Zouave gave us a piece of bronze from the big bell. It wasn't restored
at all. It was on the ground, broken.
"The church has a modern timber roof."
There he goes again--the exact opposite of what even a child could see
were the facts. And yet in his methodical, earnest way, he has tried to
get these things right. That church, for instance, has no roof at all.
It has a few pillars standing. It looks like a skeleton. I have a good
photograph of it, which the reader can see on page 69. If Baedeker would
stand under that "modern timber roof" in a rainstorm, he wouldn't think
so much of it.
"The Hotel de Ville contains a small collection of paintings."
I don't like to keep picking on what he says, but this sentence is
irritating. There aren't any paintings there, because things are
scattered. You can see torn bits strewed around on the floor of the
place, but nothing like a collection.
I could go on like that, and take him up on a lot more details. But it
sounds as if I were criticising. And I don't mean it that way, because I
believe the man is doing his best. But I do think he ought to get out
another edition of his book, and set these points straight.
He puts a little poem on his title page:
Go, little book, God send thee good passage,
And specially let this be thy prayer
Unto them all that thee will read or hear,
Where thou art wrong, after their help to call,
Thee to correct in any part or all.
That sounds fair enough. So I am going to send him these notes. But it
isn't in "parts" he is "wrong." There is a big mistake somewhere.
GOLDEN LADS
"Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
LES FUSILIERS MARINS
At times in my five months at the front I have been puzzled by the
sacrifice of so much young life; and most I have wondered about the
Belgians. I had seen their first army wiped out; there came a time when
I no longer met the faces I had learned to know at Termonde and Antwerp
and Alost. A new army of boys has dug itself in at the Yser, and the
same wastage by gun-fire and disease is at work on them. One wonders
with the Belgians if the price they pay for honor is not too high. There
is a sadness in the eyes of Belgian boy soldiers that is not easy to
face. Are we quite worthy of their sacrifice? Why should the son of
Ysaye die for me? Are you, comfortable reader, altogether sure that
Pierre Depage and André Simont are called on to spill their blood for
your good name?
Then one turns with relief to the Fusiliers Marins--the sailors with a
rifle. Here are young men at play. They know they are the incomparable
soldiers. The guns have been on them for fifteen months, but they remain
unbroken. Twice in the year, if they had yielded, this might have been a
short war. But that is only saying that if Brittany had a different
breed of men the world and its future would contain less hope. They
carry the fine liquor of France, and something of their own added for
bouquet. They are happy soldiers--happy in their brief life, with its
flash of daring, and happy in their death. It is still sweet to die for
one's country, and that at no far-flung outpost over the seas and sands,
but just at the home border. As we carried our wounded sailors down from
Nieuport to the great hospital of Zuydcoote on the Dunkirk highway,
there is a sign-board, a bridge, and a custom-house that mark the point
where we pass from Belgium into France. We drove our ambulance with the
rear curtain raised, so that the wounded men, lying on the stretchers,
could be cheered by the flow of scenery. Sometimes, as we crossed that
border-line, one of the men would pick it up with his eye, and would
say to his comrade: "France! Now we are in France, the beautiful
country."
"What do you mean?" I asked one lad, who had brightened visibly.
"The other countries," he said, "are flat and dirty. The people are of
mixed races. France is not so."
It has been my fortune to watch the sailors at work from the start of
the war. I was in Ghent when they came there, late, to a hopeless
situation. Here were youngsters scooped up from the decks, untrained in
trenches, and rushed to the front; but the sea-daring was on them, and
they knew obedience and the hazards. They helped to cover the retreat of
the Belgians and save that army from annihilation by banging away at the
German mass at Melle. Man after man developed a fatalism of war, and
expressed it to us.
"Nothing can hit you till your time," was often their way of saying it;
"it's no use dodging or being afraid. You won't be hit till your shell
comes." And another favorite belief of theirs that brought them cheer
was this: "The shell that will kill you you won't hear coming. So
you'll never know."
These sailor lads thrive on lost causes, and it was at Ghent they won
from the Germans their nickname of "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge."
The saucy French of that has a touch beyond any English rendering of
"the girls with the red pompon." "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge"
paints their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the face of a
youngster from under a rakish blue sailor hat, crowned with a fluffy red
button, like a blue flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw
an aging _marin_. There are no seasoned troops so boyish. They wear open
dickies, which expose the neck, full, hard, well-rounded. The older
troops, who go laggard to the spading, have beards that extend down the
collar; but a boy has a smooth, clean neck, and these sailors have the
throat of youth. We must once have had such a race in our cow-boys and
Texas rangers--level-eyed, careless men who know no masters, only
equals. The force of gravity is heavy on an old man. But _marins_ are
not weighted down by equipment nor muffled with clothing. They go
bobbing like corks, as though they would always stay on the crest of
things. And riding on top of their lightness is that absurd bright-red
button in their cap. The armies for five hundred miles are sober,
grown-up people, but here are the play-boys of the western front.
From Ghent they trooped south to Dixmude, and were shot to pieces in
that "Thermopylæ of the North."
"Hold for four days," was their order.
They held for three weeks, till the sea came down and took charge.
During those three weeks we motored in and out to get their wounded.
Nothing of orderly impression of those days remains to me. I have only
flashes of the sailor-soldiers curved over and snaking along the
battered streets behind slivers of wall, handfuls of them in the Hotel
de Ville standing around waiting in a roar of noise and a bright blaze
of burning houses--waiting till the shelling fades away.[C]
Then for over twelve months they held wrecked Nieuport, and I have
watched them there week after week. There is no drearier post on earth.
One day in the pile of masonry thirty feet from our cellar refuge the
sailors began throwing out the bricks, and in a few minutes they
uncovered the body of a comrade. All the village has the smell of
desolation. That smell is compounded of green ditch-water, damp plaster,
wet clothing, blood, straw, and antiseptics. The nose took it as we
crossed the canal, and held it till we shook ourselves on the run home.
Thirty minutes a day in that soggy wreck pulled at my spirits for hours
afterward. But those chaps stood up to it for twenty-four hours a day,
lifting a cheery face from a stinking cellar, hopping about in the
tangle, sleeping quietly when their "night off" comes. As our chauffeur
drew his camera, one of them sprang into a bush entanglement, aimed his
rifle, and posed.
I recollect an afternoon when we had word of an attack. We were grave,
because the Germans are strong and fearless.
"Are they coming?" grinned a sailor. "Let them come. We are ready."
We learned to know many of the Fusiliers Marins and to grow fond of
them. How else could it be when we went and got them, sick and wounded,
dying and dead, two, six, ten of them a day, for many weeks, and brought
them in to the Red Cross post for a dressing, and then on to the
hospital? I remember a young man in our ambulance. His right foot was
shot away, and the leg above was wounded. He lay unmurmuring for all the
tossing of the road over the long miles of the ride. We lifted him from
the stretcher, which he had wet with his blood, into the white cot in
"Hall 15" of Zuydcoote Hospital. The wound and the journey had gone
deeply into his vitality. As he touched the bed, his control ebbed, and
he became violently sick at the stomach. I stooped to carry back the
empty stretcher. He saw I was going away, and said, "Thank you." I knew
I should not see him again, not even if I came early next day.
There is one unfading impression made on me by those wounded. If I call
it good nature, I have given only one element in it. It is more than
that: it is a dash of fun. They smile, they wink, they accept a light
for their cigarette. It is not stoicism at all. Stoicism is a grim
holding on, the jaws clenched, the spirit dark, but enduring. This is a
thing of wings. They will know I am not making light of their pain in
writing these words. I am only saying that they make light of it. The
judgment of men who are soon to die is like the judgment of little
children. It does not tolerate foolish words. Of all the ways of showing
you care that they suffer there is nothing half so good as the gift of
tobacco. As long as I had any money to spend, I spent it on packages of
cigarettes.
[Illustration: SAILORS LIFTING A WOUNDED COMRADE INTO THE
MOTOR-AMBULANCE.]
When the Marin officers found out we were the same people that had
worked with them at Melle five months before, they invited my wife and
three other nurses to luncheon in a Nieuport cellar. Their eye brightens
at sight of a woman, but she is as safe with them as with a cowboy or a
Quaker. The guests were led down into a basement, an eighteen foot room,
six feet high. The sailors had covered the floor and papered the walls
with red carpet. A tiny oil stove added to the warmth of that blazing
carpet. More than twenty officers and doctors crowded into the room, and
took seats at the table, lighted by two lamps. There were a dozen plates
of _patisserie_, a choice of tea, coffee, or chocolate, all hot, white
and red wine, and then champagne. An orderly lifted in a little wooden
yacht, bark-rigged, fourteen inches long, with white painted sails. A
nurse spilled champagne over the tiny ship, till it was drenched, and
christened. The chief doctor made a speech of thanks. Then the ship went
around the table, and each guest wrote her name on the sails. The party
climbed out into the garden, where the shells were going high overhead
like snowballs. In amongst the blackened flowers, a 16-inch shell had
left a hole of fifty feet diameter. One could have dropped two motor
cars into the cavity.
Who but Marins would have devised a celebration for us on July 4? The
commandant, the captain, and a brace of lieutenants opened eleven
bottles of champagne in the Café du Sport at Coxyde in honor of our
violation of neutrality. It was little enough we were doing for those
men, but they were moved to graceful speech. We were hard put to it,
because one had to tell them that much of the giving for a hundred years
had been from France to us, and our showing in this war is hardly the
equal of the aid they sent us when we were invaded by Hessian troops and
a German king.
Marins whom we know have the swift gratitude of simple natures, not too
highly civilized to show when they are pleased. After we had sent a
batch of their wounded by hospital train from Adinkerke, the two
sailors, who had helped us, invited my American friend and me into the
_estaminet_ across the road from the station, and bought us drinks for
an hour. We had been good to their mates, so they wanted to be good to
us.
When we lived in barraquement, just back of the admiral's house, our
cook was a Marin with a knack at omelettes. If we had to work through
the night, going into black Nieuport, and down the ten-mile road to
Zuydcoote, returning weary at midnight, a brave supper was laid out for
us of canned meats, wines, and jellies--all set with the touch of one
who cared. It was no hasty, slapped-down affair. We were carrying his
comrades, and he was helping us to do it.
It was an officer of a quite other regiment who, one time when we were
off duty, asked us to carry him to his post in the Dunes. We made the
run for him, and, as he jumped from the car, he offered us a franc.
Marins pay back in friendship. The Red Cross station to which we
reported, Poste de Secours des Marins, was conducted by Monsieur le
Docteur Rolland, and Monsieur Le Doze. Our workers were standing guests
at their officers' mess. The little sawed-off sailor in the Villa Marie
where I was billetted made coffee for two of us each morning.
Our friends have the faults of young men, flushed with life. They are
scornful of feeble folk, of men who grow tired, who think twice before
dying. They laugh at middle age. The sentries amuse them, the elderly
chaps who duck into their caves when a few shells are sailing overhead.
They have no charity for frail nerves. They hate races who don't rally
to a man when the enemy is hitting the trail. They must wait for age to
gain pity, and the Bretons will never grow old. They are killed too
fast. And yet, as soon as I say that, I remember their rough pity for
their hurt comrades. They are as busy as a hospital nurse in laying a
blanket and swinging the stretcher for one of their own who has been
"pinked." They have a hovering concern. I have had twenty come to the
ambulance to help shove in a "blessé," and say good-by to him, and wave
to him as long as the road left him in their sight. The wounded man,
unless his back bound him down, would lift his head from the stretcher,
to give back their greetings. It was an eager exchange between the whole
men and the injured one. They don't believe they can be broken till the
thing comes, and there is curiosity to see just what has befallen one
like themselves.
When it came my time to say good-by, my sailor friend, who had often
stopped by my car to tell me that all was going well, ran over to share
in the excitement. I told him I was leaving, and he gave me a smile of
deep-understanding amusement. Tired so soon? That smile carried a live
consciousness of untapped power, of the record he and his comrades had
made. It showed a disregard of my personal feelings, of all adult human
weakness. That was the picture I carried away from the Nieuport
line--the smiling boy with his wounded arm, alert after his year of war,
and more than a little scornful of one who had grown weary in conditions
so prosperous for young men.
I rode away from him, past the Coxyde encampment of his comrades. There
they were as I had often seen them, with the peddlers cluttering their
camp--candy men, banana women; a fringe of basket merchants about their
grim barracks; a dozen peasants squatting with baskets of cigarettes,
fruit, vegetables, foolish, bright trinkets. And over them bent the
boys, dozens of them in blue blouses, stooping down to pick up trays,
fingering red apples and shining charms, chaffing, dickering, shoving
one another, the old loves of their childhood still tangled in their
being.
So when I am talking about the sailors as if they were heroes, suddenly
something gay comes romping in. I see them again, as I have so often
seen them in the dunes of Flanders, and what I see is a race of
children.
"Don't forget we are only little ones," they say. "We don't die; we are
just at play."
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
Where does the comfort of the trenches lie? What solace do the soldiers
find for a weary life of unemployment and for sudden death? Of course,
they find it in the age-old things that have always sufficed, or, if
these things do not here altogether suffice, at least they help. For a
certain few out of every hundred men, religion avails. Some of our dying
men were glad of the last rites. Some wore their Catholic emblems. The
quiet devout men continued faithful as they had been at home. Art is
playing the true part it plays at all times of fundamental need. The men
busy themselves with music, with carving, and drawing. Security and
luxury destroy art, for it is no longer a necessity when a man is
stuffed with foods, and his fat body whirled in hot compartments from
point to point of a tame world. But when he tumbles in from a gusty
night out of a trenchful of mud, with the patter from slivers of shell,
then he turns to song and color, odd tricks with the knife, and the
tales of an ancient adventure. After our group had brought food and
clothing to a regiment, I remember the pride with which one of the
privates presented to our head nurse a sculptured group, done in mud of
the Yser.
But the greatest thing in the world to soldiers is plain comradeship.
That is where they take their comfort. And the expression of that
comradeship is most often found in the social smoke. The meager
happiness of fighting-men is more closely interwoven with tobacco than
with any other single thing. To rob them of that would be to leave them
poor indeed. It would reduce their morale. It would depress their cheery
patience. The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each one of
several needs. It is the medium by which the average man maintains
normality at an abnormal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves,
to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco connects a man with the
human race, and his own past life. It gives him a little thing to do in
a big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of sharp pain. It
brings back his café evenings, when black horror is reaching out for
him.
If you have weathered around the world a bit, you know how everywhere
strange situations turn into places for plain men to feel at home.
Sailors on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out, sit around in
the evening glow and take a pipe and a chat with the same homely
accustomedness, as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle and
at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the millions of average men have
done to war. They have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible thing,
and given it a monotony and regularity of its own. They have smoked away
its fighting tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to let
mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit. Apparently there is
nothing hellish enough to flatten the human spirit. Not all the
sprinkled shells and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys of
the front line. In this work of lifting clear of horror, tobacco has
been a friend to the soldiers of the Great War.
"I wouldn't know a good cigarette if I saw it," said Geoffrey Gilling,
after a year of ambulance work at Fumes and Coxyde. He had given up all
that makes the life of an upper-class Englishman pleasant, and I think
that the deprivation of high-grade smoking material was a severe item in
his sacrifice.
Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours each day in a filthy room
in a noisy wine-shop, waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The
dreariness of it made B---- petulant and T---- mournfully silent, and
finally left me melancholy. But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman
with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out for his big can of
naval tobacco, slipped to him by the sailors at Dunkirk when the
commissariat officer wasn't looking, and would light his short stocky
pipe, shaped very much like himself, and then we were all off together
on a jaunt around the world. He had driven nearly all known "makes" of
motor-car over most of the map, apparently about one car to each
country. Twelve months of bad roads in a shelled district had left him
full of talk, as soon as he was well lit.
Up at Nieuport, last northern stand of the Allied line, a walking
merchant would call each day, a basket around his throat, and in the
hamper chocolate, fruit, and tobacco. A muddy, unshaven Brittany
sailor, out of his few sous a week, bought us cigars. The less men have,
the more generous they are. That is an old saying, but it drove home to
me when I had poor men do me courtesy day by day for five months. As we
motored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the night, we passed
hundreds of silent men trudging through the mud of the gutter. They were
troops that had been relieved who were marching back for a rest. As soon
as they came out of the zone where no sound can be made and no light
shown, we saw here and there down the invisible ranks the sudden flare
of a match, and then the glow in the cup of the hand, as the man
prepared to cheer himself.
A more somber and lonely watch even than that of these French sailors
was the vigil kept by our good Belgian friend, Commandant Gilson, in the
shattered village of Pervyse. With his old Maltese cat, he prowled
through the wrecked place till two and three of the morning, waiting for
Germans to cross the flooded fields. For him cigarettes were an endless
chain that went through his life. From the expiring stub he lit his
fresh smoke, as if he were maintaining a vestal flame. He kept puffing
till the live butt singed his upturned mustache. He squinted his eyes to
escape the ascending smoke.
Always the cigarette for him and for the other men. Our cellar of nurses
in Pervyse kept a stock of pipes and of cigarettes ready for tired
soldiers off duty. The pipes remained as intact as a collection in a
museum. The cigarettes never equaled the demand. We once took out a
carful of supplies to 300 Belgian soldiers. We gave them their choice of
cigarettes or smoking tobacco, and about 250 of them selected
cigarettes. That barrack vote gives the popularity of the cigarette
among men of French blood. Some cigars, some pipes, but everywhere the
shorter smoke. Tobacco and pipe exhaust precious pocket room. The
cigarette is portable. Cigars break and peel in the kneading motion of
walking and crouching. But the cigarette is protected in its little box.
And yet, rather than lose a smoke, a soldier will carry one lonesome
cigarette, rained on and limp and fraying at the end, drag it from the
depths of a kit, dry it out, and have a go. For, after all, it isn't
for theoretical advantages over larger, longer smokes he likes it, but
because it is fitted to his temperament. It is a French and Belgian
smoke, short-lived and of a light touch, as dear to memory and liking as
the wines of La Champagne.
Twice, in dramatic setting, I have seen tobacco intervene to give men a
release from overstrained nerves. Once it was at a skirmish. Behind a
street defense, crouched thirty Belgian soldiers. Shrapnel began to
burst over us, and the bullets tumbled on the cobbles. With each puff of
the shrapnel, like a paper bag exploding, releasing a handful of white
smoke, the men flattened against the walls and dove into the open doors.
The sound of shrapnel is the same sound as hailstones, a crisp crackle
as they strike and bounce. We ran and picked them up. They were blunted
by smiting on the paving. Any one of them would have plowed into soft
flesh and found the bone and shattered it. They seem harmless because
they make so little noise. They don't scream and wail and thunder. Our
guns, back on the hillocks of the Ghent road, grew louder and more
frequent. Each minute now was cut into by a roar, or a fainter rumble.
The battle was on. Our barricaded street was a pocket in the storm, like
the center of a typhoon.
Yonder we could see the canal, fifty feet away, at the foot of our
street. On the farther side behind the river front houses lay the
Germans, ready to sally out and charge. It would be all right if they
came quickly. But a few hours of waiting for them on an empty stomach,
and having them disappoint us, was wearing. We wished they would hurry
and have it over with, or else go away for good. Civilians stumbling and
bleeding went past us.
And that was how the morning went by, heavy footed, unrelieved, with a
sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror. It was peaceful, in a
way, but, at the heart of the calm, a menace. So we overlaid the tension
with casual petty acts. We made an informal pool of our resources in
tobacco, each man sharing with his neighbor, till nearly every one of us
was puffing away, and deciding there was nothing to this German attack,
after all. A smoke makes just the difference between sticking it out or
acting the coward's part.