still see nothing in the blackness. Suddenly I catch the glitter of
helmets.
“Halt, there!”
“Gendarmes!” cries a voice, “don’t shoot!” French gendarmes, in retreat!
“Advance slowly, one by one.”
The troop halts. One horseman advances, stops at ten paces from my
bayonet.
“I am a brigadier of the gendarmes, brigade of Avor. I have not the
password.”
The voice is indeed French. I recognize the uniform--but I still fear a
possible trap.
“Command your men to pass, one by one.”
The order is executed without reply. Some ten men file by.
“Look out for yourselves,” says the last horseman, “the Uhlans are at
our heels.”
“Thanks for the information. Tell that to the officer whom you will
meet about a hundred metres from here.” “Good luck to you.”
_Ouf!_ Berthet and I both grow hot. The watching brings us together, we
remain together. One feels stronger with company.
* * * * *
It begins to rain--only a mist at first, then a steady rain. The poor
fugitives tramp along, miserable, driven ghosts, weird figures in the
blackness of the night. Some of them give scraps of information in
passing.
“They are at the chapel.”
“They are arriving at Saint Michel.”
“There are twenty Uhlans at the _mairie_.”
Our lieutenant makes his round. “Nothing new?” “Nothing, sir.” “Very
well, I am going to look about, as far as the town. I will be back in
about fifteen minutes.” “Very well, sir.”
He disappears, swallowed up in the darkness. We wait. It rains harder
and harder. The water runs in rivulets on our shoulders, trickles down
our necks, soaks our shirts. From time to time we shake ourselves like
wet spaniels. There is nothing to do but wait. It would not do to
seek shelter. Besides, there is no shelter. When one is a sentinel in
full campaign, one must accept the weather as it comes. If it is fine,
so much the better; if it is frightful, too bad! It is impossible to
provide comforts, or conveniences. If the sun burns you or the rain
soaks you, if the heat roasts you or the cold freezes you, it is all
the same. The strong resist it, the weak succumb: so much the worse!
One is there to suffer, to endure, to hold his position. If one falls,
his place is filled. So long as there are men, the barrier is raised
and put in opposition to the enemy. “_C’est la guerre._” That is war:
a condition in which only the robust man may survive; where everything
unites madly to destroy, to obliterate him, where he must fight at the
same time his adversaries and the elements which seem to play with him
as the breeze plays with the leaf on the tree.
However, the night was advancing. The Great Bear, intermittently
visible between the clouds, had already gone down in the sky, and we
were still there. The crowd still surged on, as dense as ever. The
people came from every quarter. Very few were gathered into groups.
Here and there some worn-out soldiers were seen, who asked information
and vanished in haste. In the background of the dark picture of the
night were the burning villages and towns, but their flames were
subsiding, their ruddy glow was waning. The fires seemed to have
reached the end of their food, exhausted by a night of violence. Sudden
puffs of sparks rising with the smoke already foretold their extinction.
Berthet, my comrade, was pale in the twilight dawn. “You have had
enough of it?” I say to him. “Oh! no,” he responds, “it is nothing but
nervousness.”
The most critical moment was approaching: the dawning of day, that
troubled moment when fatigue crushes the shoulders of the most valiant,
when the vision confuses distances and blurs objects, when all one’s
surroundings take on a strange, uncanny appearance. Dawn, lustreless
and gray, the dawn of a day of rain, rising sulkily, drippingly, coming
pale and wan to meet men broken by an anxious vigil, is not a pleasing
fairy, is not the divine Aurora with fingers of light; and yet, it
brings solace. With its coming the vision is extended; it pierces the
fog, identifies the near-by hedge, the twisted birch, the neighboring
knoll of ground. Day breaks. The shadows disappear, objects regain
their natural aspect, and the terrors created by the night vanish.
Thus it was with us. I was pleased with Berthet. He had carried
himself well, and I told him so. That pleased him. He was a boy whose
self-esteem was well developed, who could impose upon a rather weak
body decisions made by his will.
“I was afraid of only one thing,” he said, “and that was that I might
be afraid.” I smiled and answered: “But you will be afraid. It is only
fools who know not fear, or deny it. Every one knows fear. Even the
bravest of the brave, Maréchal Ney himself, knew it well.”
At this moment our lieutenant returned from his hazardous expedition,
without having observed anything remarkable, and there was nothing
for us to do but wait for other sentries to relieve us, or for orders
specifying a new mission.
Nothing of the sort came, at first. If we had been abandoned in a
desert, our solitude could not have been more complete. As far as the
eye could see, we could not detect a living thing. There were no more
fugitives. We two were guarding a bare highroad where neither man nor
beast appeared.
At last, some one was seen coming from the fort. It was a comrade
bringing coffee and news. While we were absorbing with delight the
hot drink which seemed to make renewed life throb in our veins, he
recounted the events which had taken place behind us, and in some
manner under our protection.
“The boys,” he said, “have left. The fort will be blown up. It seems
that we have waited too long already. The Germans have gone by, now. We
are surrounded. No one knows how those animals slip by, but there is
fighting all around us.”
“No! Is that true?”
“Truest thing you know. Last night we put mines in the powder-magazine.
There are eight metres of fuse. We will light it on leaving. You are
going to see some fireworks.”
We did not know what to say, at first. We could not doubt the accuracy
of the information supplied by our comrade, but Berthet’s surprise
was extreme. The most difficult thing, in war, is to be willing to
comprehend nothing of what surrounds you near at hand, and to content
yourself to live as does an animal. Always one tries to reason, to
use logic, and nothing is further removed from reason and logic than
important events in which one is plunged, but of which one sees but an
infinitesimal part, too small to form even an approximate idea of the
whole.
“How,” says Berthet, “could the enemy pass by in force, without using
this road?” I shook my head. “Who knows?” “I don’t know how it was
done,” declared our comrade, “but they have passed us. As proof,
three kilometres from here they took by surprise a squad asleep in a
farmhouse. The Uhlans arrived without any one suspecting, and made them
all prisoners.”
A sharp whistle cut short our reflections. Our lieutenant called us.
We joined him and found, at the turn of the road, the entire garrison,
ready for departure. They were only awaiting the signal from the
commandant. The ranks were formed, the captains were mounted on their
horses, the lieutenants and the sergeants were overseeing the last
preparations.
We took our places in silence, not having slept at all, and having had
the sack buckled on our shoulders for twelve hours in the rain. The
rain had not ceased. The troop was enveloped in it as in a gray veil,
and the wet faces of the men expressed dejection. Their moustaches
drooped, their caps were pulled down, their looks were sullen. Even Yo
himself, with his unvarying good humor, could not find another word
with which to revive the spirits of the men. Only Amelus could be heard
growling somewhat more vigorously than usual.
Weather has an enormous effect on the morale of troops, as on all
human agglomerations. We were all more or less touched by the malign
influence of the rain. No jest flashed from the ranks as is usual in a
French troop, where bantering springs from the lip involuntarily, where
chaffing is as natural as the air one breathes, as necessary as bread.
A regiment remains alert and strong so long as this spirit of optimism
remains; but at the moment of which I speak, when we were drenched
with rain, when we saw our country invaded, when we knew ourselves
to be surrounded by the enemy, we were morose and feared the worst.
However, it was only necessary that there should be an unexpected peal
of laughter to bring light to every face, and that was what happened
soon after we were given the order to march.
Indeed, the column was scarcely in motion, when the irrepressible
Yo burst forth with a raucous tone in one of the most ancient songs
of the march, one of those which are transmitted from generation to
generation. Instantly, another voice responded, then another, then a
chorus. And then, in the downpour of rain, on a road so water-soaked
that one sunk to the ankle at each step, it was no longer a surrounded
regiment in flight, but a troop sprightly, gay, and confident and,
like their Gallic ancestors, having nothing to fear but this: that the
weeping heavens might really fall on their heads.
We had not been on the march an hour when a terrific explosion was
heard, reverberating overhead. It was the mined fort which was
blowing up. All the work of those last days was flying into the air
in a re-echoing crash of bricks, ironwork, shells, and guns. Our
labor was wiped out. Nevertheless, it had not been in vain. Thanks to
its existence, the German army which had faced us had been retarded
twenty-four hours in its advance. Indeed, their advance-guards had
encountered that garrisoned fort, and had been obliged to await the
arrival of artillery sufficient to reduce and take it. This delay had
permitted the last French troops to retreat without trouble. They
were safe when the fort, henceforth useless, blew up. It left nothing
for the hand of the enemy, and its mission was accomplished. A battle
would have added to our work nothing but blood. Our chiefs were wise in
sparing that.
It was not until later that we knew all this. At that moment we did
not look so far. We pursued our way singing, in a deluge of rain,
overtaking distracted fugitives along the route: exhausted old men,
women carrying and leading children, who moved aside to make way for
us, then stumbled in our wake. We passed through villages already
deserted, a forsaken countryside where the rain beat down the fields
of barley and ripe wheat. On we went. In passing, we gathered fruit
from the trees. At the fountains and springs we drank water made turbid
by the rain. We sang. We heard, somewhere, the roar of the cannon. We
had no idea where it thundered so. It seemed ahead of us and behind
us. As we saw nothing terrifying, as there was no visible evidence of
a battle, we advanced constantly, quite light-hearted, without knowing
that we were passing through one of the great battles of the beginning
of the war, one of the decisive struggles which did much to retard the
advance of the enemy; that our column, quite ignorant of events, was
thus marching freely across the battle of Guise.
That, at foundation, is not so impossible as might appear. Shortly
after, we had occasion to verify such zones of silence in the midst
of violent action. Yes, one may be in the midst of battle and not be
aware of it. Even at Austerlitz the guard had not yet charged, half the
troops had not broken a cartridge, when the battle was won.
This time our battle was to be gained by our legs, and consisted
solely of marching. And we marched. And we took no account of fatigue,
nor that the men who hastened along the road were all unaccustomed to
marching. One month before, all of us were civilians. Some were in
offices, bending over books; others sold dry goods, others were at
work-benches or in construction-yards. We were required to make an
unprecedented effort, to which none of us was trained. We were asked
to march for hours, for a day, for a night, none knew how long. We
must advance, cost what it might, follow an unfamiliar road, avoid
ambuscades, regain the rear of our army, rejoin other formations which,
farther on, were grouping under orders identical with our own.
We went on. The officers had their orders, we followed them. And we
sang to drive away fatigue, to forget misery, to escape the thought of
the heavy knapsack, of the cartridges dragging on our shoulders, of all
the military harness, so useful but so heavy, which weighed down each
step of the soldier. We crossed fields of freshly ploughed ground. We
climbed slopes, descended hills, traversed plains. We went straight
toward the south, covering on foot the route by which we had come
to the fort in the train; a route which had become interminable, cut
only by a pause every fifty minutes, when one could stretch his aching
limbs, could pierce the swollen blisters on his heels, could break a
crust of bread or drink a swallow of water.
Some civilians followed and attached themselves to us in the hope of
protection. There were women who marched close to the ranks, others who
confided their infants for a stage to near-by soldiers, still others
gave up, exhausted, and fell on the stones, with eyes rolled back, full
of terror and a sort of reproach. They felt themselves abandoned, too
worn out to follow longer, given over to all the tragic misery of the
invasion. And we turned our eyes that we might not see, in an agony
of soul that we must leave them, that we could not help them, that we
could not take them with us; ourselves crushed by the burdens of the
soldier, hard pushed to arrive at a destination still so far away, at
the spot selected for the halt, for rest, for sleep.
We went on, and fatigue began to weigh upon us. Some comrades suddenly
quit the ranks, threw down their sacks with a wild gesture, and fell
to the ground. They were the physically weak, those first overwhelmed
by the burden, whom the enemy would gather up in his advance and take
away prisoner, an easily won booty. The underofficers tried to make
these men rise and continue their way, without much success. They were
at the end of their strength, incapable of further effort. They gave up
and fell. They accepted whatever fate awaited them. They had struggled
to the extreme limit of endurance. One had marched for several hours
with the soles of his feet entirely blistered away from the flesh;
another had persisted though suffering intolerably from hernia. Some
had foam on the chin. Several attempted suicide. Their firearms were
taken from them and were given to another man to carry for a time. The
latter soon threw them away because of their weight, first breaking
them that they might not be of service to the enemy. Every one began to
relieve himself of superfluous articles. We threw away linen and change
of shoes; then rations. We emptied our pockets; discarded our jackets.
We marched, and marched, and marched: a march without end. There was no
pause, no aim, no goal. We marched. We sought the horizon, and must
push on still, as one horizon stretched away and gave place to another,
which again must be passed as the first. The day lengthened. The road
was never-ending. One after the other the hours rolled on, and still
we marched. We encountered vehicles stuck in the mire, which no one
attempted to help out of the ruts. We encountered horses in the last
throes of agony, struggling one last time to move one foot before the
other, then stiffening in death. We encountered automobiles in flames,
others in smoking ashes. We encountered encampments of poor wretches,
waiting at the edge of the road for a better hour. We encountered lost
children. Here and there we came upon a house pillaged, devastated,
bare, where remained no crust of bread, where even the wells had been
emptied of water. With difficulty one could draw from them a little
muddy liquid. The men chewed some beet-roots torn up in a field, to
allay the burning thirst. Then night approached. We still marched. The
twilight spread her veil of mist and blood. We marched. The shadows
fell. We marched. Night came. We marched. We stumbled on the stones
which seemed to rise from the road; over the wagon-ruts which cut it,
on the slopes which bordered it. We marched. There were unexpected
stops, when the column, suddenly halted at some point forward, folded
back upon itself like a telescope. The men jostled and swore. Wagons
were crushed, horses fell, in an indescribable confusion. Some soldiers
fell, and did not rise again. Then the movement resumed. We marched
again, and marched, and stopped, and went on.
There was no more singing. There was no more talking. Occasionally an
oath. We discarded knapsack, clothing, food, even letters, in hope of
relief, and marched on toward our goal with groans.
At last we stopped. We were in the midst of a black plain, lighted
only by a few dim fires, where the mud was almost knee-deep. We threw
ourselves down, broken, inert masses, without strength to spread a
blanket on the ground, asleep before we touched the earth. We had
covered seventy kilometres in one forced march, and no longer heard the
cannon.
* * * * *
Thus we slept, like brutes, until morning. It was not long. The early
light shone on a marsh made humpy by the bodies of men sleeping under
the mist. There were soldiers of all departments of service; Zouaves,
infantry, cavalry, artillery, fallen where they happened to be, without
order, and all but a few still sleeping. These few had lighted large
bonfires, where they warmed themselves. The light of the fires also
attracted many women, children, and old men, who stretched toward
the grateful warmth limbs stiffened by cold. The fires were fed with
branches of trees, broken parts of wagons, anything ready at hand
without too much effort to gather.
The result was a more or less comforting warmth for the benumbed
creatures who crowded around, in a surprisingly promiscuous assemblage.
Some were heating soup made from heaven knows what, others attempted to
dry their shirts and blouses, soaked by sweat and rain. The rain had
ceased, but the sky remained gray, covered with hostile clouds. The
vision was limited by a low-hanging fog. On the road, the procession
of retreat continued to roll, disordered, in nervous haste and at the
same time slow. The underofficers reassembled our troop. We must start
again, enter the column surging along the road, resume the flight,
take up the march, press on still farther, and gain ground.
With the new day the cannon again began to roar. It seemed quite near,
although one could not say exactly where the thundering came from.
One felt hunted down, without knowing the location of the enemy who
pursued so relentlessly. So the ranks were formed. Those who still had
knapsacks lifted them again to the shoulder, and again we marched.
The first steps were difficult. Every joint was stiff, every muscle
ached, and we swore with every stride. Soon we warmed up to the
exercise and advanced more easily. The pace was set for five kilometres
an hour, and every one followed.
Yo had found some wine, no one knows where. He poured a drop in the cup
of each of his neighbors, and it seemed quite refreshing. We managed to
keep going the entire morning. After a repose of two hours we started
again, always toward the south, always pursued by the cannon, which
seemed to move even faster than did we. We neared Vervins. The outlying
parishes indicated it at each kilometre, and we were only surprised
that the enemy had preceded us. It was nevertheless true. He went
like the wind, regardless of broken bridges, obstructed roads, opened
ravines. However fast we went, he went too fast even for us to follow.
He was ahead of us and behind us. He was reported on both sides of us.
He seemed to be everywhere.
This is the way of the retreat. However rapid it seems, it is exceeded
in speed by the enemy. Every difficulty retards the troops in flight;
obstructed roads, slow-moving army wagons, necessary destruction.
The enemy pushes on. He sends forward his cavalry quite indifferent
to the condition of the land. He takes strategic points, he occupies
mountains, he bars passes. We must make a détour to cross a river over
which he leaps. We must save munitions which weigh heavily and impede
our course. We must watch for a safety which he disdains. He comes
and breaks the embryonic resistance which he encounters, overthrows
battalions already in rout, sweeps away regiments already disorganized.
You believe he is behind, he is really in front. You go to the right,
he is there. You return to the left, he has forestalled you. Those
hours of torture, when difficulties accumulate to impede flight, when
the mother’s weakness detains the son, when the weight of a child is a
crushing burden! Those hours of agony, when all about is burning, when
terror is spread abroad, when only menace is seen on every hand! Those
who have lived through such hours will never be able to efface them
from the memory.
We arrived at Vervins, already attacked by the enemy, but defended by
a screen of troops with some cannon. From the distracted town, where
the detonations rocked the houses and made the window-panes rattle,
one could watch the battle. Some aeroplanes were flying about overhead
like great birds of war. They were the first military aircraft,
still incomplete and badly armed. From them the observer could see
but little, and he was obliged to descend to earth to bring his
information. Such as these machines were, they interested us much, and
seemed to fulfil in the air a remarkable mission.
Beyond this observation, the sight did not prevent some of us from
seeking provision. It was already very difficult to find food in
that town, where an army had passed. Practically nothing was left.
The shops had wound up their business and their owners were preparing
for flight. Everywhere were piled up furniture, scattered straw, torn
paper. Nothing kept its usual course. One paid no matter what sum for
two spoiled eggs. Berthet achieved a veritable triumph in discovering a
pound of almond chocolate.
However, the soup was cooked on the kitchen-stoves in the houses. The
quartermasters distributed meat and bread, at least as much as they
could procure from the commissariat wagons which had stopped at the
edge of the town. Some wounded men, returning from the fighting-lines,
mingled with the men carrying wood and water. Some artillery wagons
went through the streets at full speed, vainly searching some munitions
gone astray.
In this general turmoil there came to hand an unfamiliar newspaper:
it was the _Bulletin of the Army of the Republic_, which the minister
of war had just established, and which was distributed to the troops.
Every one, eager for news, obtained a copy and turned its pages
rapidly, in the hope of gaining some definite knowledge of events.
We read some reports of victorious progress in Alsace. The reading
gave us some comfort and strengthened our courage. All was not lost,
then, since the enemy was retreating over there! We exchanged words of
confidence, we reassured each other: Germany would be beaten, that was
certain. The Cossacks were invading Prussia, and our retreat signified
nothing: we were at a disadvantageous point of the field of action,
that was all! The enemy, hard pressed elsewhere, was going to retreat
in his turn, and would be pursued to Berlin.
Laughter became contagious, and some joyous souls could not refrain
from boasting. Our fatigue fell from us; we were again serene.
None the less, it was necessary to continue the movement already
initiated, retreat still further, resume the march as soon as night
had fallen, gain in all haste a point at the rear which had been
indicated to our chief officers. We again took the highroad. It was
still crowded, but only by the troops. The fugitive civilians were
obliged to yield it to the army wagons and infantry, and themselves
march across fields. They could be seen in long files, like migratory
tribes, stopped by natural obstacles, entangled by hedges and hindered
by watercourses. We passed without giving them aid; there was no time
to stop. We were directed toward Laon, which we must reach at all cost,
in order to organize the resistance before the arrival of the enemy.