IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR
There is something, though Heaven knows not much, to be said for
war as war. And the little to be said is said when one declares that
it refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts. Routine kills men
and nations and races; it is stagnation. But war shakes up society,
puts men into strange environments, gives them new diversions,
new aims, changed ideals. In the faint breath of war that came to
Henry and me, as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitals
and first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, there was
a tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives that
really get into war as soldiers. Even we were for ever pinching
ourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strange
land, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively to
the science of slaughter. By rights we should have been sitting in
our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers,
wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our
miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year was
a trifle, dickering with foreign advertisers who desired to spread
before Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum or
talking machines, or discussing the ever changing Situation with
the local statesmen. At five o'clock Henry should be on his way to
the Wichita golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roar
of the muffler cut-out on the family car should be warning me that
we were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in the
sunset, where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid
sugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of my
figure.
But instead, here we were puffing up a hill in France, through
underbrush, across shell holes to a hidden trench choked with
telephone cables that should lead underground to an observation
post where a part of the staff of the French army sat overlooking
the battle of the Champagne. As we puffed and huffed up the hill,
we recalled to each other that we had been in our offices but a
few weeks before when the Associated Press report had brought us
the news of the Champagne drive for hill 208. Among other things
the report had declared "a number of French soldiers were ordered
into their own barrage, and several were shot for refusing to go
into action thereafter!" And now here we were looking through a
peep-hole in the camouflage at the battlefield! We were half way
up the hill; below us lay a weedy piece of bottom land, all kneaded
and pock-marked by shells, stretching away to another range of hills
perhaps five miles, perhaps ten miles away, as the valley widened
or narrowed. The white clay of the soil erupting under shell fire
glimmered nakedly and indecently through the weeds. It was hard to
realize that three years before the valley before us had been one
of the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little grey
towns with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be
"that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" There
it all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk," with its head chopped
off; "the dock's harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope
of greenness." "As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in
leprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath looked
kneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same field that Roland
crossed! In the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines--two white
gashes in the soil, with a scab of horrible brown rust scratched
between them--the French and German trenches and the barbed wire
entanglements. At some places the trenches ran close together, a few
hundred feet or a few hundred yards marked their distance apart.
At other times they backed fearfully away from one another with the
gashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping between them. We paused to
rest in our climb at a little shrine by the wayside. A communication
trench slipped deviously up to it, and through this trench were
brought the wounded; for the shrine, a dugout in the hillside, had
been converted into a first aid station. A doctor and two stretcher
bearers and two ambulance men were waiting there. Yet the little
shrine, rather than the trenches that crept up to it, dominated the
scene and the war seemed far away. Occasionally we heard a distant
boom and saw a tan cone of dirt rise in the bottom land among the
trenches, and we felt that some poor creature might be in his death
agony. But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of our party
climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his glasses
toward the German lines. Then the trenches about us suddenly grew
alive. The Frenchmen were waving their hands and running about
excitedly. Major Murphy was a Major--a regular United States Army
major in a regular United States army uniform so grand that compared
with our cheap cotton khaki it looked like a five thousand dollar
outfit. The highest officer near us was a French second-lieutenant,
who had no right to boss a Major! But something had to be done.
So the second lieutenant did it. He called down the Major; showed
him that he was in direct range of the German guns, and made it
clear that a big six-foot American in uniform standing silhouetted
against the sky-line would bring down a whole wagon-load of German
hardware on our part of the line. The fact that the German trenches
were two miles away did not make the situation any less dangerous.
Afterwards we left the shrine and the trenches and went on up the
hill.
[Illustration: One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout
and began turning his glasses toward the German lines]
The view from the observation trench on the hill-top, when we
finally got there, was a wonderful view, sweeping the whole Champagne
battle field. Hill 208 lay in the distance, still in German hands,
and before it, wallowing in the white earth were a number of English
tanks abandoned by the French. Lying out there in No Man's Land
between the trenches, the tanks looked to our Kansas eyes like worn
out threshing machines and spelled more clearly than anything else
in the landscape the extent of the French failure in the Champagne
drive of the spring of 1917. It may be profitable to know just how
far the pendulum of war had swung toward failure in France last
spring, before America declared war. To begin: The French morale
went bad! We heard here in America that France was bled white. The
French commission told us how sorely France needed the American
war declaration. But to say that the morale of a nation has gone
bad means so much. It is always a struggle even in peace, even
in prosperity, for the honest, courageous leadership of a nation
to keep any Nation honest. But when hope begins to sag, when the
forces of disorder and darkness that lie subdued and dormant in
every nation, and in every human heart are bidden by evil times
to rise--they rise. Leadership fails in its battle against them.
For a year after the morale of the French began to come back strong,
the French newspapers and French government were busy exposing and
punishing the creatures who shamed France in the spring of 1917.
German money has been traced to persons high in authority. A network
of German spies was uncovered, working with the mistresses of men
high in government--the kaiser is not above using the thief and the
harlot for his aims; money literally by the cartload was poured into
certain departments to hinder the work of the army, and the tragic
disaster of the Champagne drive was the result partly of intrigue
in Paris in the government, partly of poverty, partly the result
of three winters of terrible suffering in the nation, and partly
the weakening under the strain of all these things, of this "too
too solid flesh and blood." During the winter of 1916-17 soldiers
at the front received letters from home telling of starvation and
freezing and sickness in their families. And trench conditions in
the long hard winter were all but unbearable. When a soldier finally
got a leave of absence and started home, he found the railroad
system breaking down and he had long waits at junction points with
no sleeping quarters, no food, no shelter. French soldiers going
home on leave would lie all night and all day out in the open,
drenched by the rain and stained by the mud, and would reach home
bringing to their families trench vermin and trench fever and trench
misery untold, to add to the woe that the winter had brought to the
home while the soldier was away. Then when he went back to fight,
he found that a bureaucratic clash had left the soldiers without
supplies, or food or ammunition in sufficient quantities to supply
the battle needs. In the bureaucratic clash some one lost his head
in the army and ordered the men into their own barrage. Hundreds
were slaughtered. Thousands were verging on mutiny. A regiment
refused to fight, and another threatened to disobey. The American
ambulance boys told us that the most horrible task they did was
when they hauled eighty poor French boys out to be shot for mutiny!
Spies in Paris, working through the mistresses of the department
heads, the sad strain of war upon the French economic resources, and
the withering hand of winter upon the heart of France had achieved
all but a victory for the forces of evil in this earth.
And there we were that summer day, when time and events had changed
the face of fate, looking out across the blighted field of Champagne
at what might have been the wreck of France.
All is changed now. At every railroad junction the American Red
Cross has built cantonments, where beds and food and baths and
disinfecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for the homeward
bound soldiers of France. The American Red Cross has the name of
every French soldier's family that is in need, and that family's
needs are being supplied by the American Red Cross. And the sure
hope of victory has given the leadership of France a mastery of
the forces of evil in the lower levels of the Nation's political
consciousness that will make it impossible for the kaiser's friends,
the courtesans, to accomplish anything next winter.
We gazed across the field that afternoon and seeing the blotched
acres, weed blasted, shell-pocked, blistered with white trenches
and scarred with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and miles,
and we thought how perfectly does the spirit of man mark the picture
of his soul's agony upon his daily work.
It was late in the afternoon when we left that sector of the line.
We passed a bombed hospital where two doctors and three nurses had
been killed a night or two before. It was a disquieting sight, and
the big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the German
airmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. Gradually
as we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter and
fainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into a
wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. It
was bombed to death--but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must
have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate,
all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here and
there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to
their homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle
of commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral and
found its outlines there--a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the
pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and--if stone and iron
can be conscious--vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet
square has been gouged in the pavement by a German shell, and the
hole uncovers a hidden passage to the Cathedral of which no one
in this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about,
gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place cast
upon us, at the details of the devastation. The roof, of course,
is but a film of wood and iron rent with big holes. The walls are
intact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spires
and gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, and
the windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of the
church gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of glass
as art treasures.
That evening at supper in Chalons, we met some American boys who
said the French were selling this glass from the windows of Rheims
made from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and green bitters
bottles, and still later we saw an English Colonel who had bought
a job lot of it and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in a
piece!
We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the back
of the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalk
with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to
Henry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the
stone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole
in the pavement, and then to a broken iron shell. It must have
weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it
clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but
a few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock up
on post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talk
French, learned that another shell would be due in three or four
minutes, we left town.
The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hidden
only, and at that rather poorly, by camouflage--straw woven into
mats, and burlap, badly torn. We were between the German guns five
miles away, and the sunset. Great holes in the ground beside the
road indicated where they had been dropping shells, so our driver
tramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hour
and we skedaddled.
From the road out of Rheims we dropped into the valley of the Marne,
a most beautiful vine-clad valley, where the road turns sharply
from the German lines and soon passes out of the German range and
the shell holes at the side of the road disappear. But even shell
holes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley
as we wound down into it from the hill. Vines were everywhere. Rows
and rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in the
earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and they
gave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It glowed with
colour. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted the
checkered fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Tall
dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through
the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in our
faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold on
their uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags
of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills,
all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of
colours. And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered,
there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias--even
the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the
German bombardment--villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan,
from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the
Germans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, running
pell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers.
As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after
division of the French army was quartered upon the population,
thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we
realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every
few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come
in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front
or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far
away," but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful,
and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover,
the emotions of France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope lash
the home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions
comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human
heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day
or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village,
in the street, in the home. Five millions of men during the last
three years and a half have passed and re-passed, through those
fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are
quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men
have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring
women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous
and gentle and as kind.
For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded
with soldiers--kindly French soldiers who were clearly living
happily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henry
burst forth, "My good Heavens, man--what if this were in Wichita
or Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine
soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were
there alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting
about here were just little children three years ago when their
daddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by
the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but
rest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia--or back East in
Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awful
thing--what a hell in the earth, war is!"
And yet we know that young hearts will express themselves as they
were meant to express themselves even in the wrack and ruin and
waste of war. And this strange picture of love and death sitting
together some way reminded us of the phlox and the dahlias blooming
in the dreary dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle line.
And then our hearts turned to the youth on the boat--that precious
load of mounting young blood that came over with us on the Espagne
where we were the oldest people in the ship's company. And we began
talking of the Eager Soul and her Young Doctor and the Gilded Youth.
If the war could lash our old hearts as it was lashing them, so
that even our emotions were raw and more or less a-quiver in the
storm of the mingled passions of the world that overwhelmed us, how
much--how fearfully much more must their younger hearts be stirred?
How could youth come out of it all unscarred! And she was such a
sweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, so fine and brave and wise--yet
her heart was a girl's heart, after all. And the Young Doctor, his
keen sensitive face showed how near to the surface was the quick
in him. As for the Gilded Youth, we had seen there on the hill in
the misty night the great hammer of the guns pound the dross out
of him! And here they were all three alone, in the fury of this
awful storm that was testing the stoutest souls in the world, and
they were so young and so untried!
The roads over which we had been travelling for two days in our
car were military roads. And we could tell instantly when we were
inside the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking at the
road menders. If they were German prisoners we were outside the
thirty kilo strip. For when the Germans discovered last spring
that the Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the Germans
demanded a rule for the treatment of prisoners, which should keep
them thirty kilos from danger. It was a rule that the Allies had
been observing; but the Germans were not observing it, until they
found that they might suffer by non-observance. So when we left the
German prisoners and came to French road menders--generally French
Chinamen or Anamites, or negroes from Dahomey or other oriental
peoples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of the big guns.
These road menders always were at work. Beside every road a few
yards apart, always were little neatly stacked cones of road metal.
A road roller always was in sight. No road ever got bumpy and at
given distances along the road were repair stations for the government
automobiles. Nothing was allowed to stop the machinery of war. At
night along these country roads, thirty kilos back from the line
we travelled with lights; so that night out of Rheims, we hurried
through the night, passed village after village swarming with soldiers,
black and yellow and white; for the colour line does not irritate
the French; and we saw how gay and happy they were, crowding into
picture shows, listening to the regimental band, sitting on the
sidewalks before the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks.
Then a time came when the village streets were lonely and dark
and we knew that the bugle had sounded taps. And so in due course
we came to the end of the day's journey, at the end of a spur of
the railroad, near one sector of the Verdun front. There we found
a field hospital of four thousand beds. And when there is to
be renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, the first thing
that happens is the general evacuation of all the patients in the
hospital. It takes a great many railroad trains to clear out a
hospital wherein six thousand wounded men are jammed. We saw one
hospital train loading. This hospital had handled twenty-six hundred
cases in one day the week before we arrived. The big guns that we
had heard booming away for three days as we went up and down the
line had been grinding their awful grist. We walked through the
hospital, which covered acres of ground. It is a board structure,
some of the walls are not even papered, but show the two-by-fours
nakedly and the rafters above. Stoves heat most of the wards, and
hospital linoleum covers the runways between the rows of beds. Of
course, the operating rooms are painted white and kept spotless.
The French are marvellous surgeons, and their results in turning
men back to the line, both in per cent of men and time are up to
the normal average of the war; but they are not so finical about
flies and fresh air and unimportant dirt as the English or the
Americans. They probably feel that there are more essential things
to consider than flies and their trysting places! In this hospital
we saw our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen
years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We
saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic
type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby
looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and
the scum of the earth."
And we saw also some well-set-up Germans, and in a bull-pen near
the railroad station waiting for the trains to take them to the
interior of France were six thousand German prisoners--for the most
part well-made men. Here and there was a scrub--a boy, a defective,
or an old man; showing that the Germans are working these classes
through the army; but indicating, so far as one batch of prisoners
from one part of the battle line may indicate, that the Germans
still have a splendid fighting army. But the old German army that
came raging through Belgium and northern France in 1914 is gone.
Germany is well past the peak in man power, as shown in the soldiers
of the line. It is also likely that the morale of the German line
has its best days behind it. The American ambulance men in the Verdun
sector told us of a company of German soldiers who had come across
a few nights before to surrender, after killing their officers.
They appeared at about ten o'clock at night, and told the French
to cease firing at exactly that time the next night for ten minutes
and another troop of Germans would come across. The French ceased
at the agreed hour and thirty more came over and brought the mail
to their comrades! That, of course, is not a usual occurrence. But
similar instances are found. The best one can say of the German
morale in the army is that it is spotted. In civilian life the nearer
one gets to Germany the surer one is that the civilian morale seems
to be sound. These things we found in the air up near the front
line trenches, where German prisoners talk, and where one sees the
war "close up."
But we were going still nearer to the German lines, and the next
day we set out for Recicourt and arrived there about noon. It is a
little bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are quartered,
and a few score villagers huddle in cellars and caves by night and
go forth to their farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. The
railway runs in front of the town, and the week we were there a
big naval gun was booming away on the railroad throwing death into
the German lines eight or ten miles away. At the back of the town,
across a bridge over a brook the white wagon road runs, and that
day the road was black with trucks going up to the front line with
supplies. We could hear the big guns plainly over in the woods a
few miles away. But we had no thought of danger as we tumbled out
of our car. We should have known that bombed villages don't just
grow that way! Something causes the gaping holes in roofs, the
shattered walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out-buildings!
Generally it is German shells, but we had been seeing bombed towns
for days, and we forgot that sooner or later we must meet the
bombs that did the miserable work. As we stood by the automobiles
at Recicourt, kicking the wrinkles out of our cotton khaki riding
breeches--and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to preserve
that pie-slice cut from my shirt tail that expanded the waistband
from 36 to 44 inches--little did it seem to Henry and me that
we should first meet a German shell face to face in a place like
Recicourt. The name did not sound historic. But we had scarcely
shaken hands around the group of American Ambulance men who gathered
to greet us before we heard a B-A-N-G!--an awful sound! It was as
if someone suddenly had picked up the whole Haynes Hardware store--at
Emporia--tinware, farm implements, stoves, nails and shelf-goods,
and had switched it with an awful whizz through the air and landed
it upon the sheet-iron roof of Wichita's Civic Forum, which seats
six thousand! We looked at each other in surprise, but each realized
that he must be casual to support the other; so we said nothing
to the Ambulance boys, and they, being used to such things, let it
pass also. We went on talking; so did Major Murphy, being a soldier.
So did Mr. Richard Norton, being head of the American Ambulance
Service. In a minute there was a fearful whistle--long, piercing,
and savage, and then they had taken the Peters Hardware stock in
Emporia and dumped it on the Wichita Union Station. This time we
saw a great cone-shaped cloud of dirt rise not 400 feet away--over
by the wagon road, across the brook from us. Still no one mentioned
the matter. It seemed to Henry and me to be anything but a secret,
but if the others had that notion of it, far be it from us to blab!
An ambulance driver came lazying around the corner and began to
start his car.
"Any one hurt, Singer?" asked a handsome youth named Hughes, of
the Corps.
"Man hit by the first shell up here by the railroad. I'm going
after him."
"Hurt badly?" asked another boy.
"Oh, arm or shoulder or something blown off. I'll be back for
lunch."
The details interested us; we could see that the secret was being
uncovered. Again came an awful roar and another terrific bang--this
time the dust cloud rose nearer to us than before--perhaps 300 feet
away. Every one ducked. In five seconds they had taught me to duck.
It's curious how quickly the adult mind acquires useful information.
But Henry for some reason got a bad start, and his duck needed
correction. To duck, you scrooch down, and shrink in, to get as
much as possible of your body under the eaves of your steel helmet.
Somewhere between the second and third bang, they got a helmet on
me. No one knows where it came from, nor how it got there. But
there it was, while they were correcting Henry's duck. In spite of
them, when he ducked, Henry would lean forward, thus multiplying
his exposure by ten. But it really does a fat man little good to
duck anyway; the eaves of his helmet hardly cover his collar. It
was while they were trying to telescope Henry that some one grabbed
me by the arm and said: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!" Abri was
a brand new word to me, but it seemed to be some place to go and
that was enough for me.
"Where" (read this line with feeling and emphasis) "is the abri?"
The ambulance boy took me by the arm and led me on a trot to a
dugout covered with railroad iron, and logs and sand bags, and we
went in there and found it full of French officers. They have some
sense. The abri would not turn a direct explosion of a shell; but
it would shield one against a glancing blow and against the shrapnel
which sprays itself out from the point where the shell hits like
a molten iron fountain. After the ninth bomb had come over we left
the abri. The Germans had been allowancing Recicourt to nine a
day. But that day they gave us three more prunes for dessert. They
came very close and fairly fast together. As they came Henry was
sitting in the barn where the ambulance boys had their meals. Lunch
was on the table and Henry was writing. The shells sounded just
outside the barn. "What are you writing, Mr. Allen?" asked Major
Murphy. "I'm sketching," stuttered the Wichita statesman, "a sort
of a draft of the American terms of peace!"
After three extra bombs had come in the Germans turned their
guns from the town, and we had our lunch at our ease. And such a
lunch! A melon to begin with; a yellow melon that looks like the
old-fashioned American muskmelon and tastes like a nectar of the
gods, followed by onion soup. Then followed an entree, a large
thin slice of cold sausage which they afterward told us was made
of horse meat, a pate of some kind, then roast veal sliced thin
and slightly underdone with browned potatoes; then new beans served
as a separate course; then fruit and cheese and coffee and cigars!
And that in a barn!
[Illustration: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!"]
We had to go up to a first aid station after lunch so we piled
into an ambulance, were buttoned in from the back by the driver,
and went sailing up the hill and into the woods. They told us that
we were in the Avecourt Woods in the Forest of Hess. We remembered
that but a few weeks before when we were in our newspaper offices,
that the Avecourt Woods had been the scene of some fierce and bloody
fighting. And as we rode up the hill we heard the French cannon
roaring all about us. We were told that four thousand cannon were
planted in the Avecourt Woods, but only about a thousand of them
were active that day. Yet we could see none, so completely were they
hidden by camouflage. The woods were barren of leaves or branches
though they should have been in foliage. We gazed through the windows
of the ambulance into the stark forest with its top off, and then
rather gradually it occurred to me that the white objects carefully
corded against the tree trunks were not sticks of cord wood at all,
as they seemed, and as they should have been if the wood had been
under the ax instead of under fire. They were French seventy-five
shells--deadly brass cartridges two feet long, all nicely and
peacefully corded against the trunks of the big trees! We rode
through them for several miles. Beside the road always were the
little heaps of road metal, little heaps of stone, and always the
engineers stood ready to refill the holes that might be made by
the incoming shells. And occasionally they were coming in; though
they seemed to be landing in a distant part of the forest. The
ear becomes curiously quick at telling the difference between what
are known as arrives and departs. The departs were going out that
day at the ratio of 32 to one arrive. For the Germans had wasted
enough ammunition on the Verdun sector and were trying to economize!
Still the arrives were landing in the Avecourt wood every minute
or so, and they were disquieting. Only the chirping of our own
broad-mouthed Canaries there in the roofless forest gave us cheer.
For some way the sound of the shells of our own guns shrieking
over us is a deep comfort; it is something like the consolation of
a great faith.
At last, seven or eight miles in the forest, we came upon the first
aid post, a quarter of a mile from the opposite edge of the wood
and but half a mile from the front line trenches of Verdun The first
aid post there was a cellar, half excavated, and half covered with
earth, and roofed with iron rails, logs and sandbags. The usual
French doctors, stretcher bearers and American Ambulance men were
there. And there was the little cemetery, always found at a first
aid post where those are buried who die on the stretchers or in the
dugout. It was lovingly adorned by the French with the tri-colour
of France, with bronze wreaths, with woodland flowers, and was
altogether bright and beautiful in the bare woods. They showed
us a shell by the cave--a gas shell that had come over during the
morning and had hit on the oblique and had not exploded. It was
gently leaking chlorine gas, which we sniffed--but gingerly. Other
shells were popping into the place and fairly near us with some
regularity and enthusiasm, and it seemed to Henry and me that we
had no desire to stare grim war's wrinkled front out of countenance,
and we hoped that the Major and Mr. Norton were nearly ready to go
back. But we heard this:
From the Major: "How far forward can we go toward Hill 304; we would
like to see it, but have no desire to go further than you care to
have us."
And from the French lieutenant in charge: "Go to Berlin if you want
to!"
It occurred to Henry and me, considering our feelings, that the
Major's nonchalant use of that "we" was without the consent of
the governed. But when he started forward we followed. Our moral
cowardice overwhelmed our physical cowardice, and our legs tracked
ahead while our hearts tracked back. The Major swung along the road
at a fast clip; Mr. Norton went with him. For short-geared men we
followed as fast as we could, but it was at a respectful distance.
Nearer and nearer we came to the open field, and by the same token,
quicker and nearer and hotter came the German shells. We were
continually on the duck. Our progress had an accordion rhythm that
made distance come slow. We came to a dead mule in the road. He
had been bombed recently, and was not ready for visitors. Now a
mule is not nature's masterpiece at his best; but in the transition
state between a mule and hamburger, a mule leaves much to be
desired. As we passed the forward reaches of the mule, Henry began
his kidding. He always begins to guy a situation under emotion.
"Bill," he cried, "if we die we'll at least save our nice new
hundred dollar uniforms down there in Paris!" And from me he got
this: "And say, Henry--if we die we won't have to face our wives
and tell 'em we paid that much for a two-piece suit! There's that
comfort in sudden death!"
It seemed to Henry and me that we had seen all there was to be seen
of the war. Hill 304 would be there after the treaty of peace was
signed and the Major and Norton then could come to see it. But
they were bound for Berlin; so we slowly edged by that poor mule;
he seemed to be the longest mule we had ever--well, he seemed to
be a sort of trans-continental mule, but we finally got past him
and came to the edge of the woods. It took about three ducks to
twenty yards, and passing the mule we had four downs and no gain.
That gave the Germans the ball. So when we got to the edge of the
wood and were standing looking into the French trenches and at Hill
304 off at our right, after the Major had handed Norton the field
glasses and Norton had considerately handed them to Henry, who passed
them to me for such fleeting glance as politeness might require,
the Germans came back with that ball. It came right out of Berlin,
too. One could hear it howl as it crossed the Thiergarten and went
over Wilhelm Strasse and scream as it whizzed over Bavaria. There
never was another such shell. And we ducked--all of us. Henry said
he never saw me make such a duck--it was the duck of a life-time.
And then that shell landed. It was a wholesale hardware store
that hit--no retail affair. The sound was awful. And then something
inside of me or outside tore with an awful rip. We had been reading
Dr. Crile's book on the anesthesia of fear, and suddenly it occurred
to me that the shell had hit me and torn a hole in me and that fear
had deadened the pain. Slowly and in terror my right hand groped
back to the place of the wound, expecting every moment to encounter
blood and ragged flesh. We were still crouched over, waiting for
the fountain of junk to cease spraying. Nearer and nearer came the
shrinking fingers to the wound. They felt no blood, but something
more terrible! There, dangling by its apex, hung that pie-shaped
slice of shirt from those cotton khaki trousers--ripped clear out!
And Paris fifty miles away!
Slowly we unfolded ourselves from the duck. And as we came up--sping!
went a sharp metallic click on Norton's helmet. A bit of shrapnel
had hit it. Under a hat he would have been killed! So we went back
to the first aid post--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer
force of will, and both hands!
So long as Norton and the Major had led the way from the dugout,
it simultaneously flashed over Henry and me that we should lead the
way back, and not leave all the exertion to our companions. So we
set the pace back.
At the first aid post we stopped for breath. The French welcomed
us back, and we rested a moment under their hospitality. Our own
French guns were carolling away; the arrives were coming in. It
seemed to Henry and me that we were not so badly frightened as we
knew we were. For we kept a running fire going of airy persiflage--which
was like the noise of boys whistling through a graveyard. Henry
said: "That German gunner is playing by ear! His time is bad, or
else it's syncopated." Then to Major Murphy: "Nice sightly location
that Hill 304; but I noticed real estate going up a good deal in
the neighbourhood!" And to the assembled company in the dugout he
remarked as he pulled out his pipe, a short Hiram Johnson, bulldog
model that he had bought on the Rue de Rivoli, "If you gentlemen
will get out your gas masks now I'll light my dreadnaught!" Which
he did and calmed his iron nerves. So in a few moments we came out
of the post and went to our ambulance which would take us back to
Recicourt. Clouds had blown across the sky and as we passed the
gay little cemetery by the dugout, we were shocked to see the body
of a French lieutenant laid ready for burial. He had met death
while we played the fool in our twenty minutes' walk.
We rode to Recicourt greatly sobered, and it was hours before we
could get back our spirit. Of course, eventually, kind hands pinned
up the rent in the corsage of those khaki trousers. They used a
dozen big steel safety pins as large as railway spikes. And that
night as we were preparing for bed in a shack near a hospital,
Henry gazed curiously at the job as it glittered before him in
our corner, when, his friend's tunic being removed, the wealth of
metal was uncovered. Henry was impressed. "Bill," he said gently,
as he gazed admiringly at his friend's armour, "I don't know as I
ever saw a man before with so much open plumbing on him as you're
wearing these days!"
For a long time we lay awake and talked about the day's experience,
and particularly our half day under fire. We agreed that really it
was not so bad. We were scared--badly scared; but we could laugh
at it, even at the hottest of it, and it was never so exceedingly
hot. Yet we might have been killed. Thousands who died, went out
in just such mild places as we had been through, and probably went
out laughing as we might have gone, by a jiggle of a quarter of
an inch one way or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita and
Emporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless live days and weeks
under what we had seen and would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused:
"I wonder if that young French lieutenant there in the woods went
out smiling!" And then for a long time no one spoke, and at last
we slept.
[Illustration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up
by sheer force of will and both hands!]