The next morning at daylight they started for the front.
Troy's breast swelled with the sense of the approach to something bigger
than he had yet known. The air of Paris, that day, was heavy with doom.
There was no mistaking its taste on the lips. It was the air of the
Marne that he was breathing....
Here he was, once more involved in one of the great convulsions of
destiny, and still almost as helpless a spectator as when, four years
before, he had strayed the burning desert of Paris and cried out in his
boy's heart for a share in the drama. Almost as helpless, yes--in spite
of his four more years, his grown-up responsibilities, and the blessed
uniform thanks to which he, even he, a poor little ambulance-driver of
eighteen, ranked as a soldier of the great untried army of his country.
It was something--it was a great deal--to be even the humblest part, the
most infinitesimal cog, in that mighty machinery of the future; but it
was not enough, at this turning-point of history, for one who had so
lived it all in advance, who was so aware of it now that it had come,
who had carried so long on his lips the taste of its scarcely breathable
air.
As the ambulance left the gates of Paris, and hurried eastward in the
grey dawn, this sense of going toward something new and overwhelming
continued to grow in Troy. It was probably the greatest hour of the war
that was about to strike--and he was still too young to give himself to
the cause he had so long dreamed of serving.
From the moment they left the gates the road was encumbered with huge
grey motor-trucks, limousines, torpedoes, motor-cycles, long trains of
artillery, army kitchens, supply wagons, all the familiar elements of
the procession he had so often watched unrolling itself endlessly east
and west from the Atlantic to the Alps. Nothing new in the sight--but
something new in the faces! A look of having got beyond the accident of
living, and accepted what lay over the edge, in the dim land of the
final. He had seen that look in the days before the Marne....
Most of the faces on the way were French: as far as Epernay they met
their compatriots only in isolated groups. But whenever one of the
motor-trucks lumbering by bore a big U.S. on its rear panel Troy pushed
his light ambulance ahead and skimmed past, just for the joy of seeing
the fresh young heads rising pyramid-wise above the sides of the lorry,
hearing the snatches of familiar song--"Hail, hail, the gang's all
here!" and "We won't come back till it's over over there!"--and shouting
back, in reply to a stentorian "Hi, kid, beat it!", "Bet your life I
will, old man!"
Hubert Jacks, the young fellow who was with him, shouted back too, as
lustily; but between times he was more occupied with the details of
their own particular job--to which he was newer than Troy--and seemed
not to feel so intensely the weight of impending events.
As they neared the Montmirail monument: "Ever been over this ground
before?" Troy asked carelessly, and Jacks answered: "N--no."
"Ah--I have. I was here just after the battle of the Marne, in September
'fourteen."
"That so? You must have been quite a kid," said Jacks with indifference,
filling his pipe.
"Well--not _quite_," Troy rejoined sulkily; and they said no more.
At Epernay they stopped for lunch, and found the place swarming with
troops. Troy's soul was bursting within him: he wanted to talk and
remember and compare. But his companion was unimaginative, and perhaps a
little jealous of his greater experience. "He doesn't want to show that
he's new at the job," Troy decided.
They lunched together in a corner of the packed restaurant, and while
they were taking coffee some French officers came up and chatted with
Troy. To all of them he felt the desperate need of explaining that he
was driving an ambulance only because he was still too young to be
among the combatants.
"But I shan't be--soon!" he always added, in the tone of one who
affirms. "It's merely a matter of a few weeks now."
"Oh, you all look like babies--but you all fight like devils," said a
young French lieutenant seasoned by four years at the front; and another
officer added gravely: "Make haste to be old enough, _cher monsieur_. We
need you all--every one of you...."
"Oh, we're coming--we're all coming!" Troy cried.
That evening, after a hard and harrowing day's work between _postes de
secours_ and a base hospital, they found themselves in a darkened
village, where, after a summary meal under flying shells, some one
suggested ending up at the Y.M.C.A. hut.
The shelling had ceased, and there seemed nothing better to do than to
wander down the dark street to the underground shelter packed with
American soldiers. Troy was sleepy and tired, and would have preferred
to crawl into his bed at the inn; he felt, more keenly than ever, the
humiliation (the word was stupid, but he could find no other) of being
among all these young men, only a year or two his seniors, and none, he
was sure, more passionately eager than himself for the work that lay
ahead, and yet so hopelessly divided from him by that stupid difference
in age. But Hubert Jacks was seemingly unconscious of this, and only
desirous of ending his night cheerfully. It would have looked unfriendly
not to accompany him, so they pushed their way together through the
cellar door surmounted by the sociable red triangle.
It was a big cellar, but brown uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it from
wall to wall. In one corner the men were sitting on packing-boxes at a
long table made of boards laid across barrels, the smoky light of little
oil lamps reddening their cheeks and deepening the furrows in their
white foreheads as they laboured over their correspondence. Others were
playing checkers, or looking at the illustrated papers, and everybody
was smoking and talking--not in large groups, but quietly, by twos or
threes. Young women in trig uniforms, with fresh innocent faces, moved
among the barrels and boxes, distributing stamps or books, chatting with
the soldiers, and being generally homelike and sisterly. The men gave
them back glances as honest, and almost as innocent, and an air of
simple daylight friendliness pervaded the Avernian cave.
It was the first time that Troy had ever seen a large group of his
compatriots so close to the fighting front, and in an hour of ease, and
he was struck by the gravity of the young faces, and the low tones of
their talk. Everything was in a minor key. No one was laughing or
singing or larking: the note was that which might have prevailed in a
club of quiet elderly men, or in a drawing-room where the guests did not
know each other well. Troy was all the more surprised because he
remembered the jolly calls of the young soldiers in the motor-trucks,
and the songs and horse-play of the gangs of trench-diggers and
hut-builders he had passed on the way. Was it that his compatriots did
not know how to laugh when they were at leisure, or was it rather that,
in the intervals of work, the awe of the unknown laid its hand on these
untried hearts?
Troy and Jacks perched on a packing-box, and talked a little with their
neighbours; but presently they were interrupted by the noise of a motor
stopping outside. There was a stir at the mouth of the cavern, and a
girl said eagerly: "Here she comes!"
Instantly the cellar woke up. The soldiers' faces grew young again, they
flattened themselves laughingly against the walls near the entrance, the
door above was cautiously opened, and a girl in a long blue cloak
appeared at the head of the stairs.
"Well, boys--you see I managed it!" she cried; and Troy recognized the
piercing accents and azure gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick.
"_She_ managed it!" the whole cellar roared as one man, drowning her
answer in a cheer. And, "Of course I did!" she continued, laughing and
nodding right and left as she made her triumphant way down the lane of
khaki, to what, at her appearance, had somehow promptly become the stage
at the farther end of a packed theatre. The elderly Y.M.C.A. official
who accompanied her puffed out his chest like a general and blinked
knowingly behind his gold eye-glasses.
Troy's first movement had been one of impatience. He hated all that Miss
Warlick personified, and hated it most of all on this sacred soil, and
at this fateful moment, with the iron wings of doom clanging so close
above their heads. But it would have been almost impossible to fight his
way out through the crowd that had closed in behind her--and he stayed.
The cheering subsided, she gained her improvised platform--a door laid
on some biscuit-boxes--and the recitation began.
She gave them all sorts of things, ranging from grave to gay, and
extracting from the sentimental numbers a peculiarly piercing effect
that hurt Troy like the twinge of a dental instrument. And her audience
loved it all, indiscriminately and voraciously, with souls hungry for
the home-flavour and long nurtured on what Troy called "cereal-fiction."
One had to admit that Miss Warlick knew her public, and could play on
every chord.
It might have been funny if it had not been so infinitely touching. They
were all so young, so serious, so far from home, and bound on a quest so
glorious! And there overhead, just above them, brooded and clanged the
black wings of their doom.... Troy's mockery was softened to tenderness,
and he felt, under the hard shell of his youthful omniscience, the stir
of all the things to which the others were unconsciously responding.
"And now, by special request, Miss Warlick is going to say a few words,"
the elderly eye-glassed officer importantly announced.
Ah, what a pity! If only she had ended on that last jolly chorus, so
full of artless laughter and tears! Troy remembered her dissertations on
the steamer, and winced at a fresh display of such fatuity in such a
scene.
She had let the cloak slip from her shoulders, and stepped to the edge
of her unsteady stage. Her eyes burned large in a face grown suddenly
grave.... For a moment she reminded him again of Sophy Wicks.
"Only a few words, really," she began apologetically; and the cellar
started a cheer of protest.
"No--not that kind. Something different...." She paused long enough to
let the silence prepare them: sharp little artist that she was! Then
she leaned forward. "This is what I want to say. I've come from the
French front--pretty near the edge. They're dying there, boys--dying by
thousands, _now_, this minute.... But that's not it--I know: you want me
to cut it out--and I'm going to.... But this is why I began that way;
because it was my first sight of--things of that sort. And I had to tell
you----"
She stopped, pale, her pretty mouth twitching.
"What I really wanted to say is this. Since I came to Europe, nearly a
year ago, I've got to know the country they're dying for--and I
understand why they mean to go on and on dying--if they have to--till
there isn't one of them left.
"Boys--I know France now--and she's worth it! Don't you make any
mistake!
"I have to laugh now when I remember what I thought of France when I
landed. My! How d'you suppose she'd got on so long without us? Done a
few things too--poor little toddler! Well--it was time we took her by
the hand, and showed her how to behave. And I wasn't the only one
either; I guess most of us thought we'd have to teach her her letters.
Maybe some of you boys right here felt that way too?"
A guilty laugh, and loud applause.
"Thought so," said Miss Warlick, smiling.
"Well," she continued, "there wasn't hardly anything _I_ wasn't ready to
teach them. On the steamer coming out with us there was a lot of those
Amb'lance boys. My! How I gassed to them. I said the French had got to
be taught how to love their mothers--I said they hadn't any
home-feeling--and didn't love children the way we do. I've been round
among them some since then, in the hospitals, and I've seen fellows
lying there shot 'most to death, and their little old mothers in white
caps arriving from 'way off at the other end of France. Well, those
fellows know how to see their mothers coming even if they're blind, and
how to hug 'em even if their arms are off.... And the children--the way
they go on about the children! Ever seen a French soldier yet that
didn't have a photograph of a baby stowed away somewhere in his dirty
uniform? I never have. I tell you, they're _white_! And they're fighting
as only people can who feel that way about mothers and babies. The way
we're going to fight; and maybe we'll prove it to 'em sooner than any of
us think....
"Anyhow, I wanted to get this off my chest to-night; not for _you_, only
for myself. I didn't want to have a shell get me before I'd said
'Veever la France!' before all of you.
"See here, boys--the Marcellaze!"
She snatched a flag from the wall, drawing herself up to heroic height;
and the whole cellar joined her in a roar.
X
The next morning Jacks dragged Troy out of bed by the feet. The room was
still dark, and through the square of the low window glittered a bunch
of stars.
"Hurry call to Montmirail--step lively!" Jacks ordered, his voice thick
with sleep.
All the old names; with every turn of the wheel they seemed to be
drawing nearer and nearer to the ravaged spot of earth where Paul
Gantier slept his faithful sleep. Strange if, to-day of all days, Troy
should again stand by his friend's grave.
They pushed along eastward under the last stars, the roll of the cannon
crashing through the quiet dawn. The birds flew up with frightened cries
from the trees along the roadside; rooks cawed their warning from clump
to clump, and gathered in the sky in dark triangles flying before the
danger.
The east began to redden through the dust-haze of the cloudless air. As
they advanced the road became more and more crowded, and the ambulance
was caught in the usual dense traffic of the front: artillery,
field-kitchens, motor-trucks, horse-wagons, hay-carts packed with
refugees, and popping motor-cycles zigzagging through the tangle of
vehicles. The movement seemed more feverish and uncertain than usual,
and now and then the road was jammed, and curses, shouts and the crack
of heavy whips sounded against the incessant cannonade that hung its
iron curtain above the hills to the north-east. The faces of soldiers
and officers were unshaved sallow drawn with fatigue and anxiety. Women
crouched sobbing on their piled-up baggage, and here and there, by the
roadside, a little country cart had broken down, and the occupants sat
on the bank watching the confusion like impassive lookers-on.
Suddenly, in the thickest of the struggle, a heavy lorry smashed into
Troy's ambulance, and he felt the unmistakable wrench of the
steering-gear. The car shook like a careening boat, and then righted
herself and stopped.
"Oh, hell!" shouted Jacks in a fury. The two lads jumped down, and in a
few minutes they saw that they were stranded beyond remedy. Tears of
anger rushed into Troy's eyes. On this day of days he was not even to
accomplish his own humble job!
Another ambulance of their own formation overtook them, and it was
agreed that Jacks, who was the sharper of the two, was to get a lift to
the nearest town, and try to bring back a spare part, or, failing that,
pick up some sort of a car in which they could continue their work.
Troy was left by the roadside. Hour after hour he sat there waiting and
cursing his fate. When would Jacks be back again? Not at all, most
likely; it was ten to one he would be caught on the way and turned on to
some more pressing job. He knew, and Troy knew, that their ambulance was
for the time being a hopeless wreck, and would probably have to stick
ignominiously in its ditch till some one could go and fetch a spare part
from Paris. And meanwhile, what might not be happening nearer by?
The rumble and thump of the cannonade grew more intense; a violent
engagement was evidently going on not far off. Troy pulled out his map
and tried to calculate how far he was from the front; but the front, at
that point, was a wavering and incalculable line. He had an idea that
the fighting was much nearer than he or Jacks had imagined. The place at
which they had broken down must be about fifteen miles from the Marne.
But could it be possible that the Germans had crossed the Marne?
Troy grew hungry, and thrust his hand in his pocket to pull out a
sandwich. With it came a letter of his mother's, carried off in haste
when he left Paris the previous morning. He re-read it with a mournful
smile. "Of course we all know the Allies must win; but the preparations
here seem so slow and blundering; and the Germans are still so
strong...." (Thump, thump, the artillery echoed: "_Strong!_") And just
at the end of the letter, again; "I do wonder if you'll run across
Sophy...."
He lit a cigarette, and shut his eyes and thought. The sight of Miss
Warlick had made Sophy Wicks's presence singularly vivid to him: he had
fallen asleep thinking of her the night before. How like her to have
taken a course at the Presbyterian Hospital without letting any one
know! He wondered that he had not suspected, under her mocking
indifference, an ardour as deep as his own, and he was ashamed of having
judged her as others had, when, for so long, the thought of her had been
his torment and his joy. Where was she now, he wondered? Probably in
some hospital in the south or the centre: the authorities did not let
beginners get near the front, though, of course, it was what all the
girls were mad for.... Well, Sophy would do her work wherever it was
assigned to her: he did not see her intriguing for a showy post.
Troy began to marvel again at the spell of France--his France! Here was
a girl who had certainly not come in quest of vulgar excitement, as so
many did: Sophy had always kept herself scornfully aloof from the pretty
ghouls who danced and picnicked on the ruins of the world. He knew that
her motives, so jealously concealed, must have been as pure and urgent
as his own. France, which she hardly knew, had merely guessed at through
the golden blur of a six weeks' midsummer trip, France had drawn her
with an irresistible pressure; and the moment she had felt herself free
she had come. "Whither thou goest will I go, thy people shall be my
people...." Yes, France was the Naomi-country that had but to beckon,
and her children rose and came....
Troy was exceedingly tired: he stretched himself on the dusty bank, and
the noise of the road-traffic began to blend with the cannonade in his
whirling brain. Suddenly he fancied the Germans were upon him. He
thought he heard the peppering volley of machine-guns, shouts, screams,
rifle-shots close at hand....
He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
What he had heard was the cracking of whips and the shouting of carters
urging tired farm-horses along. Down a by-road to his left a stream of
haggard country people was pouring from the direction of the Marne. This
time only a few were in the carts: the greater number were flying on
their feet, the women carrying their babies, the old people bent under
preposterous bundles, blankets, garden utensils, cages with rabbits, an
agricultural prize framed and glazed, a wax wedding-wreath under a
broken globe. Sick and infirm people were dragged and shoved along by
the older children: a goitred idiot sat in a wheel-barrow pushed by a
girl, and laughed and pulled its tongue....
In among the throng Troy began to see the torn blue uniforms of wounded
soldiers limping on bandaged legs.... Others too, not wounded, elderly
haggard territorials, with powder-black faces, bristling beards, and the
horror of the shell-roar in their eyes.... One of them stopped near
Troy, and in a thick voice begged for a drink ... just a drop of
anything, for Gods sake. Others followed, pleading for food and drink.
"Gas, gas ..." a young artilleryman gasped at him through distorted
lips.... The Germans were over the Marne, they told him, the Germans
were coming. It was hell back there, no one could stand it.
Troy ransacked the ambulance, found water, brandy, biscuits, condensed
milk, and set up an impromptu canteen. But the people who had clustered
about him were pushed forward by others crying: "Are you mad to stay
here? The Germans are coming!"--and in a feeble panic they pressed on.
One old man, trembling with fatigue, and dragging a shaking brittle old
woman, had spied the stretcher beds inside the ambulance, and without
asking leave scrambled in and pulled his wife after him. They fell like
logs on to the grey blankets, and a livid territorial with a bandaged
arm drenched in blood crawled in after them and sank on the floor. The
rest of the crowd had surged by.
As he was helping the wounded soldier to settle himself in the
ambulance, Troy heard a new sound down the road. It was a deep
continuous rumble, the rhythmic growl of a long train of army-trucks.
The way must have been cleared to let them by, for there was no break or
faltering in the ever-deepening roar of their approach.
A cloud of dust rolled ahead, growing in volume with the growing noise;
now the first trucks were in sight, huge square olive-brown motor-trucks
stacked high with scores and scores of rosy soldiers. Troy jumped to his
feet with a shout. It was an American regiment being rushed to the
front!
The refugees and the worn-out blue soldiers fell back before the
triumphant advance, and a weak shout went up. The rosy soldiers shouted
back, but their faces were grave and set. It was clear that they knew
where they were going, and to what work they had been so hurriedly
summoned.
"It's hell back there!" a wounded territorial called out, pointing
backward over his bandaged shoulder, and another cried: "Vive
l'Amérique!"
"Vive la France!" shouted the truckful abreast of Troy, and the same cry
burst from his own lungs. A few miles off the battle of the Marne was
being fought again, and here were his own brothers rushing forward to
help! He felt that his greatest hour had struck.
One of the trucks had halted for a minute just in front of him, marking
time, and the lads leaning over its side had seen him, and were calling
out friendly college calls.
"Come along and help!" cried one, as the truck got under way again.
Troy glanced at his broken-down motor; then his eye lit on a rifle lying
close by in the dust of the roadside. He supposed it belonged to the
wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance.
He caught up the rifle, scrambled up over the side with the soldier's
help, and was engulfed among his brothers. Furtively he had pulled the
ambulance badge from his collar ... but a moment later he understood the
uselessness of the precaution. All that mattered to any one just then
was that he was one more rifle for the front.