war-widow about ways and means for taking care of her children, I find
him in the living-room, the hearty, broad-faced fellow, smiling, giving
me his great, farm-laborer's hand, thanking me for the last package of
goodies ... as though he had not just come through the inferno of the
attack at M----. "The package never arrived at a better moment," he said
gaily. "We had been on awfully short rations for three days ... in a
shell-hole, you know." I know that I do not know it all, but it is
futile to try to draw fine distinctions with Groissard, cheeriest and
simplest of "permissionnaires," always the same, always open-faced and
clear-eyed, always emanating quiet confidence and always seeing it about
him. If there are any tired or disheartened or apprehensive or perplexed
soldiers in the army, they pass unperceived of Groissard's honest eyes.
His companions are all ... to hear him talk ... as brave, as untroubled,
as single-hearted as he. They never complain--that is, if Groissard's
account of them is accurate: they think as little as possible about
anything but food and packages from the rear and jokes. And when they do
think, it is always only to be sure that everybody must hold hard and
stick it out quite to the end. As long as "they" are on French soil, of
course there is nothing else for an honest Frenchman to do. And they are
all honest Frenchmen around Groissard.
"Oh yes, madame," he says simply, balancing my little boy on his knee,
"the spirit of the army is excellent. Why shouldn't it be? We're going
to get them, you know. And you ought to see our regimental fireless
cookers now. They're great! The cooks fill them up at the kitchen at the
rear, quite out of range, you know, where there's no danger of a shell
upsetting the pots, and then the men bring the big fireless cookers up
on mitrailleuse carriages that can go anywhere. They worm their way
clear up to us in the first-line trenches, and our ragout is piping hot.
It's like sitting down to the table at the farm at home. There's nothing
so good for the spirit of an army as hot _rasta_. And your packages, the
packages madame sends with the money from her American friends ... why,
the days when they come it's like being a kid again, and having a
birthday! And then we get two days out of five for rest at the rear, you
know, except when there is a _very_ big attack going on. We're not so
badly off at all!"
"During those big attacks aren't you sometimes cut off from food
supplies?" I ask.
"Oh, not so often. The longest one was three days and four nights, and
we had our emergency rations for half that time." He tosses my fat
little son up in the air and catches him deftly in his great farm
laborer's hands, butcher's hands. The children adore Groissard, and his
furloughs are festivals for them. As for me, I have an endless curiosity
about him. I can never be done with questioning him, with trying to find
out what is underneath his good-natured acceptance of the present insane
scheme of the universe; I sometimes descend to banalities, the foolish
questions schoolgirls ask. I lower my voice: "Groissard, did you
ever--have you ever had to ... I don't mean firing off your rifle at a
distant crowd, I mean in close quarters...?"
"Have I killed many Boches, you mean, madame?" he breaks through my
mincing, twentieth-century false-modesty about naming a fact I
accept ... since I accept Groissard! "Oh yes, a good many. We fought all
over Mort-Homme, you know; and we were in the last attack on Hill 304.
There was a good deal of hand-to-hand work there, of course." He turns
the delighted baby upside down and right-side up, and smiles sunnily at
the resultant shrieks of mirth.
I try again: "Do you see many prisoners, Groissard?" He is always ready
to answer questions, although he cannot understand my interest in such
commonplace details.
"Yes indeed, madame, ever so many. Just the day before this 'permission'
began, day before yesterday it was, we brought in a squad of twenty
from a short section of trench we had taken. I'm not likely to forget
them for _one_ while! Our cook, who is from the South and loses his head
easily, went and cooked up for them at three o'clock in the afternoon
every last beefsteak we were going to have for dinner that night. We
didn't have a thing but beans left! But we didn't grumble very much,
either. They were the coldest, hungriest-looking lot you ever saw. It
did your heart good to see the way they got around those beefsteaks!"
I gaze at him baffled. "But, Groissard, you kill them. You are there to
kill them! What can you care whether they have beefsteaks or not."
He stops playing with the baby to look at me, round-eyed with
astonishment. "I'm not there to kill _prisoners_!" he says, with an
unanswerable simplicity. And I lose myself again in a maze of conjecture
and speculation.
III
"Oh, it's got to stop, that's all; it's too sickening, too imbecile, too
monstrous!"
It is the _brancardier_ talking, the one who had been a prosperous
sugar-broker before the war, and who has been a first-line
stretcher-carrier since the beginning of the war. If you think you have
any idea what it has meant to be first-line stretcher-carrier for three
years, you have only to hear Paul Arbagnan talk for five minutes to
guess at the extent of your ignorance. He is just back from the front,
on a twenty-four hours' furlough, granted after a terrible fortnight
under incessant fire. He sits in the midst of our family group, beside
his older brother, the despatch-carrier, also here "_en permission_."
The brother was before the war a professor of political economy. From
the worn blue uniforms of both brothers swings the _croix de guerre_
gloriously. The younger one's face is thin and very brown, his blue eyes
look out at us with an irritable flicker. The mud dried on his clumsy
boots crumbles off in great flakes on my polished floor. His hard, grimy
hand with broken nails (which had been so fine and well-kept before the
war) teases and pulls at his close-clipped hair, now as grizzled with
silver as that of a man twenty years his senior.
A harmless elderly relative murmurs something sentimental about the mud
on the floor being sacred earth, like that the Crusaders brought back
from Jerusalem, and the inevitable explosion takes place. "Oh, you
people at the rear, your silly chatter about heroism and holy causes!
You don't know what you are talking about. There ought to be a law to
make all the civilian population keep silence about the war. You have no
idea, not the faintest glimmering of a notion of what life is at the
front! If you _had_...! My _croix de guerre_! Don't you suppose I would
give it back ten times over if I could forget what I feel deliberately
to leave a mortally wounded man to die because I have orders to select
(if my stretcher has not room enough for all) only those who may get
well enough to go back and fight again. Without having known what it is,
you've no right to say a word, to have an opinion or a thought about it,
you safe, clean, soft, gossiping people at the rear! The dirt ...! Why,
the bath I had this morning here in Paris was the first time I have
taken my clothes off, except to hunt for vermin, for twenty-two days. Do
you know what your body is like, what your clothes are like, what your
socks are like, when you have lived and cooked and sweat and slept and
bled in them for twenty-two days? Of course you don't. No civilized
being does. And until you do, less talk from you about the heroism of
the soldier! Filth, that's what war is, and dirty diseases lying in wait
for decent men. And cold, cold day and night, cold that brutalizes, that
degenerates you till you would sell your soul, your mother's soul to be
warm again. And mud, not clean country mud, but filth, and up to your
eyes and beyond, horrible infected mud splashing upon the emergency
bandage you are trying to put on a wound. And the wounded ... see here,
when the newspapers speak complacently of the superb artillery
preparation which after three days of cannon-duel silences the enemy's
batteries, do you know what that means to me? It means I am squatting
all day in an underground shelter, with twenty wounded, the German
shells falling one a minute over my head, my supplies of bandages gone,
my anaesthetics gone, no cotton, not even a cup of water left. To see
them die there, begging for help, calling for their mothers ... to
crouch there helpless, all day long, hearing the shells falling, and
wondering which one will come through the roof--oh, you have plenty of
time to think the whole proposition over, the business you're in. You
have time, let me tell you, to have your own opinion of the imbecility
of setting one highly civilized man down in filth and degradation to
shoot at others. When some idiot of a journalist, reporting the war,
speaks of the warlike ardor of the men, how it is difficult to restrain
them until the order to charge is given ... when we read such paragraphs
in the papers ... if you could hear the snarl that goes up! We 'charge'
when the word of command is given, yes, because we know nothing better
to do, but ..."
The sentimental aunt breaks in resolutely: "Of course, it's very noble
of you, Paul; the fact is simply that you don't or won't recognize your
own courage."
"Courage, nonsense! A rat in a hole, surrounded by other rats
putrefying ... that's what I am in my underground shelter! What else can
I do? What else can we any of us do? We can't get away! There wouldn't be
anywhere to go if we did! But when I think of the people at the rear, how
they don't know, will never know, the sickening hours the troops live
through. See here! No sensitive, civilized being can forget it if he has
only _once_ been wholly filthy, wholly bestial ... and we have been
that, time without number. When I come back to Paris on furlough and
look at the crowds in the Paris streets, the old men with white collars,
and clean skins, the women with curled hair and silk stockings, I could
_kill_ them, when I think that they will have a voice in the future,
will affect what will be done hereafter about war ..."
"Time for your train, Paul," warns the elder brother soberly.
The man who had been reviling the life of a soldier springs instantly to
his feet and looks anxiously at his watch. He claps on his blue steel
casque.
We try to give a light touch to the last of his stay. "How medieval
those helmets make you look!"
He is not to be distracted. "Put it further back, stone-age,
cannibalistic," he cries bitterly, marching out hurriedly so that he may
be promptly at his task.
The elder brother comes back from the door, a dim, patient smile on his
lips. "Oh, Paul, poor boy! He takes it hard! He takes it hard!" he
murmurs. "Who would think to hear him that he is accounted the best
_brancardier_ in his section? He is the one always sent out to do the
impossible, and he always goes, silently, and does it. After this last
engagement, he had shown such _bravoure_, they wanted to have him cited
again, to give him the palms to wear above his _croix_. But he said he
had had his share, that others had done as much as he, and he persuaded
them to give the _croix_ to one of the other _brancardiers_, a stevedore
from Marseilles who can't read or write. You are perhaps not surprised
to know that he is adored by his comrades."
"But is it _true_ ... all he says?" I ask, shivering a little.
"Oh yes, true enough, and more than he says or any one can ever say.
But, but ..." He searches for a metaphor and finds it with a smile.
"See, Paul is like a man with a fearful toothache! He can't think of
anything else. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything else."
I ask him: "But you, who have been through all that Paul sees, what do
_you_ find, besides?" He hesitates, smiling no longer, and finally
brings out in a low tone: "When a mother gives birth to a child, she
suffers, suffers horribly. Perhaps all the world is now trying to give
birth to a new idea, which we have talked of, but never _felt_ before;
the idea that all of us, each of us, is responsible for what happens to
all, to each, that we must stick together for good...." He picks up his
steel helmet, and looks at us with his dim, patient, indomitable smile.
"It is like a little new baby in more ways than one, that new idea. It
has cost us such agony; and it is so small, so weak, so needing all our
protection ... and then also, because ..." his sunken eyes are
prophetic, "because it is _alive_, because it will grow!"
IV
I glance at my calendar in dismay. Is it possible that three months have
gone, and that it is time for Amieux to have another "permission"? How
long the week of his furlough always seems, how the three months between
race away! Of course we have the greatest regard for Amieux. We feel
that his uniform alone (he is a _chasseur alpin_ who has been a
first-line fighter since the Battle of the Marne) would entitle him to
our services, but more than that, his personality commands our respect,
sound, steady, quiet Amieux whose sturdy body is wounded in one place
after another, who is repaired hastily in the nearest hospital and
uncomplainingly goes back to the trenches, his sleeve decorated with
another one of the V-shaped marks which denote wounds. The only trouble
with Amieux as a household hero is a total dearth of subjects of
conversation. You see, he is a glass-blower by profession. We often feel
that if we were not as ignorant of glass-blowing as Amieux is of
everything else, we could get on famously with him. As it is ...
"_Oh bon jour_, M. Amieux," I say, jumping to my feet, "welcome back to
the rear! All well?"
"Yes, madame," he says with as ponderous an emphasis on the full-stop as
that of any taciturn New England farmer.
"Well, has it been hard, the last three months?" I ask.
"No, madame."
I draw a long breath.
"Do the packages we send, the chocolate, the cigarettes, the soap--do
they reach you promptly?"
"Yes, madame. Thank you, madame."
The full-stop is more overpowering with each answer.
I resort to more chatter, anything to fill that resounding silence.
"Here we have been so busy! So many more American volunteers are coming
over for the Ambulance service, my husband has not a free moment. The
children never see him. My little daughter is doing well in school. She
begins to read French now. Of course the little son doesn't go to
school, but he is learning to speak French like a French baby. It has
been so cold here. There has been so little coal. You must have heard,
the long lines waiting to get coal ..." I stop with almost a shrug of
exasperation. As well talk to a basalt statue as to Amieux, impassive,
his rough red hands on his knees, his _musette_ swollen with all the
miscellaneous junk the poilu stuffs into that nondescript receptacle,
his cap still firmly on his head ... formal manners are not specialties
of Amieux. And then I notice that one leg is thrust out, very stiff and
straight, and has a big bulbous swelling which speaks of a bandage under
the puttees.
I glance at it. "Rheumatism? Too much water in the trenches?"
He looks down at it without a flicker on his face. "No, madame, a
wound."
"Really? How did it happen this time?"
He looks faintly bored. They always hate to tell how they were wounded.
"Oh, no particular way. A shell had smashed up an _abri_, and while I
was trying to pull my captain out from under the timbers another shell
exploded near by."
"Did you save the captain?"
"Oh yes. He was banged up around the head. He's all right now."
"Were you there with him? How did it happen you weren't buried under the
wreck too?"
"I wasn't there. I was in a trench. But I saw. I knew he was there."
I am so used to Amieux's conversational style that I manage even through
this arid narration to see what had happened. "Do you mean to say that
you left the trench and went out under shell-fire to rescue your
captain! And they didn't give you a decoration! It's outrageous not
recognizing such bravery!"
He shuffles his feet and looks foolish. "The captain wanted to have me
cited all right. He's a _chic type_, but I said he'd better not."
"Don't you want the _croix de guerre_?" I cry, astounded at such apathy
even from Amieux.
"Oh, I wouldn't mind. It's my mother."
"Don't you suppose your mother would _love_ to have her son decorated?"
I feel there must be some absurd misunderstanding between us, the man
seems to be talking such nonsense.
"Well, you see, my mother ... my only brother was killed last winter.
_Maman_ worries a good deal about me, and I told her, just so she could
sleep quietly, you know, I have told her my company isn't near the front
at all. I said we were guarding a munitions depot at the rear."
"Well ..." I am still at a loss.
"Well, don't you see, if I get the _croix de guerre_ for being under
fire, _maman_ would get to worrying again. So I told my captain I'd
rather he'd give it to one of the other fellows."
V
I had just come from several hours spent with one of the war-blind, one
of those among the educated, unresigned war-blind, who see too clearly
with the eyes of their intelligence what has happened to them. I had
been with him, looking into his sightless face, pitting my strength
against the bitterness of his voice; and I was tired, tired to the
marrow of my bones, to the tip of every nerve.
But the children had not been out for their walk and the day was that
rare thing in a Paris March, a sunshiny one, not to be wasted. "Come,
dears," I told them as I entered the apartment, "get on your wraps.
We'll all go out for a play while the sun is still high."
I walked along the street between them, my little daughter and my little
son, their warm soft hands in mine. The sparrows chattered in the bare
trees above us, the sparrows who even in this keen air felt the coming
of spring which was foretold by the greening of the grass in the public
squares. My children chattered incessantly, like the sparrows. Perhaps
they felt the spring too. _I_ did not want to feel the spring. We turned
away from the Seine and walked on one side of the open square before
Notre Dame.
"Mother, I caught my ball twenty-three times to-day without missing."
"Muvver, I see a white horse, a _big_ white horsie!"
"Mother, do you like arithmetic as well as history? _I_ don't."
"Muvver, I have a little p'tend doggie here, trotting after me, a little
brown p'tend doggie."
"Mother, O _mother_, let me tell you what happened at school to-day,
during recess!"
Through the half-heard ripple of clear little voices, there came upon me
one of those thunder-claps of realization which, since the beginning of
the war, have brought wiser and stronger people than I to the brink of
insanity--realization for an instant (longer than an instant would carry
any one over the brink) that the war is really going on, realization of
what the war really means, one glimpse of the black abyss. I felt very
sick, and stood still for an instant, because my knees shook under
me....
But those wiser and stronger ones had not little children of their own
to draw them away from that black gulf.... I was pulled at by impatient
little hands, lucid, ineffably pure eyes were turned up to mine, the
clear little voices grew louder, "Muvver, muvver, I'm losing my mitten!"
"Mother, why are you standing still? _This_ isn't a good place to play!
There! A little nearer the big church is some sand. And a bench for
you."
How could I go on this everyday commonplace life, eating, drinking,
sleeping, caring for the children, cheering them ... in such a wicked
and imbecile world! I looked up and down the bare, sun-flooded square.
All about me were other women, caring for little children. And for the
most part, those other women were in mourning. But they were there under
that cruel, careless sunshine, caring for their children, cheering
them....
I put the little mitten on; I walked forward to the bench, the little
singing voices died away to a ripple again. "Oh, this is fine! See,
little brother, here is a cave already. Let me have that stick!" "No,
me! _Me!_"
That was what was sounding in my ears. But what I heard was a muffled
voice saying scornfully: "Re-education ... courage, taking up our lives
again ... oh yes, whatever you please to imagine to distract our
attention! But we are finished men, done for ... lost!"
My children played before me in the sunshine, but what I saw were the
scarred, mutilated, sightless faces of young men in their prime, with
long lives of darkness before them. And as I sat there, then, that
instant, other young men in their prime were being blinded, were being
mutilated for life.
My fatigue deepened till it was like lead upon me. Under it I was cold.
The sun did not warm me. It fell like a mockery upon a race gone mad,
upon a world bankrupt in hope. Yes, what we suffered was not the worst,
not even what _they_ suffered, the men at the front; what was worst was
the fact that the meaning of it all was hopelessness, was the end, a
black end to all we had looked forward to, striven for ... paralysis,
death in life. And an indifferent sun shining down on it, as it had on
our illusions.
* * * * *
After a time the children tired of sand. "Mother, mayn't we go in the
big church? You never have taken us inside. What does it look like?"
Their restless upspringing life thrust my paralysis aside as an
upspringing young tree cleaves the boulder which would hamper it. We
pushed open the heavy leather door and stepped into the huge cavern, our
eyes so full of the glare of the sunshine that, as we walked forward up
the nave, we could see nothing but velvety darkness, faintly scented
with mold and incense.
The silence was so intense that I could hear my sore, angry heart
beating furiously in my breast....
Further along before us, where rich-colored patches lay, on the stone
pavement, there was the light from the great rose-windows.... We stood
there now, our eyes slowly clearing, the blackness slowly fading out
into twilight, to a sweet, clear translucent dimness which hid nothing.
Silence, long, shadowy veiled aisles, hushed immensity ...
A great calm hand seemed laid on my shoulder, so that my fever sank, my
pulses were quieted. I stood motionless, feeling slowly pulsating
through me a vaster rhythm than the throbbing irregularity of my own
doubting heart. A great soundless benediction was breathed upon me out
of the man-wrought beauty around and above me.
Up, up, up, I raised my eyes, following the soaring of the many-columned
pillars, and something in my heart burst its leaden bonds and soared up
out of my breast....
Yes, here was beauty, here was that beauty I had forgotten and
denied ... _and men had made it_! It had nothing to do with the glare
of the indifferent sun, with the callous face of our calamity. Men had
made this beauty, imperfect, warring, doubting, suffering, sinning men
had upreared this perfect creation. They had created this beauty out of
their faith in righteousness, and they would again create other beauty,
out of other manifestations of righteousness, long after this war was a
forgotten nightmare....
"What is that shining on your face, mother?"
I put my hand up. My cheeks are wet. "Tears, dear."
"O mother, why do you cry?"
"Because I am very happy, my darling."
A FAIR EXCHANGE
The energetic, well-dressed man who walked so quickly in spite of his
gray hair was quite out of breath from the unusual experience of
mounting stairs on foot, when he stepped into the anteroom. There he
looked about him with a keenly observant eye. The room had obviously not
been intended as the entrance to modern offices. Its dingy, paneled
walls and darkened carved ceiling dated at least from the time when the
ancestors of the newcomer were hunting Indians in the untracked forests
of Massachusetts. It was a forlorn cheerless apology for a convenient,
well-equipped business waiting-room. And yet the intelligent, keen eyes
now looking at it saw in it ... what? Something he could not analyze,
something he tried to express. "What the devil is it about their little
old holes...?" he asked himself with the fresh vivid curiosity which was
his habit about phenomena new to him.
A one-armed young soldier, in a worn blue uniform, with a patch over one
eye, rose up from the cane-bottomed chair, took from the white-pine
table a small pad of paper and held it out to the newcomer sketching a
bow. The older man looked the other way sedulously. He was a very
tender-hearted person (except of course for his business competitors)
and the constant sight of the maimed wreckage of young manhood made him
sick.
On the pad of paper was printed "Nom du Visiteur," with a blank
following it, and, underneath, "Objet du la visite." Mr. Hale's French
was limited, but he made out that he was to write down who he was and
what his business was, and generously he admired the little detail of
office administration which he had never happened to see in an American
business office. "That beats sending in a message by the office-boy, all
right!" he thought to himself as he wrote. "They are funny people! Just
when you get absolute proof that they can't do business any more than a
sick cat, you run into something that makes you wonder."