VERDUN
_Verdun! The sound is like a clarion call. Verdun! It is shorty but
gravely harmonious. It is satisfying to the ear, it is quickening to the
soul. Verdun! It is for France the word of words; in it lies the whole
beauty of her language and of her martial glory as well._
_Who shall say it is but a fortuitous collection of letters, this word
Verdun, beautiful as a chalice, that holds the dearest blood of France?
It would not have been the same mystically, perhaps not actually, had it
been Toul or Epinal or even that other melodic sound, Belfort. Verdun!
It is the call through red days and nights, and everywhere the sons of
France rallying to it with great hurryings lest mayhap one be there
before the other, to dye with deeper color the crimson of high deeds.
Verdun, ear and tongue relinquish you regretfully._
_Verdun, glory and sorrow of France, I salute you, Verdun! Verdun!_
Night, silence, and memory turning over the events of the day.
I stopped writing this morning as a gentleman of supreme personal
distinction entered the little sandy-floored café, a gentleman who
should always be arriving in a dark-red, sixty-horse-power Panhard, or
receiving on a terrace with a castle behind him, or sitting in a library
of first editions only, in soft but gorgeous bindings. It was M. de S.,
and we shortly all got into the big auto, we three women on the broad
back seat, M. de S. in front with the military chauffeur. Even the bend
of his long back was _l’élégance suprême_. He said the motor had seen
three years of war-service, but certainly there was something unfatigued
about it as it started out through the ancient streets of Bar-le-Duc, on
the white road to the fateful fortress. The arrow on the first Verdun
sign-post gave a feeling of having shot itself into one’s heart, as well
as pointing the way.
Almost immediately we met a long convoy bringing men back from the front,
ourselves and everything else enveloped in a white plaster-of-Paris-like
cloud of dust. It seemed an endless line, with their camouflaged canvas
tops and sides, painted in great splashes of green and brown. In some
of them the men were singing the _chansons de route_ that soldiers so
love, and many of them had green branches stuck in the sides as a slight
protection against the sun and the shifting white dust. The grass and
flowers of the wayside were as if dipped in whitewash, but the road, like
all the roads of France—those veins of her body of death _and_ life—was
in excellent condition. Next we met a great line of Red Cross convoys,
and all the time we were swinging through ruined villages.
At the entrance to X. the guard stopped us with his bayonet. Our papers
being in _archi_ condition, we passed through the little village of the
_Quartier-Général_ without further hindrance. In front of the Mairie
there is a quaint old fountain with its statue of three women holding up
a _motif_ of flowers in a basket; near by there is an old hostelry, _Le
Raisin Blanc_, in front of which soldiers were sitting, drinking their
_bocks_ and reading newspapers. Turning out again on the white road, we
pass settlements of Red Cross barracks and munition parks, looking for
all the world like mining camps in Western towns at home.
We arrived at Dugny at ten o’clock and descended to look about for a
suitable place for the installing of a canteen, which was partly our
reason for being where we were. There is an old country house in the
middle of the little town, with a coat of arms above the door and lions
crouching on its gates; behind is a lovely ancient park with linden and
elder trees in full blossom, and under them quiet, shady walks. It is
used as an ambulance station, and convalescing men were sitting or lying
about on the ground. We met the _médecin-chef_, who, however, like all
doctors, didn’t care twopence for well soldiers, and was but platonically
interested in the canteen matter—just as the military count out the sick
and wounded soldiers. It’s all in the point of view.
As we stood talking a German aeroplane flew high above Dugny outlined in
a perfect sky. Little white clouds of shrapnel from the vertical guns
began to burst about it in the clear blue, and there was a louder sound
of cannonading as the _avion_ disappeared in some far and upper ether. E.
M.’s brother had been once stationed here for months, and she told the
story of his meeting unexpectedly his cousin Casimir. They were going
different ways with different detachments, and they “held up the war”
while they embraced! Smart officers, ahorse and afoot, convoys going to
the trenches with rations, great carts full of bread, and ambulating
soup-kitchens filled the little street. Verdun was but seven kilometers
distant, and the road lay straight before us as we left Dugny. On the
horizon the outline of the citadel and the towers of the cathedral
showed against the sky. Another endless convoy of ambulances and
_camions_ enveloped us in a choking white dust. This is the lining of the
front, and it is quite easy to see where the war billions go.
We passed into Verdun under the Porte de France, and then went
immediately up to the citadel through the old drawbridge, all dating from
the days of Louis XIV and Vauban, and it was at Verdun that the sons of
Louis the Debonair met to divide the empire of Charlemagne.[4]
We got out by the demolished barracks, and M. de S. went to pay his
respects to the colonel, who was expecting him. As I descended I saw at
my feet a beautiful tiny bird’s nest, which I picked up with a clutching
at the heart. The birds went away that first terrible spring of 1916, the
colonel afterward told me, but they had come back in great numbers in
1917, and were everywhere building their nests, in spite of the continual
bombardments. The citadel was a desolate mass of mortar, stones, rusty
barbed-wire entanglements, blackened and broken tree stumps, but
everywhere, too, were quantities of undiscourageable new green.
We met a young doctor coming across the Place, and fell into conversation
with him. He had been at the front since the beginning, and he was
sad-eyed in spite of his youth. When I spoke of the near-by tenth-century
tower toppling and half-demolished, all that was left of the ancient
church, and the celebrated abbey of Saint-Vannes, and said what a pity
it was that the beautiful things of the old days had to go, he answered,
with a gesture of complete indifference:
“_Qu’est-ce que celà fait? A nous qui restons de faire de nouvelles
choses, et mieux, que n’en out fait nos aïeux._ All the comrades I loved
in the beginning are gone—and what remains, or perishes, of brick and
mortar is of little account beside the sum of living things that is lost.”
Just at this moment M. de S. appeared with the colonel, and the young
philosopher touched his cap. We were then introduced to Colonel Dehaye,
a brilliant officer and delightful _homme du monde_, loving the arts of
peace, as I afterward discovered, as well as practising those of war.
In his hands now lie the destinies of Verdun. He presented us each then
and there with the famous medal of Verdun and an accompanying paper with
his signature, and furthermore gave us an invitation to lunch, which we
accepted with delight after delicate references to sandwiches and wine in
the motor. We spent half an hour walking about the citadel, and he showed
us the most recent damage—of yesterday—when a very especially precise aim
of the Germans had destroyed nearly everything that had been left.
Then we descended really into the bowels of the earth, cemented,
white-tiled, electric-lighted, artificially aired bowels, to the very
depths of the great fortress. To get to the mess-room of the colonel and
his staff we had to pass through a long room where perhaps a hundred
officers were sitting at dinner. There was something deeply impressive
about the dim, long, low length of it, and those groups of men prepared
for battle. Thoughts of Knights Templar and Crusaders came to me, and
there seemed something of consecration about it all. Behind the tables on
the walls were hung helmets and arms.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
A young officer said to me once, “We don’t tell _all_ our stories there
and we don’t often laugh very loud.” From it we got into the small,
well-lighted mess-room, where kings and presidents and premiers and
generalissime, too, have dined in the past few months.
The staff and Paul Renouard, the painter, were waiting, and we sat down
immediately to an excellent dinner, though the colonel said it was
entirely _à l’improviste_. There were flowers on the table, too, but
these I did suspect were specially for us. The colonel remarked, with the
_hors-d’œuvre_, that he would take us to the battle-field after dinner,
to the famous Fort de Souville, and the repast, instead of a meal, became
the prelude to a supreme climax. The arrival of General Pershing was the
first subject of conversation, accompanied by the most courteous and
appreciative remarks; one of the officers told of the first day when the
Stars and Stripes had appeared in the field with the other flags, and
of the cheers that went up. And they drank to the United States, and we
drank to France; they praised the work of women, and spoke of the immense
moral and practical aid of the entry into the war of the United States.
Whether it would shorten the conflict was another question. To the
captain sitting opposite I said:
“If the soul of the war has a special dwelling-place it is Verdun,”
and told him how the thought of America turned about it those days of
February and March of 1916. “But,” I added, “there was a time when I
thought they might get through.”
The commandant answered quickly from the other end of the table: “Ah,
madame, there was a time when we thought they might get through, _mais
‘ils n’ont pas passé—ils ne passeront pas.’_”
And then I quoted the beautiful phrase of the _Commentaires de Polybe_:[5]
“_Et Verdun y en ruines, avec ses soldats, debouts, toujours dans la
tempête, comme il n’y en a jamais eu de plus beaux ... avec Nivelle,
et avec Pétain, avec l’image de Raynal qui vient roder la nuit dans
les décombres de Vaux et avec le paraphe de Castelnau sur cet autre
Couronné...._”
We ended a most pleasant repast, with its great under throb, by coffee
and tilleul and a little glass of cassis (black-currant cordial), the
native liqueur.
Then, on into a room where we pulled up our coat-collars so no white
would show, slung the bags containing the gas-masks across our chests,
left our flowers, parasols, and other impedimenta, and went out through
the long, dim now empty hall to get into the autos. We waited half an
hour for ours, which had performed the seemingly impossible feat of
getting lost in Verdun. The officers began to get impatient, and M. de S.
to make bitter remarks about his chauffeur; the colonel to walk up and
down. The commandant said, “_Du calme_,” and the colonel answered that
only sous-lieutenants _savent avoir du calme_. “_Ils sont étonnants_,”
said another officer with four stripes on his arm.
Finally our man appeared, with a story no one listened to, Colonel Dehaye
getting in with us, the other officers leading the way in his auto.
It was two o’clock, and a white, burning sun was shining on a white,
burning earth as we drove through the crumbling streets, through houses
in every stage of ruin, to the great plain of La Woèvre, toward the
dreadful, scarred battle-field, where the chariot of God rides the ridges.
Verdun is built to reinforce the natural rampart of the Côtes de Meuse,
to bar the passage of the river’s valley, and cover the Argonne.
As we passed out of the town on one side was a cemetery where sleep
four thousand, on another side sleep twenty thousand—and these are but
a handful to the numbers that lie everywhere in the white, scarred
earth around Verdun. The colonel named various battered places as we
passed—Fleury, Tavannes, etc., and finally we climbed a steep hillside
near the celebrated Fort de Souville, where we left the motors. The
abomination of desolation over which we passed once had been a green,
smiling, wooded, gently rolling hillside. The village of Tavannes was
but a spot of white horror, even with the ground. The hills of Douaumont
and Thiaumont had on their blanched sides only a few blackened stumps of
trees that will not leaf again. To the left as we looked about were the
fateful summits of Le Mort Homme and Hill 304 with a white ribbon of road
running between. We walked along, stumbling over heaps of water-bottles,
haversacks, helmets, cartridge-belts, belonging alike to the invader
and the invaded—bones, skulls, rusty rolls of barbed wire, remains of
_obus_, and mixed with what lies in the earth of fair and brave and dear
are myriads of unexploded shells. The country round Verdun, despite the
rich blood that could render it so fertile, can’t be cultivated for years
on account of the vast quantities of shells buried in it. A man pulls a
piece of wire, and he loses his hand, another tries to clear away bits of
something round, and his head is blown off. One of the officers told us
of societies for the demineralization of battle-fields, but the work is
slow and costly.
Yet a winter’s snows had lain upon it all and spring had breathed over
it since the first awful combats of February, 1916. I knew suddenly some
complete “heartbreak over fallen things” as I stumbled, and, looking
down, saw at my feet a helmet, and by it a skull with insects crawling in
and out the eyes, and a broken gun-stock.
Great and gorgeous patches of scarlet poppies in a profusion never seen
before splash themselves like something else red against the white earth,
or fill great shell hollows and spill and slop over the fields....
The Germans had been shelling a near-by 75 battery that very morning, and
fresh bits of _warm_ shrapnel were lying all about as we twisted in and
out of the _boyaux_. I brought away but a small bit with me, having early
discovered that a small piece is as good a reminder as a big bit, and
much easier to carry. We passed the grave of a soldier buried where he
had fallen, a few hours before. His shallow grave, with its little cross,
was running _red_, but he was mayhap already in his Father’s house of
many mansions.
In many places under the feet scarcely buried bodies gave an elastic
sensation....
We first visited the emplacement of a great gun worked by the most
complicated electric machinery, something that seemed built as strongly
as the Pyramids, revolving on its great axis, at a touch fulfilling that
which it was cast into being to perform. When we came out, we climbed
some last white scarred heights that the colonel called “_Les Pyrénées_,”
and there, stretched out, was the whole great and fateful panorama of
Verdun—“_par où ils n’ont pas passé_.” I thought of the men I had known
who had been engaged in those dreadful attacks, whose mothers and wives
had looked upon them again, and of others still whose wives and mothers
would behold them no more. And I had again a breaking of the heart over
the vast tangle, and cried within myself, “Shall all the world be a
valley of dry bones?”
[Illustration: OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917]
[Illustration: IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917]
Then we hid ourselves in some _boyaux_ well out of sight, for we were
nearing a camouflaged battery, two of whose guns had been silenced
that very morning. In dark woods over beyond Tavannes the Germans were
intrenched, and their shells were also falling thickly over Douaumont and
Thiaumont. It was the front indeed. It was at Tavannes that in a dreadful
moment, in a moment such as can happen anywhere, artillery fire had
been trained on thousands of men who were rushing to the top in a great
charge. And yet I kept thinking of the words of a dead hero, “Nothing but
good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part well.”[6]
At that moment the enemy began to send an unwonted number of shells,
which were exploding just behind Thiaumont, so the colonel told the
captain of artillery—who had joined our party at the gun emplacement—to
answer, and he climbed down a steep decline to his masked battery. In a
few minutes, as we lay hidden in the _boyau_, twenty discharges sounded;
but shells that go up, come down, and on the other side of the hill we
were watching, who shall say what agony? I am so constituted that I
cannot think of the passage of any soul into the next life other than
with awe.
We then descended into the Fort of Souville, down 850 feet, where men
live and breathe and have their being in dimly lighted, damp, narrow
spaces. But it seemed temporarily like heaven to be out of the glare and
the heat. Preceded by lanterns, an officer in front of each one of us, we
crept or felt our way up and down, stumbling through vault-like passages,
where we would come upon men lying asleep in damp, dim places, or writing
by the light of lanterns, or preparing meals in their kitchen, or waiting
at the little dispensary, and then we stumbled up again into the heat,
reverberating from the white hills.
On the way back we passed a little chapel installed in an old cemented
dugout. On the altar were many flowers. I bent and peered into the
dimness, and, as I knelt, it seemed to me that never had I so understood
the words _Introibo ad Altare Dei_. I thought of the Lamb of God, and
martyrs new and old, and the catacombs and the primitive Church.... Again
men in stress were worshiping in the bowels of the earth.
We were photographed against a particularly sinister group of blackened
trees, and we picked up some helmets and bits of _obus_. As I write, the
_couronne_ of one, quite evenly exploded, lies on the little table by my
side.
Just before getting into town the colonel ordered the motor to stop, and
we got out, and, walking through a field of deep, waving grass, found
ourselves in the largest of the cemeteries with its long, even lines of
broad graves where lie, in a last co-mingling, the brothers of France,
and I repeated to myself in a quiver of feeling, “_Scio quod Redemptor
meus vivit et in novissime die resurrecturus sum et in carne mea videbo
Deum Salvatorum meum_.”
All was in beautiful order. The crosses bore sometimes a name, but
oftener a number only: _140 soldats_, or _85 soldats_. The round tricolor
badge hung from every cross. There were a few graves of officers who
could be identified, their bodies having been brought in by friends or
faithful orderlies. How anything could live on those fire-swept hills is
the wonder, not that any one died. Suddenly, again, a great sadness fell
upon me, and as the colonel pointed out the grave of an especially dear
comrade—Colonel Dubois, I think his name was—dead in some heroic manner,
I could look no more.
We finally got back into the green freshness of Verdun, whose normal
state, I see, is to be vine-bowered, tree-shaded, grass-carpeted. After
the scarred and blazing battle-field, and in spite of the ruined streets,
the roofless houses, I had a feeling of refreshment, coming from those
heights where “all the round world is indeed a sepulcher” ... and near
the station is the monument to the heroes fallen at Verdun, in 1870.
Of the Cercle Militaire on the right bank of the Meuse little is left
except the walls, but it is no loss architecturally, and _messieurs les
officiers_ are otherwise engaged. The banks of the Meuse are a pitiful
sight. The old houses that reach over the water are roofless, bits of
mattress hang from broken windows, and heaps of mortar are falling
into the river. The great Porte Chaussée of the fifteenth century,
with its two huge gray towers, is unharmed. We stopped at the theater
for a moment. A big shell last month had made a sort of pudding of it.
We crept in through a large aperture, to find the orchestra stalls
precipitated onto the stage, and the loges sagging, ready to fall. We
then went up into the old, high part of the town, and Colonel Dehaye,
a true lover of the arts, in sadness showed us the cathedral and the
charming old buildings that surround it. The huge church constructed
according to Germanic traditions has two equal transepts, with high and
beautiful vaulting, which is now so damaged that the roof at any time may
fall. Inside were masses of débris, and nothing was left of the famous
stained-glass windows except powdery bits of color on the floor. The
colonel had rescued some old Spanish Stations of the Cross, and had put
in safety a few other portable things of value. We passed out through
the sacristy, which was a scene of disorder, bits of vestment, torn
altar-cloths, and books lying about on the floor.
“But,” I said, “the Germans didn’t get here?”
“Oh,” answered one of the officers, with a smile, “_ce sont nos bons
français_.”
Then we descended into the crypt, the remains of the church that Pope
Eugene III built in the twelfth century. Leading down to it is an old
winding stair, with a delicious eighteenth-century wrought-iron railing.
An artist in a white blouse, sent to restore some frescoes dating
from the twelfth century, was rescuing from too complete destruction
a beautiful figure of Christ with something stern and immutable in
His look, reminding me of the Christ in the church of San Cosmo and
San Damiano in the Roman Forum. We then went into the cloisters, with
lovely and diverse _motifs_ on their vaultings, very much damaged in
parts, a big shell having landed in the courtyard which they inclose. M.
Renouard had stationed himself there with his easel, before a beautiful
arrangement of trees and grass and enchanting old statues on mossy
pedestals. In front of him was a great heap of fallen masonry, and a
beautiful bit of toppling vaulting that the colonel had had propped up by
beams, though he said: “_Demain ou après-demain cela ne sera plus_—it’s
all at the mercy of a shot.” A sculptured Holy Family, somewhat the worse
for _war_, is plastered into one side, dating from the fourteenth century.
From there we passed into what had been a seminary until 1914, and one
of the rooms with rows of _lavabos_ (not of the eighteenth century, as
the colonel observed) looked out on the great plain of La Woèvre, and
again the fateful panorama was unrolled before us. In what had been a
council-room there was an old choir high up over the door, with a little
balcony giving a Spanish effect.
Coming out, at the north side of the church, an ancient Romanesque statue
of Adam and Eve on the outer hemicycle of the apse and some little
windows, also of pure Romanesque, were pointed out to us. In the ground
underneath the statue of Adam and Eve a great shell had opened up a Roman
foundation and walls, formed of immense square blocks of stone, hidden
during ages.
Near the church is the great Cour d’Honneur, once the house of the
bishop, a very perfect example of Louis XIV, making me think of
Versailles; but it, too, has received many a blow in its lovely heart.
One longed so to bandage up all those wounds of war, preserve in being
those lovelinesses of another age.
We then visited the house of Pope Julius II (I forget what he was doing
at Verdun), which, fortunately, has not suffered much up to now, though
it, too, is at the mercy of a shot—to-night, to-morrow, or the next day.
It would make a perfect museum, with its beautiful old door, bearing
inscription and date, through which one passes into a tiny V-shaped court
with a flowering linden-tree, and there are two romantic winding stone
stairways, with something Boccaccioesque about them, leading to the upper
stories.
Though it wasn’t an occasion in which to think how one felt, the flesh
_was_ weary by this time, and we went gladly back to the colonel’s
mess-room, where we had tea, or rather, to be exact, some ice-cold
champagne _coupé d’eau_, and some sort of madeleine, a specialty of
Verdun, which gave us the little flip-up that we needed. Another
specialty of Verdun is the _dragées_ (hard, sugared almonds), but the
factory, so one of the officers said, had been destroyed the year before
in one of the bombardments. Generations of tourists having broken their
teeth on them, however, we wasted no regrets.
The colonel begged us to stay for dinner, and the cinematograph
representation after, but we were obliged to regretfully decline, as
we had to pay our respects to the general at Y——, to whose courtesy M.
de S. owed the safe-conducts to Verdun. As we passed by we looked into
the long, narrow hall where the representations are given, the sight of
which the colonel offered as further inducement. It would have ennobled
for me forever that most boresome of modern things, had I assisted at one
underneath the citadel of Verdun. The hall was hung with flags of the
Allies. With sudden tears I saluted, ours waving among them.
We thanked a thousand times the colonel and his group of officers
standing by the auto at the entrance to the subterranean passage, and
though I had a consciousness of the uncertainty of their lives, I thought
again “Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part
well.”
Now comes to mind a conversation I had before I ever dreamed of going
to Verdun, when I talked for three hours of battles and scars with a
young hero wounded on Hill 304, June 9, 1916. He is a flashing-eyed,
straight-featured, tall, slim-waisted young hero who knows what it is to
have made, and with astounding ease, the sacrifice of the life that he
loves so, and drinks in full bumpers. And this is part of what we said,
one of a thousand, of ten thousand, of a hundred thousand happenings, of
which Verdun is the golden frame:
De G.—“There was something hanging about Verdun; ‘_Ils ne
passeront pas, et ils ne sont pas passés_.’ If the enemy could
have but known how thinly, poorly, in so many places it was
defended! It was seemingly the will of Heaven rather than the
strength of mortals that they were not to pass, not man, not
artillery, but the high destiny of nations.
“When I lay during those hours at the _poste d’observation_
on Hill 304, in front of the French army, signaling ‘shell
square 17,’ or 16, or whatever it might be, I could see clearly
the havoc in the German ranks as the shells would fall. Great
groups of men would be blown to atoms and new formations would
press in to take their place. The whole horror was there before
me, mapped out in numbered squares.
“I dismissed all my men except my orderly of the fourth
Zouaves, who wouldn’t have gone, anyway. It was a work I
could do alone, lying with a sand-bag against my head, my
field-glasses in my hand, and before me my field map held down
by four sticks. We lay there just under the crest of the hill
from two o’clock in the morning until the next afternoon,
watching seven attacks. Toward three o’clock I was wounded, and
I knew it was only a question of time and chance when I would
lie like the dead man at my side, that Dueso had been pressing
his feet against, and whose place I had been sent to take.
Almost at the same moment I caught sight of Dueso spinning
around, holding his elbows to his side, and crying out: ‘_Nom
de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_ I’ve got it in the arm!’—but trying with
the other hand to undo his _cravate_.
“Two jets of blood were now spurting like two faucets from
my leg, the big artery was cut. _Ça y est._ In five minutes
I’ll be dead, I thought, and there came a fainting away and a
thinking not on God, but on still untasted joys of the flesh
and life—not even on my mother’s grief; and waking up after
years, it seemed, and calling for water, and Dueso bending
over me, after a frantic twisting at his _cravate_, and a
frantic pulling and tightening of it about my leg, with one
hand and his teeth, and then a pleasant, happy fainting away. A
delicious sensation of ease invaded me, and I said to myself,
‘_Ce n’est que ça, mourir?_’ (‘Is death only this?’) I have
seen so many men die, and whatever their agonies, if long or
short, minutes or hours or days, as it may happen, just before
dying something gentle and simple takes place.”
E. O’S.—“The inevitable dust to dust, the natural law
fulfilling itself?”
De G.—“It may be. This _rictus de la mort_, I haven’t seen it,
though I have heard men screaming and cursing and praying in
the trenches as they got their blow, and watched their agonies,
but before death something else, softer, always happens. Unless
it comes too suddenly. I remember once being on the dunes in
Belgium, and against the yellow sand men were sitting in red
trousers and _chechias_, and one was telling a tale of laughter
when a shell burst. In a moment the blood of his brains was
flowing red upon the yellow sand, and then it got blue, and
then it sank and was no more, like the laughing man himself
from whom it flowed, and his tale of laughter.... About nine
o’clock we were brought in. Dueso had been lying with his head
under my armpit, and his feet still on the dead man, and we
would both come out of a faint from time to time and ask for
water.
“Dueso! ah, Dueso! for a human being _il est plus chic que
moi_. He had been in jail for various reasons not very _chic_,
and I was warned against him when I took him for my orderly,
but to him I owe my life. Now he is in Salonique, _cité à
l’armée_, knows how to live in those regions, hard as nails,
originally from Tunis; a dark man, with dark mustache and very
big white teeth.”
E. O’S.—“One thinks so often how little the common soldier,
defending honors and riches that he doesn’t share, has to gain.
There is nothing for him, in fact, except to step out into
anonymous death; at a given moment to make the sacrifice of his
life, or his eyes or his limbs, knowing nothing of war except
its horror, rarely any glory, sometimes a mention or a medal,
oftener not. But,” I continued, after we had sat silent for a
while, “who will carry it all on? Few like yourself are left,
and it is not enough. France is bleeding white—France, whose
sons are heroes, not fathers!”
De G.—“What does it matter if we do go? There are the little
ones coming on. It will be like something out of which a whole
piece has been cut and the ends must be sewed together. The
very old, and the very young, the children, are these ends. We
shall have done what we were born to do. This is the immortal
history of France that we have made, her _chant du cygne_, too,
the most beautiful of her epics and it is enough to have lived
for that. To others the carrying on of the generations....”
A pale rose light begins to come in at the window, but sleep cometh not.
Fortunately, if need be, I can do without it, but I must close my eyes
now. He, too, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps....