he held his hands out still, praying with the others, as the priest
directed them. “Lord help us, for we perish. Lord! Thou alone canst
save us! Lord, say but one word and we are healed. Lord, say but one
word. But one word, oh, Lord!”
He held his strengthless hands out as he was told, groping helplessly
for the blessing he so sorely needed; his blind eyes turned docilely in
the direction indicated to him; he repeated meekly in his feeble little
voice whatever words he was told to say--and all around him thousands
and thousands of other helpless, docile, suffering human beings in
similar plight, did the same, desperately, their faces groping up
toward the sky, their joined hands imploring, “Lord save us, or we
perish!”
The pilgrims filed past continually, their eyes staringly fixed on the
feeble light of their tapers, their voices torn out of their bodies by
the ever-deepening fervor and hope of the shouted, passionate commands
of the priest, calling, “Brothers! With all your soul pray for our
sick! Lord, say but one word and they are healed! But one word, oh,
Lord!”
“The blessing is very long in coming,” faltered the blind boy timidly,
his face even whiter than at the beginning, his lips blue.
The pilgrims passed constantly, the heavy tramp of their feet shaking
the chair on which sat the little paralyzed boy and the blind child,
their hands outstretched. The men’s voices were hoarse and deep now,
trembling with fatigue and emotion.
The perspiration streamed down the face of the priest as in piercing
tones he exhorted the multitudes, “Brothers, with all your soul, pray!
_Pray!_”
Presently, because he was a weak, sick little child, and because the
blessing was so long in coming, the little blind boy fell asleep, his
head on the shoulder of the paralyzed child.
Then all the care and anxiety and humiliation and sorrow left his
little white face. It was perfect in a perfect peace.
The blessing had come.
_Evening._
Scattered all over the vast stretch of the esplanade, thousands
of little lights flickered and moved about in the rainy darkness,
all that could be seen of the immense multitude gathering for the
evening procession. The top of the great, horseshoe-shaped, marble,
inclined plane up which they were later to defile, was so high above
the ground that not a sound reached there of all those human voices
talking together in the dark, calling to each other, as people tried
to find their friends in the obscurity, and to form groups that they
might march together. The little lights they held were only slightly
sheltered from the gusts of wind-driven rain by cheap paper shades and
they flickered and flared up, and many were extinguished. Although many
went out and were lighted again only once more to have the wind puff
them into blackness, the number of lighted ones grew fabulously as the
crowd assembled. The little yellow spots of life spread further and
further, till around the foot of the huge inclined plane was an ocean
of lights, heaving formlessly, with a futile, aimless motion like the
sea, humanity lost in the darkness.
Then a faint murmur came up through the rain and darkness. Speaking
voices are not heard far, but voices raised in song have wings. The
crowd was beginning to sing.
It was also beginning to take shape. From the foot of the inclined
plane out into the black esplanade, streamed two long files of light,
purposeful, with the sharp, forward-piercing line of the arrow. The
procession was beginning to form.
The murmur rose into a chant as the crowd, hearing the first notes,
took it up, singing as they fell into line. The first of the lights
advanced up the ascent toward the top, which was blazing with light
from the illuminated front of the lofty church. Far, far behind,
stretching twice around the immense esplanade and disappearing into the
distant blackness of the endless avenue, the flickering lights were now
in two lines, moving forward steadily.
The sound of voices grew louder, the advancing files were visible now,
masses intensely black against the night.
The wind roared, the rain beat down. The voices suddenly rang out clear
and vibrant, high above the confused roar of the singing multitudes
below.
Then the glimmering blur of the faces in the reflected light of the
candles shone through the rain; each dim figure, in a momentary
transfiguration, was resplendent in the flare of light from the church,
the voices shouted loud and strong, drowning out in their instant’s
glory of individual life the hoarse chant of the vast crowd below.
Then each figure passed forward out of the light and began to descend
the inclined plane on the other side, going singing down into the
blackness.
There were so many singing now that, although they all sang the same
chant over and over, a chant in which recurs constantly the acclaiming
shout of “Hail! Hail!” they were not singing in tune together nor even
in time, nor even often the same words at the same time.
As the groups passed, each one was singing in its own fashion on a
different key from those gone before and those following them. When
this was too apparent, they sometimes stopped, listened, caught the
note from the pilgrims nearest to them, and burst out again, this time
in harmony. But for the most part they listened only to their own
voices and to those of their friends, and sang lustily in a hearty
discordance.--and so vast was the throng and so simple the joyful air
they chanted, that from that monstrous discordance rose a strange
and wonderful harmony like no other music in the world, with a deep
pulsation longer than that of any other music, beating time, beating
true.
They passed, shouting out loudly the confident words of their song;
the young faces often laughing gaily in the shaking light of their
candles, stopping to light the blown-out flames at the candles of
their friends; the older people tramping forward resolutely, singing,
often not noting that their one light had been blown out and that they
were walking in darkness--no, not walking in darkness, because of the
infinite number of lights about them, carried by their fellows; the
young girls’ eyes glistening through the rain as they gazed upward
toward the circle of white light at the top of the ascent; the old
men’s eyes turned downward on the darkness to which they would descend;
the occasional priest-leader beating time, marshaling the lines; the
occasional children holding to their parents’ hands, their eyes blank
and trustful, fixed on their candles, their pure lips incessantly
shaping the joyful acclaiming shout of “Hail! Hail!”
Sometimes a group lagged behind, either because of the carelessness of
the young people in it, or the fatigue of the old people, and there was
almost a break in the line of lights. But always as they approached the
moment of transfiguration, the ones who were behind hurried forward
shufflingly to keep the line intact. The line was always intact.
The rain beat down on them, but they sang loudly and joyously,
rejoicing in singing together; the wind tore at their garments and
puffed at their frail, unprotected lights. Many went out. But there
were always enough lights left in each group to light those of the
others--if they wished.
Last of all I saw a strong young man whose light had been extinguished,
holding out his lifeless candle to that of an old, poor, bent woman
who, patiently, patiently, offered him her tiny, living flame.
SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS
(_Near Château-Thierry, July, 1918_)
They were detraining in dense brown crowds at what had been the station
before German guns had knocked it into a shapeless heap of tumbled
bricks; they were pouring in on foot along the road from the west;
and when I made my way along the main street to the river, I found
another khaki-clad line leaving the little town, marching heavily,
unrhythmically and strongly out across the narrow, temporary wooden
bridge, laid hastily across the massive stone pillars which were all
that remained of the old bridge.
An old, white-capped woman, who had been one of my neighbors in the
days before the little town had known German guns or American soldiers,
called out to me: “Oh, Madame! See them! Isn’t it wonderful! Just look
at them! All day like that, all night like that. Are there any people
left in America? And are all your people so big, so fine?”
“Where are they going?” I asked her, taking refuge for a moment in her
doorway.
“To the front directly, the poor boys. They’ll be fighting in two
hours--do you hear the big guns off there banging away? And they so
good, like nice big boys! Their poor mothers!”
I addressed myself in English to a soldier loitering near, watching
the troops pass, “So they are going to the front, these boys?” After a
stare of intense surprise, a broad smile broke over his face. He came
closer. “No, ma’am,” he said, looking at me hard. “No, these are the
Alabama boys just coming back from the front. They’ve been fighting
steady for five days.” He added: “My, it seems good to talk to an
American woman. I haven’t seen one for four months!”
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
“Just from the Champagne front, with the Third Division. Two of our
regiments out there were--” He began pouring out exact, detailed
military information which I would not have dreamed of asking him. The
simple-hearted open confidence of the American soldier was startling
and alarming to one who had for long breathed the thick air of
universal suspicion. I stopped his fluent statement of which was his
regiment, where they had been, what their losses had been, where they
were going. “No, no, I mean where are you from in the States?” I raised
my voice to make myself heard above the sudden thunder of a convoy of
munition-camions passing by and filling the narrow street from side to
side.
“Oh, from Kansas City, Missouri. It’s just eight months and seven days
since I last saw the old town.” (Thus does a mother count the very days
of the little new life of her child.)
“And how do you like France?”
“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. The climate’s not so bad. And the towns
would be well enough if they’d clean up their manure-piles better.”
“And the people, how do you get on with them?”
The camions had passed and the street was again filled with American
infantry, trudging forward with an air of resolute endurance.
“Well enough, they don’t cheat you. I forgot and left a fifty-franc
bill lying on the table of a house where I’d bought some eggs, and the
next morning the woman sent her little girl over to camp to give it
back. Real poor-appearing folk they were, too. But I’ve had enough. I
want to get home. Uncle Sam’s good enough for me. I want to hurry up
and win the war and beat it back to God’s country.”
He fell away before the sudden assault on me of an old, old man and his
old wife, with the dirt, the hunted look, the crumpled clothes, the
desperate eyes of refugees: “Madame, Madame, help us! We cannot make
them understand, the Americans! We want to go back to Villers-le-Petit.
We want to see what is left of our house and garden. We want to start
in to repair the house--and our potatoes must be dug.”
I had passed that morning through what was left of their village. For a
moment I saw their old, tired, anxious faces dimly as though across the
long stretch of shattered heaps of masonry. I answered evasively, “But
you know they are not allowing civilian population to go back as yet.
All this region is still shelled. It’s far too dangerous.”
They gave together an exclamation of impatience as though over the
futilities of children’s talk. “But, Madame, if _we_ do not care about
the danger. We never cared! We would not have left, ever, if the
soldiers had not taken us away in camions--our garden and vineyard just
at the time when they needed attention every hour. Well, we will not
wait for permission; we will go back anyhow. The American soldiers are
not bad, are they, Madame? They would surely not fire on an old man and
his wife going back to their homes? If Madame would only write on a
piece of paper that we only want to go back to our home to take care of
it--”
Their quavering old voices came to me indistinctly through the steady
thudding advance of all those feet, come from so far, on so great,
so high, so perilous a mission; come so far, many of them, to meet
death more than half-way--the poor, old, cramped people before me,
blind and deaf to the immensity of the earthquake, seeing nothing but
that the comfort of their own lives was in danger. I had a nervous
revulsion of feeling and broke the news to them more abruptly than I
would have thought possible a moment before. “There is nothing left to
Villers-de-Petit. There is nothing left to go back to.”
Well, they were not so cramped, so blind, so small, my poor old people.
They took the news standing, and after the first clutch at each other’s
wrinkled hands, after the first paling of their already ashy faces,
they did not flinch.
“But the crops, Madame. The vineyards. Are they all gone, too?”
“No, very little damage done there. Everything was kept, of course,
intact for camouflage, and the retreat was so rapid there was not
enough time for destruction.”
“Then we will still go back, Madame. We have brought the things for
spraying the vineyards as far as here. Surely we can get them to
Villers-de-Petit, it is so near now. We can sleep on the ground,
anywhere. In another week, you see, Madame, it will be too late to
spray. We have enough for ours and our neighbors, too. We can save them
if we go _now_. If Madame would only write on a piece of paper in their
language that--”
So I did it. I tore a fly-leaf out of a book lying in the heap of
rubbish before the ruins of a bombarded house (it was a treatise on
Bach’s chorales by the French organist Widor!) and wrote, “These are
two brave old people, inhabitants of Villers-de-Petit, who wish to go
back there to work under shell-fire to save what they can of their own
and their neighbors’ crops. Theirs is the spirit that is keeping France
alive.”
“It probably won’t do you a bit of good,” I said, “but there it is for
what it is worth.”
“Oh, once the American soldiers know what we want, they will let us
pass, we know.” They went off trustfully, holding my foolish “pass” in
their hands.
I turned from them to find another young American soldier standing near
me. “How do you do?” I said, smiling at him.
He gave a great start of amazement at the sound of my American accent.
“Well, how do you like being in France?” I asked him.
“Gee! Are you really an American woman?” he said incredulously, his
young face lighting up as though he saw a member of his own family. “I
haven’t talked to one in so _long_! Why yes, I like France fine. It’s
the loveliest country to look at, isn’t it? I didn’t know any country
could be kept up so, like a garden. How do they _do_ it without any men
left? They must be awfully fine people. I wish I could talk to them
some.”
“Who are these soldiers going through to-day?” I asked. “Are they going
out to the front line trenches, or coming back? I’ve been told both
things.”
He answered with perfect certainty and precision: “Neither. They are
Second Division troops, from Ohio mostly, just out of their French
training-camp, going up to hold the reserve line. They never have been
in action yet.”
Our attention was distracted to the inside of a fruit-shop across
the street, a group of American soldiers struggling with the
sign-language, a flushed, tired, distracted woman shopkeeper volubly
unable to conceive that men with all their senses could not understand
her native tongue. I went across to interpret. One of the soldiers in
a strong Southern accent said, “Oh golly, yes, if you _would_ do the
talkin’ fo’ us. We cyan’t make out whetheh we’ve paid heh or not, and
we wondeh if she’d ’low us to sit heah and eat ouh fruit.”
From the Frenchwoman, “Oh, Madame, please what _is_ it they want now?
I have shown them everything in sight. How strange that they can’t
understand the simplest language!”
The little misunderstanding was soon cleared away. I lingered by the
counter. “How do you like our American troops, Madame?” I asked. “Very
well, very much indeed, if only they could talk. They don’t do any
harm. They are good to the children. They are certainly as brave as
men can be. But there is one thing about them I don’t understand. They
overpay you, often, more than you ask--won’t take change--and yet if
you leave things open, as we always do, in front of the shop, they just
put their hands in and steal as they go by. I have lost a great deal in
that way. If they have so much money, why do they steal?”
I contemplated making, and gave it up as too difficult, a short
disquisition on the peculiarities of the American orchard-robbing
tradition with its ramifications, and instead sat down at the table
with the Americans, who gave me the greeting always repeated, “Great
Scott! its good to talk to an American woman!”
A fresh-faced, splendidly built lad, looked up from the first bite
of his melon, crying: “Yes suh, a cantaloupe, a’ honest-to-the-Lawd
cantaloupe! I neveh thought they’d _heahd_ of such a thing in France.”
They explained to me, all talking at once, pouring out unasked military
information till my hair rose up scandalized, that this was their
first experience with semi-normal civilian life in France because they
belonged to the troops from Georgia, volunteers, that they had been in
the front-line trenches at exactly such a place for precisely so many
weeks where such and such things happened, and before that at such
another place, where they were so many strong, etc., etc.
“So we neveh saw real sto’s to buy things till we struck this town.
And when I saw a cantaloupe I mighty nigh dropped daid! I don’t reckon
I’m likely to run into a watermelon, am I? I suahly would have to be
ca’ied back to camp on a stretcheh if I did!” He laughed out, a boy’s
cloudless laughter. “But say, what do you-all think? I paid fo’ty-five
cents for this slice, yes, ma’am, fo’ty-five cents for a _slice_, and
back home in Geo’gia you pay a nickel for the biggest one in the sto’!”
He buried his face in the yellow fruit.
The house began to shake to the ponderous passage of artillery. The
boys in khaki turned their stag-like heads toward the street, glanced
at the motley-colored, mule-drawn guns and pronounced expertly, “The
43rd, Heavy Artillery, going out to Nolepieds, the fellows from
Illinois. They’ve just been up in the Verdun sector and are coming down
to reinforce the 102nd.”
For the first time the idea crossed my head that possibly their mania
for pouring out military information to the first comer might not be
so fatal to necessary secrecy as it seemed. I rather pitied the spy who
might attempt to make coherent profit out of their candor. “How do you
like being in France?” I asked the boy who was devouring the melon.
He looked up, his eyes kindling, “Well, I was plumb crazy to get heah
and now I’m heah I like it mo’ even than I ’lowed I would.” I looked
at his fresh, unlined boy’s cheeks, his clear, bright boy’s eyes, and
felt a great wave of pity. “You haven’t been in active service yet,” I
surmised.
Unconsciously, gayly, he flung my pity back in my face, “You bet yo’
life I have. We’ve just come from the Champagne front, and the sehvice
we saw theah was suah active, how about it, boys?”
They all burst out again in rapid, high-keyed, excited voices, longing
above everything else for a listener, leaning forward over the table
toward me, their healthy faces flushed with their ardor, talking
hurriedly because there was so much to say, their tense young voices
a staccato clatter of words which brought to me in jerks, horribly
familiar war-pictures, barrage-fires meeting, advancing over dead
comrades, hideous hand-to-hand combats--all chanted in those eager
young voices.
I felt the heavy pain at the back of the head which presages a wave of
mortal war-sickness.
In a pause, I asked, perhaps rather faintly, “And you like it? You are
not ever homesick?”
The boy with the melon spoke for them all. He stretched out his long
arms, his hands clenched to knotty masses of muscles; he set his jaw,
his blue eyes were like steel, his beautiful young face was all aflame.
“Oh, you just get to _love_ it!” he cried, shaking with the intensity
of his feeling. “You just _love_ it! Why, I _neveh_ want to go home! I
want to stay over heah and go right on killin’ _Boches_ all my life!”
At this I felt sicker, stricken with the collective remorse over the
war which belongs to the older generation. I said good-by to them and
left them to their child-like ecstasy over their peaches and melons.
The artillery had passed. The street was again solidly filled with
dusty, heavily laden young men in khaki, tramping silently and
resolutely forward, their brown steel casques, shaped like antique
Greek shepherd hats, giving to their rounded young faces a curious air
of classic rusticity.
An older man, with a stern, rough, plain face stood near me. “How do
you do?” I asked. “Can you tell me which troops these are and where
they are going?” I wondered what confident and uninformed answer I
would receive this time.
Showing no surprise at my speech, he answered, “I don’t know who they
be. You don’t never know anything but your own regiment. The kids
always think they do. They’ll tell you this and they’ll tell you that,
but the truth is we don’t know no more than Ann--not even where we are
ourselves, nor where we’re going, most of the time.”
His accent made me say: “I wonder if you are not from my part of the
country. I live in Vermont, when I’m at home.”
“I’m from Maine,” he said soberly, “a farmer, over draft age of
course. But it looked to me like a kind o’ mean trick to make the boys
do it all for us, so I come along, too.” He added, as if in partial
explanation, “One of my uncles was with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”
“How do you like it, now you’re here?” I asked.
He looked at me heavily. “Like it? It’s hell!” he said.
“Have you been in active service?” I used my usual cowardly evasive
phrase.
“Yes, ma’am, I’ve killed some of ’em,” he answered me with brutal,
courageous directness. He looked down at his hands as he spoke, big,
calloused farmer’s hands, crooked by holding the plough-handles. As
plainly as he saw it there, I saw the blood on them, too. His stern,
dark, middle-aged face glowered down solemnly on those strong farmer’s
hands. “It’s dirty work, but it’s got to be done,” he said, gravely,
“and I ain’t a-going to dodge my share of it.”
A very dark-eyed, gracefully-built young soldier came loitering by now,
and stopped near us, ostensibly to look at the passing troops, but
evidently in order to share in the phenomenon of a talk in English with
an American woman. I took him into the conversation with the usual
query, “How do you do, and how do you like being in France?”
He answered with a strong Italian accent, and I dived into a dusty
mental corner to bring out my half-forgotten Italian. In a moment we
were talking like old friends. He had been born in Italy, yes, but
brought up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His grandfather had been one of
Garibaldi’s Thousand, so of course he had joined the American army and
come to France among the first.
“Well, there are more than a Thousand of you this time,” I said,
looking at the endless procession defiling before us.
“_Si, signora_, but it is a part of the same war. We are here to go on
with what the Thousand began.”
Yes, that was true, John Brown’s soul and Garibaldi’s, and those of how
many other fierce old fighting lovers of freedom were marching on there
before my eyes, carried like invisible banners by all those strong
young arms.
An elderly woman in well-brushed dowdy black came down the street
toward us, an expression of care on her face. When she saw me she
said, “Well, I’ve found you. They said you were in town to-day. Won’t
you come back to the house with me? Something important. I’m terribly
troubled with some American officers--oh, the war!”
I went, apprehensive of trouble, and found her house (save for a total
absence of window-glass) in its customary speckless and shining order.
She took me upstairs to what had been a bedroom and was now an office
in the Quartermaster’s department. It was filled with packing-case
improvised desks and with serious-faced, youngish American officers
who, in their astonishment at seeing me, forgot to take their long
black cigars out of their mouths.