IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE "ROCKET'S RED GLARE"
Bordeaux is the "Somewhere in France" from which cablegrams from
passengers on the French liners usually are sent. This will be no
news to the Germans, nor to Americans who read the advertisements
of the French liners, but it may be news to Americans who receive
the mysterious cablegrams "from a French port," after their friends
have landed. It is a dear old town, mouldy, and weather-beaten,
and mediaeval, this Bordeaux, with high, mysterious walls along the
street's over which hang dusty branches of trees or vines sneaking
mischievously out of bounds. A woe-begone trolley creaks through the
narrow streets and heart-broken cabmen mourning over the mistakes
of misspent lives, larrup disconsolate horses over stony streets
as they creak and jog and wheeze ahead of the invisible crows
that seem always to be hovering above ready to batten upon their
rightful provender. For an hour in the morning before our train left
for Paris we chartered one of the ramshackle cabs of the town and
took in Bordeaux. It was vastly unlike either Emporia or Wichita,
or anything in Kansas, or anything in America; or so far as that
goes, to Henry and me, it was unlike anything else in the wide and
beautiful world. "All this needs," said Henry, as he lolled back
upon the moth-eaten cushions of the hack that banged its iron rims
on the cobbles beneath us, and sent the thrill of it into our teeth,
"all this needs is Mary Pickford and a player organ to be a good
film!" The only thing we saw that made us homesick was the group
of firemen in front of the engine house playing checkers or chess
or something. But the town had an historic interest for us as the
home of the Girondists of the French Revolution; so we looked up
their monument and did proper reverence to them. They were moderate
idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we
thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we
could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band
wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew;
indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own
politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what
seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered
heads for a second before we took the train for Paris.
All day long we rode through the only peaceful part of France
we were to see in our martial adventures. It was fair and fat and
smiling--that France that lay between the river Gironde and Paris,
and all day we rode through its beauty and its richness. The thing
which we missed most from the landscape, being used to the American
landscape, was the automobile. We did not see one in the day's
journey. In Kansas alone there are 190,000 continually pervading
the landscape. We had yet to learn that there are no private
automobiles in France, that the government had commandeered all
automobiles and that even the taxis of Paris have but ten gallons
of gasoline a day allotted to each of them. So we gazed at the
two-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong white oxen, the ribbons
of roads, hard-surfaced and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills,
and longed for a car to make the journey past the fine old chateaux
that flashed in and out of our vision behind the hills. War was a
million miles away from the pastoral France that we saw coming up
from Bordeaux.
But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, where at dusk a
great flock of airplanes from a training camp buzzed over us and
sailed along with the train, distancing us and returning to play
with us like big sportive birds. The train was filled with our
shipmates from the boat and we all craned our necks from the windows
to look at the wonderful sight of the air covey that fluttered
above us. Even the Eager Soul, our delicious young person with her
crinkly red hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long enough
from the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor "for to admire and for
to see," the airplanes.
But the airplanes gave us the day's first opportunity to talk to
the Eager Soul. Until dusk the Gilded Youth had kept her in his
donjon--a first class compartment jammed with hand-baggage, and
where she had insisted that the Young Doctor should come also. We
knew that without being told; also it was evident as we passed up
and down the car aisle during the day that she was acting as a sort
of human Baedeker to the Young Doctor, while the Gilded Youth, to
whom chateaux and French countryside were an old, old story, sat
by and hooted. But the airplanes pulled him out of his donjon keep
and the Young Doctor with him. He wasn't above showing the Young
Doctor how much a Gilded Youth really knows about mechanics and
airplanes, and we slipped in and chatted with the Eager Soul. We
had a human interest in the contest between the Gilded Youth and
the Young Doctor, and a sporting interest which centered in the
daily score. And we gathered this: That it was the Young Doctor's
day. For he was in France to help the greatest cause in the world;
and the Gilded Youth affected to be in France--to enjoy the greatest
outdoor game in the world. But he had made it plain that day to
the Eager Soul that working eighteen hours a day under shell fire,
driving an ambulance, was growing tame. He was going back, of course,
but he was thinking seriously of the air service. The Doctor wanted
no thrills. He was willing to boil surgical instruments or squirt
disinfectant around kitchens to serve. And the Eager Soul liked
that attitude, though it was obvious to us, that she was in the
war game as a bit of a sport and because it was too dull in her
Old Home Town, "somewhere in the United States." And we knew also
what she did not admit, even if she recognized it, that in the
Old Home Town, men of the sort to attract women of her spirit and
intelligence were scarce--and she was out looking for her own Sir
Galahad, as he went up and down the earth searching for the Holy
Grail. The war to her, we knew, was a great opportunity to enjoy
the new freedom of her sex, to lose her harem veil, to breathe
free air as an achieving human creature--but, alas! one's forties
are too wise. Pretty as she was, innocent as she was, and eager
as her soul was in high emprise of the conflict of world ideals
into which she was plunging, we felt that, after all, hidden away
deeply in the secret places of her heart, were a man and a home
and children.
We whizzed through the dusk in the suburbs of Paris that night,
seeing the gathering implements of war coming into the landscape
for the first time--the army trucks, the horizon blue of the French
uniform, the great training camps, the Red Cross store houses,
the scores and scores of hospitals that might be seen in the public
buildings with Red Cross flags on them, the munition plants pouring
out their streams of women workers in their jumpers and overalls.
The girl porters came through and turned on the lights in the
train. No lights outside told us that we were hurrying through a
great city. Paris was dark. We went through the underground where
there was more light than there was above ground. The streets seemed
like tunnels and the tunnels like streets. We came into the dingy
station and a score of women porters and red capped girls came for
our baggage. They ran the trucks, they moved the express; they
took care of the mail, and through them we edged up the stairway
into the half-lighted station and looked out into the night--black,
lampless, engulfing--and it was Paris!
It was nine o'clock as we stood on the threshold of the station
peering into the murk. Not a taxi was in the stand waiting; but
from afar we could hear a great honking of auto-horns, that sounded
like the night calls of monster birds flitting over the city. The
air was vibrant with these wild calls. We were an hour waiting there
in the gloom for a conveyance. But when we left the wide square
about the station, and came into the streets of Paris, we understood
why the auto horns were bellowing so. For the automobiles were
running lickety-split through the darkness without lights and
the howls of their horns pierced the night. The few street lights
burning a low candle power at the intersections of the great
boulevards were hooded and cast but a pale glow on the pavements.
And as we rode from our station and passed the Tuileries and the
Rue de Rivoli, save for the dim outline of the iron railings of
the Gardens ten feet from our cab window, we had no sign to mark
our way. Yet our cab whizzed along at a twenty-five mile gait,
and every few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out of the
darkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes we would be abreast of
another and the fiendish horns of us would go screaming in chorus
as we raced and passed and repassed one another on the broad street.
The din was nerve racking--but highly Parisian. One fancied that
Paris, being denied its lights, made up its quota of sensation by
multiplying its sound!
We went to the Ritz--now smile; the others did! Not that the Ritz
is an inferior hotel. We went there because it was really the
grandee among Paris hotels. Yet every day we were in Paris when
we told people we were at the Ritz, they smiled. The human mind
doesn't seem to be able to associate Henry and me with the Ritz
without the sense of the eternal fitness of things going wapper-jawed
and catawampus. We are that kind of men. Wichita and Emporia
are written large and indelibly upon us; and the Ritz, which is
the rendezvous of the nobility, merely becomes a background for
our rusticity--the spotlight which reveals the everlasting jay in
us! We went to the Ritz largely because it seemed to me that as a
leading American orator, Henry should have proper European terminal
facilities. And the Ritz looked to me like the proper setting for
an international figure. There, it seemed to me, the rich and the
great would congregate to invite him to dinners, and to me, at
least, who had imagination, there seemed something rather splendid
in fancying the gentry saying, "Ah, yes--Henry J. Allen, of
Wichita--the next governor of Kansas, I understand!" Henry indicated
his feeling about the Ritz thus: The night we arrived he failed,
for the first time in two weeks, to demand a dress rehearsal in
our $17.93 uniforms from 43rd Street in New York. The gold braided
uniforms that we saw in the corridors of the Ritz that night made
us pause and consider many things. When we unpacked our valises,
there were the little bundles just as they had come from 43rd
Street. Henry tucked his away with a sigh, and just before he went
to sleep he called across the widening spaces between sleep and
wakening: "I suppose we might have bought that $23.78 outfit, easy
enough!"
It was in the morning that the veneer of the Ritz began to wear
off for Henry. He had pulled a bath and found it cold; they were
conserving fuel and no hot water was allowed in the hotels of
Paris excepting Friday and Saturday nights. The English, who are
naturally mean, declare that the French save seventy-five per cent
of the use of their hot water by putting the two hot water nights
together, as no living Frenchman ever took a bath two consecutive
days. But it did not seem that way to Henry and me. And anyway we
heard these theories later. But that morning Henry, who doesn't
really mind a cold bath, was ready for it when he happened to look
around the bathroom and found there wasn't a scrap of soap. There
he was, as one might say, au natural, or perhaps better--if one
should include the dripping from his first plunge--one might say
he was au jus! And what is more, he was au mad. He jabbed the bell
button that summoned the valet, and when the boy appeared Henry had
his speech ready for him. "Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty
blame toot sweet about it!" The valet explained that soap was
not furnished with the room. It took some time to get that across
in broken French and English; then Henry, talking very slowly and
in his best oratorical voice, with his foot on the fortissimo,
cried: "Say! We are paying," at the dazed look in the valet's
face Henry repeated slower and louder, "We are paying, I say,
fifteen-dollars--fif-teen dollars a day for these rooms. You go
ask Mrs. Ritz if she will furnish soap for twenty?" And he waved
the valet grandly out.
[Illustration with caption: "Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty
blame toot sweet about it!"]
An hour later we sallied forth to see Paris in war time. Our way
lay through the lonely Vendome, out by the empty Rue Castiglione,
down the Rue de Rivoli. So we came into the great beautiful Place
de la Concorde; and what a wide and magnificent waste it was. Now
and then a wayfarer might be seen crossing its splendid distances,
or a taxicab spinning along through the statuesque grandeur of the
place. But the few moving objects in the white stretch of marble
and cement only accented its lonely aspect. The circle of the
French provinces was as desolate as the Pompeiian Forum, and save
for the bright colours of the banks of flowers that were heaped
upon the monuments to Alsace and Lorraine, the place might have been
an excavation rather than the heart of a great world metropolis.
Before the war, to cross the Place de la Concorde and go into the
Champs Elysees was an adventure of a life time. One took one's
chances. One survived, but he had his thrills. But that morning we
might have walked safely with bowed head and hands clasped behind
us through the Place, across the Elysian fields; there we sat for
a moment in one of the Babylonian cafes and saw nothing more shocking
than the beautiful women of France gathering in the abandoned
cafes and music halls to assemble surgical dressings for the French
wounded.
In due course, in that first day of our pilgrimage in Europe, we
came to the headquarters of the American Red Cross in the Place de
la Concorde. The five floors of a building once used for a man's club
are now filled with bustling, hustling Americans. Those delicately
tinted souls in Europe who are homesick for Broadway may find it
in the office of the American Red Cross; but they will find lower
Broadway, not the place of the bright lights. The click and clatter
of typewriters punctuate the air. Natty stenographers, prim office
women, matronly looking heads of departments, and assistants from
perhaps the tubercular department, the reconstruction department,
the bureau of home relief in Paris, or what not, move briskly through
the corridors. In the reception rooms are men from the ends of the
earth--Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Belgians, Boers, Russians,
Japs--every nation at peace with America has some business sometime
in that Paris office of the American Red Cross. For there abides
the commissioner of the Red Cross for all Europe. At that time he
was a spare, well made man in his late thirties,--Major Grayson M.
P. Murphy; a West Pointer who left the army fifteen years ago after
service in the Philippines, started "broke" in New York peddling
insurance, and quit business last June vice-president of the largest
trust company in the world, making the climb at considerable speed,
but without much noise. He was the quietest man in Paris. He was
so quiet that he had to have a muffler cut-out on his own great
heart to keep it from drowning his voice! There is a soft lisp in
his speech which might fool strangers who do not know about the
steel of his nerves and the keenness of his eye. He sat in a roomy
office with a clean desk, toyed with a paper knife and made quick,
sure, accurate decisions in a low hesitant voice that never backed
track nor weakened before a disagreeable situation. He is the man
who more than anyone else has laid out the spending of the major
part of the first one hundred millions gathered in America by the
Red Cross drive last summer. He held his rank as Major in the United
States army, and wore his uniform as though it were his skin, clean,
unwrinkled and handsome, with that gorgeous quality of unconscious
pride that is, after all, the West Pointer's real grace.
As we sat in that noble room, looking out across the Place de
la Concorde, past the Obelisk to the House of Deputies beyond the
Seine, it was evident that Henry was thinking hard. The spectacle
of Major Murphy's young men in their habiliments of service, Red
Cross military uniforms that made them look like lilies of the
valley and bright and morning stars, gave us both something to
think about. The recollection of those $17.93 uniforms of ours in
the rooms at the Ritz was disquieting. We had service hats; these
young gods wore brown caps with leather visors and enameled Red
Crosses above the leather. We had cotton khaki tunics unadorned,
and of a vintage ten years old. They had khaki worsted of a cut
to conform to the newest general order. They had Sam Browne belts
of high potency, and we had no substitute even for that insignia
of power. They had shiny leather puttees. We had tapes. They had
brown shoes--we had not given a fleeting thought to shoes. We might
as well have had congress gaiters! So when the conversation with
Major Murphy turned to a point where he said that he expected us to
go with him to the French front immediately he took a look at our
Sunday best Emporia and Wichita civilian clothes and asked casually,
"Have you gentlemen uniforms?" For me right there the cock crowed
three times. Henry heard it also, and answered slowly, "Well,
no--not exactly."
"Mr. Hoppen," said the Major, "take these gentlemen down the street
and show them where to get uniforms!" Which Mr. Hoppen went and
did. Now Mr. Hoppen is related to the Morgans--the J. Pierpont
Morgans--and he has small notion of Emporia and Wichita. So he took
us to a tailorshop after his own heart. We chose a modest outfit,
with no frills. We ordered one pair of riding breeches each, and
one tunic each, and one American army cap each. The tunic was to
conform to the recent Army regulation for Red Cross tunics, and the
trousers were to match; Henry looked at me and received a distress
signal, but he ignored it and said nonchalantly, "When can we have
them?" The tailor told us to call for a fitting in two weeks, but
we were going to the front before that. That made no difference;
and then Henry came to the real point. "How much," he asked, "will
these be?" The tailor answered in francs and we quickly divided the
sum into dollars. It made $100. "For both?" asked Henry hopefully.
"For each," answered the tailor firmly. There stood Mr. Hoppen, of
Morgans. There also stood Wichita and Emporia. Henry's eyes did not
bat; Mr. Hoppen wore a shimmering Sam Browne belt. Looking casually
at it Henry asked:
"Shall we require one of those?"
"Gentlemen are all wearing them, sir," answered the tailor.
"How much?" queried Henry.
"Well, you gentlemen are a trifle thick, sir, and we'll have to
have them specially made, but I presume we may safely say $14 each,
sir!"
Henry did not even look at me, but lifted the wormwood to his lips
and quaffed it. "Make two," he answered.
The world should not be unsafe for democracy if Wichita and Emporia
could help it!
We went to a show that night with the feeling of guilt and shame
one has who has betrayed his family. That $114 with ten more to
come for brown shoes, flickered in the spot light and babbled on
the lips of the singers. They danced it in the ballet. Each of us
was thinking with guilty horror of how he would break the news of
that uniform bargain to his wife. So we went home tired that first
night, through the grim dark streets of Paris and to our rooms.
And there were those 43rd street uniforms still unwrapped in the
bureau drawer. Henry again demanded a dress rehearsal. He insisted
that as we were going to have to wear them to the front we ought to
know how we looked inside of them. But we were weary and again put
off the dread hour. The next morning we bought our ten dollar brown
shoes, and concluded that there was a vast amount of foolishness
connected with this war.
During the long fair days while we waited for Major Murphy to take
us to the front, we wandered about Paris, puffing and spluttering
through the French language. Henry never was sure of anything
but toot sweet and some devilish perversion was forever sticking
sophomore German into my mouth, when French should have risen. The
German never actually broke out. If it had, we should have been shot
as spies. But it was so close that it always seemed to be snooping
around ready to jump out. That made it hard for me to shine in
French.
These adventures with the French language were not exactly the
martial adventures that Charley Chandler, of Wichita, and Warren
Finney, of Emporia, thought we would be having at the Front, when
they trundled us out to win the war. Yet these adventures were
serious. They were adventures in lonesomeness. We could imagine
how the American soldier boy would feel and what he would say when
this language began to wash about his ears and submerge him in
its depths. We could fancy American soldiers wandering through
the French villages, unable to buy things, because they couldn't
understand the prices. We could understand the dreary, bleak,
isolated lives of these American boys, with all the desolation of
foreigners hungering always for human companionship, outside of the
everlasting camp. And we came to know the misery of homesickness
that hides in the phrase, "a stranger in a strange land!"
So we were glad to summon the Eager Soul to dine with us, and we
let her order a dinner so complicated that it tasted like a lexicon!
We learned much about the Eager Soul that night. She told us of
her two college degrees, her year's teaching experience, her four
years' nursing, and her people in the old home town. Bit by bit,
we picked out her status from the things she dropped inadvertently.
And that night in our rooms we assembled the parts of the puzzle
thus; one rambling Bedford limestone American castle in the Country
Club district; two cars, with garage to match; a widowed mother, a
lamented father who made all kinds of money, so naturally some of
it was honest money; two brothers, a married sister; a love for
Henry James, and Galsworthy; substantial familiarity with Ibsen,
Hauptman, Bergsen, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Freud, Tschaikovsky, and
Bernard Shaw; a whole-hearted admiration for Barrie; and a record
as organizer in the suffrage campaign which won in her state three
years ago, plus a habit of buying gloves by the dozen and candy
in five pound boxes! We could not prove it, but we agreed that she
probably bossed her mother and that the brothers' wives hated her
and the sister's husband loved her to death! She was one of those
socially assured persons in the Old Home Town who are never afraid
of themselves out of it! She confessed that she had seen more
or less of the Gilded Youth, before he left for Verdun, and in a
pyrotechnic display of dimples, she admitted that she had gone to
the station to bid the Young Doctor good-bye. She had been assigned
to a hospital near the Verdun sector, and was going out the following
day. When we left her at the door of the Hotel Vouillemont, we
plunged back into the encircling gloom of the French language with
real regret.
As we went further into the life about us, we felt that all the men
were in uniform and all the women in mourning. The French mourn
beautifully. France today is the world's tragedy queen whose
suffering is all genuine, but all magnificently done. In the shop
windows of the Boulevards, and along the Avenue of the Opera are
no bright colours--excepting for men's uniforms. In the windows
of the millinery shops, purple is the gayest colour--purple and
lavender and black prevail. On every street are blind windows of
departed shops. Some bear signs notifying customers that they are
closed for the duration of the war; others simply stare blankly
and piteously at passersby who know the story without words.
Yet if it is not a gay Paris, it is anything but a sad Paris. Rather
it is a busy Paris; a Paris that stays indoors and works. For an
hour or two after twilight the crowds come out; Sunday also they
throng the boulevards. And the theatres are always well filled;
and there the bright dress uniforms of the men overcome the sombre
gowns of the women and the scenes in lobbies and foyers are not far
from brilliant. Bands and orchestras play in the theatres, but the
music lacks fire. It is beautiful music, carefully done, artistically
executed, but the orchestras are made up for the most part of men
past the military age. We heard "La Tosca" one afternoon and in
the orchestra sat twenty men with grey hair and the tenor was fat!
As the season grew old, we heard "Louise," "Carmen," "Aphrodite,"
"Butterfly" (in London), and "Aida" (in Milan), and always the
musical accompaniment to the social vagaries of these ladies who
are no better than they should be, was music from old heads and
old hearts. The "other lips and other hearts whose tales of love"
should have been told ardently through fiddle and clarinet are
toying with the great harp of a thousand strings that plays the dance
of death. That is the music the young men are playing in Europe
today. But in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the music
that should be made from the soul of youth, crying into reeds
and strings and brass is an echo, an echo altogether lovely but
passionless!
Finally our season of waiting ended. We came home to the Ritz
at midnight from a dinner with Major Murphy, where we had been
notified that we were to start for the front the next morning. We
told him that the new uniforms were not yet ready and confessed
to him that we had the cheap uniforms; he looked resigned. He
had been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade of Red Cross
commissioners from America, and he probably felt that he had seen
the worst and that this was just another cross. But when we reached
our rooms that midnight, Henry lifted his voice, not in pleading,
but in command. For we were to start at seven the next morning,
and it was orders. So each went to his bedroom and began unwrapping
his bundles. In ten minutes Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolate
divinity! With me there was trouble. Someone had blundered. The shirt
went on easily; the tunic went on cosily, but the trousers--someone
had shuffled those trousers on me. Even a shoe spoon and foots-case
wouldn't get them to rise to their necessary height. Inspection
proved that they were 36; now 36 doesn't do me much good as a waist
line! There is a net deficit of eight tragic inches, and eight
inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe. Yet there we were.
It was half past twelve. In six hours more we must be on our way
to the front--to the great adventure. Uniforms were imperative.
And there was the hiatus! Whereupon Henry rose. He rang for the
valet; no response. He rang for the tailor; he was in bed. He rang
for the waiter; he was off duty. There was just one name left on
the call card; so Henry hustled me into an overcoat and rang for
the chambermaid! And she appeared as innocent of English as we were
of French. It was an awful moment! But Henry slowly began making
gestures and talking in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones. The gestures
were the well-known gestures of his valedictory to the Republican
party at the Chicago Auditorium in 1912--beautiful gestures
and impressive. The maid became interested. Then he took the
recalcitrant trousers, placed them gently but firmly against his
friend's heart--or such a matter, showing how far from the ideal
they came. Then he laid on the bed a brown woollen shirt, and in
the tail of it marked out dramatically a "V" slice about the shape
of an old-fashioned slice of pumpkin pie--a segment ten or a dozen
inches wide that would require two hands in feeding. Then he pointed
from the shirt to the trousers and then to the ample bosom of his
friend, indicating with emotion that the huge pie-slice was to
go into the rear corsage of the breeches. It was wonderful to see
intelligence dawn in the face of that chambermaid. The gestures of
that Bull Moose speech had touched her heart. Suddenly she knew the
truth, and it made her free, so she cried, "Wee wee!" And oratory
had again risen to its proper place in our midst! At two o'clock
she returned with the pumpkin pie slice from the tail of the brown
shirt, neatly, but hardly gaudily inserted into the rear waist line
of the riding trousers, and we lay down to pleasant dreams; for we
found that by standing stiffly erect, by keeping one's tunic pulled
down, and by carefully avoiding a stooping posture, it was possible
to conceal the facts of one's double life. So we went forth with
Major Murphy the next morning as care-free as "Eden's garden birds."
We looked like birds, too--scarecrows!
[Illustration: Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe]
Our business took us to the American Ambulance men who were with the
French army. Generally when they were at work they were quartered
near a big base hospital; and their work took them from the large
hospital to the first aid stations near the front line trenches.
Our way from Paris to these men led across the devastated area of
France. As the chief activity of the French at the time of our
visit was in the Verdun sector, we spent most of our first week
at the front near Verdun. And one evening at twilight we walked
through the ruined city. The Germans had just finished their
evening strafe; two hundred big shells had been thrown over from
their field guns into the ruins. After the two hundredth shell
had dropped it was as safe in Verdun as in Emporia until the next
day. For the Germans are methodical in all things, and they spend
just so many shells on each enemy point, and no more. The German
work of destruction is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains intact
upon its walls; not a wall remains uncracked; not a soul lives in
the town; now and then a sentinel may be met patrolling the wagon
road that winds through the streets. This wagon road, by the way,
is the object of the German artillery's attention. Upon this road
they think the revitalment trains pass up to the front. But the
sentinels come and go. The only living inhabitants we saw in the
place were two black cats. It must have been a beautiful city before
the war--a town of sixty thousand and more. It contained some old
and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings--a cloister, a
bishop's residence, a school--or what not--that, even crumbled and
shattered by the shells, still show in ruins grace and charm and
dignity. And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellous
that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping
of men's hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing. And the
broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of
their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling
it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about
these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops
and stores--places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling
wreck--where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and
risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries
to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts,
pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly
groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little
round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a
table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris
and left to petrify as the shell wrecked it--a thousand little
details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town,
leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron--this was
the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished
their evening strafe.
From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruined
villages to a big base hospital. We came there in the dark before
moonrise, and met our ambulance men--mostly young college boys joyously
flirting with death under the German guns. They were stationed in
a tent well outside the big hospital building. They gave us a dinner
worth while--onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots,
some sort of pasta--perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omelet
soused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese and
coffee--and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on five
minutes' notice, an hour after the regular dinner. The ambulance men
were under the direct command of a French lieutenant--a Frenchman
of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully,
played host graciously and told us many interesting things about
the work of the army around him; and told it so simply--yet withal
so sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long after
we had left him. Three or four times a day we were meeting French
lieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front. But
this one was different. He was so gentle and so serious without
being at all solemn. He had been in the war for three years, and
said quite incidentally, that under the law of averages his time
was long past due and he expected to go soon. It didn't seem to
bother him. He passed the rum omelet with a steady hand. But his
serious mien had attracted the ambulance boys and upon the room of
his office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled in chalk,
"Defense absolutement de rire!" "It's absolutely forbidden to
laugh." Evidently American humour got on his nerves. As we dined
in the tent, the boys outside sang trench songs, and college songs
with trench words, and gave other demonstrations of their youth.
So we ate and listened to the singing, while the moon rose, and
with it came a fog--more than a fog--a cloud of heavy mist that
hid the moon. We moved our baggage from the tent to a vacant room
in a vacant ward in the big hospital. We saw in the misty moonlight
a great brick structure running around a compound. The compound was
over 200 feet square, and in the centre of the compound was a big
Red Cross made of canvas, painted red, on a background of whitewashed
stones. It was 100 feet square. On each side of the compound a
Red Cross blazed from the roof of the buildings, under the Geneva
lights--lights which the Germans had agreed should mark our hospitals
and protect them from air raids.
At midnight we left the hospital to visit those ambulance men who
were stationed at the first aid posts, up near the battle line.
It was an eery sort of night ride in the ambulance, going without
lights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle front of Verdun.
The white clay of the road was sloppy and the car wobbled and
skidded along and we passed scores of other vehicles going up and
coming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The Red
Cross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything but
ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalment
time. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions,
food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an army
going, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When we
reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been
climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at
a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could
see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards
into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In the
dugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandaged
before starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital,
and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing
inside out of the misty rain.
As we had been climbing the hill in the ambulance, the roar of the
big guns grew louder and louder. We believed it was French cannon.
But when we got out of the car we heard an angry whistle and a
roar which told us that German shells were coming in near us. As
we stood before the dugout shivering in the mist we saw beyond us,
over the hill, the glare of the French trench rockets lighting up
the clouds above us weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over the
white muddy road before us. On the road skirting the very door of
the dugout passed a line of motor trucks and carts--the revitalment
train. The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out of the mist
came a huge grey truck or a lumbering two-wheeled cart; and then,
creaking heavily past the dugout door, plunged into the mist again.
Never did the procession stop. At regular intervals the German
shells crashed into the woods farther up the hill beyond us. But
the silent procession before us--looming out of the mist, passing
us, and fading into the mist, kept constantly moving. In the
ghostly light of the misty moonshine, the procession seemed to be
spectral--like a line of passing souls. A doctor came out of the
dugout and started up the hill. He, too, was swallowed in the mist.
Ahead of us up the road were noises that told us the Germans were
landing bombs there, not half a mile--perhaps not much more than
a quarter of a mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that the
Germans were shelling a cross-road. They shelled it every night at
midnight to smash the revitalment train. The shells were landing
right in the road whereon all these trucks and horse carts were
passing. The doctor who left us returned in a few minutes in an
ambulance--wounded. Another ambulance came up with four or five
wounded. A shell had crashed in and wiped out a truck load of men.
But the procession under the misty moon never stopped--never even
hesitated. No driver spoke. No teams or trucks cluttered up the
road. As fast as a bomb shattered the road out there behind the
mist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers hurried up, cleared
the way, removed the debris and the ceaseless procession in the
ghostly moonlight moved on. Another ambulance brought in two more
wounded.
After one o'clock the bombing stopped. Some other cross-road was
taking its turn. Five men were buried that night in the little
cemetery there by the dugout. We stood or sat about for a while!
no one had much to say. The grey mist thickened and enveloped us.
And we became as very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in the mist
up the hill, near where the rocket's red glare flushed on the dim
horizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais." It
fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling
together. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one another
whistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the ship--the
Gilded Youth whose many millions had made him shimmer. He was not
shimmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field service
man, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talked
music--music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midst
of death, and the spirit that was moving men in the moonlight to
forget death for something more real than death. And so it came
about that the crescendo of our talk ran thus:
And courage--that thing which the Germans thought was their special
gift from Heaven, bred of military discipline, rising out of German
kultur--we know now is the commonest heritage of men. It is the
divine fire burning in the souls of us that proves the case for
democracy. For at base and underneath we are all equals. In crises
the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, the preacher,
the teacher, the labourer, the ignorant, the wise, all go to death
for something that defies death, something immortal in the human
heart. Those truck-drivers, those mule whackers, those common
soldiers, that doctor, these college men on the ambulances are
brothers tonight in the democracy of courage. Upon that democracy
is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a wider and deeper kinship
of men.
So then we knew that under the gilding of the Gilded Youth was
fine gold. He was called for a wounded man. As he cranked up his
car he asked rather too casually, "Have you seen our friend from
the boat--the pretty nurse?" We started to answer; the stretcher
bearer called again and in an instant he went buzzing away and we
returned to the hospital.
We slept that night in a hospital bed. The week before three thousand
men had passed through that hospital--some upon the long journey,
so we rose early the next morning. For some way to Henry and me
there seemed a curious disquietude about those hospital beds.
In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out the
dead from the hospital. The stretcher bearers moved as quickly as
they could with their burden through the yard. A dozen soldiers and
orderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a head
toward the bearers and their burden. There were indeed, in sad deed,
"a dearth of woman's nursing and a lack of woman's tears." No one
knew who the dead man was. He wore his identification tag about
him. No one cared except that it should be registered. If he was
an officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outside
the fence; if he was a private he went inside. It was a lonely,
heart-breaking sight. And it occurred to Henry and me--we had
been among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept
uneasily with the ghosts in the hospital--that we should give one
poor fellow a funeral. So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followed
the stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to his
tomb. It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever
had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and
gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows.
Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in
St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English
on us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, "Have
you heard the news from the big base hospital?" We had not. Then
he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the
hospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs--incendiary
bombs. An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives.
They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraft
guns near by--the allies until those August and September German
raids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided--they came
again swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctors
and the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out of
the burning building. Then toward morning they came and dropped
handbills which declared, "If you don't want your hospitals bombed,
move them back further from the front!"
The Germans were not acting in the heat of passion. They were fighting
scientifically, even if barbarously. For every mile a hospital is
moved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrene
in the wounded. And by checking gangrene we are saving a great
majority of our wounded to return to battle.
Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many wounded were killed that
night at Vlaincourt. "And the French officer de liason between the
French army and the American ambulance, what of him?" we asked.
"He slept in the hospital and was killed by a bomb," answered the
Frenchman.
So our serious faced French lieutenant knew all too well why "It
is absolutely forbidden to laugh" in war!