good quality; in other words, that the remarkable ability of every Frenchman to think for himself was destroying the national unity.
Meanwhile, what was the state of the army and navy?
The Minister of War of the radicals who had triumphed was General Andre, a narrow, bigoted doctrinaire. The force behind the evil work of this man can be hardly realized by those who are unfamiliar with the passion with which the French invest the idea. There are times when the French, the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to lack mental brakes–when the idea so obsesses them, that they become fanatics,–not the emotional, English type of fanatic, but a cold, hard-headed, intellectual Latin type. The radical Frenchman says, “Are the Gospels true?” “Presumably no, according to modern science and historical research.” “Then away with everything founded on the Gospels,” he replies; and begins a cold-blooded, highly intellectual campaign of destruction. Thus it is that the average French church or public building of any antiquity, whether it be in Paris or in an obscure village, has been so often mutilated that it is only a shadow of itself. France is strewn with wrecks of buildings embodying disputed ideas. And worst of all, these buildings were rarely sacked by a mob; the revolutionary commune, in many cases, paying laborers to smash windows and destroy sculpture at so much a day.
Andre believed it his mission to extirpate all conservatism, whether Catholic or not, from the army. In a few short months, by a campaign of delation and espionage, he had completely disorganized the army, the only really national institution left in France. Officers of standing, suspected of any reactionary political tendency, were discharged by the thousand; and officers against whom no charge could be brought were refused ammunition, even though they were stationed at a ticklish point on the frontier. At the same time a like disorganization was taking place in the navy, the evil genius of the Marine being the Minister Camille Pelletan.
Those who saw, in 1912, the ceremonies attendant on the deposition of the bones of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Pantheon were sick at heart. Never had the Government of France sunk so low. The Royalists shouted, the extreme radicals hooted, and when the carriage of Fallieres passed, it was seen that humorists had somehow succeeded in writing jocose inscriptions on the presidential carriage. The head of the French nation, a short, pudgy man, the incarnation of pontifying mediocrity, went by with an expression on his face like that of a terrified, elderly, pink rabbit. The bescrawled carriage and its humiliated occupant passed by to an accompaniment of jeering. Everybody–parties and populace–was jeering. The scene was disgusting.
The election of Poincare, a man of genuine distinction, was a sign of better times. Millerand became Minister of War, and began the reorganization of the army, thus making possible the victory of the Marne. But a petty intrigue led by a group of radicals caused the resignation of this minister at a time when the First Balkan War threatened to engulf Europe. The maneuver was inexcusable. Messimy, an attache of the group who had led the attack, took Millerand’s place. When the war broke out, Messimy was invited to make himself scarce, and Millerand returned to his post. Thanks to him, the army was as ready as an army in a democratic country can be.
The France of 1915-16 is a new France. The nation has learned that if it is to live it must cease tearing itself to pieces, and all parties are united in a “Holy Union” (l’Union Sacree). Truce in the face of a common danger or a real union? Will it last? Alarmists whisper that when the war is over, the army will settle its score with the politicians. Others predict a great victory for the radicals, because the industrial classes are safe at home making shells while the conservative peasants are being killed off in the trenches. Everybody in France is saying, “What will happen when the army comes home?” There is to-day only one man in France completely trusted by all classes–General Joffre, and if by any chance there should be political troubles after the war, the army and the nation will look to him.
The French fully realize what the English alliance has meant to them, and are grateful for Engish aid. As the titanic character of England’s mighty effort becomes clearer, the sympathy with England will increase. Of course one cannot expect the French to understand the state of mind which insists upon a volunteer system in the face of the deadliest and most terrible foe. The attitude of the English to sport has rather perplexed them, and they did not like the action of some English officers in bringing a pack of hounds to the Flanders front. It was thought that officers should be soldiers first and sportsmen afterward, and the knowledge that dilettante English officers were riding to hounds while the English nation was resisting conscription and Jean, Jacques, and Pierre were doing the fighting and dying in the trenches, provoked a secret and bitter disdain.
But since the British have got into the war as a nation, this secret disdain has been forgotten, and the poilu has taken “le Tommie” to his heart.