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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12330 ***
+
+A VOLUNTEER POILU
+
+by Henry Sheahan
+
+
+
+
+To Professor Charles Townsend Copeland of Harvard University
+
+Dear Copey,
+
+At Verdun I thought of you, and the friendly hearth of Hollis 15 seemed
+very far away from the deserted, snow-swept streets of the tragic city.
+Then suddenly I remembered how you had encouraged me and many others to
+go over and help in any way that we could; I remembered your keen
+understanding of the Epic, and the deep sympathy with human beings which
+you taught those whose privilege it was to be your pupils. And so you
+did not seem so far away after all, but closer to the heart of the war
+than any other friend I had.
+
+I dedicate this book to you with grateful affection after many years of
+friendship.
+
+Henry
+
+
+
+
+
+Topsfield, September, 1916
+
+Preface
+
+I have ventured to call this book A Volunteer Poilu principally because
+we were known to the soldiers of the Bois-le-Prêtre as "les Poilus
+Américains." Then, too, it was my ambition to do for my comrades, the
+French private soldiers, what other books have done for the soldiers of
+other armies. The title chosen, however, was more than complimentary; it
+was but just. In recognition of the work of the Section during the
+summer, it was, in October, 1915, formally adopted into the French army;
+a French officer became its administrative head, and the drivers were
+given the same papers, pay, and discipline as their French comrades.
+
+I wish to thank many of my old friends of Section II, who have aided me
+in the writing of this book.
+
+HENRY SHEAHAN
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+I. THE ROCHAMBEAU S'EN VA-T-EN GUERRE
+
+A war-time voyage--The Rochambeau--Loading ammunition and food
+supplies--Personalities on board--The dyestuffs agent--The machine
+lathes man--The Swede from Minnesota who was on his way to the Foreign
+Legion--His subsequent history--The talk aboard--The French officer--His
+philosophy of war--Ernest Psichari--Arrival at Bordeaux--The Arabs at
+the docks--The convalescent soldiers-- Across La Beauce--The French
+countryside in war-time.
+
+
+II. AN UNKNOWN PARIS IN THE NIGHT AND RAIN.
+
+Paris, rain, and darkness--The Gardens of the Tuileries--The
+dormitory--The hospital at night--Beginning of the Champagne
+offensive--The Gare de la Chapelle at two in the morning--The
+wounded--The Zouave stretcher-bearers--The Arabs in the abandoned
+school--Suburban Paris at dawn--The home of the deaconesses.
+
+
+III. THE GREAT SWATHE OF THE LINES
+
+Nancy--The porter's story--Getting to the front--What the phrase "the
+front" really means--The sense of the front--The shell zone--The zone of
+quiet--My quarters in the shelled house--The fire shells--Bombarded at
+night--Death of the soldier fireman.
+
+
+IV. LA FORET DE BOIS-LE-PRETRE
+
+Le Bois-le-Prêtre--Description--History--Les Glycines, "Wisteria
+Villa"--The Road to the trenches--At the trenches--The painter's idea of
+"le sinistre dans l'art"--The sign post--The zone of violence--The
+Quart-en-Réserve--The village caught in the torment of the lines--The
+dead on the barbed wire--"The Road to Metz."
+
+
+V. THE TRENCHES IN THE "WOOD OF DEATH."
+
+The Trenches--Organization--Nature of the war--Food, shelters, clothing,
+ammunition, etc.--A typical day in the trenches--Trench shells or
+"crapouilots"--In the abri--The tunnel--The doctrinaire lieutenant of
+engineers.
+
+
+VI. THE GERMANS ATTACK
+
+The piano at Montauville--An interrupted concert--At the Quart--The
+battle for the ridge of the Wood--Fall of the German
+aeroplane--Psychology of the men in the trenches--Religion in the
+trenches--
+
+
+VII. THE TOWN IN THE TRENCHES
+
+Poor old "Pont"--Description of the town--A civilian's story--The house
+of the Captain of the Papal Zouaves--Church of St. Laurent--The Cemetery
+and its guardian.
+
+
+VIII. MESSIEURS LES POILUS DE LA GRANDE GUERRE
+
+En repos--A village of troops--Manners and morals--The concert--journal
+of the Bois-le-Prêtre--Various poilus.
+
+
+IX. PREPARING THE DEFENSE OF VERDUN
+
+En permission--State of France--The France of 1905 and the France of
+1915--The class of 1917--Bar-le-Duc--The air raid--Called to Verdun.
+
+
+X. THE GREAT DAYS OF VERDUN
+
+Verdun in 1912--Verdun on the night of the first great attack--The
+hospital--The shelled cross road--The air shell--The pastry cook's
+story--The cultivateur of the Valois and the crater at Douaumont--The
+pompiers of Verdun--"Do you want to see an odd sight?"--Verdun in storm
+and desolation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A Volunteer Poilu
+
+Chapter I
+
+The Rochambeau S'en Va-t-en Guerre
+
+Moored alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the land, the
+cargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie Générale was
+being loaded with American supplies for the France of the Great War. A
+hot August sun struck spots and ripples of glancing radiance from the
+viscous, oily surface of the foul basin in which she lay inert; the air
+was full of sounds, the wheezing of engines, the rattling of cog-checks,
+and the rumble of wheels and hoofs which swept, in sultry puffs of noise
+and odor, from the pavements on the land. Falling from the exhausts, a
+round, silvery-white cascade poured into the dark lane between the wharf
+and the deck, and sounded a monotonous, roaring underchord to the
+intermingled dins. At the sun-bathed bow, a derrick gang lowered bags of
+flour into the open well of the hold; there were commands in French, a
+chugging, and a hissing of steam, and a giant's clutch of dusty,
+hundred-kilo flour-bags from Duluth would swing from the wharf to the
+Rochambeau, sink, and disappear. In some way the unfamiliar language,
+and the sight of the thickset, French sailor-men, so evidently all of
+one race, made the Rochambeau, moored in the shadow of the sky-scrapers,
+seem mysteriously alien. But among the workers in the hold, who could be
+seen when they stood on the floor of the open hatchway, was a young,
+red-headed, American longshoreman clad in the trousers part of a suit of
+brown-check overalls; sweat and grime had befouled his rather foolish,
+freckled face, and every time that a bunch of flour-bags tumbled to the
+floor of the well, he would cry to an invisible somebody--"More
+dynamite, Joe, more dynamite!"
+
+Walking side by side, like ushers in a wedding procession, two of the
+ship's officers made interminable rounds of the deck. Now and then they
+stopped and looked over the rail at the loading operations, and once in
+low tones they discussed the day's communiqué. "Pas grand' chose"
+(nothing of importance), said he whom I took to be the elder, a bearded,
+seafaring kind of man. "We have occupied a crater in the Argonne, and
+driven back a German patrol (une patrouille Boche) in the region of
+Nomény." The younger, blond, pale, with a wispy yellow mustache,
+listened casually, his eyes fixed on the turbulence below. The derrick
+gang were now stowing away clusters of great wooden boxes marked the
+Something Arms Company. "My brother says that American bullets are
+filled with powder of a very good quality" (d'une très bonne qualité),
+remarked the latter. "By the way, how is your brother?" asked the
+bearded man. "Very much better," answered the other; "the last fragment
+(éclat) was taken out of his thigh just before we left Bordeaux." They
+continued their walk, and three little French boys wearing English
+sailor hats took their places at the rail.
+
+As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a level with
+the upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for farewells; and
+little groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes. There was a good
+deal of worrying about submarines; one heard fragments of
+conversations--"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"--"Absolutely
+safe, je t'assure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice,
+"Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund,
+snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for
+"the success of his business." Two young Americans with the same
+identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black
+Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth,
+paraded lonelily. A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back to
+the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, wept at the going of
+a younger woman, and ruined an elaborate make-up with grotesque
+traceries of tears. "Give him my love," she sobbed; "tell him that the
+business is doing splendidly and that he is not to buy any of Lafitte's
+laces next time he goes to Paris en permission." A little later, the
+Rochambeau, with slow majesty, backed into the channel, and turned her
+bow to the east.
+
+The chief interest of the great majority of her passengers was
+commercial; there were American drummers keen to line their pockets with
+European profits; there were French commis voyageurs who had been
+selling articles of French manufacture which had formerly been made by
+the Germans; there were half-official persons who had been on missions
+to American ammunition works; and there was a diplomat or two. From the
+sample trunks on board you could have taken anything from a pair of
+boots to a time fuse. Altogether, an interesting lot. Palandeau, a
+middle-aged Frenchman with a domed, bald forehead like Socrates or
+Verlaine, had been in America selling eau-de-cologne.
+
+"Then you are getting out something new?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, and no," he answered. "Our product is the old-fashioned
+eau-de-cologne water with the name 'Farina' on it."
+
+"But in America we associate eau-de-cologne with the Germans," said I.
+"Doesn't the bottle say 'Johann Maria Farina'? Surely the form of the
+name is German."
+
+"But that was not his name, monsieur; he was a Frenchman, and called
+himself 'Jean Marie.' Yes, really, the Germans stole the manufacture
+from the French. Consider the name of the article, 'eau-de-cologne,' is
+not that French?"
+
+"Yes," I admitted.
+
+"Alors," said Palandeau; "the blocus has simply given us the power to
+reclaim trade opportunities justly ours. Therefore we have printed a new
+label telling the truth about Farina, and the Boche 'Johann Maria' is
+'kapout.'"
+
+"Do you sell much of it?"
+
+"Quantities! Our product is superior to the Boche article, and has the
+glamour of an importation. I await the contest without uneasiness."
+
+"What contest?"
+
+"When Jean Marie meets Johann Maria--après la guerre," said Palandeau
+with a twinkle in his eye.
+
+In the deck chair next to mine sat a dark, powerfully built young Iowan
+with the intensely masculine head of a mediaeval soldier. There was a
+bit of curl to the dark-brown hair which swept his broad, low forehead,
+his brown eyes were devoid of fear or imagination, his jaw was set, and
+the big, aggressive head rested on a short, muscular neck. He had been a
+salesman of machine tools till the "selling end" came to a standstill.
+
+"But didn't the munitions traffic boom the machine-tool industry?" I
+asked.
+
+"Sure it did. You ought to have seen what people will do to get a lathe.
+You know about all that you need to make shells is a machine lathe. You
+can't get a lathe in America for love or money--for anything"--he made a
+swift, complete gesture--"all making shells. There isn't a junk factory
+in America that hasn't been pawed over by guys looking for lathes--and
+my God! what prices! Knew a bird named Taylor who used to make water
+pipes in Utica, New York--had a stinking little lathe he paid two
+hundred dollars for, and sold it last year for two thousand. My firm had
+so many orders for months ahead that it didn't pay them to have
+salesmen--so they offered us jobs inside; but, God, I can't stand indoor
+work, so I thought I'd come over here and get into the war. I used to be
+in the State Cavalry. You ought to have seen how sore all those Iowa
+Germans were on me for going," he laughed. "Had a hell of row with a guy
+named Schultz."
+
+Limping slightly, an enormous, grizzled man approached us and sat down
+by the side of the ex-machinist. Possibly a yellow-gray suit, cut in the
+bathrobe American style, made him look larger than he was, and though
+heavily built and stout, there was something about him which suggested
+ill health. One might have thought him a prosperous American business
+man on his way to Baden-Baden. He had a big nose, big mouth, a hard eye,
+and big, freckled hands which he nervously opened and closed.
+
+"See that feller over there?" He pointed to a spectacled individual who
+seemed lost in melancholy speculation at the rail--"Says he's a Belgian
+lieutenant. Been over here trying to get cloth. Says he can't get it,
+the firms over here haven't got the colors. Just think of it, there
+isn't a pound of Bernheim's blue in the whole country!"
+
+"I thought we were beginning to make dyes of our own," said the Iowan.
+
+"Oh, yes, but we haven't got the hang of it yet. The product is pretty
+poor. Most of the people who need dyes are afraid to use the American
+colors, but they've got to take what they can get. Friend of mine, Lon
+Seeger, of Seeger, Seeger & Hall, the carpet people in Hackensack, had
+twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats spoiled on him last week by
+using home dyes."
+
+The Belgian lieutenant, still standing by the rail, was talking with
+another passenger, and some fragments of the conversation drifted to our
+ears. I caught the words--"My sister--quite unexpected--barely
+escaped--no doubt of it--I myself saw near Malines--perfectly
+dreadful--tout-à-fait terrible."
+
+"Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats all spoiled, colors ran,
+didn't set, no good. This war is raising the devil with the United
+States textiles. Maybe the Germans won't get a glad hand when they come
+back. We hear that they're going to flood the market with good,
+low-priced dyes so as to bust up the new American plants. Haven't you
+heard them hollerin' for tariff protection? I'm going over to look up a
+new green dye the French are getting out. We hear it's pretty good
+stuff. What are you boys doing, looking for contracts?"
+
+The Iowan replied that he hoped to get into an English cavalry regiment,
+and I mentioned the corps I had joined.
+
+"Well, don't get killed," exclaimed the dye-stuffs agent paternally, and
+settled down in his chair for a nap.
+
+It was the third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color of
+the American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising and
+falling under the August sun. From the rail I saw coming toward us over
+the edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer marked with two white
+blotches which, as the vessel neared, resolved themselves into painted
+reproductions of the Swedish flag. Thus passed the Thorvald, carrying a
+mark of the war across the lonely seas.
+
+"That's a Swedish boat," said a voice at my elbow.
+
+"Yes," I replied.
+
+A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a downy
+face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me. There was
+something psychologically wrong with his face; it had that look in it
+which makes you want to see if you still have your purse.
+
+"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota," he continued.
+
+"What's your name?" I asked.
+
+"Oscar Petersen," he answered.
+
+"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded.
+
+"You bet," he replied--and an instant later--"Are you?"
+
+I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the same
+kind of experience he later became communicative. He had run away from
+home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reform
+school, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago. I
+can't imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed. At
+length he "got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war," as he
+expressed it, and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, but
+received no answer. "My father was a Bible cuss," he remarked
+cheerfully,--"never got over my swiping the minister's watch."
+
+A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his going to
+enlist in the Foreign Legion--"popular young man very well known in
+the--th ward," said the article. He showed me, too, an extraordinary
+letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil on
+the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing five
+dollars. "I hope you will try to avenge the Lusitania," it said among
+other things. The letter was signed by a woman.
+
+"Do you speak French?" I asked.
+
+"Not a word," he replied. "I want to be put with the Americans or the
+Swedes. I speak good Swedish."
+
+Months later, on furlough, I saw in a hospital at Lyons a college
+classmate who had served in the Foreign Legion. "Did you know a fellow
+named Petersen?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, I knew him," answered my friend; "he lifted a fifty-franc note
+from me and got killed before I could get it back."
+
+"How did it happen?"
+
+"Went through my pockets, I imagine."
+
+"Oh, no, I meant how did he get killed?" "Stray shell sailed in as we
+were going through a village, and caught him and two of the other boys."
+
+"You must not make your friend talk too much," mumbled an old Sister of
+Charity rather crossly.
+
+The two young men with the same identical oddity of gait were salesmen
+of artificial legs, each one a wearer and demonstrator of his wares. The
+first, from Ohio, had lost his leg in a railroad accident two years
+before, and the second, a Virginian with a strong accent, had been done
+for in a motor-car smashup. One morning the man from Ohio gave us a kind
+of danse macabre on the deck; rolling his trouser leg high above his
+artificial shin, he walked, leaped, danced, and ran. "Can you beat
+that?" he asked with pardonable pride. "Think what these will mean to
+the soldiers." Meanwhile, with slow care, the Virginian explained the
+ingenious mechanism.
+
+Strange tatters of conversation rose from the deck. "Poor child, she
+lost her husband at the beginning of the war"--"Third shipment of
+hosses"--"I was talking with a feller from the Atlas Steel
+Company"--"Edouard is somewhere near Arras"; there were disputes about
+the outcome of the war, and arguments over profits. A voluble French
+woman, whose husband was a pastry cook in a New York hotel before he
+joined the forces, told me how she had wandered from one war movie to
+another hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband, and had finally seen
+"some one who resembled him strongly" on the screen in Harlem. She had a
+picture of him, a thin, moody fellow with great, saber whiskers like
+Rostand's and a high, narrow forehead curving in on the sides between
+the eyebrows and the hair. "He is a Chasseur alpin," she said with a
+good deal of pride, "and they are holding his place for him at the
+hotel. He was wounded last month in the shoulder. I am going to the
+hospital at Lyons to see him." The day's sunset was at its end, and a
+great mass of black clouds surged over the eastern horizon, turning the
+seas ahead to a leaden somberness that lowered in menacing contrast to
+the golden streaks of dying day. The air freshened, salvos of rain fell
+hissing into the dark waters, and violet cords of lightning leaped
+between sea and sky. Echoing thunder rolled long through unseen abysses.
+In the deserted salon I found the young Frenchman with the star-shaped
+scar reading an old copy of "La Revue." He had been an officer in the
+Chasseurs-à-pied until a fearful wound had incapacitated him for further
+service, and had then joined the staff of a great, conservative Parisian
+weekly. The man was a disciple of Ernest Psichari, the soldier mystic
+who died so superbly at Charleroi in the dreadful days before the Marne.
+From him I learned something of the French conception of the idea of
+war. It was not uninteresting to compare the French point of view with
+the German, and we talked late into the night while the ship was
+plunging through the storm. An article in the review, "La Psychologie
+des Barbares," was the starting-point of our conversation.
+
+"You must remember that the word 'barbarian' which we apply to the
+Germans, is understood by the French intellectually," said he. "Not only
+do German atrocities seem barbarous, but their thought also. Consider
+the respective national conceptions of the idea of war. To the Germans,
+war is an end in itself, and in itself and in all its effects perfect
+and good. To the French mind, this conception of war is barbaric, for
+war is not good in itself and may be fatal to both victor and
+vanquished." (He spoke a beautiful, lucid French with a sort of military
+preciseness.)
+
+"It was Ernest Psichari who revealed to us the raison d'être of arms in
+modern life, and taught us the meaning of war. To him, war was no savage
+ruée, but the discipline of history for which every nation must be
+prepared, a terrible discipline neither to be sought, nor rejected when
+proffered. Thus the Boches, once their illusion of the glory of war is
+smashed, have nothing to fall back on, but the French point of view is
+stable and makes for a good morale. Psichari was the intellectual leader
+of that movement for the regeneration of the army which has saved
+France. When the doctrines of pacificism began to be preached in France,
+and cries of 'A bas l'armée' were heard in the streets, Psichari showed
+that the army was the only institution left in our industrialized world
+with the old ideals and the power to teach them. Quand on a tout dit,
+the military ideals of honor, duty, and sacrifice of one's all for the
+common good are the fundamentals of. character. Psichari turned this
+generation from a generation of dreamers to a generation of soldiers,
+knowing why they were soldiers, glad to be soldiers. The army saved the
+morale of France when the Church had lost its hold, and the public
+schools had been delivered to the creatures of sentimental doctrinaire
+government. Was it not a pity that Psichari should have died so young?"
+
+"Did you know him?" I asked.
+
+"Yes; I saw something of him in Africa. The mystery of the East had
+profoundly stirred him. He was a dark, serious fellow with something of
+the profile of his grandfather, Ernest Renan. At Charleroi, after an
+heroic stand, he and every man of his squad died beside the guns they
+served."
+
+Long after, at the Bois-le-Prêtre, I went to the trenches to get a young
+sergeant. His friends had with clumsy kindness gathered together his
+little belongings and put them in the ambulance. "As tu trouvé mon
+livre?" (Have you found my book?) he asked anxiously, and they tossed
+beside the stretcher a trench-mired copy of Psichari's "L'Appel des
+Armes."
+
+One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and anchored
+at the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde. A spindly lighthouse
+was flashing, seeming more to reflect the sunlight from outside than to
+be burning within, and a current the color of coffee and cream with a
+dash of vermilion in it, went by us mottled with patches of floating
+mud. From the deck one had an extraordinary view, a ten-mile sweep of
+the strangely colored water, the hemisphere of the heavens all of one
+greenish-blue tint, and a narrow strip of nondescript, sandy coast
+suspended somehow between the strange sea and unlovely sky. At noon, the
+Rochambeau began at a good speed her journey up the river, passing
+tile-roofed villages and towns built of pumice-gray stone, and great
+flat islands covered with acres upon acres of leafy, bunchy vines. There
+was a scurry to the rail; some one cried, "Voilà des Boches," and I saw
+working in a vineyard half a dozen men in gray-green German regimentals.
+A poilu in a red cap was standing nonchalantly beside them. As the
+Rochambeau, following the channel, drew incredibly close to the bank,
+the Germans leaned on their hoes and watched us pass, all save one, who
+continued to hoe industriously round the roots of the vines, ignoring us
+with a Roman's disdain. "Comme ils sont laids" (How ugly they are), said
+a voice. There was no surprise in the tone, which expressed the expected
+confirmation of a past judgment. It was the pastry cook's voluble wife
+who had spoken. The land through which we were passing, up to that time
+simply the pleasant countryside of the Bordelais, turned in an instant
+to the France of the Great War.
+
+Late in the afternoon, the river, slowly narrowing, turned a great bend,
+and the spires of Bordeaux, violet-gray in the smoky rose of early
+twilight, were seen just ahead. A broad, paved, dirty avenue, with the
+river on one side and a row of shabby houses on the other, led from the
+docks to the city, and down this street, marching with Oriental dignity,
+came a troop of Arabs. There was a picture of a fat sous-officier
+leading, of brown-white rags and mantles waving in the breeze blowing
+from the harbor, of lean, muscular, black-brown legs, and dark,
+impassive faces. "Algerian recruits," said an officer of the boat. It
+was a first glimpse at the universality of the war; it held one's mind
+to realize that while some were quitting their Devon crofts, others were
+leaving behind them the ancestral well at the edges of the ancient
+desert. A faint squeaking of strange pipes floated on the twilight air.
+
+There came an official examination of our papers, done in a businesslike
+way, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were free to land in
+France. That evening a friend and I had dinner in a great café opening
+on the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried to analyze the difference
+between the Bordeaux of the past and the Bordeaux of the war. The ornate
+restaurant, done in a kind of Paris Exhibition style, and decorated with
+ceiling frescoes of rosy, naked Olympians floating in golden mists and
+sapphire skies, was full of movement and light, crowds passed by on the
+sidewalks, there were sounds--laughter.
+
+"Looks just the same to me," said my friend, an American journalist who
+had been there in 1912. "Of course there are more soldiers. Outside of
+that, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the town has not changed."
+
+But there was a difference, and a great difference. There was a terrible
+absence of youth. Not that youth was entirely absent from the tables and
+the trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and unhealthy-looking, afraid
+to meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the pitiable jeunesse that could
+not pass the physical examination of the army. Most of the other young
+men who bent over the tables talking, or leaned back on a divan to smoke
+cigarettes, were strangers, and I saw many who were unquestionably
+Roumanians or Greeks. A little apart, at a corner table, a father and
+mother were dining with a boy in a uniform much too large for him;--I
+fancied from the cut of his clothes that he belonged to a young squad
+still under instruction in the garrisons, and that he was enjoying a
+night off with his family. Screened from the rest by a clothes rack, a
+larky young lieutenant was discreetly conversing with a "daughter of
+joy," and an elderly English officer, severely proper and correct, was
+reading "Punch" and sipping red wine in Britannic isolation. Across the
+street an immense poster announced, "Conference in aid of the Belgian
+Red Cross--the German Outrages in Louvain, Malines, and
+Liège--illustrated."
+
+We finished our dinner, which was good and not costly, and started to
+walk to our hotel. Hardly had we turned the corner of the Place, when
+the life of Bordeaux went out like a torch extinguished by the wind. It
+was still early in the evening, there was a sound of an orchestra
+somewhere behind, yet ahead of us, lonely and still, with its shops
+closed and its sidewalks deserted, was one of the greater streets of
+Bordeaux. Through the drawn curtains of second stories over little
+groceries and baker-shops shone the yellow light of lamps. What had
+happened to the Jean, Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the war
+began? What tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these silent
+windows not conceal? And every French city is much the same; one notices
+in them all the subtle lack of youth, and the animation of the great
+squares in contrast to the somber loneliness of streets and quarters
+which once were alive and gay. At the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, the
+whirlpool of Parisian life is still turning, but the great streets
+leading away from the Place de l'Étoile are quiet. Young and old,
+laborer and shopkeeper, boulevardier and apache are far away holding the
+tragic lines.
+
+The next morning at the station, I had my first glimpse of that mighty
+organization which surrounds the militaire. There was a special entrance
+for soldiers and a special exit for soldiers, and at both of these a
+long file of blue-clad poilus waited for the countersigning of their
+furlough slips and military tickets. The mud of the trenches still
+stained the bottom edges of their overcoats, and their steel helmets
+were dented and dull. There was something fine about the faces
+collectively; there was a certain look of tried endurance and perils
+bravely borne. I heard those on furlough telling the names of their home
+villages to the officer in charge,--pleasant old names, Saint-Pierre aux
+Vignes, La Tour du Roi.
+
+A big, obese, middle-aged civilian dressed in a hideous greenish suit,
+and wearing a pancake cap, sat opposite me in the compartment I had
+chosen. There was a hard, unfriendly look in his large, fat-encircled
+eyes, a big mustache curved straight out over his lips, and the short
+finger nails of his square, puffy fingers were deeply rimmed with dirt.
+He caught sight of me reading a copy of an English weekly, and after
+staring at me with an interest not entirely free from a certain
+hostility, retreated behind the pages of the "Matin," and began picking
+his teeth. Possibly he belonged to that provincial and prejudiced
+handful to whom England will always be "Perfidious Albion," or else he
+took me for an English civilian dodging military service. The French
+press was following the English recruiting campaign very closely, and
+the system of volunteer service was not without its critics.
+"Conscription being considered in England" (On discute la conscription
+en Angleterre), announced the "Matin" discreetly.
+
+It was high noon; the train had arrived at Angoulême, and was taking
+aboard a crowd of convalescents. On the station platform, their faces
+relentlessly illumined by the brilliant light, stood about thirty
+soldiers; a few were leaning on canes, one was without a right arm, some
+had still the pallor of the sick, others seemed able-bodied and hearty.
+Every man wore on the bosom of his coat about half a dozen little
+aluminum medals dangling from bows of tricolor ribbon. "Pour les
+blessés, s'il vous plaît," cried a tall young woman in the costume and
+blue cape of a Red-Cross nurse as she walked along the platform shaking
+a tin collection box under the windows of the train.
+
+To our compartment came three of the convalescents. One was a sturdy,
+farmhand sort of fellow, with yellow hair and a yellow mustache--the
+kind of man who might have been a Norman; he wore khaki puttees, brown
+corduroy trousers, and a jacket which fitted his heavy, vigorous figure
+rather snugly. Another was a little soul dressed in the "blue horizon"
+from head to foot, a homely little soul with an egg-shaped head,
+brown-green eyes, a retreating chin, and irregular teeth. The last,
+wearing the old tenue, black jacket and red trousers, was a good-looking
+fellow with rather handsome brown eyes. Comfortably stretched in a
+corner, the Norman was deftly cutting slices of bread and meat which he
+offered to his companions. Catching sight of my English paper, all three
+stared at me with an interest and friendliness that was in psychological
+contrast to the attitude of the obese civilian.
+
+"Anglais?" asked the Norman.
+
+The civilian watched for my answer.
+
+"Non--Américain," I replied.
+
+"Tiens," they said politely.
+
+"Do you speak English?" asked the homely one.
+
+"Yes," I answered.
+
+The Norman fished a creased dirty letter and a slip of paper from his
+wallet and handed them to me for inspection.
+
+"I found them in a trench we shared with the English," he explained.
+"These puttees are English; a soldier gave them to me." He exhibited his
+legs with a good deal of satisfaction.
+
+I examined the papers that had been given me. The first was a medical
+prescription for an anti-lice ointment and the second an illiterate
+letter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about somebody whom the
+writer was having trouble to manage, "now that you aren't here." I
+translated as well as I could for an attentive audience. "Toujours les
+totos," they cried merrily when I explained the prescription. A spirit
+of good-fellowship pervaded the compartment, till even the suspicious
+civilian unbent, and handed round post-card photographs of his two sons
+who were somewhere en Champagne. Not a one of the three soldiers could
+have been much over twenty-one, but they were not boys, but men, serious
+men, tried and disciplined by war. The homely one gave me one of his
+many medals which he wore "to please the good Sisters"; on one side in
+an oval of seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and on the other, the
+determined features of General Joffre.
+
+Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce. Distant
+villages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black against
+the burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the sweeping
+golden plain. We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and shuttered, though
+the harvests had been gathered and stacked. There was something very
+tragic in those deserted, outlying farms. The train began to rattle
+through the suburbs of Paris. By the window stood the Norman looking out
+on the winking red and violet lights of the railroad yard. "This Paris?"
+he asked. "I never expected to see Paris. How the war sets one to
+traveling!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain
+
+
+
+It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I was
+strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun was
+drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods and
+athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn,
+so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of the
+mighty vista of the Champs Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown and
+vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was
+maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white and
+silver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy show
+the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of
+treble shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel," squeaked a voice.
+Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was a
+prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored with
+a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted its
+puzzled, wooden head to the laughing children. Beneath a little Prussian
+helmet was the head of William of Germany, caricatured with Parisian
+skill into a scowling, green fellow with a monster black mustache turned
+up to his eyes. "Lie down!" cried the Zouave doll imperiously. "Here is
+a love pat for thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche." And he struck
+him down again with his staff.
+
+Soldiers walked in the garden,--permissionnaires (men on furlough) out
+for an airing with their rejoicing families, smart young English
+subalterns, and rosy-fleshed, golden-haired Flemings of the type that
+Rubens drew. But neither their presence nor the sight of an occasional
+mutilé (soldier who has lost a limb), pathetically clumsy on his new
+crutches, quite sent home the presence of the war. The normal life of
+the city was powerful enough to engulf the disturbance, the theaters
+were open, there were the same crowds on the boulevards, and the same
+gossipy spectators in the sidewalk cafés. After a year of war the
+Parisians were accustomed to soldiers, cripples, and people in mourning.
+The strongest effect of the war was more subtle of definition, it was a
+change in the temper of the city. Since the outbreak of the war, the
+sham Paris that was "Gay Paree" had disappeared, and the real Paris, the
+Paris of tragic memories and great men, had taken its place. An old
+Parisian explained the change to me in saying, "Paris has become more
+French." Deprived of the foreigner, the city adapted itself to a taste
+more Gallic; faced with the realities of war, it exchanged its
+artificiality for that sober reasonableness which is the normal attitude
+of the nation.
+
+At noon I left the garden and strolled down the Champs Élysées to the
+Porte Maillot. The great salesrooms of the German motor-car dealers had
+been given by the Government to a number of military charities who had
+covered the trade signs with swathes and rosettes of their national
+colors. Under the banner of the Belgians, in the quondam hop of the
+Mercedes, was an exhibition of leather knickknacks, baskets, and dolls
+made by the blind and mutilated soldiers. The articles--children's toys
+for the most part, dwarfs that rolled over and over on a set of parallel
+bars, Alsatian lasses with flaxen hair, and gay tops--were exposed on a
+row of tables a few feet back from the window. By the Porte Maillot,
+some of the iron saw-horses with sharpened points, which had formed part
+of the barricade built there in the days of the Great Retreat, lay, a
+villainous, rusty heap, in a grassy ditch of the city wall; a few stumps
+of the trees that had been then cut down were still visible, and from a
+railroad tie embedded in the sidewalk hung six links of a massive chain.
+Through this forgotten flotsam on the great shore of the war, the quiet
+crowds went in and out of the Maillot entrance to the Bois de Boulogne.
+There was a sense of order and security in the air. I took a seat on the
+terrace of a little restaurant. The garçon was a small man in the
+fifties, inclined to corpulence, with a large head, large, blue-gray
+eyes, purplish lips, and blue-black hair cut pompadour. As we watched
+the orderly, Sunday crowds going to the great park, we fell into
+conversation about the calmness of Paris. "Yes, it is calm," he said;
+"we are all waiting (nous attendons). We know that the victory will be
+ours at the finish. But all we can do is to wait. I have two sons at the
+front." He had struck the keynote. Paris is calmly waiting--waiting for
+the end of the war, for victory, for the return of her children.
+
+Yet in this great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty blues,
+and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was another Paris,
+a terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early in the afternoon
+a dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest. It began to rain.
+
+In a great garret of the hospital, under a high French roof, was the
+dormitory of the volunteers attached to the Paris Ambulance Section. At
+night, this great space was lit by only one light, a battered electric
+reading-lamp standing on a kind of laboratory table in the center of the
+floor, and window curtains of dark-blue cambric, waving mysteriously in
+the night wind, were supposed to hide even this glimmer from the eyes of
+raiding Zeppelins. Looking down, early in the evening, into the great
+quadrangle of the institution, one saw the windows of the opposite wing
+veiled with this mysterious blue, and heard all the feverish unrest of a
+hospital, the steps on the tiled corridors, the running of water in the
+bathroom taps, the hard clatter of surgical vessels, and sometimes the
+cry of a patient having a painful wound dressed. But late at night the
+confused murmur of the battle between life and death had subsided, the
+lights in the wards were extinguished, and only the candle of the night
+nurse, seen behind a screen, and the stertorous breathing of the many
+sleepers, brought back the consciousness of human life. I have often
+looked into the wards as I returned from night calls to the station
+where we received the wounded, and been conscious, as I peered silently
+into that flickering obscurity, of the vague unrest of sleepers, of the
+various attitudes assumed, the arms outstretched, the upturned throats,
+and felt, too, in the still room, the mystic presence of the Angel of
+Pain.
+
+It was late at night, and I stood looking out of my window over the
+roofs of Neuilly to the great, darkened city just beyond. From somewhere
+along the tracks of the "Little Belt" railway came a series of piercing
+shrieks from a locomotive whistle. It was raining hard, drumming on the
+slate roof of the dormitory, and somewhere below a gutter gurgled
+foolishly. Far away in the corridor a gleam of yellow light shone from
+the open door of an isolation room where a nurse was watching by a
+patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been to the movies at
+the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilant
+whispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them said, "That war
+film was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?"
+"Yuh, damn good," answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. It
+was a strange crew that inhabited these quarters; there were idealists,
+dreamers, men out of work, simple rascals and adventurers of all kinds.
+To my right slept a big, young Westerner, from some totally unknown
+college in Idaho, who was a humanitarian enthusiast to the point of
+imbecility, and to the left a middle-aged rogue who indulged in secret
+debauches of alcohol and water he cajoled from the hospital orderlies.
+Yet this obscure and motley community was America's contribution to
+France. I fell asleep.
+
+"Up, birds!"
+
+The lieutenant of the Paris Section, a mining engineer with a
+picturesque vocabulary of Nevadan profanity, was standing in his pajama
+trousers at the head of the room, holding a lantern in his hand. "Up,
+birds!" he called again. "Call's come in for Lah Chapelle." There were
+uneasy movements under the blankets, inmates of adjoining beds began to
+talk to each other, and some lit their bedside candles. The chief went
+down both sides of the dormitory, flashing his lantern before each bed,
+ragging the sleepy. "Get up, So-and-So. Well, I must say, Pete, you have
+a hell of a nerve." There were glimpses of candle flames, bare bodies
+shivering in the damp cold, and men sitting on beds, winding on their
+puttees. "Gee! listen to it rain," said somebody. "What time is it?"
+"Twenty minutes past two." Soon the humming and drumming of the motors
+in the yard sounded through the roaring of the downpour.
+
+Down in the yard I found Oiler, my orderly, and our little Ford
+ambulance, number fifty-three. One electric light, of that sickly yellow
+color universal in France, was burning over the principal entrance to
+the hospital, just giving us light enough to see our way out of the
+gates. Down the narrow, dark Boulevard Inkerman we turned, and then out
+on to a great street which led into the "outer" boulevard of De
+Batignolles and Clichy. To that darkness with which the city, in fear of
+raiding aircraft, has hidden itself, was added the continuous, pouring
+rain. In the light of our lamps, the wet, golden trees of the black,
+silent boulevards shone strangely, and the illuminated advertising
+kiosks which we passed, one after the other at the corners of great
+streets, stood lonely and drenched, in the swift, white touch of our
+radiance. Black and shiny, the asphalt roadway appeared to go on in a
+straight line forever and forever.
+
+Neither in residential, suburban Neuilly nor in deserted Montmartre was
+there a light to be seen, but when we drew into the working quarter of
+La Chapelle, lights appeared in the windows, as if some toiler of the
+night was expected home or starting for his labor, and vague forms,
+battling with the rain or in refuge under the awning of a café, were now
+and then visible. From the end of the great, mean rue de La Chapelle the
+sounds of the unrest of the railroad yards began to be heard, for this
+street leads to the freight-houses near the fortifications. Our
+objective was a great freight station which the Government, some months
+before, had turned into a receiving-post for the wounded; it lay on the
+edge of the yard, some distance in from the street, behind a huddle of
+smaller sheds and outbuildings. To our surprise the rue de La Chapelle
+was strewn with ambulances rushing from the station, and along two sides
+of the great yard, where the merchandise trucks had formerly turned in,
+six or seven hundred more ambulances were waiting. We turned out of the
+dark, rain-swept city into this hurly-burly of shouts, snorting of
+engines, clashing of gears, and whining of brakes, illuminated with a
+thousand intermeshing beams of headlights across whose brilliance the
+rain fell in sloping, liquid rods. "Quick, a small car this way!" cried
+some one in an authoritative tone, and number fifty-three ran up an
+inclined plane into the enormous shed which had been reserved for the
+loading of the wounded into the ambulances.
+
+We entered a great, high, white-washed, warehouse kind of place, about
+four hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, built of wood
+evidently years before. In the middle of this shed was an open space,
+and along the walls were rows of ambulances. Brancardiers
+(stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were loading wounded
+into these cars, and as soon as one car was filled, it would go out of
+the hall and another would take its place. There was an infernal din;
+the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was full of blue gasoline
+fumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was increasing every minute,
+were carried the wounded, often nothing but human bundles of dirty blue
+cloth and fouled bandages. Every one of these wounded soldiers was
+saturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly to their
+overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its
+powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a
+puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister
+mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded
+soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human
+relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of the
+trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds, the
+soldier comes from the train a sight for which only the great heart of
+Francis of Assisi could have adequate pity.
+
+Oiler and I went through an opening in a canvas partition into that part
+of the great shed where the wounded were being unloaded from the trains.
+In width, this part measured four hundred feet, but in length it ran to
+eight hundred. In two rows of six each, separated by an aisle about
+eight feet wide, were twelve little houses, about forty feet square,
+built of stucco, each one painted a different color. The woodwork of the
+exterior was displayed through the plaster in the Elizabethan fashion,
+and the little sheds were clean, solidly built, and solidly roofed. In
+one of these constructions was the bureau of the staff which assigned
+the wounded to the hospitals, in another was a fully equipped
+operating-room, and in the others, rows of stretcher-horses, twenty-five
+to a side, on which the wounded were laid until a hospital number had
+been assigned them. A slip, with these hospital numbers on it, the names
+of the patients, and the color of the little house in which they were to
+be found, was then given to the chauffeur of an ambulance, who, with
+this slip in hand and followed by a number of stretcher-bearers,
+immediately gathered his patients. A specimen slip might run thus--"To
+Hospital 32, avenue de Iéna, Paul Chaubard, red barraque, Jules Adamy,
+green barraque, and Alphonse Fort, ochre barraque."
+
+To give a French touch to the scene, this great space, rapidly filling
+with human beings in an appalling state of misery, as the aftermath of
+the offensive broke on us, was decorated with evergreen trees and shrubs
+so that the effect was that of an indoor fair or exhibition; you felt as
+if you might get samples of something at each barraque, as the French
+termed the little houses. To the side of these there was a platform, and
+a sunken track running along the wall, and behind, a great open space
+set with benches for those of the wounded able to walk. Some fifty
+great, cylindrical braziers, which added a strange bit of rosy, fiery
+color to the scene, warmed this space. When the wounded had begun to
+arrive at about midnight, a regiment of Zouaves was at hand to help the
+regular stretcher-bearers; these Zouaves were all young, "husky" men
+dressed in the baggy red trousers and short blue jacket of their classic
+uniform, and their strength was in as much of a contrast to the weakness
+of those whom they handled as their gay uniform was in contrast to the
+miry, horizon blue of the combatants. There was something grotesque in
+seeing two of these powerful fellows carrying to the wagons a dirty blue
+bundle of a human being.
+
+With a piercing shriek, that cut like a gash through the uproar of the
+ambulance engines, a sanitary train, the seventh since midnight, came
+into the station, and so smoothly did it run by, its floors on a level
+with the main floor, that it seemed an illusion, like a stage train. On
+the platform stood some Zouaves waiting to unload the passengers, while
+others cleared the barraques and helped the feeble to the ambulances.
+There was a steady line of stretchers going out, yet the station was so
+full that hardly a bit of the vast floor space was unoccupied. One
+walked down a narrow path between a sea of bandaged bodies. Shouldering
+what baggage they had, those able to walk plodded in a strange, slow
+tempo to the waiting automobiles. All by themselves were about a hundred
+poor, ragged Germans, wounded prisoners, brothers of the French in this
+terrible fraternity of pain.
+
+About four or five hundred assis (those able to sit up) were waiting on
+benches at the end of the hall. Huddled round the rosy, flickering
+braziers, they sat profoundly silent in the storm and din that moved
+about them, rarely conversing with each other. I imagine that the
+stupefaction, which is the physiological reaction of an intense
+emotional and muscular effort, had not yet worn away. There were fine
+heads here and there. Forgetful of his shattered arm, an old fellow,
+with the face of Henri Quatre, eagle nose, beard, and all, sat with his
+head sunken on his chest in mournful contemplation, and a fine-looking,
+black-haired, dragoon kind of youth with the wildest of eyes clung like
+grim death to a German helmet. The same expression of resigned fatalism
+was common to all.
+
+Sometimes the chauffeurs who were waiting for their clients got a chance
+to talk to one of the soldiers. Eager for news, they clustered round the
+wounded man, bombarding him with questions.
+
+"Are the Boches retreating?"
+
+"When did it begin?"
+
+"Just where is the attack located?"
+
+"Are things going well for us?"
+
+The soldier, a big young fellow with a tanned face, somewhat pale from
+the shock of a ripped-up forearm, answered the questions good-naturedly,
+though the struggle had been on so great a scale that he could only tell
+about his own hundred feet of trench. Indeed the substance of his
+information was that there had been a terrible bombardment of the German
+lines, and then an attack by the French which was still in progress.
+
+"Are we going to break clear through the lines?"
+
+The soldier shrugged his shoulders. "They hope to," he replied.
+
+Just beyond us, in one of the thousand stretchers on the floor, a small
+bearded man had died. With his left leg and groin swathed in bandages,
+he lay flat on his back, his mouth open, muddy, dirty, and dead. From
+time to time the living on each side stole curious, timid glances at
+him. Then, suddenly, some one noticed the body, and two
+stretcher-bearers carried it away, and two more brought a living man
+there in its place.
+
+The turmoil continued to increase. At least a thousand motor-ambulances,
+mobilized from all over the region of Paris, were now on hand to carry
+away the human wreckage of the great offensive. Ignorant of the ghastly
+army at its doors, Paris slept. The rain continued to fall heavily.
+
+"Eh la, comrade."
+
+A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed me
+from his stretcher.
+
+"You speak French?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I am going to ask you to do me a favor--write to my wife who is here in
+Paris, and tell her that I am safe and shall let her know at once what
+hospital I am sent to. I shall be very grateful."
+
+He let his shoulders sink to the stretcher again and I saw him now and
+then looking for me in the crowd. Catching my eye, he smiled.
+
+A train full of Algerian troops came puffing into the station, the
+uproar hardly rising above the general hubbub. The passengers who were
+able to walk got out first, some limping, some walking firmly with a
+splendid Eastern dignity. These men were Arabs and Moors from Algeria
+and Tunisia, who had enlisted in the colonial armies. There was a great
+diversity of size and racial type among them, some being splendid, big
+men of the type one imagines Othello to have been, some chunkier and
+more bullet-headed, and others tall and lean with interesting aquiline
+features. I fancy that the shorter, rounder-skulled ones were those with
+a dash of black blood. The uniform, of khaki-colored woolen, consisted
+of a simple, short-waisted jacket, big baggy trousers, puttees, and a
+red fez or a steel helmet with the lunar crescent and "R.F." for its
+device. We heard rumors about their having attacked a village. Advancing
+in the same curious tempo as the French, they passed to the braziers and
+the wooden benches. Last of all from the train, holding his bandaged arm
+against his chest, a native corporal with the features of a desert
+tribesman advanced with superb, unconscious stateliness. As the
+Algerians sat round the braziers, their uniforms and brown skins
+presented a contrast to the pallor of the French in their bedraggled
+blue, but there was a marked similarity of facial expression. A certain
+racial odor rose from the Orientals.
+
+My first assignment, two Algerians and two Frenchmen, took me to an
+ancient Catholic high school which had just been improvised into a
+hospital for the Oriental troops. It lay, dirty, lonely, and grim, just
+to one side of a great street on the edge of Paris, and had not been
+occupied since its seizure by the State. Turning in through an enormous
+door, lit by a gas globe flaring and flickering in the torrents of rain,
+we found ourselves in an enormous, dark courtyard, where a half-dozen
+ambulances were already waiting to discharge their clients. Along one
+wall there was a flight of steps, and from somewhere beyond the door at
+the end of this stair shone the faintest glow of yellow light.
+
+It came from the door of a long-disused schoolroom, now turned into the
+receiving-hall of this strange hospital. The big, high room was lit by
+one light only, a kerosene hand lamp standing on the teacher's desk, and
+so smoked was the chimney that the wick gave hardly more light than a
+candle. There was just enough illumination to see about thirty Algerians
+sitting at the school desks, their big bodies crammed into the little
+seats, and to distinguish others lying in stretchers here and there upon
+the floor. At the teacher's table a little French adjutant with a trim,
+black mustache and a soldier interpreter were trying to discover the
+identity of their visitors.
+
+"Number 2215," (numéro deux mille deux cent quinze), the officer cried;
+and the interpreter, leaning over the adjutant's shoulder to read the
+name, shouted, "Méhémet Ali."
+
+There was no answer, and the Algerians looked round at each other, for
+all the world like children in a school. It was very curious to see
+these dark, heavy, wild faces bent over these disused desks.
+
+"Number 2168" (numéro deux mille cent soixante huit), cried the
+adjutant.
+
+"Abdullah Taleb," cried the interpreter.
+
+"Moi," answered a voice from a stretcher in the shadows of the floor.
+
+"Take him to room six," said the adjutant, indicating the speaker to a
+pair of stretcher-bearers. In the quieter pauses the rain was heard
+beating on the panes.
+
+There are certain streets in Paris, equally unknown to tourist and
+Parisian--obscure, narrow, cobble-stoned lanes, lined by walls
+concealing little orchards and gardens. So provincial is their
+atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to believe
+one's self on the fringe of an old town, just where little bourgeois
+villas begin to overlook the fields; but to consider one's self just
+beyond the heart of Paris is almost incredible. Down such a street, in a
+great garden, lay the institution to which our two Frenchmen were
+assigned. We had a hard time finding it in the night and rain, but at
+length, discovering the concierge's bell, we sent a vigorous peal
+clanging through the darkness. Oiler lifted the canvas flap of the
+ambulance to see about our patients.
+
+"All right in there, boys?"
+
+"Yes," answered a voice.
+
+"Not cold?"
+
+"Non. Are we at the hospital?"
+
+"Yes; we are trying to wake up the concierge."
+
+There was a sound of a key in a lock, and a small, dark woman opened the
+door. She was somewhat spinstery in type, her thin, black hair was
+neatly parted in the middle, and her face was shrewd, but not unkindly.
+
+"Deux blessés (two wounded), madame," said I.
+
+The woman pulled a wire loop inside the door, and a far-off bell
+tinkled.
+
+"Come in," she said. "The porter will be here immediately."
+
+We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and a
+carbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall.
+
+"Are they seriously wounded?" she asked.
+
+"I cannot say."
+
+A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a small,
+beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber boots,
+and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room.
+
+"Two wounded have arrived," said the lady. "You are to help these
+messieurs get out the stretchers."
+
+The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance,
+glowing red behind its curtain of rain.
+
+"Mon Dieu, what a deluge!" he exclaimed, and followed us forth. With an
+"Easy there," and "Lift now," we soon had both of our clients out of the
+ambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, little
+room, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy,
+stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small,
+nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes. The
+mud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed, beside the
+Victorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A middle-aged
+servant--a big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature, probably the
+porter's wife--entered, followed by two other women, the last two
+wearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and the same pattern
+of white wristlets and collar. We then carried the two soldiers upstairs
+to a back room, where the old servant had filled a kind of enamel
+dishpan with soapy water. Very gently and deftly the beefy old porter
+and his wife took off the fouled, blood-stained uniforms of the two
+fighting men, and washed their bodies, while she who had opened the door
+stood by and superintended all. The feverish, bright-eyed fellow seemed
+to be getting weaker, but the big peasant conversed with the old woman
+in a low, steady tone, and told her that there had been a big action.
+
+When Oiler and I came downstairs, two little glasses of sherry and a
+plate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us. There was something
+distinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in the demeanor of
+the two prim ladies who stood by. It roused my curiosity. Finally one of
+them said:--
+
+"Are you English, gentlemen?"
+
+"No," we replied; "Americans."
+
+"I thought you might be English," she replied in that language, which
+she spoke very clearly and fluently. "Both of us have been many years in
+England. We are French Protestant deaconesses, and this is our home. It
+is not a hospital. But when the call for more accommodations for the
+wounded came in, we got ready our two best rooms. The soldiers upstairs
+are our first visitors."
+
+The old porter came uneasily down the stair. "Mademoiselle Pierre says
+that the doctor must come at once," he murmured, "the little fellow (le
+petit) is not doing well."
+
+We thanked the ladies gratefully for the refreshment, for we were cold
+and soaked to the skin. Then we went out again to the ambulance and the
+rain. A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning. Later in the morning, I
+saw a copy of the "Matin" attached to a kiosk; it said something about
+"Grande Victoire."
+
+Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris,
+bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle. For
+three days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance squads
+drove continuously. It was a terrible phase of the conflict to see, but
+he who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the soul of the
+war. Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that were
+spiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in its
+essence, profoundly animal.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+The Great Swathe of the Lines
+
+
+
+The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region whence came
+the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself, share the life of
+the French soldier. Late one evening in October, I arrived in Nancy and
+went to a hotel I had known well before the war. An old porter, a man of
+sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair, and a florid face almost
+devoid of expression, carried up my luggage, and as I looked at him,
+standing in the doorway, a simple figure in his striped black and yellow
+vest and white apron, I wondered just what effect the war had had on
+him. Through the open window of the room, seen over the dark silhouette
+of the roofs of Nancy, shone the glowing red sky and rolling smoke of
+the vast munition works at Pompey and Frouard.
+
+"You were not here when I came to the hotel two years ago," said I.
+
+"No," he answered; "I have been here only since November, 1914."
+
+"You are a Frenchman? There was a Swiss here, then."
+
+"Yes, indeed, I am Français, monsieur. The Swiss is now a waiter in a
+café of the Place Stanislas. It is something new to me to be a hotel
+porter."
+
+"Tiens. What did you do?"
+
+"I drove a coal team, monsieur."
+
+"How, then, did you happen to come here?"
+
+"I used to deliver coal to the hotel. One day I heard that the Swiss had
+gone to the café to take the place of a garçon whose class had just been
+called out. I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks of coal, and
+being always out of doors, so I applied for the porter's job."
+
+"You are satisfied with the change."
+
+"Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur."
+
+"I suppose you have kinsmen at the front."
+
+"Only my sister's son, monsieur."
+
+"In the active forces?"
+
+"No, he is a reservist. He is a man thirty-five years of age. He was
+wounded by a shrapnel ball in the groin early in the spring, but is now
+at the front again."
+
+"What does he do en civil?"
+
+"He is a furniture-maker, monsieur."
+
+He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off down the
+green velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator. In the street
+below a crowd was coming out of the silky white radiance of the lobby of
+a cinema into the violet rays thrown upon the sidewalk from the
+illuminated sign over the theater door. There are certain French cities
+to which the war has brought a real prosperity, and Nancy was then one
+of them. The thousands of refugees from the frontier villages and the
+world of military officials and soldier workmen mobilized in the
+ammunition factories had added to the population till it was actually
+greater than it had been before the war, and with this new population
+had come a development of the city's commercial life. The middle class
+was making money, the rich were getting richer, and Nancy, hardly more
+than eighteen or nineteen miles from the trenches, forgot its danger
+till, on the first day of January, 1916, the Germans fired several
+shells from a giant mortar or a marine piece into the town, one of which
+scattered the fragments of a big five-story apartment house all over
+Nancy. And on that afternoon thirty thousand people left the city.
+
+The day on which I was to go across the great swathe of the front to the
+first-line trenches dawned cool and sunny. I use the word "swathe"
+purposely, for only by that image can the real meaning of the phrase
+"the front" be understood. The thick, black line which figures on the
+war-maps is a great swathe of country running, with a thousand little
+turns and twists that do not interfere with its general regularity, from
+the summits of the Vosges to the yellow dunes of the North Sea. The
+relation of the border of this swathe to the world beyond is the
+relation of sea to land along an irregular and indented coast. Here an
+isolated, strategic point, fiercely defended by the Germans, has
+extended the border of the swathe beyond the usual limits, and villages
+thirteen and fourteen miles from the actual lines have been pounded to
+pieces by long-range artillery in the hope of destroying the enemy's
+communications; there the trenches cross an obscure, level moor upon
+whose possession nothing particular depends, and the swathe narrows to
+the villages close by the lines. This swathe, which begins with the
+French communications, passes the French trenches, leaps "No Man's
+Land," and continues beyond the German trenches to the German
+communications, averages about twenty-two miles in width. The territory
+within this swathe is inhabited by soldiers, ruled by soldiers, worked
+by soldiers, and organized for war.
+
+Sometimes the transition between civilian life and the life of the
+swathe is abrupt, as, for instance, at Verdun, where the villages beyond
+the lines have been emptied of civilian inhabitants to make room for the
+soldiery; but at other times the change is gradual and the peasants
+continue to work fields almost in the shadow of the trenches. Since the
+line of trenches was organized by the Germans only after a series of
+engagements along the front, during which the battle-line oscillated
+over a wide territory, the approach to the swathe is often through a
+region of desolated villages sometimes far removed from the present
+trenches. Such is the state of affairs in the region of the Marne, the
+Argonne, and on the southern bank of the Moselle. Moss-overgrown and
+silent, these villages often stand deserted in the fields at the
+entrance to the swathe, fit heralds of the desolation that lies beyond.
+
+Imagine, then, the French half of the swathe extending from the edge of
+the civilian world to the barbed-wire entanglements of No Man's Land.
+Within this territory, in the trenches, in the artillery positions, in
+the villages where troops are quartered (and they are quartered in every
+village of the swathe), and along all the principal turns and corners of
+the roads, a certain number of shells fall every twenty-four hours, the
+number of shells per locality increasing as one advances toward the
+first lines. There are certain disputed regions, that of Verdun in
+particular, where literally the whole great swathe has been pounded to
+pieces, till hardly one stone of a village remains on another, and
+during the recent offensive in the Somme the British are said to have
+systematically wiped out every village, hamlet, and road behind the
+German trenches to a depth of eighteen miles. Yet, protected from rifle
+bullets and the majority of shells by a great wooded hill, the
+inhabitants of M------, one mile from the lines of the Bois-le-Prêtre,
+did a thriving business selling fruit to the soldiers, and I once saw an
+old peasant woman, who was digging potatoes in her garden when a small
+shell burst about two hundred feet from her, shake her fist toward the
+German lines, mutter something, and plod angrily home to her cellar.
+There are rarely any children close to the trenches, but in villages
+that are only occasionally shelled, the school is open, and the class
+hurries to the cellar at the first alarm.
+
+The lieutenant of the American Section, à young Frenchman who spoke
+English not only fluently, but also with distinction, came to Nancy to
+take me to the front. It was a clear, sunny morning, and the rumble of
+the commercial life of Nancy, somewhat later in starting than our own,
+was just beginning to be heard. Across the street from the
+breakfast-room of the hotel, a young woman wearing a little black cape
+over her shoulders rolled up the corrugated iron shutter of a
+confectioner's shop and began to set the window with the popular
+patriotic candy boxes, aluminum models of a "seventy-five" shell tied
+round with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a white
+apron and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his head;
+and from the nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant dressed in
+a black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the morning I
+was contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; that
+night I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire shells.
+
+"Please give me all your military papers," said my officer. I handed
+over all the cards, permits, and licenses that had been given me, and he
+examined them closely.
+
+"Allons, let us go," he said to his chauffeur, a young soldier wearing
+the insignia of the motor-transportation corps.
+
+"How long does it take us to get to the lines, mon lieutenant?"
+
+"About an hour. Our headquarters are thirty kilomètres distant."
+
+The big, war-gray Panhard began to move. I looked round, eager to notice
+anything that marked our transition from peace to war. Beyond the Nancy,
+built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay the
+industrial Nancy which has grown up since the development of the iron
+mines of French Lorraine in the eighties. Through this ugly huddle we
+passed first: there were working men on the sidewalks, gamins in the
+gutters,--nothing to remind one of the war.
+
+"Halt!"
+
+At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small,
+gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car. From the door of a
+neighboring wineshop, a hideous old woman, her uncombed, tawny yellow
+hair messed round her coarse, shiny face, came out to look at us.
+
+"Your papers, please," said a red-faced, middle-aged sergeant wearing a
+brown corduroy uniform, who, walking briskly on enormous fat legs, had
+followed the sentry out into the street. The lieutenant produced the
+military permit to travel in the army zone--the ordre de mouvement, a
+printed form on a blue sheet about the size of a leaf of typewriter
+paper.
+
+"Pass," said the sergeant, and saluted. The sentry retired to his post
+on the sidewalk. At the door of the wineshop the woman continued to
+stare at us with an animal curiosity. Possibly our English-like uniforms
+had attracted her attention; the French are very curious about les
+Anglais. Over the roof of an ugly row of working men's barracks, built
+of mortar and trimmed with dingy brick, came the uproar of a great
+industry, the humming clang of saws, the ringing of iron on iron, and
+the heart-beat thump of a great hammer that shook the earth. In a vast,
+detached building five great furnaces were crowned with tufts of pinkish
+fire, workmen were crossing the cindery yard dragging little carts and
+long strips of iron, and a long line of open freight cars was being
+emptied of coal.
+
+"They are making shells," said the lieutenant in the tone that he might
+have said, "They are making candy."
+
+Another sentry held us up at the bridge where the road crosses the
+Moselle as it issues from the highlands to the southwest.
+
+Beyond the bridge, running almost directly north to Metz, lay the
+historic valley of the Moselle. Great, bare hills, varying between seven
+hundred and a thousand feet in height, and often carved by erosion into
+strange, high triangles and abrupt mesas, formed the valley wall. The
+ground color of the hills was a warm buff-brown with a good deal of
+iron-red in it, and the sky above was of a light, friendly blue. A
+strange, Egyptian emerald of new wheat, a certain deep cobalt of cloud
+shadows, and a ruddy brownness of field and moor are the colors of
+Lorraine. Here and there, on the meadows of the river and the steep
+flanks of the hills, were ancient, red-roofed villages. Across the
+autumnal fields the smoke and flame of squalid Pompey loomed strangely.
+
+There were signs of the war at Marbache, fourteen kilomètres from Nancy,
+slight signs, to be sure, but good ones--the presence of a military
+smithy for the repair of army wagons, several of which stood by on rusty
+wheels, and a view of some twenty or thirty artillery caissons parked
+under the trees. But it was at B------, sixteen kilomètres from Nancy,
+and sixteen from the lines, that I first felt the imminence of the war.
+The morning train from Nancy had just stopped, to go no farther for fear
+of shells, and beyond the station the tracks of the once busy Nancy-Metz
+railroad advanced, rusty, unused, and overgrown with grass, into the
+danger zone. Far behind now lay civilian Pompey, and Marbache shared by
+soldiers and civilians. B------was distinctly a village of the soldiery.
+The little hamlet, now the junction where the wagon-trains supplying the
+soldiery meet the great artery of the railroad, was built on the banks
+of a canal above the river. The color of these villages in Lorraine is
+rather lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the local
+buff-yellow stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown tone that goes
+well with the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown landscape. A
+glorious sky of silvery white cloud masses, pierced with sunlight and
+islanded with soft blue, shone over the soldier village. There were no
+combatants in it when we passed through, only the old poilus who drove
+the wagons to the trenches and the army hostlers who looked after the
+animals. There were pictures of soldier grooms leading horses down a
+narrow, slimy street between brown, mud-spattered walls to a
+drinking-trough; of horses lined up along a house wall being briskly
+curry-combed by big, thick-set fellows in blousy white overalls and blue
+fatigue caps; and of doors of stables opening on the road showing a
+bedding of brown straw on the earthen floor. There was a certain stench,
+too, the smell of horse-fouled mud that mixed with that odor I later was
+able to classify as the smell of war. For the war has a smell that
+clings to everything miltary, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, and
+cantonments, and saturates one's own clothing, a smell compounded of
+horse, chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human beings. At the guarded
+exit of the village to the shell zone was a little military cemetery in
+which rows of wooden crosses stood with the regularity of pins in a
+paper.
+
+Two kilomètres farther on, at Dieulouard, we drew into the shell zone. A
+cottage had been struck the day before, and the shell, arriving by the
+roof, had blown part of the front wall out into the street. In the
+façade of the house, to the left of a door hanging crazily on its
+hinges, an irregular oval hole, large enough to drive a motor-car
+through, rose from the ground and came to a point just below the
+overhang of the roof. The edges of the broken stone were clean and new
+in contrast to the time-soiled outer wall of the dwelling.
+
+A pile of this clean stone lay on the ground at the outer opening of the
+orifice, mixed with fragments of red tiles.
+
+"They killed two there yesterday," said the lieutenant, pointing out the
+débris.
+
+The village, a farming hamlet transformed by the vicinity of a great
+foundry into something neither a village nor a town, was full of
+soldiers; there were soldiers in the streets, soldiers standing in
+doorways, soldiers cooking over wood fires, soldiers everywhere. And
+looking at the muddy village-town full of men in uniforms of blue, old
+uniforms of blue, muddy uniforms of blue, in blue that was blue-gray and
+blue-green from wear and exposure to the weather, I realized that the
+old days of beautiful, half-barbaric uniforms were gone forever, and
+that, in place of the old romantic war of cavalry charges and great
+battles in the open, a new, more terrible war had been created, a war
+that had not the chivalric externals of the old.
+
+After Dieulouard began the swathe of stillness.
+
+Following the western bank of the canal of the Moselle the road made a
+great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and then
+mounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur the road went
+through lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses surrounded by
+acres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in their weedy
+profusion. Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great burlap
+screens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect of a
+continuous line when seen from a certain angle.
+
+"What are those for?"
+
+"To hide the road from the Germans. Do you see that little village down
+there on the crest? The Boches have an observatory there, and shell the
+road whenever they see anything worth shelling."
+
+A strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and
+decay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued to
+shine on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the world
+was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed. A village
+lay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells and half deserted. Beyond
+the still, shell-spattered houses, a great wood rose, about a mile and a
+half away, on a ridge that stood boldly against the sky. Running from
+the edge of the trees down across an open slope to the river was a
+brownish line that stood in a little contrast to the yellower grass.
+Suddenly, there slowly rose from this line a great puff of grayish-black
+smoke which melted away in the clear, autumnal air.
+
+"See," said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he would
+have shown at a bonfire--"those are the German trenches. We have just
+fired a shell into them."
+
+Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of Pont-à-Mousson.
+The road was now everywhere screened carefully with lengths of
+light-brown burlap, and there was not a single house that did not bear
+witness to the power of a shell. The sense of "the front" began to
+possess me, never to go, the sense of being in the vicinity of a
+tremendous power. A ruined village, or a deserted town actually on the
+front does not bring to mind any impression of decay, for the intellect
+tends rather to consider t\& means by which the destruction has been
+accomplished. One sees villages of the swathes so completely blown to
+pieces that they are literally nothing but earthy mounds of rubbish, and
+seeing them thus, in a plain still fiercely disputed night and day
+between one's own side and the invisible enemy, the mind feels itself in
+the presence of force, titanic, secret, and hostile.
+
+Beyond Pont-à-Mousson the road led directly to the trenches of the
+Bois-le-Prêtre, less than half a mile away. But the disputed trenches
+were hidden behind the trees, and I could not see them. Through the
+silence of the deserted town sounded the muffled boom of shells and
+trench engines bursting in the wood beyond, and every now and then
+clouds of gray-black smoke from the explosion would rise above the brown
+leaves of the ash trees. The smoke of these explosions rose straight
+upwards in a foggy column, such as a locomotive might make if, halted on
+its tracks somewhere in the wood, it had put coal on its fires.
+
+With the next day I began my service at the trenches, but the war began
+for me that very night.
+
+A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted apartment
+house had been assigned me. It was nine o'clock, and I was getting ready
+to roll up in my blankets and go to sleep. Beneath the starlit heavens
+the street below was black as pitch save when a trench light, floating
+serenely down the sky, illuminated with its green-white glow the curving
+road and the line of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous villas. There was not
+a sound to be heard outside of an occasional rifle shot in the trenches,
+sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet balls. I went
+round to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen windows to
+the lines. A little action, some quarrel of sentries, perhaps, was going
+on behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river.
+Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad track
+running across the un-harvested fields. Gleaming palely through the
+French window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed the
+deserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished
+water-tap above the stone sink. The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke
+upon my ears.
+
+My own room was lit by the yellow flame of a solitary candle, rising,
+untroubled by the slightest breath of wind, straight into the air. A
+large rug of old-rose covered the floor, an old-rose velvet canopy
+draped a long table, hanging down at the corners in straight, heavy
+creases, and the wallpaper was a golden yellow with faint stripes of
+silvery-gray glaze. By the side of the wooden bed stood a high cabinet
+holding about fifty terra-cotta and porcelain figurines, shiny
+shepherdesses with shiny pink cheeks, Louis XV peasants with rakes on
+their shoulders, and three little dogs made of a material the color of
+cocoa. The gem of the collection was an eighteenth-century porcelain of
+a youth and a maid sitting on opposite sides of a curved bench over
+whose center rose a blossoming bush. The youth, dressed in black, and
+wearing yellow stockings, looked with an amorous smile at the girl in
+her gorgeous dress of flowering brocade.
+
+A marbly-white fireplace stood in the corner, overhung by a great Louis
+XV mirror with a gilt frame of rich, voluptuous curves. On the mantel
+lay a scarf of old-rose velvet smelling decidedly musty. Alone, apart,
+upon this mantel, as an altar, stood a colored plaster bust of Jeanne
+d'Arc, showing her in the beauty of her winsome youth. The pale, girlish
+face dominated the shadowy room with its dreamy, innocent loveliness.
+
+There came a knock at the door, and so still was the town and the house
+that the knock had the effect of something dramatic and portentous. A
+big man, with bulging, pink cheeks, a large, chestnut mustache, and
+brown eyes full of philosophic curiosity, stood in the doorway. The
+uniform that he was wearing was unusually neat and clean.
+
+"So you are the American I am to have as neighbor," said he.
+
+"Yes," I replied.
+
+"I am the caporal in charge of the dépôt of the engineers in the
+cellar," continued my visitor, "and I thought I'd come in and see how
+you were."
+
+I invited him to enter.
+
+"Do you find yourself comfortable here, son?"
+
+"Yes. I consider myself privileged to have the use of the room. Have a
+cigarette?"
+
+"Are these American cigarettes?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Your American tobacco is fine, son. But in America everybody is a
+millionaire and has the best of everything--isn't that so? I should like
+to go to America."
+
+"A Frenchman is never happy out of France."
+
+Comfortably seated in a big, ugly chair, he puffed his cigarette and
+meditated.
+
+"Perhaps you are right," he admitted. "We Frenchmen love the good
+things, and think we can get them in France better than anywhere else.
+The solid satisfactions of life--good wine--good cheese." He paused.
+"You see, son, all that (tout ça) is an affair of mine--in civilian life
+(dans le civil) I am a grocer at Macon in Bourgogne."
+
+For a little while we talked of Burgundy, which I had often visited in
+my student days at Lyons. There came another pause, and the Burgundian
+said:--
+
+"Well, what do you think of this big racket (ce grand fracas)?"
+
+"I have not seen enough of it to say."
+
+"Well, I think you are going to get a taste of it to-night. I heard our
+artillery men (nos artiflots) early this morning firing their long-range
+cannon, and every time they do that the Boches throw shells into
+Pont-à-Mousson. I have been expecting an answer all day. If they start
+in to-night, get up and come down cellar, son. This house was struck by
+a shell two weeks ago."
+
+The shadowy, candlelit room and the dark city became at his words more
+mysterious and hostile. The atmosphere seemed pervaded by some obscure,
+endless, dreadful threat. It was getting toward ten o'clock.
+
+"Is this the only room you have? I have never been in this suite."
+
+"No, there is another room. Would you like to see it?"
+
+He followed me into a small chamber from which everything had been
+stripped except a bedside table, a chair, and a crayon portrait of a
+woman. The picture, slightly tinted with flesh color, was that of a
+bourgeoise on the threshold of the fifties, and the still candle-flame
+brought out in distinct relief the heavy, obese countenance, the hair
+curled in artificial ringlets, and the gold crucifix which she wore on
+her large bosom. The Burgundian's attention centered on this picture,
+which he examined with the air of a connoisseur of female beauty.
+
+"Lord, how ugly she is!" he exclaimed. "She might well have stayed. Such
+an old dragon would have no reason to fear the Boches." And he laughed
+heartily from his rich lips and pulled his mustache.
+
+"Don't forget to hurry to the cellar, son," he called as he went away.
+
+At his departure the lonely night closed in on me again. Far, far away
+sounded the booming of cannon.
+
+I am a light sleeper, and the arrival of the first shell awakened me.
+Kicking off my blankets, I sat up in bed just in time to catch the swift
+ebb of a heavy concussion. A piece of glass, dislodged from a broken
+pane by the tremor, fell in a treble tinkle to the floor. For a minute
+or two there was a full, heavy silence, and then several objects rolled
+down the roof and fell over the gutters into the street. It sounded as
+if some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto the house-roof from the
+height of the clouds. Another silence followed. Suddenly it was broken
+by a swift, complete sound, a heavy boom-roar, and on the heels of this
+noise came a throbbing, whistling sigh that, at first faint as the sound
+of ocean on a distant beach, increased with incredible speed to a
+whistling swish, ending in a HISH of tremendous volume and a roaring,
+grinding burst. The sound of a great shell is never a pure bang; one
+hears, rather, the end of the arriving HISH, the explosion, and the
+tearing disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one grinding
+hammer-blow of terrific violence. On the heels of this second shell came
+voices in the dark street, and the rosy glow of fire from somewhere
+behind. More lumps, fragments of shell that had been shot into the air
+by the explosion, rained down upon the roof. I got up and went to the
+kitchen window. A house on one of the silent streets between the city
+and the lines was on fire, great volumes of smoke were rolling off into
+the starlit night, and voices were heard all about murmuring in the
+shadows. I hurried on my clothes and went down to the cellar.
+
+The light of two candles hanging from a shelf in loops of wire revealed
+a clean, high cellar; a mess of straw was strewn along one wall, and a
+stack of shovels and picks, some of them wrapped in paper, was banked
+against the other. In the straw lay three oldish men, fully clad in the
+dark-blue uniform which in old times had signaled the Engineer Corps;
+one dozed with his head on his arm, the other two were stretched out
+flat in the mysterious grossness of sleep. A door from the cellar to a
+sunken garden was open, and through this opening streamed the intense
+radiance of the rising fire. At the opening stood three men, my visitor
+of the evening, a little, wrinkled man with Napoleon III whiskers and
+imperial, and an old, dwarfish fellow with a short neck, a bullet head,
+and close-clipped hair. Catching sight of me, the Burgundian said:--
+
+"Well, son, you see it is hammering away (ça tape) ce soir."
+
+Hearing another shell, he slammed the door, and stepped to the right
+behind the stone wall of the cellar.
+
+"Very bad," croaked the dwarf. "The Boches are throwing fire shells."
+
+"And they will fire shrapnel at the poor bougres who have to put out the
+fires," said the little man with the imperial.
+
+"So they will, those knaves," croaked the dwarf in a voice entirely free
+from any emotion. "That fire must be down on the Boulevard Ney," said
+the bearded man.
+
+"There is another beginning just to the right," said the Burgundian in
+the tone of one retailing interesting but hardly useful information.
+
+"There will be others," croaked the dwarf, who, leaning against the
+cellar wall, was trying to roll a cigarette with big, square, fumbling
+fingers. And looking at a big, gray-haired man in the hay, who had
+turned over and was beginning to snore, he added: "Look at the new man.
+He sleeps well, that fellow" (ce type là).
+
+"He looks like a Breton," said the man with the imperial.
+
+"An Auvergnat--an Auvergnat," replied the dwarf in a tone that was meant
+to be final.
+
+The soldier, who had just been sent down from Paris to take the place of
+another recently invalided home, snored on, unconscious of our scrutiny.
+The light from the fires outside cast a rosy glow on his weather-worn
+features and sparse, silvery hair. His own curiosity stirred, the
+corporal looked at his list.
+
+"He came from Lyons," he announced. "His name is Alphonse Reboulet."
+
+"I am glad he is not an Auvergnat," growled the dwarf. "We should have
+all had fleas."
+
+A shell burst very near, and a bitter odor of explosives came swirling
+through the doorway. A fragment of the shell casing struck a window
+above us, and a large piece of glass fell by the doorway and broke into
+splinters. The first fire was dying down, but two others were burning
+briskly. The soldiers waited for the end of the bombardment, as they
+might have waited for the end of a thunderstorm.
+
+"Tiens--here comes the shrapnel," exclaimed the Burgundian. And he
+slammed the door swiftly.
+
+A high, clear whistle cleaved the flame-lit sky, and about thirty small
+shrapnel shells burst beyond us.
+
+"They try to prevent any one putting out the fires," said the Burgundian
+confidentially. "They get the range from the light of the flames."
+
+Another dreadful rafale (volley) of shrapnel, at the rate of ten or
+fifteen a minute, came speeding from the German lines.
+
+"They are firing on the other house, now."
+
+"Who puts out the fires?"
+
+"The territorials who police and clean up the town. Some of them live
+two doors below."
+
+The Burgundian pointed down the garden to a door opening, like our own,
+on to an area below the level of the street. Suddenly, a gate opening on
+a back lane swung back, and two soldiers entered, one carrying the feet
+and the other the shoulders of a third. The body hung clumsily between
+them like a piece of old sacking.
+
+"Tiens--someone is wounded," said the Burgundian. "Go, thou, Badel, and
+see who it is."
+
+The dwarf plodded off obediently.
+
+"It is Palester," he announced on his return, "the type that had the
+swollen jaw last month."
+
+"What's the matter with him?"
+
+"He's been killed."
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+La Forêt De Bois-Le-Pretre
+
+
+
+Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare,
+desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to the
+river in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to the
+northward-flowing stream. The town of Pont-à-Mousson lies an apron of
+meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle
+and the ridge of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The latter is the highest of all
+the spurs of the valley. Rising from the river about half a mile to the
+north of the city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, and
+was seen from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking the
+sky-line to the northwest. The hamlet of Maidières, in which our
+headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a
+point where the amphitheater of Pont-à-Mousson, crowding between the two
+ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the west.
+
+The Bois-le-Prêtre dominated at once the landscape and our minds. Its
+existence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty thousand
+Frenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled Americans; it had dominated
+and ended the lives of the dead; it would dominate the imagination of
+the future. Yet, looking across the brown walls and claret roofs of the
+hamlet of Maidières, there was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope,
+open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a
+fire shell, and a wood. The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees,
+seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost all
+lights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate. Such was the
+forest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any other
+point along the line. The wood had been contested trench by trench,
+literally foot by foot. It was at once the key to the Saint-Mihiel
+salient and the city of Metz.
+
+The Saint-Mihiel salient--"the hernia," as the French call it--begins at
+the Bois-le-Prêtre. Pivoting on The Wood, the lines turn sharply inland,
+cross the desolate plateau of La Woevre, attain the Meuse at
+Saint-Mihiel, turn again, and ascend the river to the Verdunois. The
+salient, as dangerous for the Germans as it is troublesome for the
+French, represents the limit of a German offensive directed against Toul
+in October, 1914. That the French retreated was due to the fact that the
+plateau was insufficiently protected, many of the regiments having been
+rushed north to the great battle then raging on the Aisne.
+
+Only one railroad center lies in the territory of the salient,
+Thiaucourt in Woevre. This pleasant little moorland town, locally famous
+for its wine, is connected with Metz by two single-track railroad lines,
+one coming via Conflans, and the other by Arnaville on the Moselle. At
+Vilcey-sur-Mad, these lines unite, and follow to Thiaucourt the only
+practicable railroad route, the valley of the Rupt (brook) de Mad.
+
+Thus the domination of Thiaucourt, or the valley of the Rupt de Mad, by
+French artillery would break the railroad communications between the
+troops keeping the salient and their base of supplies, Metz. And the
+fate of Metz itself hangs on the control of the Bois-le-Prêtre.
+
+Metz is the heart of the German organization on the western front: the
+railroad center, the supply station, the troop dépôt. A blow at Metz
+would affect the security of every German soldier between Alsace and the
+Belgian frontier. But if the French can drive the Germans out of the
+Bois-le-Prêtre and establish big howitzers on the crest the Germans are
+still holding, there will soon be no more Metz. The French guns will
+destroy the city as the German cannon destroyed Verdun.
+
+When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the battles
+of September and October, 1914, they took to the ground on the heights
+of the Bois-le-Prêtre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt and Metz
+to preserve these centers from the danger of being shelled. On the crest
+of the highest ridge along the valley, admirably ambushed in a thick
+forest, they waited for the coming of the French. And the French came.
+
+They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster, rich
+young noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld by
+one vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from behind the
+German lines to the town of Thiaucourt. In the trenches behind the slaty
+trunks of the great ash trees, Bavarian peasants, Saxons, and
+round-headed Wurttem-burgers, the olive-green, jack-booted Boches,
+awaited their coming, determined to hold the wood, the salient, and the
+city.
+
+A year later the Bois-le-Prêtre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume of
+ecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in an old
+church, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of Death).
+
+The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer residence
+of a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the beginning of the war.
+If there is an architectural style of German origin known as the
+"Neo-Classic," which affects large, windowless spaces framed in
+pilasters of tile, and decorations and insets of omelet-yellow and
+bottle-green glazed brick, "Wisteria Villa" is of that school. It stood
+behind a high wall of iron spikes on the road leading from Maidières to
+the trenches, a high, Germano-Pompeian country house, topped by a roof
+rich in angles, absurd windows, and unexpected gables. There are huge,
+square, French-roofed houses in New England villages built by local
+richessîmes of Grant's time, and still called by neighbors "the Jinks
+place" or the "Levi Oates place"; Wisteria Villa had something of the
+same social relation to the commune of Maidières. Grotesque and ugly, it
+was not to be despised; it had character in its way.
+
+Our social center was the dining-room of the villa. Exclusive of the
+kitchen range, it boasted the only stove in the house, a queerly shaped
+"Salamandre," a kind of Franklin stove with mica doors. The walls were
+papered an ugly chocolate brown with a good deal of red in it, and the
+borders, doors, and fireplace frame were stained a color trembling
+between mission green and oak brown. The room was rectangular and too
+high for its width. There were pictures. On each side of the fireplace,
+profiles toward the chimney, hung concave plaques of Dutch girls. To the
+left of the door was a yellowed etching of the tower of the château of
+Heidelberg, and to the right a very small oil painting, in an ornate
+gilt frame three inches deep, of a beach by moonlight. About two or
+three hundred books, bound in boards and red leather, stood behind the
+cracked glass of a bookcase in the corner; they were very "jeune fille,"
+and only the romances of Georges Ohnet appeared to have been read. The
+thousand cupboards of the house were full of dusty knickknacks, old
+umbrellas, hats, account-books, and huge boxes holding the débris of
+sets of checkers, dominoes, and ivory chessmen. An enlarged photograph
+of the family hung on the walls of a bedroom; it had been taken at
+somebody's marriage, and showed the group standing on the front steps,
+the same steps that were later to be blown to pieces by a shell. One saw
+the bride, the groom, and about twenty relatives, including a boy in
+short trousers, a wide, white collar, and an old-fashioned, fluffy bow
+tie. Anxious to be included in the picture, the driver of the bridal
+barouche has craned his neck forward. On the evidence of the costumes,
+the picture had been taken about 1902.
+
+Our bureau in the cellar of Wisteria Villa was connected directly with
+the trenches. When a man had been wounded, he was carried to the poste
+de secours in the rear lines, and it was our duty to go to this trench
+post and carry the patient to the hospital at the nearest rail-head. The
+bureau of the Section was in charge of two Frenchmen who shared the
+labor of attending to the telephone and keeping the books.
+
+A hundred yards beyond Wisteria Villa, at a certain corner, the
+principal road to the trenches divided into three branches, and in order
+to interfere as much as possible with communications, the Germans daily
+shelled this strategic point. A comrade and I had the curiosity to keep
+an exact record of a week's shelling. It must be remembered that the
+corner was screened from the Germans, who fired casually in the hope of
+hitting something and annoying the French. The cannons shelling the
+corner were usually "seventy-sevens," the German quick-firing pieces
+that correspond to the French "seventy-fives."
+
+Monday, ten shells at 6.30, two at 7.10, five at 11.28, twenty at
+intervals between 2.15 and 2.45, a swift rafale of some sixteen at 4.12,
+another rafale of twenty at 8, and occasional shells between 9 and
+midnight.
+
+Tuesday, two big shells at mid-day.
+
+Wednesday, rafales at 9.14, 11, 2.18, 4.30, and 6.20.
+
+Thursday--no shells.
+
+Friday, twelve at intervals between 10.16 and 12.20. Solitary big shell
+at 1.05. Another big shell at 3. Some fifteen stray shells between 5 and
+midnight.
+
+Saturday--no shells.
+
+Sunday--About five shells an hour between 4 in the afternoon and
+midnight.
+
+I give the number of shells falling at this corner as a concrete
+instance of what was happening at a dozen other points along the road.
+The fire of the German batteries was as capricious as the play of a
+search-light; one week, the corner and three or four other points would
+catch it, the next week the corner and another set of localities. And
+there were periods, sometimes ten days to two weeks long, when hardly a
+shell was fired at any road. Then, after a certain sense of security had
+begun to take form, a rafale would come screaming over, blow a horse and
+wagon to pieces, and leave one or two blue figures huddled in the mud.
+But the French replied to each shell and every rafale, in addition to
+firing at random all the day and a good deal of the night. There was
+hardly a night that Wisteria Villa did not rock to the sound of French
+guns fired at 2 and 3 in the morning. But the average day at
+Pont-à-Mousson was a day of random silences. The war had all the
+capricious-ness of the sea--of uncertain weather. There were hours of
+calm in the day, during which the desolate silence of the front flooded
+swiftly over the landscape; there were interruptions of great violence,
+sometimes desultory, sometimes beginning, in obedience to a human will,
+at a certain hour. The outbreak would commence with the orderliness of a
+clock striking, and continue the greater part of the day, rocking the
+deserted town with its clamor. Hearing it, the soldiers en repos would
+say, talking of The Wood, "It sings (ça chante)," or, "It knocks (ça
+tape) up there to-day." The smoke of the bursting shells hung over The
+Wood in a darkish, gray-blue fog. But since The Wood had a personality
+for us, many would say simply, "Listen to The Wood."
+
+The shell expresses one idea--energy. The cylinder of iron, piercing the
+air at a terrific speed, sings a song of swift, appalling energy, of
+which the final explosion is the only fitting culmination. One gets,
+too, an idea of an unbending volition in the thing. After a certain time
+at the front the ear learns to distinguish the sound of a big shell from
+a small shell, and to know roughly whether or not one is in the danger
+zone. It was a grim jest with us that it took ten days to qualify as a
+shell expert, and at the end of two weeks all those who qualified
+attended the funeral of those who had failed. Life at The Wood had an
+interesting uncertainty.
+
+A quarter of a mile beyond the corner, on the slope of Puvenelle
+opposite The Wood, stood Montauville, the last habitable village of the
+region. To the south of it rose the wooded slopes of Puvenelle; to the
+north, seen across a marshy meadow, were the slope and the ridge of the
+Bois-le-Prêtre. The dirty, mud-spattered village was caught between the
+leathery sweeps of two wooded ridges. Three winding roads, tramped into
+a pie of mire, crossed the grassy slope of The Wood, and disappeared
+into the trees at the top. Though less than a mile from the first German
+line, the village, because of its protection from shells by a spur of
+the Bois-le-Prêtre, was in remarkably good condition; the only building
+to show conspicuous damage being the church, whose steeple had been
+twice struck. It was curious to see pigeons flying in and out of the
+belfry through the shell rents in the roof. Here and there, among the
+uncultivated fields of those who had fled, were the green fields of some
+one who had stayed. A woman of seventy still kept open her grocery shop;
+it was extraordinarily dirty, full of buzzing flies, and smelled of
+spilled wine.
+
+"Why did you stay?" I asked her.
+
+"Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course my daughter
+wanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I, who have been to
+Nancy only once! A fine figure I should make in Dijon in my sabots!"
+
+"And you are not afraid of the shells?"
+
+"Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But I
+never leave my shop."
+
+And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front,
+Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate. But
+Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a man
+killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of
+twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of
+weariness. He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartily
+that the whole affaire--meaning the war in general--was finished. He was
+very anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going to
+win. Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the Boches
+seemed to be in his mind. I assured him that American opinion was
+optimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away.
+Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a "seventy-seven" shell, arriving
+without warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, I
+saw the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he were a rubber
+effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly ripped the
+envelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from the waist,
+leaned face down into the mud. I was the first to get to him. The young,
+discontented face was full of the gray street mud, there was mud in the
+hollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the fluffy mustache. A chunk of
+the shell had ripped open the left breast to the heart. Down his sleeve,
+as down a pipe, flowed a hasty drop, drop, drop of blood that mixed with
+the mire.
+
+Several times a day, at stated hours, the numbers of German missiles
+that had fallen into the trenches of the Bois-le-Prêtre, 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-à-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 qualité 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-Prêtre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon the
+high plateau of La Woevre; the last kilomètre 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-Prêtre rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At length
+the forest of Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Prêtre 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 kilomètres Metz, 25 kilomètres.
+
+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-Réserve first."
+
+The Quart-en-Réserve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of the
+Bois-le-Prêtre 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-Prêtre;
+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-Prêtre. 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 débris 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 mêlée 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-Prêtre, 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-à-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-Prêtre 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-Prêtre, 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 Poincaré--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 à 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 tunneï (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. Voilà 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-à-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-Réserve, 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-Prêtre--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-Réserve 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 â 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 (fusées éclairantes), 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-à-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 décor, 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 décor, 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-à-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 Américains. 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-à-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 événements) and did not mean war. Then over this bill
+the maire posted a notice that in case of a real mobilization (une
+mobilisation sérieuse) 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 hôtel 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-à-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 Français. In
+the morning I went out to get some bread.
+
+"'Eh là, good woman' (bonne femme), said a grand Boche to me.
+
+"'What do you want?' said I.
+
+"'Are there any soldats français 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-à-Mousson--there were some vulgarities (grossièretés). 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-à-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 Français nor Boches. Finally some
+French dragoons came down the road from Dieulouard, and little by little
+other soldiers came too. But, hélas, monsieur, the Boches were waiting
+for them in the Bois-le-Prêtre."
+
+Such was the way that Pont-à-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 Nomény, just across
+the river, is beyond question. I have talked with survivors. At
+Pont-à-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-Prêtre, 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 kilomètres 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 à 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 Maidières 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 Ségur's "Histoire de la Grande Armée en 1812," and another taking
+Flaubert's "Un cœur 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 à
+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 kilomètres," 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." (Après 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. "Voilà un colonel boche," said the sexton; "and a
+lieutenant boche--and fifty soldats boches."
+
+The destroyed quarter of Pont-à-Mousson lay between the main street and
+the flank of the Bois-le-Prêtre. 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-Prêtre, 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-à-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-à-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 (défenseur) 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 (pères 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-à-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-Prétre.
+
+
+
+
+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 véritable 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 Fêtes," 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 pâtés de foie gras,
+little sugar biscuits, and the well- beloved tablet of chocolate.
+
+While the grocery-man (l'épicier) is fighting somewhere in the north or
+in the Argonne, madame l'épicière 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 pâté de foie gras, madame,
+s'il vous plaît." "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 épicière 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 éclats 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'armée 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-Prêtre
+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 deputé 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 École des Beaux-Arts; Magne,
+a village schoolmaster in the Dauphiné; and Grétry, 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 café-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 Fêtes," 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 Théâtre des Variétés 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 français" and blew it on the bugle; then "la
+Charge boche," and blew that. "La Retraite français--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 téléphone 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 cœur. 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 mère, ma mère); and still another leçon 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-Prêtre, 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-Prêtre, 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 abbé, 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
+chrétienne). 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
+communiqué. "Le premier homme was called Adam, and la première 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 démons.) "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-à-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-Prêtre 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
+François 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 Delcassé 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 André,
+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.
+
+André 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 Fallières 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 Poincaré, 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
+attaché 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 Sacrée). 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.
+
+I heard only the friendliest criticism of the Russians.
+
+It is a rather delicate task to say what the French think of the
+Americans, for the real truth is that they think of us but rarely. Our
+quarrel with Germany over the submarines interested them somewhat, but
+this interest rapidly died away when it became evident that we were not
+going to do anything about it. They see our flag over countless charity
+dépôts, hospitals, and benevolent institutions, and are grateful. The
+poilu would be glad to see us in the fray simply because of the aid we
+should bring, but he is reasonable enough to know that the United States
+can keep out of the mêlée without losing any moral prestige. The only
+hostile criticism of America that I heard came from doctrinaires who saw
+the war as a conflict between autocracy and democracy, and if you grant
+that this point of view is the right one, these thinkers have a right to
+despise us. But the Frenchman knows that the Allies represent something
+more than "virtue-on-a-rampage."
+
+In Lyons I saw a sight at once ludicrous and pathetic. Two little
+dragoons of the class of 1917, stripling boys of eighteen or nineteen at
+the most, walked across the public square; their uniforms were too large
+for them, the skirts of their great blue mantles barely hung above the
+dust of the street, and their enormous warlike helmets and flowing
+horse-tails were ill-suited to their boyish heads. As I looked at them,
+I thought of the blue bundles I had seen drying upon the barbed wire,
+and felt sick at the brutality of the whole awful business. The sun was
+shining over the bluish mists of Lyons, and the bell of old Saint-Jean
+was ringing. Two Zouaves, stone blind, went by guided by a little, fat
+infirmier. At the frontier, the General Staff was preparing the defense
+of Verdun.
+
+One great nation, for the sake of a city valueless from a military point
+of view, was preparing to kill several hundred thousand of its citizens,
+and another great nation, anxious to retain the city, was preparing
+calmly for a parallel hecatomb. There is something awful and dreadful
+about the orderliness of a great offensive, for while one's imagination
+is grasped by the grandeur and the organization of the thing, all one's
+faculties of intellect are revolted by the stark brutality of death en
+masse.
+
+Early in February we were called to Bar-le-Duc, a pleasant old city some
+distance behind Verdun. Several hundred thousand men were soon going to
+be killed and wounded, and the city was in a feverish haste of
+preparation. So many thousand cans of ether, so many thousand pounds of
+lint, so many million shells, so many ambulances, so many hundred
+thousand litres of gasoline. Nobody knew when the Germans were going to
+strike.
+
+During the winter great activity in the German trenches near Verdun had
+led the French to expect an attack, but it was not till the end of
+January that aeroplane reconnoitering made certain the imminence of an
+offensive. As a first step in countering it, the French authorities
+prepared in the villages surrounding Bar-le-Duc a number of dépôts for
+troops, army supplies, and ammunition. Of this organization, Bar-le-Duc
+was the key. The preparations for the counter-attack were there
+centralized. Day after day convoys of motor-lorries carrying troops
+ground into town and disappeared to the eastward; big mortars mounted on
+trucks came rattling over the pavements to go no one knew where; and
+khaki-clad troops, troupes d'attaque, tanned Marocains and chunky,
+bull-necked Zouaves, crossed the bridge over the Ornain and marched
+away. At the turn in the road a new transparency had been erected, with
+VERDUN printed on it in huge letters. Now and then a soldier, catching
+sight of it, would nudge his comrade.
+
+On the 18th we were told to be in readiness to go at any minute and
+permissions to leave the barrack yard were recalled.
+
+The attack began with an air raid on Bar-le-Duc. I was working on my
+engine in the sunlit barrack yard when I heard a muffled Pom! somewhere
+to the right. Two French drivers who were putting a tire on their car
+jumped up with a "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" We stood together looking
+round. Beyond a wall on the other side of the river great volumes of
+brownish smoke were rolling up, and high in the air, brown and silvery,
+like great locusts, were two German aeroplanes.
+
+"Nom d'un chien, il y'en a plusieurs," said one of the Frenchmen,
+pointing out four, five, seven, nine aeroplanes. One seemed to hang
+immobile over the barrack yard. I fancy we all had visions of what would
+happen if a bomb hit the near-by gasoline reserve. Men ran across the
+yard to the shelter of the dormitories; some, caught as we were in the
+open, preferred to take a chance on dropping flat under a car. A
+whistling scream, a kind of shrill, increasing shriek, sounded in the
+air and ended in a crash. Smoke rolled up heavily in another direction.
+Another whistle, another crash, another and another and another. The
+last building struck shot up great tongues of flame. "C'est la gare,"
+said somebody. Across the yard a comrade's arm beckoned me, "Come on,
+we've got to help put out the fires!"
+
+The streets were quite deserted; horses and wagons abandoned to their
+fate were, however, quietly holding their places. Faces, emotionally
+divided between fear and strong interest, peered at us as we ran by,
+disappearing at the first whistle of a bomb, for all the world like
+hermit-crabs into their shells. A whistle sent us both scurrying into a
+passageway; the shell fell with a wicked hiss, and, scattering the
+paving-stones to the four winds, blew a shallow crater in the roadway. A
+big cart horse, hit in the neck and forelegs by fragments of the shell,
+screamed hideously. Right at the bridge, the sentry, an old territorial,
+was watching the whole scene from his flimsy box with every appearance
+of unconcern.
+
+Not the station itself, but a kind of baggage-shed was on fire. A hose
+fed by an old-fashioned seesaw pump was being played on the flames.
+Officials of the railroad company ran to and fro shouting unintelligible
+orders. For five minutes more the German aeroplanes hovered overhead,
+then slowly melted away into the sky to the south-east. The raid had
+lasted, I imagine, just about twenty minutes.
+
+That night, fearing another raid, all lights were extinguished in the
+town and at the barracks. Before rolling up in my blankets, I went out
+into the yard to get a few breaths of fresh air. Through the night air,
+rising and falling with the wind, I heard in one of the random silences
+of the night a low, distant drumming of artillery.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+
+
+The Great Days of Verdun
+
+The Verdun I saw in April, 1913, was an out-of-the-way provincial city
+of little importance outside of its situation as the nucleus of a great
+fortress. There were two cities--an old one, la ville des évêques, on a
+kind of acropolis rising from the left bank of the Meuse, and a newer
+one built on the meadows of the river. Round the acropolis Vauban had
+built a citadel whose steep, green-black walls struck root in the mean
+streets and narrow lanes on the slopes. Sunless by-ways, ill-paved and
+sour with the odor of surface drainage, led to it. Always picturesque,
+the old town now and then took on a real beauty. There were fine,
+shield-bearing doorways of the Renaissance to be seen, Gothic windows in
+greasy walls, and here and there at a street corner a huddle of
+half-timbered houses in a high contrast of invading sunlight and
+retreating shade. From the cathedral parapet, there was a view of the
+distant forts, and a horizontal sweep of the unharvested, buff-brown
+moorlands.
+
+"Un peu morte," say the French who knew Verdun before the war. The new
+town was without distinction. It was out of date. It had none of the
+glories that the province copies from Paris, no boulevards, no grandes
+aertères. Such life as there was, was military. Rue Mazel was bright
+with the gold braid and scarlet of the fournisseurs militaires, and in
+the late afternoon chic young officers enlivened the provincial
+dinginess with a brave show of handsome uniforms. All day long squads of
+soldiers went flick! flack! up and down the street and bugle-calls
+sounded piercingly from the citadel. The soldiery submerged the civil
+population.
+
+With no industries of any importance, and becoming less and less of an
+economic center as the depopulation of the Woevre continued, Verdun
+lived for its garrison. A fortress since Roman days, the city could not
+escape its historic destiny. Remembering the citadel, the buttressed
+cathedral, the soldiery, and the military tradition, the visitor felt
+himself to be in a soldier's country strong with the memory of many
+wars.
+
+The next day, at noon, we were ordered to go to M------, and at 12.15 we
+were in convoy formation in the road by the barracks wall. The great
+route nationale from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun runs through a rolling,
+buff-brown moorland, poor in villages and arid and desolate in aspect.
+Now it sinks through moorland valleys, now it cuts bowl-shaped
+depressions in which the spring rains have bred green quagmires, and
+now, rising, leaps the crest of a hill commanding a landscape of
+ocean-like immensity.
+
+Gray segments of the road disappear ahead behind fuzzy monticules; a
+cloud of wood-smoke hangs low over some invisible village in a fold of
+the moor, and patches of woodland lie like mantles on the barren slopes.
+Great swathes of barbed wire, a quarter of a mile in width, advancing
+and retreating, rising and falling with the geographical nature of the
+defensive position, disappear on both sides to the horizon. And so thick
+is this wire spread, that after a certain distance the eye fails to
+distinguish the individual threads and sees only rows of stout black
+posts filled with a steely, purple mist.
+
+We went though several villages, being greeted in every one with the
+inevitable error, Anglais! We dodged interminable motor-convoys carrying
+troops, the poilus sitting unconcernedly along the benches at the side,
+their rifles tight between their knees. At midnight we arrived at
+B------, four miles and a half west of Verdun. The night was clear and
+bitter cold; the ice-blue winter stars were westering. Refugees tramped
+past in the darkness. By the sputtering light of a match, I saw a woman
+go by with a cat in a canary cage; the animal moved uneasily, its eyes
+shone with fear. A middle-aged soldier went by accompanying an old woman
+and a young girl. Many pushed baby carriages ahead of them full of
+knick-knacks and packages.
+
+The crossroad where the ambulances turned off was a maze of beams of
+light from the autos. There was shouting of orders which nobody could
+carry out. Wounded, able to walk, passed through the beams of the lamps,
+the red of their bloodstains, detached against the white of the
+bandages, presenting the sharpest of contrasts in the silvery glare. At
+the station, men who had died in the ambulances were dumped hurriedly in
+a plot of grass by the side of the roadway and covered with a blanket.
+Never was there seen such a bedlam! But on the main road the great
+convoys moved smoothly on as if held together by an invisible chain. A
+smouldering in the sky told of fires in Verdun.
+
+From a high hill between B------and Verdun I got my first good look at
+the bombardment. From the edge of earth and sky, far across the
+moorlands, ray after ray of violet-white fire made a swift stab at the
+stars. Mingled with the rays, now seen here, now there, the
+reddish-violet semicircle of the great mortars flared for the briefest
+instant above the horizon. From the direction of this inferno came a
+loud roaring, a rumbling and roaring, increasing in volume--the sound of
+a great river tossing huge rocks through subterranean abysses. Every
+little while a great shell, falling in the city, would blow a great hole
+of white in the night, and so thundering was the crash of arrival that
+we almost expected to see the city sink into the earth.
+
+Terrible in the desolation of the night, on fire, haunted by specters of
+wounded men who crept along the narrow lanes by the city walls, Verdun
+was once more undergoing the destinies of war. The shells were falling
+along rue Mazel and on the citadel. A group of old houses by the Meuse
+had burnt to rafters of flickering flame, and as I passed them, one
+collapsed into the flooded river in a cloud of hissing steam.
+
+In order to escape shells, the wounded were taking the obscure by-ways
+of the town. Our wounded had started to walk to the ambulance station
+with the others, but, being weak and exhausted, had collapsed on the
+way. They were waiting for us at a little house just beyond the walls.
+Said one to the other, "As-tu-vu Maurice?" and the other answered
+without any emotion, "II est mort."
+
+The 24th was the most dreadful day. The wind and snow swept the heights
+of the desolate moor, seriously interfering with the running of the
+automobiles. Here and there, on a slope, a lorry was stuck in the slush,
+though the soldier passengers were out of it and doing their best to
+push it along. The cannonade was still so intense that, in intervals
+between the heavier snow-flurries, I could see the stabs of fire in the
+brownish sky. Wrapped in sheepskins and muffled to the ears in knitted
+scarves that might have come from New England, the territorials who had
+charge of the road were filling the ruts with crushed rock. Exhaustion
+had begun to tell on the horses; many lay dead and snowy in the frozen
+fields. A detachment of khaki-clad, red-fezzed colonial troops passed
+by, bent to the storm. The news was of the most depressing sort. The
+wounded could give you only the story of their part of the line, and you
+heard over and over again, "Nous avons reculés." A detachment of cavalry
+was at hand; their casques and dark-blue mantles gave them a crusading
+air. And through the increasing cold and darkness of late afternoon,
+troops, cannons, horsemen, and motor-trucks vanished toward the edge of
+the moor where flashed with increasing brilliance the rays of the
+artillery.
+
+I saw some German prisoners for the first time at T---, below Verdun.
+They had been marched down from the firing-line. Young men in the
+twenties for the most part, they seemed even more war-worn than the
+French. The hideous, helot-like uniform of the German private hung
+loosely on their shoulders, and the color of their skin was unhealthy
+and greenish. They were far from appearing starved; I noticed two or
+three who looked particularly sound and hearty. Nevertheless, they were
+by no means as sound-looking as the ruddier French.
+
+The poilus crowded round to see them, staring into their faces without
+the least malevolence. At last--at last--voilà enfin des Boches! A
+little to the side stood a strange pair, two big men wearing an odd kind
+of grayish protector and apron over their bodies. Against a near-by wall
+stood a kind of flattish tank to which a long metallic hose was
+attached. The French soldiers eyed them with contempt and disgust. I
+caught the words, "Flame-throwers!"
+
+I do not know what we should have done at Verdun without Lieutenant
+Roeder, our mechanical officer. All the boys behaved splendidly, but
+Lieutenant Roeder had the tremendously difficult task of keeping the
+Section going when the rolling-stock was none too good, and fearful
+weather and too constant usage had reduced some of the wagons to wrecks.
+It was all the finer of him because he was by profession a
+bacteriologist. Still very young, he had done distinguished work. Simply
+because there was no one else to attend to the mechanical department, he
+had volunteered for this most tiresome and disagreeable task. There is
+not a single driver in Section II who does not owe much to the friendly
+counsel, splendid courage, and keen mind of George Roeder.
+
+A few miles below Verdun, on a narrow strip of meadowland between the
+river and the northern bluffs, stood an eighteenth-century château and
+the half-dozen houses of its dependents. The hurrying river had flooded
+the low fields and then retreated, turning the meadows and pasturages to
+bright green, puddly marshes, malodorous with swampy exhalations. Beyond
+the swirls and currents of the river and its vanishing islands of
+pale-green pebbles, rose the brown, deserted hills of the Hauts de
+Meuse. The top of one height had been pinched into the rectangle of a
+fortress; little forests ran along the sky-line of the heights, and a
+narrow road, slanting across a spur of the valley, climbed and
+disappeared.
+
+The château itself was a huge, three-story box of gray-white stone with
+a slate roof, a little turret en poivrière at each corner, and a
+graceless classic doorway in the principal façade. A wide double gate,
+with a coronet in a tarnished gold medallion set in the iron arch-piece,
+gave entrance to this place through a kind of courtyard formed by the
+rear of the château and the walls of two low wings devoted to the
+stables and the servants' quarters. Within, a high clump of dark- green
+myrtle, ringed with muddy, rut-scarred turf, marked the theoretical
+limits of a driveway. Along the right-hand wall stood the rifles of the
+wounded, and in a corner, a great snarled pile of bayonets, belts,
+cartridge-boxes, gas-mask satchels, greasy tin boxes of anti-lice
+ointment, and dented helmets. A bright winter sunlight fell on walls
+dank from the river mists, and heightened the austerity of the
+landscape. Beyond a bend in the river lay the smoke of the battle of
+Douaumont; shells broke, pin-points of light, in the upper fringes of
+the haze.
+
+The château had been a hospital since the beginning of the war. A heavy
+smell of ether and iodoform lay about it, mixed with the smell of the
+war. This effluvia of an army, mixed with the sharper reek of
+anaesthetics, was the atmosphere of the hospital. The great rush of
+wounded had begun. Every few minutes the ambulances slopped down a miry
+byway, and turned in the gates; tired, putty-faced hospital attendants
+took out the stretchers and the nouveaux clients; mussy bundles of blue
+rags and bloody blankets turned into human beings; an overworked,
+nervous médecin chef shouted contradictory orders at the brancardiers,
+and passed into real crises of hysterical rage.
+
+"Avancez!" he would scream at the bewildered chauffeurs of the
+ambulances; and an instant later, "Reculez! Reculez!"
+
+The wounded in the stretchers, strewn along the edges of the driveway,
+raised patient, tired eyes at his snarling.
+
+Another doctor, a little bearded man wearing a white apron and the red
+velvet képi of an army physician, questioned each batch of new arrivals.
+Deep lines of fatigue had traced themselves under his kindly eyes; his
+thin face had a dreadful color. Some of the wounded had turned their
+eyes from the sun; others, too weak to move, lay stonily blinking.
+Almost expressionless, silent, they resigned themselves to the
+attendants as if these men were the deaf ministers of some inexorable
+power.
+
+The surgeon went from stretcher to stretcher looking at the diagnosis
+cards attached at the poste de secours, stopping occasionally to ask the
+fatal question, "As-tu craché du sang?" (Have you spit blood?) A thin
+oldish man with a face full of hollows like that of an old horse,
+answered "Oui," faintly. Close by, an artilleryman, whose cannon had
+burst, looked with calm brown eyes out of a cooked and bluish face.
+Another, with a soldier's tunic thrown capewise over his naked torso,
+trembled in his thin blanket, and from the edges of a cotton and
+lint-pad dressing hastily stuffed upon a shoulder wound, an occasional
+drop of blood slid down his lean chest.
+
+A little to one side, the cooks of the hospital, in their greasy aprons,
+watched the performance with a certain calm interest. In a few minutes
+the wounded were sorted and sent to the various wards. I was ordered to
+take three men who had been successfully operated on to the barracks for
+convalescents several miles away.
+
+A highway and an unused railroad, both under heavy fire from German guns
+on the Hauts de Meuse, passed behind the château and along the foot of
+the bluffs. There were a hundred shell holes in the marshes between the
+road and the river, black-lipped craters in the sedgy green; there were
+ugly punches in the brown earth of the bluffs, and deep scoops in the
+surface of the road. The telephone wires, cut by shell fragments, fell
+in stiff, draping lines to the ground. Every once in a while a shell
+would fall into the river, causing a silvery gray geyser to hang for an
+instant above the green eddies of the Meuse. A certain village along
+this highway was the focal point of the firing. Many of the houses had
+been blown to pieces, and fragments of red tile, bits of shiny glass,
+and lumps of masonry were strewn all over the deserted street.
+
+As I hurried along, two shells came over, one sliding into the river
+with a Hip! and the other landing in a house about two hundred yards
+away. A vast cloud of grayish-black smoke befogged the cottage, and a
+section of splintered timber came buzzing through the air and fell into
+a puddle. From the house next to the one struck, a black cat came
+slinking, paused for an indecisive second in the middle of the street,
+and ran back again. Through the canvas partition of the ambulance, I
+heard the voices of my convalescents. "No more marmites!" I cried to
+them as I swung down a road out of shell reach. I little knew what was
+waiting for us beyond the next village.
+
+A regiment of Zouaves going up to the line was resting at the crossroad,
+and the regimental wagons, drawn up in waiting line, blocked the narrow
+road completely. At the angle between the two highways, under the four
+trees planted by pious custom of the Meuse, stood a cross of thick
+planks. From each arm of the cross, on wine-soaked straps, dangled, like
+a bunch of grapes, a cluster of dark-blue canteens; rifles were stacked
+round its base, and under the trees stood half a dozen clipped-headed,
+bull-necked Zouaves. A rather rough-looking adjutant, with a bullet head
+disfigured by a frightful scar at the corner of his mouth, rode up and
+down the line to see if all was well. Little groups were handing round a
+half loaf of army bread, and washing it down with gulps of wine.
+
+"Hello, sport!" they cried at me; and the favorite "All right," and
+"Tommy!"
+
+The air was heavy with the musty smell of street mud that never dries
+during winter time, mixed with the odor of the tired horses, who stood,
+scarcely moving, backed away from their harnesses against the
+mire-gripped wagons. Suddenly the order to go on again was given; the
+carters snapped their whips, the horses pulled, the noisy, lumbering,
+creaky line moved on, and the men fell in behind, in any order.
+
+I started my car again and looked for an opening through the mêlée.
+
+Beyond the cross, the road narrowed and flanked one of the southeastern
+forts of the city. A meadow, which sloped gently upward from the road to
+the abrupt hillside of the fortress, had been used as a place of
+encampment and had been trodden into a surface of thick cheesy mire.
+Here and there were the ashes of fires. There were hundreds of such
+places round the moorland villages between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. The
+fort looked squarely down on Verdun, and over its grassy height came the
+drumming of the battle, and the frequent crash of big shells falling
+into the city.
+
+In a corner lay the anatomical relics of some horses killed by an
+air-bomb the day before. And even as I noted them, I heard the muffled
+Pom! Pom! Pom! of anti-aircraft guns. My back was to the river and I
+could not see what was going on.
+
+"What is it?" I said to a Zouave who was plodding along beside the
+ambulance.
+
+"Des Boches--crossing the river."
+
+The regiment plodded on as before. Now and then a soldier would stop and
+look up at the aeroplanes.
+
+"He's coming!" I heard a voice exclaim.
+
+Suddenly, the adjutant whom I had seen before came galloping down the
+line, shouting, "Arrêtez! Arrêtez! Pas de mouvement!"
+
+A current of tension ran down the troop with as much reality as a
+current of water runs down hill. I wondered whether the Boche had seen
+us.
+
+"Is he approaching?" I asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Ahead of me was a one-horse wagon, and ahead of that a wagon with two
+horses carrying the medical supplies. The driver of the latter, an
+oldish, thick-set, wine-faced fellow, got down an instant from his
+wagon, looked at the Boche, and resumed his seat. A few seconds later,
+there sounded the terrifying scream of an air-bomb, a roar, and I found
+myself in a bitter swirl of smoke. The shell had fallen right between
+the horses of the two-horse wagon, blowing the animals to pieces,
+splintering the wagon, and killing the driver. Something sailed swiftly
+over my head, and landed just behind the ambulance. It was a chunk of
+the skull of one of the horses. The horse attached to the wagon ahead of
+me went into a frenzy of fear and backed his wagon into my ambulance,
+smashing the right lamp. In the twinkling of an eye, the soldiers
+dispersed. Some ran into the fields. Others crouched in the wayside
+ditch. A cart upset. Another bomb dropped screaming in a field and
+burst; a cloud of smoke rolled away down the meadow.
+
+When the excitement had subsided, it was found that a soldier had been
+wounded. The bodies of the horses were rolled over into the ditch, the
+wreck of the wagon was dragged to the miry field, and the regiment went
+on. In a very short time I got to the hospital and delivered my
+convalescents.
+
+My way home ran through the town of S------, an ugly, overgrown village
+of the Verdunois, given up to the activities of the staff directing the
+battle. The headquarters building was the hôtel de ville, a large
+eighteenth-century edifice, in an acre of trampled mud a little distance
+from the street. Before the building flowed the great highway from
+Bar-le-Duc to Verdun; relays of motor lorries went by, and gendarmes,
+organized into a kind of traffic squad, stood every hundred feet or so.
+The atmosphere of S------at the height of the battle was one of calm
+organization; it would not have been hard to believe that the
+motor-lorries and unemotional men were at the service of some great
+master-work of engineering. There was something of the holiday in the
+attitude of the inhabitants of the place; they watched the motor show
+exactly as they might have watched a circus parade.
+
+"Les voilà," said somebody.
+
+A little bemedaled group appeared on the steps of the hôtel de ville.
+Dominating it was Joffre. Above middle height, silver-haired, elderly,
+he has a certain paternal look which his eye belies; Joffre's eye is the
+hard eye of a commander-in-chief, the military eye, the eye of an Old
+Testament father if you will. De Castelnau was speaking, making no
+gestures--an old man with an ashen skin, deep-set eye and great hooked
+nose, a long cape concealed the thick, age-settled body. Poincaré stood
+listening, with a look at once worried and brave, the ghost of a sad
+smile lingering on a sensitive mouth. Last of all came Pétain, the
+protégé of De Castelnau, who commanded at Verdun--a tall, square-built
+man, not un-English in his appearance, with grizzled hair and the sober
+face of a thinker. But his mouth and jaw are those of a man of action,
+and the look in his gray eyes is always changing. Now it is speculative
+and analytic, now steely and cold.
+
+In the shelter of a doorway stood a group of territorials, getting their
+first real news of the battle from a Paris newspaper. I heard "Nous
+avons reculé--huit kilomètres--le général Pétain--" A motor-lorry
+drowned out the rest.
+
+That night we were given orders to be ready to evacuate the château in
+case the Boches advanced. The drivers slept in the ambulances, rising at
+intervals through the night to warm their engines. The buzz of the
+motors sounded through the tall pines of the château park, drowning out
+the rumbling of the bombardment and the monotonous roaring of the flood.
+Now and then a trench light, rising like a spectral star over the lines
+on the Hauts de Meuse, would shine reflected in the river. At intervals
+attendants carried down the swampy paths to the chapel the bodies of
+soldiers who had died during the night. The cannon flashing was
+terrific. Just before dawn, half a dozen batteries of "seventy-fives"
+came in a swift trot down the shelled road; the men leaned over on their
+steaming horses, the harnesses rattled and jingled, and the cavalcade
+swept on, outlined a splendid instant against the mortar flashes and the
+streaks of day.
+
+On my morning trip a soldier with bandaged arm was put beside me on the
+front seat. He was about forty years old; a wiry black beard gave a
+certain fullness to his thin face, and his hands were pudgy and short of
+finger. When he removed his helmet, I saw that he was bald. A bad cold
+caused him to speak in a curious whispering tone, giving to everything
+he said the character of a grotesque confidence.
+
+"What do you do en civil?" he asked.
+
+I told him.
+
+"I am a pastry cook," he went on; "my specialty is Saint-Denis apple
+tarts."
+
+A marmite intended for the road landed in the river as he spoke.
+
+"Have you ever had one? They are very good when made with fresh cream."
+He sighed.
+
+"How did you get wounded?" said I.
+
+"Éclat d'obus," he replied, as if that were the whole story. After a
+pause he added, "Douaumont--yesterday."
+
+I thought of the shells I had seen bursting over the fort.
+
+"Do you put salt in chocolate?" he asked professionally.
+
+"Not as a rule," I replied.
+
+"It improves it," he pursued, as if he were revealing a confidential
+dogma. "The Boche bread is bad, very bad, much worse than a year ago.
+Full of crumbles and lumps. Dégoûtant!"
+
+The ambulance rolled up to the evacuation station, and my pastry cook
+alighted.
+
+"When the war is over, come to my shop," he whispered benevolently, "and
+you shall have some tartes aux pommes à la mode de Saint-Denis with my
+wife and me."
+
+"With fresh cream?" I asked.
+
+"Of course," he replied seriously.
+
+I accepted gratefully, and the good old soul gave me his address.
+
+In the afternoon a sergeant rode with me. He was somewhere between
+twenty-eight and thirty, thick-set of body, with black hair and the
+tanned and ruddy complexion of outdoor folk. The high collar of a
+dark-blue sweater rose over his great coat and circled a muscular
+throat; his gray socks were pulled country-wise outside of the legs of
+his blue trousers. He had an honest, pleasant face; there was a certain
+simple, wholesome quality about the man. In the piping times of peace,
+he was a cultivateur in the Valois, working his own little farm; he was
+married and had two little boys. At Douaumont, a fragment of a shell had
+torn open his left hand.
+
+"The Boches are not going to get through up there?"
+
+"Not now. As long as we hold the heights, Verdun is safe." His simple
+French, innocent of argot, had a good country twang. "But oh, the people
+killed! Comme il y a des gens tués!" He pronounced the final s of the
+word gens in the manner of the Valois.
+
+"Ça s'accroche aux arbres," he continued.
+
+The vagueness of the ça had a dreadful quality in it that made you see
+trees and mangled bodies. "We had to hold the crest of Douaumont under a
+terrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope when the Germans tried
+to fortify them. Our 'seventy-fives' dropped shells into the big craters
+as I would drop stones into a pond. Pauvres gens!"
+
+The phrase had an earth-wide sympathy in it, a feeling that the
+translation "poor folks" does not render. He had taken part in a strange
+incident. There had been a terrible corps-à-corps in one of the craters
+which had culminated in a victory for the French; but the lieutenant of
+his company had left a kinsman behind with the dead and wounded. Two
+nights later, the officer and the sergeant crawled down the dreadful
+slope to the crater where the combat had taken place, in the hope of
+finding the wounded man. They could hear faint cries and moans from the
+crater before they got to it. The light of a pocket flash-lamp showed
+them a mass of dead and wounded on the floor of the crater--"un tas de
+mourants et de cadavres," as he expressed it.
+
+After a short search, they found the man for whom they were looking; he
+was still alive but unconscious. They were dragging him out when a
+German, hideously wounded, begged them to kill him.
+
+"Moi, je n'ai plus jambes," he repeated in French; "pitié, tuez-moi."
+
+He managed to make the lieutenant see that if he went away and left
+them, they would all die in the agonies of thirst and open wounds. A
+little flickering life still lingered in a few; there were vague râles
+in the darkness. A rafale of shells fell on the slope; the violet glares
+outlined the mouth of the crater.
+
+"Ferme tes yeux" (shut your eyes), said the lieutenant to the German.
+The Frenchmen scrambled over the edge of the crater with their
+unconscious burden, and then, from a little distance, threw
+hand-grenades into the pit till all the moaning died away.
+
+Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and the
+organization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I went
+again to Verdun. The snow was falling heavily, covering the piles of
+débris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned houses.
+Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow. Above the Meuse,
+above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope, rose the
+shell-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers of the
+still, tragic town. The drumming of the bombardment had died away. The
+river was again in flood. In a deserted wine-shop on a side street well
+protected from shells by a wall of sandbags was a post of territorials.
+
+To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was something
+Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin of
+the beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the wrecked houses
+gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood a
+two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned seesaw fire pump. There were
+old clerks and bookkeepers among the soldier firemen--retired gendarmes
+who had volunteered, a country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant from
+the Lyonnais. Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and the
+outbreak of fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop. On
+that day only a few explosive shells had fallen.
+
+"Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?" said one of the pompiers
+to me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a cold, deserted
+house. The snow had blown through the shell-splintered window-panes. In
+the dining-room stood a table, the cloth was laid and the silver spread;
+but a green feathery fungus had grown in a dish of food and broken
+straws of dust floated on the wine in the glasses. The territorial took
+my arm, his eyes showing the pleasure of my responding curiosity, and
+whispered,--
+
+"There were officers quartered here who were called very suddenly. I saw
+the servant of one of them yesterday; they have all been killed."
+
+Outside there was not a flash from the batteries on the moor. The snow
+continued to fall, and darkness, coming on the swift wings of the storm,
+fell like a mantle over the desolation of the city.
+
+
+The End
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12330 ***