IN WHICH WE DISCERN THINGS "BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT"
At the close of one fair autumn day our car developed tire trouble,
in a village "Somewhere in France," not far from the headquarters
of the American Army. There are four excellent reasons for deleting
the name of the town. First, the censor might not like to have
it printed; second, because the name of the place has escaped my
memory; third, because there is a munition factory there and it
should not be mentioned, and fourth, because even if the name of
the place returned to me, its spelling would get lost in transit.
In passing it should be said in this connection that it seemed
to Henry and me that the one thing France really needed was a
pronounceable language and phonetic spelling. The village where we
stopped really was not a village in the Kansas sense; it was twice
as big as Emporia and nearly half as big as Wichita, which is
70,000. But the thing that made the place seem like a village to
us was the town crier. As we sat in the car he came down the street
beating a snare drum and crying the official news of the sugar
ration; he was telling the people where they could get sugar, how
much they should pay for it and how much they should use for each
member of a family a month.
"Why," asked Henry of an English speaking bystander, "don't you
put that in your daily newspaper; why keep up the old custom?"
"We have no daily newspaper," answered the inhabitant.
"All right, then, is there any reason why the news won't wait for
the weekly?" asked Henry.
"And we have no weekly and no monthly and no annual. We have no
newspaper in this town."
That stumped us both. In America every town of five thousand has
its daily newspaper, and frequently two dailies, and in the West
every town of five hundred people has its weekly newspaper. With us
the newspaper crystallizes public sentiment, promotes local pride,
and tries to be the social and intellectual centre of the community. A
community of twenty-five thousand without a newspaper--and we found
that this community never had supported a newspaper--was unthinkable
to us in terms of any civilization that we knew. How do they know
about the births, deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they told
us that the churches recorded those things. How do they know about
the scandal? And we remembered that scandal was older than the
press; it was the father of the press, as the devil is the father
of lies. How do they know how to vote? And they told us that
newspapers hindered rather than helped that function. How did they
record local history? And in our hearts, we knew who had recorded
so much local history, that most of it is not worth recording and
that tradition takes care of what is left. But how did they manage
to create a town spirit, to vote the bonds for the city waterworks,
to establish the public library, to enforce the laws, to organize
the Chamber of Commerce, to get up subscriptions for this, that or
the other public benevolence? And men shook their heads and said:
Water has run down hill many years; perhaps it will keep on running,
even without a newspaper.
[Illustration: As we sat in the car he came down the street beating
a snare drum and crying official news of the sugar ration]
It was a sad blow to Henry and me, who thought our calling was a
torch-bearer of civilization. Indeed, one may digress and say that
we found the whole estate of the press in France rather disenchanting.
For advertising is not regarded as entirely "ethical" in France.
The big stores sometimes do not advertise at all; because people
look with the same suspicion on advertising drygoods and clothing
merchants as we in America look upon advertising lawyers and doctors.
So newspapers too often have to sell their editorial opinions, and
the press has small influence in France, compared with the influence
of the press in what we call the Anglo-Saxon countries.
But in that French village of twenty-five thousand people without
a newspaper we found a civilization that compared favourably with
the civilization in any American town. While the tire was going on
it developed that a cog had slipped in the transgression of the
car--or something of the sort, so we were laid up for an hour,
and we piled out of our seats and took in the town. We found four
good bookstores there--rather larger than our bookstores at home.
We found two or three big co-operative stores largely patronized
by industrial workers and farmers, and they were better stores by
half than any cooperative stores we had seen in America. For with
us the co-operative store is generally a sad failure. Our farmers
talk big about cooperation, but they sneak around and patronize
the stores that offer the best bargains, and our industrial workers
haven't begun to realize how co-operative buying will help them. We
found no big stores, in the American sense, but we found many bright,
well-kept shops. In electrical supplies we found the show windows
up to the American average, which is high indeed; but in plumbing
there was a sag. We discovered that the town had comparatively few
sewers. The big, white-tiled bathroom with its carload of modern
fixtures which adorns the show window of at least one plumber's shop
in every American town--we missed. The bathtub is not a household
need in France. Yet some way we surmised that if our towns could
have better bookstores and fewer bathtubs we might have felt easier
in our minds for the palladiums of our liberties. And it can't be
laid to the picture shows--this slump in the American book reading
average; for the French towns are just as full of picture shows
as American towns. That superiority in bookstores which lies with
the French over the Americans, should give us pause. It more than
overbalances our superiority in country newspapers. And then as
we walked about the town that evening in the sunset pondering upon
these things we came to the town park.
It was not a large park; but it lay close down to the main street--"right
in the heart of the city," we would say at home. Everyone in town
who moved about, to the stores from the residential streets, had to
pass through that park. In it were certain long rows of grey-barked
trees--trees with trunks that shimmered like the trunks of sycamores,
but that rose sheer from the ground forty feet before branching,
and then spread widely and calmly into mighty sprays of foliage.
One could not walk under those trees day after day and year after
year through life and not feel their spell upon his heart. "From
the old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in the
heaven," to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhaps
more or less sordid routine, must inevitably come "the thought
of boundless power and inaccessible majesty!" And that is a good
thought to keep in the heart. That grove in the midst of that little
French town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a daily
newspaper, more than a trolley line or a convention hall. For it
called incessantly to men a mute inexorable summons to the things
outside ourselves that make for righteousness in this earth. We
in America, we in the everlasting Wichitas and Emporias, are prone
to feel that we can make for righteousness what or when we will
by calling an election, by holding a public meeting, by getting a
president, a secretary and a committee on ways and means, by voting
the bonds! But they who walk daily through groves like this, must
in very spite of themselves give some thought to the hand that
"reared these venerable columns and that thatched the verdant
roof!" Now in every French town, we did not find a grove like this.
But in every French town we did find something to take its place,
a historic spot marked with a beautiful stone or bronze; a gently
flowing river, whose beauty was sacredly guarded; a group of old,
old buildings that recalled the past, a cathedral that had grown
almost like the woods themselves, out of the visions of men into
the dreams of men. And these dumb teachers of men have put into the
soul of France a fine and exquisite spirit. It rose at the Marne
and made a miracle.
And ever since the Marne that spirit has ruled France. Essentially
it is altruistic. Men are not living for themselves. They are living
for something outside themselves; beyond themselves, even beyond
the objects of their personal affection. Men are living and dying
today not for any immediate hope of gain for their friends or
families, but for that organized political unit which is a spiritual
thing called France. We Americans who go to France are agreed that
we have never in our lives seen anything like the French in this
season of their anguish. They are treading the winepress as no
other modern nation has trodden it, pressing their hearts' blood
into the bitter wine of war. They grumble, of course, as they do
their hard stint. The French proverbially are a nation of grumblers.
Napoleon took them grumbling for fifteen years to glory. He took
them grumbling to Moscow, and brought them grumbling back. They
grumbled under the Second Empire and into the Republic. In 1916
they all but grumbled themselves into revolution. One heard revolt
whispered in a thousand places. But they did not revolt. They will
not revolt. Grumbling is a mere outer mannerism. In their hearts
they are brave.
Over and over again as we went about France were we impressed
with the courage and the tenacity of the French. By very contrast
with their eternal grumbling did these traits seem to loom large
and definite and certain. We met Dorothy Canfield in Paris, one
of the best of the younger American novelists. She told us a most
illuminating story. She has been two years in France working with
the blind, and later superintending the commissary department of
a training camp for men in the American Field Ambulance service.
She is a shrewd and wise observer, with a real sense of humour, and
Heaven knows a sense of humour is necessary if one gets the truth
out of the veneer of tragedy that surfaces the situation. [Footnote:
This story appeared in Everybody's Magazine in Dorothy Canfield's
own words.] It seems that she was riding into Paris from her training
camp recently, and being tired went to sleep in her compartment,
in which were two civilians, too old for military service. She was
awakened by a wrangle and then--but let her tell it:
"Then I saw a couple of poilus sticking their heads in our window
shaking a beret and asking for contributions to help them enjoy
their week's leave of absence in Paris. My two elderly Frenchmen
had given a little, under protest, saying (what was perfectly true)
that it would go for drink and wouldn't do the poilus any good.
And one of the soldiers was declaiming about the fat bourgeois who
stayed at home and let himself be defended and then wouldn't give
a helping hand to the poor soldier on rest leave! To get rid of them,
I put a franc in the beret. This was received with acclamations,
and they inquired to whom should they drink a toast with the money.
I said, 'Oh, give a good Vive l'Amerique. That'll suit me best!'
They both shouted, 'Oh, is Madame an American?' And to the dismay
of the two bourgeois, put first one long leg and then another through
the window and came in noisily to sit down (they were standing on
the running-board all this time with the train going forty miles
an hour...a thing which was simply unheard-of in France before the
war...one of the 'privileges' which the poilu take!). Well, they
shook hands with me two or three times over and assured me they
had never seen an American before...and indeed the two bourgeois
looked at me curiously. Then one of them began to talk boisterously,
expressing himself with great fluency and occasionally with a
liberty of phrase which wasn't conventional at all, another poilu
privilege! They sat down, evidently for a long visit. They were
typical specimens: one was noisy, fluent, slangy, coarse, quite
eloquent at times, a real Parisian of the lower classes, the kind
which leaves its shirt open at the neck over a hairy chest and
calls itself proudly 'the proletariat.' The other was a fresh-faced,
vigorous country man from Bourgogne, the type that corresponds to
the middle western American, a kind of Emporian! He hadn't much
to say, but when he did speak, spoke to the purpose. They both,
through all their roughness and coarseness and evident excitement
over starting on their 'permission,' had that French instinctive
social tact and amenity (of a sort) which keeps decent women from
being afraid of them or from hesitating to talk with them; and they
were both very sincere, and desperately trying to express something
of the strange confusion that is in everybody's mind ever since
the war...what are we all doing anyhow!"
[Illustration: They were standing on the running board all this
time with the train going forty miles an hour]
"Here are some of the things the fluent Paris 'cockney' said...for
the type corresponds in Paris to the lower-class cockney of London.
"'See here, you know, we've had enough of it...WE CAN'T STAND
IT ANY MORE! I'm just back from the Chemin des Dames...you know
what that's been for the last month'...then he gave me a terrible
description of that battle...'how do you expect men to go back to
that...do you know what happens to you when you live for twenty-thirty
days like that?...you go mad! Yes, THAT'S what happens to you...that's
what's the trouble with me now...I know I sound wild. I am wild...I
CAN'T stand any more...it's more than flesh and blood can endure
to go back into that! Why don't the Americans GET in it if they are
going to? Oh, yes, I know they can't any sooner...but why didn't
they get IN, before! Oh, yes, I know why. I know...but when you are
mad you can't stop to reason. We look at it this way...When we're
not mad, from having been too many days under fire...we say, as we
talk it over...There are the English...they've done splendidly...they've
taken two years, it is true, to get their army really in shape...but
they didn't have anything to begin with...they're fine...all that
we could expect. But all the same, during the two years, Frenchmen were
dying like flies...just watering the whole North with blood...yes,
I've seen a brook run red just like the silly poems that nobody
believed. And the Americans...yes...suppose this man and I should
get to quarrelling. Of course you can't jump right in and decide
which is to blame, if you don't know much about the beginning. You
HAVE to stand off and watch, and see which fights fair, and all
the rest...BUT WHILE YOU ARE DECIDING, ALL FRANCE IS DYING. It is
time the weight of the defence is taken off France...there won't
be any Frenchmen left alive in France...and here she is with all
these foreigners over-running her! Do you suppose they are going to
leave after the war? Not much. All these Algerians and Senegals
and Anamites--not to speak of the Belgians and English and
Americans...there won't be any Frenchmen left alive, and France will
be populated by foreigners...THAT'S what we have to look forward
to for all the reward of our blood. They keep promising help, but
they don't bring it. WE have to go back and go back! I tell you,
Ma'ame, THREE YEARS IS TOO LONG A TIME! No man can stand three
years of war! It makes you into somebody else... you've died so
many times you're like a walking corpse...isn't that just how you
feel?' he appealed to his companion, who said impassively,
"'No, damn you, that isn't a bit how I feel. I just say to myself,
"IT'S WAR" and "THAT'S THE WAY WAR IS," and I don't TRY to make
anything out of it the way you do. That's silly! You just have to
stick it out. Understanding it hasn't anything to do with it.'
"The first one went off on another tack...still wilder and more
incoherent. 'It's the capitalists...that's what it is...they saw
that the people...the proletariat...that's ME,' with a thump of
his fist on his chest, 'had begun to see too clearly how things
were going and so they stirred up this hornet's nest to blind
everybody...for in war even more than in peace (and that's saying
a good deal)...it's the proletariat that bears the burdens. Who
do you think is in the trenches now...is the bourgeois class? NO!
It's the labouring class. One by one, the bourgeois have slipped
out of it. Got themselves the fat jobs at the rear, work in
hospitals... anything but to stay out in the front-line trenches
with us poor rats of working-people! Isn't that so?'
"He appealed to his companion, who answered again very calmly (it
was extraordinary how they didn't seem to mind differing diametrically
from each other. I suppose they had the long habit of arguing
together). 'No, it's not so! In my company there are as many
bourgeois as labouring men.'
"The first man never paid the least attention to these brief denials
of everything he was saying. 'It's the proletariat that always
pays...isn't it so, Ma'ame! Peace or war, old times or new, it's
always the poor who pay all the debts! And they're doing it to such
a tune now in France that there won't be any left, when the war is
over... oh, it's got to stop. There's no use talking about it...and
it WILL, too, one of these days...who CARES how it stops! Life...any
sort of life...is better than anything else.'
"At this the other soldier said, 'Don't pay any attention to him,
Madame, he always goes on so...but he'll stick it out just the
same. We all will. That's the nature of the Frenchman, Madame. He
must have his grievance. He must grumble and grumble but when it's
necessary, he goes forward just the same...Only he has to talk such
a lot before!'
"'Oh, yes, we'll HOLD them, fast enough!' agreed the first one.
'We'll never let them get past us!' (This type of declaring poilu
is much given to contradicting himself flatly!) 'But never, never,
NEVER an offensive again, from the French...you SEE, Madame--Never
again an offensive from the French! They've done their share!
They've done more than their share. Never an offensive. We'll hold
till the Americans get here, but not more!'
"We were pulling into the station at Meaux by this time, and as the
train stood there waiting, I heard a sound that brought my heart
up into my mouth...the sound of a lot of young men's voices singing
an American College song! Everybody sprang to the windows and there
was a group of American boys, in their nice new uniforms, singing
at the tops of their voices, and putting their heads together like
a college glee-club. Their clear young voices completely filled
that great smoky station and rang out with the most indescribably
confident inspiriting effect! 'Good God!' cried the dingy, battered
soldier at my elbow, 'how little they know what they are going into!'
The soldier from Bourgogne said nothing, but looked very stern and
sad. The contrast between those two men, one so rebellious, the
other so grimly enduring, both so shabby and war-worn, and those
splendidly fresh boys outside, seemed to me the most utterly symbolic
episode imaginable. There was America--there was France.
"It changed the current of the talk. After that we talked all
together, the two bourgeois joining in...sober talk enough, of
probabilities and hopes and fears.
"As I walked home at one o'clock in the morning through the silent
black streets of Paris, turning over and over what that poor
disinherited slum-dweller had said as we parted, quite as earnestly
and simply as he had poured out all his disgust and revolt, 'Good-bye,
Ma'ame, I never met an American before. I hope I'll meet many more.
You tell the Americans the FRENCH WILL SEE IT THROUGH...if a new
offensive is necessary...we'll do it! It's the only chance anybody
has to have a world fit to live in!'"
When she had finished her story, Dorothy Canfield concluded something
like this: "That's what they all come back to, after their fit of
utter horror at their life is over. It does them good, apparently,
to talk it all out to a patient listener. They always, always end
by saying that even what they are living through is better than a
world commanded by the Germans...what a perfectly amazing distrust
that nation has accumulated against itself!"
They are sick of war; war weary and sad. Yet they will fight on.
The will to fight is outside the individual will; yet it is not
the will of the leaders, nor is it the will of the many combined
in a common will. For the many are tired unto death of war. But for
all that they will fight on without flinching. It is the national
will--the will deeper than the will of leaders, stronger than the
molten will of the many in one purpose. It is the tradition of
centuries; it is the unexpressed purpose, perhaps unconscious habit
of an old, old people, united far down in the roots of them; not
so much by race, for the Franks are of many breeds; not so much
by industrial or geographical ties or even political unity, though
it approaches that; but bound most surely by the sense of national
tradition. A people is fighting. From a thousand villages with
their primeval temples, with their lovely cathedrals grown out of
the hearts of the race buried in the shadow of their spires, from
the shining rivers that flow through green pastures, from soft hills
rich in folk tales of heroes, come the millions; and from Paris,
ever radiant in her venerable youth, come other millions who make
this fighting soul of the nation. What if it grumbles as it fights;
it will still fight on. Of course it is sick of war; but it will
not stop. It is a spirit that is fighting in France, the spirit of
a brave people.
We have in France a few hundred thousand men and will soon have a
million and more who are offering their lives in Service. But the
whole French nation is giving thus. And it is without hate. One
finds instead of hatred in France a feeling of deep disgust for the
German and all his works. The spirit of the French is not vicious.
It is beautiful. When the war ceases that may subside, may retire
to the under consciousness of the people. But it will not depart.
It also will remain eternally a part of the salvage of this war.
By the time the transgression of our car had been sufficiently
atoned for, dusk was falling. And Henry broke away from the gothic
arches of the trees and made for a tavern. He had learned that
one must take food in France where he can find it, and ten minutes
later we came upon him in front of the inn, talking in a slow loud
voice to what was either the inn-keeper's daughter or his pretty
young wife thus: "I said," Henry paused and nodded his head and beat
the thing in with his hand; "we want some supper--de jurnay--toot
sweet!" She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders very prettily
and said she could not "say pa." And Henry laughed and went on,
still enunciating each word distinctly. "Ah, don't tell us you can't
'Say pa': say 'wee wee.'" And again he told her "toot sweet." That
was the only part of the French language that Henry was entirely
sure of--that and "comb be-ah!" But we could not get it through
her head. So we loaded ourselves into the car and headed back for
St. Dizier, where at least they understood Henry's gestures, and
we could get food!
Our next journey took us to the greatest training camp in the
allied part of the world. It is not the largest camp, of course.
It accommodates less than twenty thousand soldiers. But it is what
might be called the post graduate college of all training camps.
Here ten thousand men come every week from other training camps
all over the earth, and are given intensive training. For six days,
eighteen and twenty hours a day, these soldiers, trained by many
months' labour on other fields, are given the Ph.D. in battle lore,
and are turned out the seventh day after a Saturday night lecture
on hate, and shot straight up to the front. In all France there is
no more grisly place for the weak-stomached man than this training
camp--not even the front line trenches will kick up his gorge more
sedulously. Yet at first sight the place looks innocent enough.
One sees a great basin hollowed among the hills, and in the ten
thousand acre plain one sees horse-men galloping, soldiers running,
great trucks and tanks lumbering over the field; men digging, men
throwing hand-grenades, men clambering over trench walls, stumbling
over crater holes, men doing all the innumerable things that are
learned by those who carry on the handicraft of war.
But when one starts with the first class and goes along through
the day's work with it, the deadly seriousness of the training gets
to him. The first thing the first class does is to gather around a
sergeant major, who in a few simple words tells his pupils how to
use the bayonet. Then they go out and use the bayonet as he has
taught them. Then the pupils gather around another sergeant major,
who tells them how to use the hand-grenade or the knife or the butt
of a gun, and the simple-hearted lads go out and use the grenade,
the knife, or the butt of the gun. At length they are taken to
a part of the ground where some trenches are sunken in the earth.
Before the trenches are barbed wire entanglements and deep jagged
shell craters. The imitation enemy trenches badly bombed by barrage
lie twenty rods beyond. The men are taken in hand by the amiable
sergeant major and taught to yell and roar, and growl and snarl, to
simulate the most murderous passion, and the simulation of a husky
youth in his twenties of a murderous passion is realistic enough
to make your flesh creep; for the very simulation produces the
passion, as every wise man's son doth know. Then the youths are
lined up in the trench, and numbered "one-two; one-two; one-two";
clear down the trench. Then the order is given to go over the top.
Every gun rattles on the trench-top, and the second lieutenant
goes over. In the English papers the list of dead begins "Second
lieutenant, unless otherwise designated." And in the war zone the
second lieutenants are known as "The suicides' club." Well, the
second lieutenants get on top, and, down in the trench, number one
hands his leg to number two; clear down the line; number two boosts
number one to the top, then number one lends a hand to number two
and pulls him out. Meanwhile enemy fire is hot. The line forms in
open order. The blood curdling yells begin--and mingle in an animal
roar that sounds like the howl of an orang-outang in the circus
just before it is fed at the after-show! It is the voice of hell.
Then the line walks--not runs, but walks under machine gun and
shell fire to the enemy trench; for experience has proven that if
the men run into that fire they will be out of breath and probably
go down in the hand-to-hand, knee-to-knee, eye-to-eye conflict with
knife and bayonet and gun butt that always occurs when they go over
the top to charge the enemy trench. As they near the enemy trench
the bestial howl rises, and as they jump into the shell-shattered
trenches the howl is maniacal. In the trenches are canvas bags made
to represent wounded enemies. The first wave over the top leaves
these bags for the stretcher bearers. But by the time the next
wave comes over, or the third wave comes, the stretcher bearers
are supposed to have cleared the trenches of wounded enemies, and
after that every soldier is supposed to jab his bayonet in every
bag in the trenches, as he is expected to jab every dead body, to
prevent an enemy from playing possum and then getting to a presumably
disabled enemy machine gun and shooting our soldiers in the back.
Every time a student soldier jabs a canvas bag he snarls and growls
like a jackal, and if he misses a bag it counts against him in the
day's markings. Wave after wave comes over, and prisoners are sent
to the rear, if there are guards to take them. If not prisoners are
killed, and one does not waste ammunition on them. It may be well
to pause here to say that in the gentle art of murdering the business
of taking prisoners is not elaborately worked out. They learn that
by rote, rather than by note. The Canadians, since two of their
men were crucified by the Prussians, take few Prussian prisoners.
Here is a snap-back of the film. It is the Rue di Rivoli in Paris.
Two lanky youngsters in Canadian uniform are talking to Henry and
me.
"What part of the states do you Canadians come from?" we ask. They
grin and answer, "San Francisco."
WE: "What's this story about you Canadians not taking any prisoners?"
THEY: "Oh, we take prisoners--all right, I guess!"
WE: "Well, how often?"
THEY: "Oh, sometimes."
WE: "Come on now, boys, as Californians to Kansans, tell us the
truth."
The tall one looked at the short one for permission to tell the
truth, and got it. Then he said:
"Well, it's like this. We go into a trench after them damn brutes
has been playing machine guns on us, knowing as soon as we get
in they'll surrender, but trying to kill as many of us as they
can before they give up. Then they raise up their hands and begin
yelling, 'Kamerade, Kamerade,' and someone says, 'Come on, fellers,
let's take this poor beggar,' and we're about to do it when along
comes a chap and sees this devil, and up goes a gun by the barrel,
and whack it comes down on the Boche's head, and the feller says,
'No, damn him, he killed my pal,' and we polishes him off! polishes
him off and cleans out the trench."
[Illustration: "What part of the States do you Canadians come
from?"]
WE: "Now, boys, does that always happen? How often do you fellows
polish Fritzie off and clean up the trench?"
THEY (after the short one had nodded to the tall one): "Well,
mister, I'll tell you. It's got so it's mighty damn risky for any
Prussian to surrender to any Canadian!"
When the line out there in the training camp has gone to its
objective, which usually is the third or fourth enemy trench, the
men begin digging in. Then they go back to the sergeant major for
more instructions. The digging in is usually done under a curtain
of fire to protect them. It is a great picture.
In another part of the field we saw the engineers learning to
make tunnels under the enemy; saw the engineers blowing up enemy
trenches--a pleasant and exciting spectacle; saw the engineers
making camouflage, and it may interest the gentle reader to know
that one of the niftiest bits of camouflage we saw was over a French
seventy-five gun. It was set in the field. A rail-road siding ran
to it. On a canvas over the gun two rails and the usual number of
ties were painted, and the track ran on beyond. Fifty feet in the
air one could not tell that the gun was there.
The liveliest part of this martial cloister was the section devoted
to the bayonet practice. And as we watched the men trying to rip
the vest buttons off a dummy and expose its gastric arrangements
with a bayonet, while loping along at full speed, we recalled a
Civil War story which may well be revived here. A Down-easter from
Vermont and a Southerner were going around and around one day at
Shiloh, each trying to get the other with the bayonet, but both
were good dodgers. Finally as the Yankee was getting winded he
cried between puffs:
"Watch aout--! Mind what yer dewin'! Ye dern smart aleck! Haint yew
got no sense! You'll stick the pint of thet thing in my boawels,
if you ain't keerful!"
We heard a lot of shivery stories around that training camp. They
told us that the French chasseurs, the famous blue devils, were
more or less careless about the way they forgot to take prisoners.
They are a proud people, from the French Alps, and exceedingly
democratic. A German brigadier, caught under their barrage, came
up to a troop of chasseurs and when they demanded his surrender
asked curtly, "Where's your superior officer?" They pointed down
the hill, and he started down. At a safe distance they threw a hand
grenade into him and obliterated him, remarking, "Well, the world
is that much safer for democracy." It is told of a Canadian who
came across a squad of Germans with their hands up that he asked:
"How many are you?" Eleven, they said. He reached in his pocket;
found his hand grenade, and threw it at them, remarking, "I'm sorry
I have but the one; but divide it between you!" There is also the
story of the Indian Sikhs, who begged to go out on a night raiding
party--crawling on their bellies with their knives as their only
weapons. Finally two of them returned with new pairs of boots.
Showing them proudly to their amazed Captain, they said humbly,
"Yes, sire! But you would be pained to learn how long we had to
hunt for a fit!" There is also the story of the festive Tommy who
tried to play a practical joke on his German prisoner by slipping
a lighted bomb in the German's pocket. The Tommy then started to
run; the German thought he must keep up with his captor and Tommy
realized that the joke was on him, just as the bomb went off and
killed them both.
Such stories are innumerable. They are probably untrue. But they
indicate what men at war think is funny; they reflect a certain
impoliteness and lack of courtesy that prevails in war. As it wears
on it grows more or less unneighbourly. And yet the upheaval of
war is just a passing emotional disturbance in the normal life of
men. Even in France, even in the war zone, there is no glorifying
of war; men in war, at least on our side of the line, hate war
more than they hate the Germans. And with the whole heart of the
civilized world--if one frankly may call the Turk and the Prussian
the savages that they are--set upon maintaining this war to a
victory for the allies, civilization may be said to be in the war
as a make-shift. Everywhere one hears that it is a war against war.
Every one is "longing for the dawn of peace" when it shall come
with justice, and in the meantime France is as deeply devoted to
healing the wounds of war as it is in promoting the war. Six hundred
French societies are devoted to various war works of mercy! Every
man and woman in France who is not a soldier or a nurse is working
in one of these societies. And yet life goes on with all this
maladjustment of its cams and cogs and levers much as in its ordinary
routine. There never were more joyous dahlias and phlox and china
asters than we saw coming back from that training camp where men
were learning the big death game. And when we came to Paris the
real business of war seemed remote. Of course, Paris is affected by
the war. But Paris is not war-like. One doesn't associate Paris with
"grim-visaged war!" For if Paris is not gay, still it remains mighty
amiable. At noon the boulevard cafes are filled to the side-walks,
and until nine o'clock at night they give a fair imitation of
their former happiness. Then they close and the picture shows are
crowded, and the theaters are filled. One sees soldiers and their
women folk at the opera and at the vaudeville shows more than at
the other shows. During the summer and the autumn a strong man put
on a show at the Follies with the soldiers that was the talk of the
town. His game was a tug of war. He announced that he would give
fifty dollars to any soldier who could withstand him. The strong
man sat the soldier down on the floor, foot to foot before him.
Both grasped a pole, and it was the strong man's "act" to throw
the soldier over his head, on to a mattress just back of the strong
man. It is a simple act; one that soon would tire Broadway, but
when one remembers that soldiers bring their local pride with them
to Paris from the ends of the earth, from New Zealand, from India,
from Canada, from South Africa, from Morocco, from China, from
Australia, and then when one remembers that the men of his country
are gathered in the theater to back every local athlete, it is
easy to see why the strong man holds week after week, month after
month, season after season. Every night some proud nation gathers
in the show house to get that fifty dollars with its favourite
son. And every night some favourite son almost gets it. And if the
strong man didn't fudge a little, pinch the favourite son's hands
on the pole and make him let go, almost every night the strong man
would be worsted. The struggle sets the house yelling. It is the
only real drama in Paris. We noticed that the shows of Paris which
appealed to the eyes and ears were far below the American standard.
In comedy which appeals to something behind the sense, in the higher
grades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better than
Broadway shows. But in the choruses, the dancers lack that finish,
that top dressing of mechanical unison required by American taste.
Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. The music at the Follies
was Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to be
in vogue. One heard "O Johnny" and "Over There" at every vaudeville
house this year. Sometimes they were done in French, sometimes
in English. In Genoa, one may say in passing that we heard one of
the songs from "Hitchy-Coo" done in Italian. It was eery! American
artists are popular in Paris. We saw a girl at three show houses
in Paris, under the name of Betty Washington, doing a gipsy dance,
playing the fiddle. She was barefoot, and Henry, who has a keen
eye, noticed that she had her toes rouged! But she always was good
for four encores, and she usually got a good start at the fifth from
Henry and me; we had just that much national pride! Great throngs
of soldiers filled these gay show houses. The French, the English,
and the Australians seemed satisfied with them. But the Canadians
and Americans sniffed. To them Paris is a poor show town.
One night we fell into a Boulevard show the like of which we had
never seen before. It was a political revue! The whole evening was
devoted to skits directed at the ministry, at the food administration,
at the scandals in the interior department and the deputies, at the
high taxes and the profiteering of the munition makers. The skits
were done in dialogue, song and dance, and the various forms of
burlesque. A good crowd--but not a soldier crowd--sat through it
and applauded appreciatively. Imagine an American audience devoting
a whole evening to a theatrical performance exclusively concerned
with Hoover, Secretary Daniels, Colonel Roosevelt, former Mayor
Mitchel, and LaFollette. In America we get little politics out of
the theater. In France, where they distrust the newspapers, they get
much politics from the theater. The theater is free in France--and
apparently not so closely censored as the newspapers. We learned that
night at the revue of a coming cabinet crisis, before the newspapers
announced it. And in learning of the crisis we had this curious
social experience, which we modestly hoped was quite as Parisian as
the Revue. During the first act of the show it was Greek to Henry
and me. We could understand a vaudeville show, and by following
the synopsis could poke along after the pantomime in a comedy. But
here in this revue, where the refinements of sarcasm and satire
were at play and that without a cue, we were stumped. Henry was
for getting out and going somewhere else. But we had a dollar a seat
in the show and it seemed to me that patience would bring results.
And it did! A good-looking, middle-aged couple sat down in the seats
next to us, and the woman began talking English. She was sitting
next to me, so it was my turn, not Henry's to speak. We asked her
if it would be too much trouble to interpret the show for two jays
from Middle Western America. She replied cordially enough. And she
gave us a splendid running interpretation of the show. The man with
her seemed friendly. We noticed that he was slyly holding her hand
in the dark, and that once he slipped his arm around her when the
lights went clear down. But that spelled a newly married middle-aged
couple, and we would have bet money that he was a widower and she,
late from his office, was at the head of his household. Between
acts he and Henry went out to smoke, leaving me with the lady. We
exchanged confidences of one sort and another after the manner of
strangers in a strange land. When it occurred to me to ask: "What
does your husband do for a living?"
"My--what?" she exclaimed.
"Your husband, there?"
"Who--that man? Why, I never saw him in my life until I picked him
up in a cafe an hour ago!"
And she got from me a somewhat gaspy "Oh." But we had a good chat
just the same and she told me all about the coming fall of the
cabinet. Her type in America would not be interested in politics.
But the shows of the boulevards discuss politics and the theaters
are free! So her type in France had to know politics. It takes
all kinds of people and also all kinds of peoples to make a world.
And the war really is being fought so that they may work out their
lives and their national traditions freely and after the call of
their own blood. If we are to have only one kind of people, the
kind is easy to find. There is kultur!
Still the love affairs of the French did bother us. Henry did
not mind them so much; but to me they seemed as unreasonable and
as improbable as the ocean and onion soup seemed to Henry. Every
man has his aversion, and the French idea of separating love from
marriage, and establishing it beautifully in another relation, is
my aversion, and it will have to stand. Henry was patient with me,
but we were both genuinely glad when a day or two later we came back
to the sprightly little American love affair that we had chaperoned
on the Espagne crossing the ocean. That love affair we could
understand. It had been following us with a feline tenacity all
over France. When we left the Eager Soul with the Gilded Youth in
the hospital at--we'll say Landrecourt, because that is not the
place--we thought our love affair was gone for ever. The letter
she gave us to deliver to the Young Doctor we had to trust to other
hands; for he was not at the American hospital where he should have
been. He had gone to the British front for a week's experimental
work in something with four syllables and a Latin name at that. But
the cat came back one day, when we were visiting a hospital four
hours out of Paris. The place had that curious French quality
of charm about it, which we Americans do not manage to put into
our "places and palaces." Down a winding village street--a kind
of low-walled stone canyon, narrow and grey, but brightened with
uniforms like the streets of most French villages these days--we
wormed our machine and stopped at an important looking building--an
official looking building. It was not official, we learned--just
a chateau. A driveway ran under it. That got us. For when a road
leads into a house in America, it means a jail, or a courthouse,
or a hotel, or a steel magnate's home or a department store. But
when we scooted under the house we came into a wide white courtyard,
gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard into
a garden--the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the corners
of the garden were fine old trees--tall, spike-shaped evergreens
of some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree and
a fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about the
walks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phlox
and asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers of various gay
sorts. And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital--a
new modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from the
street by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was
made of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, built
architecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof to
represent "green fields and running brooks." Board floors and board
partitions under the roof were covered as well as they could be;
and stoves furnished the heat. The beds--acres and acres of iron
beds--were assembled in the great wards and stretched far down the
long rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was
American--new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. We
were proud of it, and of the business-like young medical students
who as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in their
brand new uniforms--young crown princes of democracy, twice as
handsome and three times as dignified as they would have been if
they had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent "of all
the ages" and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the place
a tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into a
king's palace. When we had finished our errand at the hospital and
were returning through the garden, we met our young doctor. He was
sitting on an old stone bench, among the asters and dahlias--wounded.
It was not a serious wound from an ordinary man's stand-point; but
from the Young Doctor's it was grave indeed. For it was a bullet
wound through his hand. He thought it would not affect the muscles
permanently--but no one could know. Then he sat there in the
mediaeval garden among the flowers under the yew trees and told us
how it happened; took us out to the first aid post again, and on
out to the first line trenches, and over them into No Man's Land,
stumbling over the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with the
wounded. In time he came to a wounded German--a Prussian officer
with a shell-wound in his leg.
He told us what happened, impersonally, as one who is listening to
another man's story in his own mouth. "I gave him something like
a first aid to stop the bleeding," the young Doctor paused, picked
a ravelling from his bandage and went on, still detached from the
narrative. "Then I put my arm around him, to help him back to the
ambulance." Again he hesitated and said quietly, "That was a half
mile back and the shells were still popping--more or less--around
us." He looked for appreciation of the situation. He got it, smiled
and went on without lifting his voice. "Then he did it"
"Not that fellow?" exclaimed Henry.
"Well, how?" from me.
"Oh, I don't know. He just did it," droned the Young Doctor. "We
were talking along; and then he seemed to quit talking. I looked
up. The pistol was at my head; I knocked it away as he fired. It
got my hand!" He stopped, began poking the gravel with his toe,
and smiled again as one who has heard an old story and wants to be
polite. To Henry and me, it was unbelievable. We sat down on the
hoary, moss-covered curb of the ancient fountain regardless of
our spanking new uniforms and cried: "Well, my Heavenly home!" He
nodded, drew a deep breath and said, "That's the how of it."
[Illustration: He told us what happened impersonally as one who is
listening to another man's story in his own mouth]
"Well, what do you know about--"
Then Henry checked me with, "You weren't expecting it? Did he make
no warning sign?"
"Not a peep--not a chirrup," answered the Doctor, still diffidently.
Then he added, as one reflecting over an incident in a rather
remote past: "It was odd, wasn't it. You would think that two men
who stood where we were together--I, who had put my hands in his
live flesh, and had felt his blood flow through my fingers, and
he who was clinging to my body for support--you would think we had
come together not as foes, but as friends; for the war was over
for him!"
The Young Doctor's eyebrows knitted. His mouth set. He went on:
"This man should have abandoned his military conscience. But no--,"
the Doctor shook his head sadly, "he was a Prussian before he was
a man! He carefully figured it out, that it takes four years to
make a doctor, and three months to make a soldier, so to kill a
doctor is as good as killing a dozen men. It's all very scientific,
this German warfare--scientific and fanatical; Nietzsche and Mahomet,
what a perfect alliance it is between the Kaiser and the Sultan."
Then it came to us again that Germans, on seas, in submarines,
in air, in their planes bombing hospitals, and on land, looting
and dynamiting villages--in all their martial enterprises, think
unlike the rest of civilized men. They are a breed apart--savage,
material-minded, diabolic, unrestrained by fear or love of God,
man or devil. We talked of these things for a time; but something,
the quiet beauty of the garden maybe, took the edge off our hate.
And gradually it became apparent to me, at least, that the Young
Doctor was marking time until we should have the sense to tell him
something of the Eager Soul. What did he care for the war? For the
Prussians? For their Babylonian philosophy? For his wounded hand?
What were gardens made for in this drab earth, if not for sanctuaries
of lovers? One does not go to a garden to hate, to buy, or sell, to
fight, to philosophize, but to adore something or someone, somehow
or somewhere. And the Young Doctor was in his Holy Temple, and we
knew it. So Henry asked: "You received your letter?" And when he
thanked us for our trouble, Henry asked again: "Did she tell you
that the Gilded Youth was there at her hospital?"
"Only in a pencilled postscript after she had decided to send the
letter to me by you," answered the Doctor.
That sounded good to me. Evidently she had written to the Young
Doctor before the Gilded Youth had appeared. Also presumably she
had not written to the Gilded Youth. If she had written to him
after the air raid that had killed the head nurse, it would indicate
that she had turned to the Young Doctor, in an emotional crisis,
and that he was still a safe bet, as against the Gilded Youth. The
only question which occurred to me to develop this fact was this:
"Did she tell you that she was made assistant to the new head
nurse that came to supply the place of the one who was slain by
the Germans?" Henry looked at me as if he thought the question was
unfair.
"Yes," laughed the Doctor, "in the very first line."
"What odds are you giving now, Bill?" asked Henry bitterly.
"In the very first line,--" we could all three see the Eager face, the
proud blue eyes, the pretty effective hands brushing the straying
crinkly strands of red hair from her forehead, as she sat there
in the bare little nurses' room, bringing her first promotion in
pride to the young Doctor. Perhaps he did not realize all that it
meant. For you see he was very young. Certainly he did not understand
about the odds and repeated the word in a question. Henry cut in,
"Oh, nothing, only that night after they went walking in the hospital
yard, Bill made me give him three to five. Now I ought to have two
to one. It's all over but the shouting." And Henry laughed at the
Young Doctor's bewilderment; but the young Doctor looked at his
bandaged hand and shook his head. The walk in the hospital yard
was disturbing news to him.
"Ah, don't worry about that," Henry reassured him. "Why, man, you
ought to have heard what she said about you!" And Henry, being
a good-natured sort, told the Doctor what the Eager Soul had said
to the Gilded Youth in the hospital compound, while the buzzing
monsters in the air were singing their nightingale songs of death
in the moonlight.
We left the Young Doctor after he had squeezed out of us all the
news we had of the girl. Long after we had passed through the garden
gate, out into the white, gravel-paved court under the proud arch
and into the crooked, low, grey-walled canyon of the street, we
thought of the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes into
china asters, red hair into dahlias, pink cheeks into the phlox,
and hearing ineffable things whispered among the leaves of the
melancholy yew tree. And all that, in a land of waste and desolation,
with war's alarms on every wind.
And we thought that he looked more like a poet than a Doctor even
in his uniform; and less like a soldier than either. Such is the
alchemy of love in youth!