delicate, a living medallion with closed eyes. Over in yonder corner,
for example, is a boy fast asleep. His head tilted against the wall
reveals a face as finely chiseled as any on an old Roman coin. His
curly lashes lie flat on his thin cheeks. His nostrils are slightly
pinched. Two perpendicular lines run from nose to jaw. How young he
looks, how white and worn! His mobile mouth, softly closed, droops
at the corners, like that of a tired child. He stirs and mutters
something. And now he smiles! He is dreaming, that boy, I know. If his
mother could see him now!... The rear door opens, the guard thrusts in
a head and calls a certain train. The young soldier rouses, staggers
for his pack, drunk with sleep, his face still soft with dreams.
I remember one night a slumbering poilu sprang to his feet, shouting
“_Aux armes!_” And his voice was so thrilling and terrible, so charged
with hoarse command, that all the soldiers leaped up, wide awake on the
instant, and glared wildly about them. The next minute the room was
filled with curses, not loud but deep.
Work of this kind, hard and monotonous as it undoubtedly is, is yet the
most satisfying in the world--provided one has a gift for it. It takes
hold of the heart. It is immediate, it has the warm personal touch,
and it ties you straight up with humanity in the raw. The abstract
philosophy of the war--who is the most to blame and why--ceases to vex
you. You become absorbed in your own little circle. Life beyond it
seems remote. You love the poilu and he loves you--and makes no bones
about it. So let the Huns rage over behind yonder ridge, and imagine
vain things. Somehow, all that does not concern you. You have become
confident, gay, certain of destiny--like the simple little poilu. It’s
service that does it.
Last night when I returned home from work it had stopped raining.
Overhead the great overturned cup of sky glittered and gleamed--with
half its stars dropped down into the dark flowing river by my side.
And there was a second moon down there, pale and drowned. An enchanted
mist, fine as a bride’s veil, hung over all. By night the Marne is
beautiful. Far off came the boom of the Verdun guns, that hammering
which has been going on now for years, “as if two armies of giants were
striking unceasingly at an unshakable gate of bronze.” Here it was
nothing but an echo on the wind. There, as one Tommy put it, it was
“hell multiplied by six.”
They say the Germans will break through this way. I think of the
thousand thousand poilus who have tramped through our canteen, each one
an anonymous hero--and I smile. It’s all right. Let the Huns come on!
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN
In the beginning we did not intend to go to Verdun. We did not dream
that it was even within the bright realms of possibility. At the
moment--a supremely painful and suspense-filled moment, fraught with
danger to France and the Allied world--Verdun belonged strictly to
the forbidden zone. Forbidden to all outsiders, men and women, to all
civilians and civilian affairs; forbidden, indeed, to all the world
save those grim horizon-blue-clad veterans who were rushing northward
by trainloads, together with heavy effectives.
Permission had been stopped. Stopped also the parcels to the Front.
It was not the hour for the manifestation of woman or love or the
transmission of tokens of affection. It was the hour for men and arms.
Paris, a military camp shelled in the day by long-range guns and bombed
in the night by Gothas, was locked to the north with a staunch lock,
and the Grand Quartier General held the key. You could come in if you
chanced to be caught up there when the storm broke, but you could
not get out again. For it was the closing week of March, 1918. The
long-awaited, much-heralded offensive had arrived. For months it had
been the first word in the mouths of privates, officers, statesmen,
editors--the entire civilized world. When, where, how--some one of
those three aspects of the universal question cropped up in every
conversation in the course of half an hour.
Well, now we knew the partial answer to those three questions. For
the shadow of the menace of the long months was beginning to realize
itself; it had become flesh and dwelt among us, a fabulous red monster
of carnage and slaughter up there in the north.
When the Germans struck their first sledge-hammer blow and the Fifth
British Army recoiled before the blow the entire line from north to
south felt the thrill of the shock. Paris, the goal of the enemy, felt
it, too, and there went up from the city a kind of big sigh, a long
exhalation, which was almost a breath of relief. At any rate the long
suspense was past. At the end of the third or fourth day refugees began
to pour in by thousands, a poor, tragic, dazed procession, twice bereft
of their scanty possessions. They brought with them wild, incoherent,
garbled accounts of the terrible sanguinary losses on both sides.
Paris, perhaps all France, possesses the feminine temperament. In
hours of ease she is willful, coy and hard to please--especially with
strangers; she is charming, baffling, impatient, outspoken over the
foibles of her best friends and allies, keenly aware of the ridiculous,
gay with a spice of maliciousness; her caricatures, often grossly
unjust, are masterpieces of fine satirical wit. But in the hour of
trial she gathers herself together with a courage, a poise and a
profound tenderness for those of her people who have been stricken that
are exceedingly good to see.
And that is what happened now. Paris found immediate food and shelter
for the fugitives; printed proclamations that appeared all over
the city, bidding the citizens to remain steadfast and unshaken in
their faith of victory and put no credence in lying rumors; and at
the same time, as the Big Berthas continued their vehement spitting
at intervals, and the air raids harried and took toll of the city’s
innocent poor--for it is chiefly the workers, the servants, the little
people of Paris living in the top stories up under the roofs who had
to descend each night to the caves at the call of the siren--the
newspapers urged all families who could afford it, all those who had
children or old or sick to remove themselves out of the new zone of
danger to the tranquillity of the country. And thousands followed
the wise advice. Hôtels de luxe were emptied inside of a week.
Shopkeepers and workers who could manage to leave ordained a spring
holiday and departed to their relatives in the provinces. It was an
exodus. There were left the big wide empty places of Paris, filled with
a gray-blue gossamer mist soft as chiffon, which wrapped all the city
in an enchanted web; the tranquil garden walks deserted by children,
vivid with rhododendrons and the drifting pink and white petals of
chestnut blooms; and the good solid block of reliable Paris citizens,
neither frightened nor fugitive, who had lived through the Marne and
the Mons and the Champagne and the Verdun attacks, and who read the
disquieting communiqués with composed faces and went about their
affairs as usual.
[Illustration:
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information._
_Copyright, 1918, by The Curtis Publishing Company._
_Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._
THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF THE CITADEL OF VERDUN.
NEXT, ON LEFT, MISS FRAZER, IN HELMET, CARRYING GAS MASK.
THE TUNNEL-ENTRANCE TO THE FORTRESS IS IN THE BACKGROUND.]
Practically no troops are now routed through the capital, but
occasionally one saw small detachments of _fantassins_ with their heavy
marching equipment filing through the empty squares. They did not look
warlike, those poilus, veterans of four years, when they appeared
in the streets of Paris. They marched slowly, laboriously, one foot
lagging after the other, shoulders bent beneath the weight of the kit,
their eyes fixed on the ground. The horizon-blue uniforms were faded
and patched and their clumsy storm coats with the skirts buttoned
back gave them an indescribably pathetic air. Seen thus at twilight
and melting into the dusky background there was something about these
somber, slow-plodding, burdened figures that hurt the heart. One felt
an overwhelming tenderness, a pity for these brave little men. And
yet these were the selfsame poilus who a few days later stemmed the
furious German tide--and they sang as they went into battle. And nearly
four years they sang!
It would not be untrue to say that underneath her courageous calm Paris
did not feel the cruel strain of that first uncertain week of the
offensive. The strain of the situation was brought home to me, waiting
for my passes, by several incidents. Naomie, the trim little _femme
de chambre_, pretty as a pink camellia, whose voice has the soft deep
throb of a cello, went about with a face as pale as the linen she bore
on her arm. And as she made the bed and swept and aired the room she
wept, quietly, steadily, the silvery globules stealing silently one
by one down her cheeks. When they obstructed her vision she stopped,
brushed them away methodically and went on. My pillow was wet with
Naomie’s tears.
“I am ashamed, mademoiselle; I ask pardon to be like this,” she
murmured one morning when I had caught her outright drying her eyes.
“One must be strong these days. But my husband, he has been transferred
up north on the British line. And now I have not heard from him, here
it is over a week. Before he always sent me a little word each day. He
never failed--some little word each day.” She plaited the counterpane
with unseeing eyes as she muttered: “Ten days! Yes, it is that--just.
And not one little word. But one must be strong, _n’est-ce pas,
mademoiselle_?”
The next disturbing thing that happened was the news that B---- had
deserted. His wife was my friend. B---- was a Frenchman in a famous
fighting regiment, sensitive, fine-strung, none too strong, who had
been in the trenches since 1914. What evil of fear, irritation, revolt
or sheer brain collapse led to the decision we shall never know. But
one day he threw down his gas mask in the midst of an attack and walked
out of the trenches. His battalion had been incessantly shelled for
weeks. In the front-line trenches they were hammered by the guns. In
the back areas, _en repos_, they caught the bombs. No sleep in either
place. This kept up week after week. And suddenly, like an elephant,
B---- had “gone bad.”
He appeared suddenly in Paris at a time when not a single Frenchman was
on leave; and he walked the boulevards with the number of that famous
fighting regiment on the collar of his tunic blazing forth for all the
world to see. It was a miracle he was not instantly caught. As it was
he was a prisoner; for he had no papers, and therefore he could not
send a telegram or register at a hotel or take a train or leave the
city. A friend telegraphed for B----’s wife, who was in the country,
sending a noncommittal wire so as not to alarm B----’s mother, an
ardent patriot, who would have instantly handed over her recreant son
to the police. The wife arrived. To her B---- declared his intention
of joining the Foreign Legion. That meant that his brain flare or
momentary cowardice had passed.
Anyone may join the Foreign Legion. There no embarrassing questions are
asked. They take on all comers, and then pitch them headlong into the
very hottest hell of the battle. Accordingly B----, knowing that if he
could once win to their offices he would be safe from arrest, stole
out from his doorway one morning and, avoiding officers and gendarmes,
gained the recruiting bureau.
But here an unexpected blow fell. The recruiting end of the bureau had
been shifted to Lyons. But how to get there! He could not ride in a
train or a public conveyance. He could not dine openly in a restaurant
or sleep in a hotel. And to be seen tramping south in this crisis meant
certain arrest and death. However, there was nothing for it but to make
the attempt--to walk by night and lie hidden in the day. He started
forth--and no word has been heard of him since.
In time the news of his desertion leaked out. And the gendarme on the
beat took it upon himself to rebuke Madame B---- for having such a
villain husband. He is a fat, greasy, bald-headed little man, this
gendarme, who sits long over his grenadine, and has never been nearer
the Front than the city fortifications.
Madame B flew at him like a fury.
“Have you ever been out there--fat _embusqué_?” she shrilled, shaking
her finger under his nose. “Have you fought four years in that hell?
Been wounded five times, had fever, rheumatism, suffered from shell
shock, been made deaf from bombardment, had your nerves shattered so
that you never sleep? Is your hair turned gray at twenty-five years?
Oh, my God! No? Then keep your mouth shut! ’Tis not for such as you to
speak of this war! ’Tis for those who have endured.”
It was this courage made human by the private griefs of the people
of France, who after four weary, crucifying years were still bearing
the cross, filling the breach, saving the day, and saving it with a
superb dash despite individual heartbreaks, that filled my mind as, our
passes obtained, we journeyed northward. It seemed to me that perhaps
the month of March, 1918, was to be made memorable by the fact that at
that particular time America began definitely to shift to her own young
shoulders the weight of the agonizing burden France had borne so long.
For this reason the opening offensive marked a transition period, for
theretofore we had held only quiet sectors.
But it was not the fact of the shifting of the outward burden that
interested me so much as to discover if possible whether that shift
was to extend also to the spirit--whether the soul of France, the
soul of her soldiers, her poilus, was to pass into the soul of this
new, strong, eager young Army. For the quality that distinguishes
the poilu from his enemies and from his allies alike is not brute
force, or body fitness, or stubborn pride, or stiff resistance, or
obedience, or cohesion, or physical valor--but sheer spiritual stamina.
He has an invincible come-back. His soul can’t be beat. The French,
who are an extremely clannish race, say that they feel a closer bond
with Americans than with any other people on earth. This is not mere
diplomatic balder-dash. They declare that aside from possessing the
same democratic ideals, the same passion for scientific research,
there is a decided similarity of temperament. In both peoples there
are the same swiftness of perception, the same suppleness of mind,
lightness of wit and comradeliness toward life and toward each other
which have made France like one great family. And now that the two
nations in this offensive are fighting side by side and brigade by
brigade, the French in their speeches and editorials and communiqués
have announced that the spiritual metal of the two armies is the same;
that the spontaneous, unquenchable, “_En avant! Toujours en avant!_”
quality of attack, attack, and again attack of the French poilu is also
the salient characteristic of the newcomers. It was this particular
declaration that put a keener edge on my observations during my
journey. I was on the lookout for signs in our men of the conquering
will of the poilu.
It is not germane to the subject to describe in detail that eight-day
motor trip through the heart of the American war zone in France. We
covered each day hundreds of kilometers of the lovely rolling meadow
and hill country of Lorraine--orchards, fields and woods radiant in
shimmering green, clothed in primal light of leaf. We passed scores
of red-tiled hamlets, each the identical facsimile of the other, with
steaming manure heaps adorning the front yards of prominent citizens,
hens and bouncing babies scratching therein, and toothless old dames
sitting on the doorsteps peering out upon the world with faded eyes.
We stopped at numerous American base-hospital centers, some in stone
cantonments, formerly army barracks turned over by the French; some
former hotel resorts; and still others brand-new frame buildings,
entire villages with duck-board streets. We motored through endless
series of _repos_ stations, one following hard upon another like
beads on a string, of English, American, French, Italian, Portuguese,
Annamite and Senegalese troops. At the close of the day in the rosy
smolder of the afterglow we hunted aviation camps in the advanced
war zone, and found the vast aërodromes so shrewdly camouflaged that
we could scarcely discern them from the dappled landscape. We passed
through the center where is situated the training school for army
officers, a beautiful old fortressed town set like a coronet high on
a wooded hill. We stayed the night at Army Headquarters in a hotel
packed with the hierarchy of the General Staff, where automobiles with
flags drew up before the door and mackintoshed generals beribboned and
bestarred strode in out of the lashing rain.
Our quest took us from the drowsy, tranquil rear of the war zone clear
up to the Luneville sector beyond Toul, where we witnessed two air
fights in the course of one morning. It was the portion of France
given over to the American effort. We traversed and crisscrossed it
back and forth and from end to end. And everywhere we met the same
phenomenon--the lithe, clean-limbed, khaki-clad American soldier. The
land was alive with him! Several months previously I had been over
this same territory, and then even a Red Cross man was a rare animal
which the natives paused to regard. Now, after eight months, the entire
countryside hummed and buzzed like a vast beehive. It was the visible
result before our eyes of all the sweat and labor and strain of a
mighty nation intent on a single goal--to transport men to France.
Well, here were the men, hundreds of thousands of them, scattered over
a vast camp ground. We met battalions of them swinging along the roads
in step and singing a lively marching air. We came across them in sunny
fields prodding dummy Huns with bayonets; we passed groups of them
in remote and peaceful valleys picking off targets at rifle ranges.
We met them at lonely crossroads, together with a French comrade,
acting as military police. They gave us the salute that is known as the
Pershing--bringing the hand smartly up to the forage cap in an abrupt
little gesture full of style. And they invariably followed the salute
with an infectious aftergrin. The salute was Pershing’s. The grin was
all their own. We saw them tearing along roads at a breakneck clip
in those snorting demons of motor-cycles called “wife-killers.” We
overtook them driving camions and transports and mule teams.
Later we met an entire division on the move--artillery, infantry,
ammunition and cook wagons--a long strung-out procession against the
drab sky line. They were bound up there, they vaguely told us. But we
knew and they knew that they were going to participate in a struggle
compared to which life in the drowsy Toul sector was as but a holiday
fête. We glimpsed them driving powerful American locomotives, beside
which the diminutive French engines seemed like toys that one could
pick up in the palm of the hand--and they leaned far out of their
cabooses to cheer. We saw them packed like herrings in the dingy
low-ceiled dining-rooms of provincial towns, drinking their _pinard_
diluted with water in true poilu style, then fetching out their makings
and rolling a smoke in true American style. We saw them in camp, _en
repos_, in hospital, on the march.
There is a pageantry about war when one sits back thus and views its
effects from the outside--a kind of large, glittering nobility which
thrills and quickens the blood despite oneself--until one sees the
wrecks. And in the hospitals we began to get the wrecks. In ----, a
famous old town turned into a hospital center, we stopped to look up
some missing men. The other members of the party went to visit the
wards, but I wandered about the streets and presently came upon a squad
of privates in wrinkled, freshly disinfected uniforms, the tunics
skin-tight, revealing the owners’ slim waists and finely swelling
shoulder muscles. But they had a pale washed-out look, as if they
themselves had undergone the ordeal of disinfection along with their
uniforms. A lieutenant was calling the roll.
Aside from the line-up a few paces stood a husky private with a sulky
lowering face. He had crowded his battered sombrero down over his
bloodshot eyes and was scowling like a movie pirate. “What’s happening
to those men?” I asked, nodding at the squad.
“They’ve been gassed and now they’re declared O. K. and are going back
to the Front.”
He spoke in a curious broken rasping whisper, which I recognized.
“You’ve been gassed, too?” I hazarded.
“Yes,” he croaked. “And I’m just as well as any fellow in that gang.
We all got it at the same time. But the doc, when he heard my voice,
wouldn’t let me go. But damn it all, a guy don’t fight with his voice!”
“He’s playing favorites, that doc,” whispered another lank,
humorous-eyed young giant strolling up, his peaked forage cap drawn low
so as to shelter, if possible, those bloodshot eyes. “Wouldn’t let me
out, either! Durn the durned docs, I say!”
“But you were burned as well as gassed,” I objected, for the entire
lower part of his face and neck was an angry red peeling blister. “What
kind of gas was it?” I demanded.
“Mustard. Burns your insides out if you get a bad case. I tell you I’ve
had enough to last me one life. No more mustard on cold beef for mine!”
“And how is the gas-mask discipline?”
“Well, that depends on the battalion. In my battalion the commander
was strong for drills. We had them morning, noon and night, and in
the middle of the night. Seemed as if the old man had gone crazy on
gas discipline. But when the big gas attack came we had only a four
per cent casualty list, and the battalion alongside, which had been
going easy on drills, caught it something fierce. Our battalion got
recommended to G. H. Q. I caught my gas in a dugout the next day.”
“And you are still keen to get back into all that?”
“Am I?” he repeated, his eyes hardening. “I’ll tell you how I feel:
When I first came over I had a kind of sneaking notion that Heinie
wasn’t so dusky as he was painted. But I lost that notion pretty quick
when I got up front and saw my lieutenant shot in the back by a boche
prisoner who had thrown up his hands. Now I want to lick the Huns till
they holler, and then keep on licking them for a year after that for
the good of their souls.”
Inside of the hospital were grimmer cases. In one of the wards we
came on a Texan with the bright, clear-gazing eyes that one sometimes
finds in old sailors. They had taken his leg off. When we asked how he
was making it he turned on us those straight deep eyes, and there was
trouble in them.
“There’s just one thing I’m sorry for,” said he.
“What is that?”
“That I didn’t have more time.”
Time for what, I wondered. And then looking down on that wrecked body,
with the covers lifted high over apparatus so as not to touch the
tormented nerves, I thought I understood. He was sorry he didn’t have
more time to get out of the way. That was it. It was what anybody would
wish for--two, three, five seconds of grace to have gotten out of the
way. Lying here through the long hours empty of everything but pain, he
had doubtless worked out the problem to the finest precision, and he
knew to the last trick just how much more time it would have taken to
have dropped to the ground, to have eluded that exploding shell. Now
all his life long he was going to regret the lack of those few precious
seconds.
“Yes,” he repeated slowly, laboriously, the trouble still in his eyes,
“I’d like to have had more time. Don’t seem right somehow. ’Tain’t
fitting to be lying here with the show just begun. I’d like to have
done more damage. But,” he brightened, “I’ve figured there’s still some
jobs a peg-legged man can do over here. And I tell you one thing: I’m
not going home till we’ve licked the Huns or the Huns have licked us.”
He laughed at the latter impossibility, and the laughter shook his
body and turned him pale. And still he laughed on. I thought when he
wished for more time that he was thinking in terms of self and personal
safety, and all the time he had been thinking in the biggest terms of
service to mankind.