look at that. Just _look_! I tell them and I _tell_ them, not to put
their horrid boxes on the floor but to keep them on the linoleum, but
they are so stupid, they can’t understand language that any child could
take in! And they drag those boxes just full of nails all over the
floor. I’m _sick_ of them and their scratches!”
A big gun boomed solemnly off on the horizon as accompaniment to this
speech.
I explained in a neutral tone to the officers looking expectantly at
me, what was at issue. I made no comment. None was needed evidently,
for they said with a gravity which I found lovable that they would
endeavor to be more careful about the floor, that indeed they had not
understood what their landlady had been trying to tell them. I gave her
their assurance and she went away satisfied.
As the door closed on her, they broke into broad grins and pungent
exclamations. “Well, how about that! Wouldn’t that get you? With the
town bombarded every night, to think the old lady was working herself
up to a froth about her floor-varnish! And we thinking that every
French person is breaking his heart over the invaded regions!”
One of them said, “I never thought of it before, but I bet you my Aunt
Selina would do just that! I just bet if her town was bombarded she’d
go right on shooing the flies out of her kitchen and mopping up her
pantry floor with skim-milk. Why, the French are just like anybody,
aren’t they? Just like our own folks!”
“They are,” I assured him, “so exactly like our own folks, like
everybody’s own folks that it’s quite impossible to tell the
difference.”
When I went away, the owner of the house was sweeping the garden-path
clear of broken-glass. “This bombardment is such a nuisance!” she said
disapprovingly. “I’d like to know what the place would be like if I
didn’t stay to look after it.”
I looked at her enviously, securely shut away as she was by the rigid
littleness of her outlook from any blighting comprehension of what was
going on about her. But then, I reflected, there are instants when the
comprehension of what is going on is not blighting. No, on the whole I
did not envy her.
Outside the gate I fell in at once with a group of American soldiers.
It was impossible to take a step in any direction in the town without
doing this. After the invariable expressions of surprise and pleasure
over seeing an American woman, came the invariable burst of eager
narration of where they had been and what had been happening to them.
They seemed to me touchingly like children, who have had an absorbing,
exciting adventure and must tumble it all out to the first person
they meet. Their haste, their speaking all at once, gave me only an
incoherent idea of what they wished to say. I caught odd phrases,
disconnected sentences, glimpses through pin-holes.
“One of the fellows, a conscript, that came to fill a vacant place
in our lines, he was only over in France two weeks, and it was his
first time in a trench. He landed there at six o’clock in the evening,
and just like I’m telling you, at a quarter past six a shell up and
exploded and buried him right where he stood. Yes, ma’am, you certainly
do see some very peculiar things in this war.”
From another, “We took the whole lot of ’em prisoners, and passed ’em
back to the rear, but out of the fifteen we took, eight died of sudden
heart-disease before they got back to the prisoners’ camp.” (I tried
not to believe this, but the fact that it was told with a laugh and
received with a laugh reminded me gruesomely that we are the nation
that permits lynching of helpless men by the mob.)
From another, “Some of the fellows say they think about the _Lusitania_
when they go after the _Boche_. I don’t have to come down as far as
that. Belgium’s plenty good enough a whetstone for _my_ bayonet.”
(This reminded me with a thrill that we are the nation that has always
ultimately risen in defense of the defenseless.)
From another, “One of our own darkies went up to one of these here
Senegalese and began talking United States to him. Of course the other
darkey talked back in French, and ours said, ‘Why, you pore thing! You
be’n over heah so long you dun forgot yo’ motheh-tongue!’”
From another, “Oh, I can’t stand the French! They make me tired! And
their jabber! I seen some of ’em talk it so fast they couldn’t even
understand each other! Honest, I did.”
From another, “There’s something that sort of _takes_ me about the
life over here. I’m not going to be in any hurry to go back to the
States and hustle my head off, after the war’s over.”
From another, “Not for mine. Me for Chicago the day after the _Boches_
are licked.”
They were swept away by a counter-current somewhere in the khaki ebb
and flow about us, and I found myself with a start next to a _poilu_,
yes a real _poilu_ with a faded horizon-blue uniform and a domed,
battered, blue French casque, such a _poilu_ as had filled the town
when I had lived there.
“Well,” I said to him, “things have changed here. The town’s khaki
now.” He looked at me out of bright brown eyes, smiled, and entered
into conversation. We talked, of course, of the American soldier,
one of whom came up and stood at my elbow. When I stopped to speak
to him, “Gee!” he said, “I wish I could rip it off like that. I can
say ‘combien’ and ‘trop cher,’ but there I stick. Say, what does the
Frenchman say about us? Now, since that little Belleau-wood business I
guess they see we know a thing or two ourselves about how to run a war!
They’re all right, of course; mighty fine soldiers, but Lord! you’d
know by the way any one of them does business, as if he’s all day for
it, that they couldn’t run a war _fast_, the way it ought to be run,
the way we’re going to run it, now we’re here.”
I did not think it necessary to translate all of this to the
bright-eyed little Frenchman on my other side, who began to talk as
the American stopped. “You asked my opinion of the American troops,
Madame. I will give it to you frankly. The first who came over, your
regular army, the mercenaries, made a very bad impression indeed. All
who have come since have made the best possible impression. They are
really astonishingly courageous, and there could be no better, or more
cordial comrades in the world. But oh! Madame, as far as they really
know how to make modern war, they are children, just children! They
make the mistakes we made four years ago. They have so much to learn of
the technique of war, and they will lose so many men in learning it! It
is sad to think of!”
I did not think it necessary to translate all this to the American who
now shook hands with both of us and turned away. The Frenchman, too,
after a look at the clock in the church-tower, made his compliments,
saluted, and disappeared.
I walked forward and, coming to the church door, stepped inside. It was
as though I had stepped into another world. I had found the only place
in town where there were no soldiers. The great, gray, dim, vaulted
interior was empty.
After the beat of the marching feet outside, after the shuffling to and
fro of the innumerable men quartered in town, after the noisy shops
crowded with khaki uniforms, after the incessant thunderous passage
of the artillery and munitions-camions--the long, hushed quiet of the
empty church rang loud in my ears. I wondered for just an instant if
there could be any military regulation, forbidding our soldiers to
enter the church; and even as I wondered, the door opened and a boy in
khaki stepped in--one out of all those hordes. He crossed himself, took
a rosary out of his pocket, knelt, and began his prayers.
Thirty-thousand soldiers were in that town that day. Whatever else we
are, I reflected, we are not a people of mystics.
But then I remembered the American soldier who had said that Belgium
was a good enough whetstone for his bayonet. I remembered the rough,
gloomy farmer who did not want to shirk his share of the world’s dirty
work. Perhaps there are various kinds of mystics.
Once outside the church I turned to look up Madame Larconneur, the
valiant market-gardener who had been one of my neighbors, a tired young
war-widow, with two little children, whom I had watched toiling early
and late, day and night, to keep intact the little property left her by
her dead soldier husband. I had watched her, drawing from the soil of
her big garden, wet quite literally by her sweat, the livelihood for
her fatherless little girls. I wondered what the bombardment of the
town had done to her and her small, priceless home.
I found the street, I found the other houses there, but where her
little, painfully, well-kept house had stood was a heap of stones and
rubble, and in the place of her long, carefully tended rows of beans
and cabbages and potatoes, were shell-holes where the chalky barren
subsoil streaked the surface, and where the fertile black earth, fruit
of years of labor, was irrevocably buried out of sight. Before all
this, in her poor, neat black, stood the war-widow with her children.
I sprang forward, horrified, the tears on my cheeks. “Oh, Madame
Larconneur, how awful! How awful!” I cried, putting out both hands to
her.
She turned a white, quiet face on me and smiled, a smile that made
me feel infinitely humble. “My little girls are not hurt,” she said,
drawing them to her, “and as for all this--why, if it is a part of
getting other people’s homes restored to them”--her gesture said that
the price was not too high.
The look in her sunken eyes took me for an instant up into a very
high place of courage and steadfastness. For the first time that day,
the knot in my throat stopped aching. I was proud to have her put her
work-deformed hands in mine and to feel on my cheeks her sister’s kiss.
It steadied me somewhat during the difficult next hour, when in the
falling twilight I walked up and down between the long rows of
raw earth, with the innumerable crosses, each with its new, bright
American flag, fluttering in the sweet country air. I needed to recall
that selfless courage, for my heart was breaking with sorrow, with
guilt-consciousness, with protest, as I stood there, thinking of our
own little son, of the mothers of the boys who lay there.
A squad of soldiers were preparing graves for the next day. As they dug
in the old, old soil of the cemetery to make a place for the new flesh
come from so far to lie there forever, a strong odor of corruption and
decay came up in puffs and drifted away down toward the little town
lying below us, in its lovely green setting, still shaking rhythmically
to the ponderous passage of the guns, of the troops, of the camions.
At one side were a few recent German graves, marked with black crosses
and others, marked with stones, dating from the war of 1870, that other
nightmare when all this smiling countryside was blood-soaked--and how
many times before that!
Above me, dominating the cemetery, stood a great monument of white
marble, holding up to all those graves the ironic inscription, “Love ye
one another.”
The twilight fell more and more deeply, and became darkness. The dull,
steady surge of the advancing troops grew louder. Night had come, night
no longer used for rest after labor in the sunlight, night which must
be used to hurry troops and more troops forward over roads shelled by
day.
They passed by hundreds, by thousands, an endless, endless
procession--horses, mules, camions, artillery, infantry, cavalry;
obscure shadowy forms no longer in uniform, no longer from Illinois,
or Georgia or Vermont, no longer even American; only human--young men,
crowned with the splendor of their strength, going out gloriously
through the darkness to sacrifice.
“IT IS RATHER FOR US TO BE HERE DEDICATED”
“_It is rather for us to be here dedicated...._”
Out in the wheat-field, golden under a golden sun, I came suddenly
on the young American soldier, lying dead, his face turned toward
the _Bois de Belleau_. He was the stillest thing in all the silent
countryside, ghostly quiet after the four-days’ din of battle, now
gone forward and thundering on the horizon. Compared to his stillness,
the wheat-stalks, broken and trampled as they were, seemed quivering
conscious life; the trees, although half-shattered by the shell-fire,
fluttered their bright leaves, vividly alive; the weeds by the roadside
vibrated in triumph. They were wounded, mutilated, disfigured, but they
had survived. They were alive. Only the soldier had not survived.
All men go a long journey to meet their death, through many days and
months and years. But he and his comrades had gone a longer than any
man before them. They had passed through all those days and months
and years; and more than that, across unending miles of those other
wheat-fields in a far country and across the unending miles of the
ocean they saw for the first time; but far more than that, they had
crossed incalculable gulfs of traditions, of prejudice, of the tyranny
of old, fixed ideas.
He had come a long journey, he had trod a new road, he was fighting a
new fight, this soldier who had turned his back on the limitations of
the past, who was making forward into the future with all the strength
and faith of his young manhood, when he met his sudden destiny and lay
down forever in a wheat-field of France.
There he lay in a blessed, blessed stillness, having done his best.
Being still alive, and so not permitted to lie down by him to rest,
I left him, and returned to a great city, any great city--all great
cities everywhere in the world being the same.
I stood before the door of a shop. I saw an old, thin, work-deformed
woman cowering before a well-fed man with a brutal voice who stood
over her, angrily shouting at her that she had not sufficiently
burnished the brass hinges of the great glass doors. With the rich
abundance of the wheat-fields still golden before my eyes, I saw her
cowering before him, all her sacred human dignity stripped from her
by her need for food, by the fear of more hunger than even she could
endure.
I saw a woman with a bloated, flabby body, strained together into a
cohesion by steel bands, with a bloated, flabby face covered with red
and white. Small glass-like pieces of white stone were thrust into the
pierced flesh of her ears, gleamed on her protuberant bosom, on her
puffed, useless fingers. With the roar of the distant battle still in
my ears, I heard her saying, “The war is lasting too long! Lucette
tells me that it’s impossible for her to get the right shade of silk
for my corset; the only coiffeur who understands my hair has been sent
to the front; and I have not had a bonbon in ten days.”
I saw a wretched, disinherited son of man, shaking with alcoholism,
rotten with disease, livid with hunger, undone with hopelessness,
flung on a bench like a ragged sack of old bones. Only the palsied
trembling of his dirty hands showed that he lived. But with the awful
odor of real death still in my nostrils, I perceived that he was alive,
while the strong young soldier was dead.
I saw a man with a gross, pale countenance, with white fine linen and
smooth black broad-cloth, who stepped confidently forward, not deigning
to lift his eyes to the crowd about him, sure that they would give way
before the costliness of his ring and pin.
In his soft, white hands he held a newly printed newspaper which, open
at the news from the stock exchange, he read with an expression of
eager rapacity. On his way stood a woman in all the fleshly radiance of
her youth, with some of the holiness of youth still left on her painted
mouth. She, looking at him hungrily, desperately, forced his eyes up to
meet hers. With the glory of the dead soldier still in my soul, I saw
the rapacity in his eyes change to lust, I saw an instant’s sickness in
hers go out, quenched by the bravado of despair.
Oh, American soldier, lying still in the wheat-field of France, did you
come so far a journey to meet your death in order that all this might
continue?
“_Let us here highly resolve that all these dead shall not have died
in vain...._”
THE DAY OF GLORY
_... if the armistice is signed, a salvo of cannon from the Invalides
at eleven o’clock will announce the end of the war._
The clock hands crept slowly past ten and lagged intolerably
thereafter. The rapid beating of your heart, telling off the minutes,
brought eleven finally very near. Then the clock, your heart, all the
world, seemed to stand still. The great moment was there. Would the
announcing cannon speak? Such a terrible silence as the world kept
during that supreme moment of suspense! It was the quintessence of all
the moral torture of four nightmare years.
And then ... like a shock within your own body it came, the first
solemn proclamation of the cannon, shaking the windows, the houses, the
very sky, with its news. The war was over. The accursed guns had ceased
tearing to pieces our husbands and our sons and our fathers.
Of all the hundreds of thousands of women who heard those guns, I think
there was not one who did not feel instantly, scalding on her cheeks,
the blessed tears--tears of joy! She had forgotten that there could
be tears of joy. The horrible weight on the soul that had grown to be
a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging flood; the horrible
constriction around the heart loosened. We wept with all our might; we
poured out once for all the old bitterness, the old horror. We felt
sanity coming back, and faith and even hope, that forgotten possession
of the old days.
When the first tears of deliverance had passed, and your knees had
stopped shaking, and your heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your
throat, why, then every one felt one common imperious desire, to leave
the little cramping prison of his own walls, to escape out of the
selfish circle of his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving with that
of all his fellows, to make himself physically, as he felt spiritually,
at one with rejoicing humanity.
And we all rushed out into the streets.
I think there never can have been such a day before, such a day of pure
thanksgiving and joy for every one. For the emotion was so intense
that, during the priceless hours of that first day, it admitted no
other. Human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. The
dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. We lived
and drew our breath only in the knowledge that “firing had ceased at
eleven o’clock that morning,” and that those who had fought as best
they could for the Right had conquered. You saw everywhere supreme
testimony to the nobility of the moment, women in black, with bits of
bright-colored tricolor pinned on their long black veils, with at last
a smile, the most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed eyes. They
were marching with the others in the streets; every one was marching
with every one else, arm in arm, singing:
_Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_
The houses echoed to those words, repeated and repeated by every band
of jubilant men and women and children who swept by, waving flags and
shouting:
_Come, children of our country,
The Day of Glory is here!_
Every group had at its head a permissionnaire or two in field uniform
who had been pounced upon as the visible emblem of victory, kissed,
embraced, covered with flowers, and set in the front rank to carry the
largest flag. Sometimes there walked beside these soldiers working
women with sleeping babies in their arms, sometimes old men in frock
coats with ribbons in their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted,
laughing little munition workers still in their black aprons, but with
tricolored ribbons twisted in their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed
ladies, sometimes women in long mourning veils, sometimes ragged old
beggars, sometimes a cab filled with crippled soldiers waving their
crutches--but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing jubilee.
During those few blessed hours there was no bitterness, no evil
arrogance, no revengeful fury. Any one who saw all that afternoon
those thousands and thousands of human faces all shining with the same
exaltation can never entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing
them to be capable of that pure joy.
_The Day of Glory has come._
The crowd seemed to be merely washing back and forth in surging waves
of thanksgiving, up and down the streets aimlessly, carrying flowers
to no purpose but to celebrate their happiness. But once you were in
it, singing and marching with the others, you felt an invisible current
bearing you steadily, irresistibly, in one direction; and soon, as you
marched, and grew nearer the unknown goal, you heard another shorter,
more peremptory, rhythm mingling with the longer shout, repeated over
and over:
_Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_
Now people were beginning to shout: “To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To
Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!” Then you knew that you were being swept
along to the Place de la Concorde, to salute the statue of Strasbourg,
freed from her forty years of mourning and slavery.
The crowd grew denser and denser as it approached that heart of Paris;
and the denser it grew the higher flamed the great fire of rejoicing,
mounting up almost visibly to the quiet gray skies:
_Come, children of our country,
The Day of Glory is here!_
“To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!”
No evil epithets hurled at the defeated enemy, not one, not one in
all those long hours of shouting out what was in the heart; no ugly
effigies, no taunting cries, no mention even of the enemy--instead a
fresh outburst of rejoicing at the encounter with a long procession
of Belgians, marching arm in arm, carrying Belgian flags and pealing
out like trumpets the noble Brabançonne! We made way for them with
respectful admiration, we stopped our song to listen to theirs, we let
them pass, waving our hats, our handkerchiefs, cheering them, pressing
flowers upon them, snatching at their hands for a clasp as they went
by, blessing them for their constancy and courage, sharing their relief
till our hearts were like to burst!
We fell in behind them and at once had to separate again to allow the
passage of a huge camion, bristling with American soldiers, heaped up
in a great pyramid of brown. How every one cheered them, a different
shout, with none of the poignant undercurrent of sympathy for pain that
had greeted the Belgian exiles. These brave, lovable, boyish crusaders
come from across the sea for a great ideal, who had been ready to give
all, but who had been blessedly spared the last sacrifice--it was a
rollicking shout which greeted them! They represented the youth, the
sunshine; they were loved and laughed at and acclaimed by the crowd
as they passed, waving their caps, leaning over the side to shake the
myriad hands stretched up to them, catching at the flowers flung at
them, shouting out some song, perhaps a college cheer, judging by the
professionally frantic gestures of a cheer leader, grinding his teeth
and waving his arms wildly to exhort them to more volume of sound.
Whatever it was, it was quite inaudible in the general uproar, the only
coherent accent of which was the swelling cry repeated till it was like
an elemental sound of nature.
_The Day of Glory has arrived._
Now a group of English soldiers overtook us, carrying a great, red,
glorious English flag, adding some hearty, inaudible marching song
to the tumult. As they passed, a _poilu_ in our band sprang forward,
seized one of the Anglo-Saxons in his arms, and kissed him resoundingly
on both cheeks. Then there was laughter, and shouts and handshakings
and more embracing, and they too vanished away in the waves of the
great river of humanity flowing steadily, rapidly toward the statue of
the lost city whose loss had meant the triumph of unscrupulous force,
whose restitution meant the righting of an old wrong in the name of
justice. We were almost there now; the huge open _Place_ opened out
before us.