THERE are stories a-plenty of the dash and fire of youth in the
trenches. But by no means are all the men young who are battling on the
front in France. There are the territorials, the line defenders, the
men of the provinces, with wives and children at home.
“They are wonderful, these older fellows,” said an officer
enthusiastically, after a visit to the trenches. “They ought to be
decorated—every one of them!”
It is of these watch-dogs of the trenches that René Bazin has written
in _Lisez-Moi_, and the article, translated by Mary L. Stevenson, is
printed in the Chicago _Tribune_. Mr. Bazin says:
I am proud of the young fighters, but those I am proudest of are the
older ones. These have passed the age when the hot blood coursing
through their veins drives them to adventure; they are leaving behind
wife, children, present responsibilities, and future plans—those things
hardest to cast off. Leaving all this, as they have done, without a
moment’s hesitation, is proof enough of their courage. And from the
beginning of the war to the present time I have never talked to a
solitary commanding officer that he has not eulogized his territorials.
They are essentially trench defenders, lookout men. The young ones do
the coursing. These attack, the others guard. But how they do guard,
how they hold the ground, once won! Nearing the front, if you meet
them on the march as they are about to be relieved, you can recognize
them even from afar by two signs: they march without any military
coquetry, even dragging their feet a little, and they have everything
with them that they can possibly carry—sacks, blankets, cans, bagpipes,
cartridge-boxes, with the neck of a bottle sticking out of their
trousers pocket. Even when you get near enough to see their faces
many of these men do not look at you; they are intent upon their own
thoughts. They know the hard week ahead of them. But the wind and rain
are already old friends; the mud of the trenches does not frighten
them; patience has long been their lot; they accept death’s lottery,
knowing well that they are protecting those they have left behind, and
they go at it as to a great task whose harvest may not be reaped or
even known until months later.
In truth, these men from the provinces—vine-growers, teamsters, little
peasant farmers, the most numerous of all among today’s combatants—will
have played a magnificent rôle in the Great War. History will have
to proclaim this, in justice to the French villages, and may the
Government see fit to honor and aid these silent heroes who will have
done so much to save the country.
They disappear quickly, lost in the defiles or swallowed up by the
mist, which night has thickened. Once in the trenches, they find the
work begun the previous week and which has been carried on by their
comrades’ hands, and when it comes their turn to guard the battlements
they hide themselves in the same holes in the clay wall. No unnecessary
movements, no flurry, no bravados, no setting off of flashes or grenade
and bomb-throwing, by which the younger troops immediately show their
presence in the trenches, and which only provokes a reply from the
enemy.
They are holding fast, but they keep still about it. Suddenly the
_Boches_ are coming. There are some splendid sharpshooters in this
regiment, and in the attack of the Seventh and in the surprise attempt
of the Fourteenth at daybreak it was seen what these men could do. An
officer said to me: “They suffer the least loss; they excel in shelters
of earthwork, they merge right into the turf.”
Many of the sectors of the front are held by this guard of older men.
When the German reserves were hurled in pursuit of the Belgian Army in
1914, threatening the shores of Pas de Calais, a territorial division
checked the onslaught of the best troops of the German Empire. Of their
work in the trenches, Mr. Bazin writes:
But do not let anyone think theirs is a life of inaction; work is
not lacking; even night is a time of reports, of revictualing, of
reconnoitering, or repairing barbed-wire entanglements.
When the sector is quiet, however, the territorial enjoys some free
hours. He writes a great deal; makes up for all the time past when
he wrote almost no letters at all and for all the time to come when
he promises himself to leave the pen hidden on the groove of the
ink-well, idle on the mantel. One of them said to me: “They have put up
a letter-box in my village. What will it be good for after the war—a
swallow’s nest?”
Many of these letters contain only a recital of uneventful days and
the prescribed formalities of friendship or love, banal to the general
public but dear enough to those who are waiting and who will sit
around the lamp of an evening and comment on every word. I know young
women throughout the country who receive a letter from their husbands
every day. The war has served as a school for adults. Sometimes
expediency entirely disappears and it is the race which speaks, and the
hidden faith, and the soul which perhaps has never thus been laid bare.
Here is a letter which has been brought to my notice. For a year it had
been carried in the pocket of a territorial who wrote it as his last
will and testament, and when he was killed it was sent to his widow.
Read it and see if you would not like to have had him who wrote it as a
friend and neighbor:
“My dear, today, as I am writing these lines, my heart feels very
big, and if you ever read them it will be because I died doing my
duty. I ask you, before I go, to bring up our children in honor and in
memory of me, for I have loved them very dearly, and I shall have died
thinking of them and of you. Tell them I died on the field of honor,
and that I ask them to offer the same sacrifice the day France shall
need their arms and hearts. Preserve my certificate of good conduct,
and later make them know that their father would like to have lived for
them and for you, whom I have always held so dear. Now, I do not want
you to pass the rest of your life worshiping one dead. On the contrary,
if during your life you meet some good, industrious young fellow
capable of giving you loyal aid in rearing our children, join your life
with his and never speak to him of me, for if he loves you it would
only cast the shadow of a dead man upon him—it is over, my dear. I love
you now and forever, even through eternity. Good-bye! I shall await
you over there. Your adoring JEAN.”
As showing the dogged, determined character of these men, Mr. Bazin
relates the following incident:
Lately, when both wind and rain were raging, an officer told me of
going up to two lookout men, immovable at their posts in the first line
trench, and joking with them, he said:
“Let’s see, what do you need?”
“Less mud.”
“I am in the same boat. What else?”
“This and that—”
“You shall have it, I promise you. Tired?”
“A little.”
“Discouraged?”
They made a terrible face, looked at him, and together replied: “If you
have come to say such things as that, sir, you better not have come at
all. Discouraged? No, indeed! We’re not the kind who get discouraged!”