WAR IN THE VOSGES
PARIS, January, 1916.
When speaking of their five hundred miles of front, the French General
Staff divide it into twelve sectors. The names of these do not appear on
maps. They are family names and titles, not of certain places, but of
districts with imaginary boundaries. These nicknames seem to thrive
best in countries where the same race of people have lived for many
centuries. With us, it is usually when we speak of mountains, as "in the
Rockies," "in the Adirondacks," that under one name we merge rivers,
valleys, and villages. To know the French names for the twelve official
fronts may help in deciphering the communiques. They are these:
Flanders, the first sector, stretches from the North Sea to beyond
Ypres; the Artois sector surrounds Arras; the centre of Picardie is
Amiens; Santerre follows the valley of the Oise; Soissonais is the
sector that extends from Soissons on the Aisne to the Champagne sector,
which begins with Rheims and extends southwest to include Chalons;
Argonne is the forest of Argonne; the Hauts de Meuse, the district
around Verdun; Woevre lies between the heights of the Meuse and the
River Moselle; then come Lorraine, the Vosges, all hills and forests,
and last, Alsace, the territory won back from the enemy.
Of these twelve fronts, I was on ten. The remaining two I missed through
leaving France to visit the French fronts in Serbia and Salonika.
According to which front you are on, the trench is of mud, clay, chalk,
sand-bags, or cement; it is ambushed in gardens and orchards, it winds
through flooded mud flats, is hidden behind the ruins of wrecked
villages, and is paved and reinforced with the stones and bricks from
the smashed houses.
Of all the trenches the most curious were those of the Vosges. They were
the most curious because, to use the last word one associates with
trenches, they are the most beautiful.
We started for the trenches of the Vosges from a certain place close to
the German border. It was so close that in the inn a rifle-bullet from
across the border had bored a hole in the cafe mirror.
The car climbed steadily. The swollen rivers flowed far below us, and
then disappeared, and the slopes that fell away on one side of the road
and rose on the other became smothered under giant pines. Above us
they reached to the clouds, below us swept grandly across great
valleys. There was no sign of human habitation, not even the hut of
a charcoal-burner. Except for the road we might have been the first
explorers of a primeval forest. We seemed as far removed from the
France of cities, cultivated acres, stone bridges, and chateaux as Rip
Van Winkle lost in the Catskills. The silence was the silence of the
ocean.
We halted at what might have been a lumberman's camp. There were cabins
of huge green logs with the moss still fresh and clinging, and smoke
poured from mud chimneys. In the air was an enchanting odor of balsam
and boiling coffee. It needed only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an axe
to persuade us we had motored from a French village ten hundred years
old into a perfectly new trading-post on the Saskatchewan.
But from the lumber camp the colonel appeared, and with him in the lead
we started up a hill as sheer as a church roof. The freshly cut path
reached upward in short, zigzag lengths. Its outer edge was shored with
the trunks of the trees cut down to make way for it. They were fastened
with stakes, and against rain and snow helped to hold it in place. The
soil, as the path showed, was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is
the stone from which cathedrals have been built. That suggests that to
an ambitious young sapling it offers little nutriment, but the pines, at
least, seem to thrive on it. For centuries they have thrived on it. They
towered over us to the height of eight stories. The ground beneath was
hidden by the most exquisite moss, and moss climbed far up the tree
trunks and covered the branches. They looked, as though to guard them
from the cold, they had been swathed in green velvet. Except for the
pink path we were in a world of green--green moss, green ferns, green
tree trunks, green shadows. The little light that reached from above was
like that which filters through the glass sides of an aquarium.
It was very beautiful, but was it war? We might have been in the
Adirondacks in the private camp of one of our men of millions. You
expected to see the fire-warden's red poster warning you to stamp out
the ashes, and to be careful where you threw your matches. Then the
path dived into a trench with pink walls, and, overhead, arches of green
branches rising higher and higher until they interlocked and shut out
the sky. The trench led to a barrier of logs as round as a flour-barrel,
the openings plugged with moss, and the whole hidden in fresh pine
boughs. It reminded you of those open barricades used in boar hunting,
and behind which the German Emperor awaits the onslaught of thoroughly
terrified pigs.
Like a bird's nest it clung to the side of the hill, and, across a
valley, looked at a sister hill a quarter of a mile away.
"On that hill," said the colonel, "on a level with us, are the Germans."
Had he told me that among the pine-trees across the valley Santa Claus
manufactured his toys and stabled his reindeer I would have believed
him. Had humpbacked dwarfs with beards peeped from behind the velvet
tree trunks and doffed red nightcaps, had we discovered fairies dancing
on the moss carpet, the surprised ones would have been the fairies.
In this enchanted forest to talk of Germans and war was ridiculous. We
were speaking in ordinary tones, but in the stillness of the woods our
voices carried, and from just below us a dog barked.
"Do you allow the men to bring dogs into the trenches?" I asked. "Don't
they give away your position?"
"That is not one of our dogs," said the colonel. "That is a German
sentry dog. He has heard us talking."
"But that dog is not across that valley," I objected. "He's on this
hill. He's not two hundred yards below us."
"But, yes, certainly," said the colonel. Of the man on duty behind the
log barrier he asked:
"How near are they?"
"Two hundred yards," said the soldier. He grinned and, leaning over the
top log, pointed directly beneath us.
[Illustration: War in the forest.
A cemetery for soldiers killed in the Vosges.]
It was as though we were on the roof of a house looking over the edge at
some one on the front steps. I stared down through the giant pine-trees
towering like masts, mysterious, motionless, silent with the silence of
centuries. Through the interlacing boughs I saw only shifting shadows
or, where a shaft of sunlight fell upon the moss, a flash of vivid
green. Unable to believe, I shook my head. Even the _boche_ watchdog,
now thoroughly annoyed, did not convince me. As though reading my
doubts, an officer beckoned, and we stepped outside the breastworks and
into an intricate cat's-cradle of barbed-wire. It was lashed to heavy
stakes and wound around the tree trunks, and, had the officer not led
the way, it would have been impossible for me to get either in or out.
At intervals, like clothes on a line, on the wires were strung empty tin
cans, pans and pots, and glass bottles. To attempt to cross the
entanglement would have made a noise like a peddler's cart bumping over
cobbles.
We came to the edge of the barb-wire, and what looked like part of a
tree trunk turned into a man-sized bird's nest. The sentry in the nest
had his back to us, and was peering intently down through the branches
of the tree tops. He remained so long motionless that I thought he was
not aware of our approach. But he had heard us. Only it was no part of
his orders to make abrupt movements. With infinite caution, with the
most considerate slowness, he turned, scowled, and waved us back. It was
the care with which he made even so slight a gesture that persuaded me
the Germans were as close as the colonel had said. My curiosity
concerning them was satisfied. The sentry did not need to wave me back.
I was already on my way.
At the post of observation I saw a dog-kennel.
"There are watchdogs on our side, also?" I said.
"Yes," the officer assented doubtfully.
"The idea is that their hearing is better than that of the men, and in
case of night attacks they will warn us. But during the day they get so
excited barking at the _boche_ dogs that when darkness comes, and we
need them, they are worn-out and fall asleep."
We continued through the forest, and wherever we went found men at work
repairing the path and pushing the barb-wire and trenches nearer the
enemy. In some places they worked with great caution as, hidden by the
ferns, they dragged behind them the coils of wire; sometimes they were
able to work openly, and the forest resounded with the blows of axes and
the crash of a falling tree. But an axe in a forest does not suggest
war, and the scene was still one of peace and beauty.
For miles the men had lined the path with borders of moss six inches
wide, and with strips of bark had decorated the huts and shelters.
Across the tiny ravines they had thrown what in seed catalogues are
called "rustic" bridges. As we walked in single file between these
carefully laid borders of moss and past the shelters that suggested only
a gamekeeper's lodge, we might have been on a walking tour in the Alps.
You expected at every turn to come upon a chalet like a Swiss clock, and
a patient cow and a young woman in a velvet bodice who would offer you
warm milk.
Instead, from overhead, there burst suddenly the barking of shrapnel,
and through an opening in the tree-tops we saw a French biplane pursued
by German shells. It was late in the afternoon, but the sun was still
shining and, entirely out of her turn, the moon also was shining. In the
blue sky she hung like a silver shield, and toward her, it seemed almost
to her level, rose the biplane.
She also was all silver. She shone and glistened. Like a great bird,
she flung out tilting wings. The sun kissed them and turned them into
flashing mirrors. Behind her the German shells burst in white puffs
of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent-looking as the tips of
ostrich-plumes. The biplane ran before them and seemed to play with
them as children race up the beach laughing at the pursuing waves.
The biplane darted left, darted right, climbed unseen aerial trails,
tobogganed down vast imaginary mountains, or, as a gull skims the crests
of the waves, dived into a cloud and appeared again, her wings dripping,
glistening and radiant. As she turned and winged her way back to France
you felt no fear for her. She seemed beyond the power of man to harm,
something supreme, super-human--a sister to the sun and moon, the
princess royal of the air.
After you have been in the trenches it seems so selfish to be feasting
and drinking that you have no appetite for dinner.
But after a visit to the defenders of the forests of the Vosges you
cannot feel selfish. Visits to their trenches do not take away the
appetite. They increase it. The air they breathe tastes like brut
champagne, and gases cannot reach them. They sleep on pillows of pine
boughs. They look out only on what in nature is most beautiful. And
their surgeon told me there was not a single man on the sick-list. That
does not mean there are no killed or wounded. For even in the enchanted
forest there is no enchantment strong enough to ward off the death that
approaches crawling on the velvet moss, or hurtling through the
tree-tops.
War has no knowledge of sectors. It is just as hateful in the Vosges as
in Flanders, only in the Vosges it masks its hideousness with what is
beautiful. In Flanders death hides in a trench of mud like an open
grave. In the forest of the Vosges it lurks in a nest of moss, fern,
and clean, sweet-smelling pine.