Bar-le-Duc, March 12.
It’s not to be the Lunéville sector after all, it’s to be the sector
just south of Verdun!
We arrived here at Bar-le-Duc last night after a six-hour trip by motor
car. Mr. K. came by motor-cycle; most of the other men travelled by
truck, sitting perched on top of a load of luggage, canvas cots, and
chocolate boilers. The truck broke down somewhere _en route_ and never
reached Bar-le-Duc until this morning, when it rolled in carrying a
rather weary-looking lot of passengers.
Tomorrow we go on to our station behind the lines. Today we have spent
shopping for supplies. We have bought writing paper; materials to make
hot chocolate, paying two francs and a half apiece or almost fifty cents
for a small-sized can of condensed milk; and dozens of gross of little
jars of confiture. Ever since I was a child _Bar-le-Duc_ has meant just
the one thing to me,—those little glasses of delectable currant preserve
which bear its label. We went around to the wholesale houses which
handle the famous _Confitures Fins de Bar-le-Duc_. The sight of all
those gleaming rows of glass jars filled with deep crimson or
amber-colored currants was one that I shan’t easily forget.
Bar-le-Duc is a city which shows the wounds of war. Time and again,
unfortified, defenceless as she is, she has known _the terror that
flieth by night_. Last summer several blocks in the very heart of the
city were completely demolished by bombs and the wilderness of ruins
lies there untouched. All over the city great black signs are painted on
the houses; _Cave, Cave voutée_,—vaulted cellar,—_Place Pour 40
Personnes_. At the end of the afternoon we climbed, Mr. K and I, to the
top of the ancient clock-tower which stands on the edge of the
fortress-citadel of the Dukes of Bar, overlooking the city. Just above
the clock we came upon a tiny platform transformed for the time being
into light-housekeeping apartments for two poilus who night and day keep
watch there for enemy aircraft. As we stood on the little balcony
outside and looked down on the house-tops of the city spread beneath us,
with the little children playing in the streets, a telephone bell in the
tower tingled. A moment later one of the poilus announced; “A squadrille
of Gothas has just crossed the lines, headed for Paris.”
Alas, poor Paris! Yet the news brought a feeling of relief with it. The
little children of Bar-le-Duc are safe for the night, it seems. The
avions are out after bigger game.
Rattentout, March 14.
Out from Bar-le-Duc one swings into a separate world, the
World-Behind-the-Lines. Here one is at the back door of the war, as it
were. Passing through the half-abandoned villages one sees war in its
_déshabille_; you get no sense of the thrill of it, nor even of its
horrors; only the weary disgust, the stultifying stupidity, the
unutterable ennui.
Here everything that moves or lives, it seems, is blue; faded blue,
dingy blue, purplish or greenish blue perhaps, but blue nevertheless.
Everywhere the color insists. It streaks along the roads in long, broken
lines, the meagre trodden villages are blotched and patched with it.
Indeed the whole horizon, at this season of the year, might be expressed
in just two tones; the almost uniform grey-yellow tint that washes over
the fields, the rolling hills, the dusty roads, the squalid villages,
and the ever-insistent poilu-blue.
You pass by tilled fields labeled _Culture Militaire_; great grey-green
aerodromes with flocks of little planes resting in rows beside them, in
their gay paint resembling nothing in the world so much as dicky birds
fresh from the toy shop; and always dotted here and there over the open
fields, the little lonely graves, sometimes hedged in by fences made of
sticks and always marked by a grey wooden cross on which hangs, in
painted tin, the tricolor. Farther on you come to the world where men
live underground, burrowing in the earth like hunted animals. Scattered
along the roadside, or in rows under the shelter of a hill-slope,
everywhere you look, are dugouts, some with the entrances covered with
pine-boughs, others thatched with sticks, still others hidden beneath
earth-colored camouflages.
We arrived here last night about dusk. The poilus as we passed stared at
us as if we were so many lunatics. Rattentout is on the right bank of
the Meuse, about six miles from the trenches. This means for one thing
that you must carry a gas-mask with you wherever you go. One even sees
the little children, what few of them are left, trudging about with
small-sized masks slung over their shoulders. The Y. here is short of
masks and as yet M.—the only canteen worker besides myself to come with
the advance guard—and I have none. This morning when the Chief went out
he hung his mask on a peg in the hall. “If anything happens,” he said to
M. and me, “you two can settle it between you, which shall have it.”
Our home here is in a lordly mansion, evidently the Big House of the
village. French officers were living here before we came. The regiment
to which they belonged moving out just as we arrived, they graciously
made over the house to us. The officers had started a vegetable garden
in the back-yard and this they relinquished with deep regret, one young
lieutenant fairly having tears in his eyes as he took a last survey of
his rows of tiny lettuce and young cabbages.
Today is to be given over to house-cleaning, and getting settled.
Tomorrow the troops are due to begin detraining at the two points
Landrecourt and Dugny and we are to be there to serve them hot
chocolate.
Last night we took our supper at the dingy little house next door, a
surprisingly delicious meal, bread and butter, omelette, salad and
cocoa. The house next door is one of the half-dozen or so in town still
inhabited by civilians. The family consists of grandmother, mother and
little girl of five; the husband is in the trenches. The child Pauline
is half sick with a feverish cold. They could get no medicine, the
mother fretted; we promised some from Bar-le-Duc. The house itself is
painfully unkempt and dirty, yet Pauline is always fresh in a spotless
white pinafore, her glossy hair immaculately brushed. This morning we
went to the house next door again for bread and coffee.
“Did you sleep last night?” asked Madame.
“But yes,—and you?”
She shook her head. “I was afraid of the Boche aeroplanes. I could hear
them overhead.”
“But I should think you would be used to them by now.”
“Ah! But that makes no difference!”
What consideration keeps her here, clinging to the very door-step of the
war, as it were, hounded as she is, by terrors? Just the one reason, I
suppose,—that she has nowhere else to go.
Rattentout, March 15.
_Lafayette, nous voilà!_ The first battalions of the division have
arrived.
The car called for us early this morning to take us to Dugny-Est where
half the men are to detrain. We followed along the east bank of the
Meuse running parallel to the _Canal de L’Est_. The canal was a dismal
sight, filled with an endless line of empty abandoned barges, many of
them settling slowly down as if water-logged, a few, already sunk,
leaving nothing but a bit of prow protruding above the water’s surface.
We ran along the bank for about three miles, then swung across the Meuse
to Dugny. Dugny-Est is a half mile north of Dugny proper,—the terminus
of a strip of railway taken over and run by American engineers. Viewed
from the detraining tracks the landscape was bleak enough; the morasses
of the Meuse, strung with barbed-wire beyond, an austere
deserted-looking church in the foreground, and, dreariest of all, right
under the boys’ feet as they detrained, almost, a large military
grave-yard.
Arriving at the little stone station-house made over to us for the
occasion, we found the chocolate already made. Four of the Y. men had
spent the night there and by dint of stoking the fires all night long,
as they declared, they had gotten the five huge containers hot. The
equipment assembled in haste at Bar-le-Duc was evidently proving none
too satisfactory.
I had just time to suspend a small American flag from the front of the
station-house before the first train puffed up the track. Nothing I
think has ever looked quite so good to me as that old American
locomotive. It was the first one I had seen in France. I wanted to throw
my arms around it and hug it. As one of the boys said afterwards: “Why,
you’d be happy just to lie down on the track and let the darned thing
run over you.”
I stood under the flag and waved frantically, first to the American
train crew and then, oh joy! to my Company A! There they all were,
crowded in the open doors of their box cars, “Side-door Pullmans” as
they call them, Magulligan the prize fighter, comically conspicuous with
his head done up in a sort of night-cap made from a large white
handkerchief. The train pulled by, slowed down, came to a standstill up
the track. We hustled the chocolate cans out by the roadside. Company A,
the first off the train, came marching down the road; each man held out
his mess-cup and got a dipperful of cocoa.
“Where are we?” they demanded.
“Four miles south of Verdun. How do you like the scenery?”
“All right except the grave-yard. That’s too handy.”
“Say,” spoke up one of the boys, “I heard the mud out here in the
trenches was pretty deep.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes they said a feller went in over his ankles there the other day.”
“I wouldn’t call that very deep!” I bit.
“Mm, but he went in head-first!”
I asked one of the corporals how things were going.
“We were feelin’ kind o’ lost,” he confessed. “Then we looked out and
saw the old flag and you. After that it seemed just like home somehow.”
They marched off down the road looking very business-like and military.
Next came the other companies belonging to the first battalion, and the
regimental machine-gun company. These were not permitted to stop by the
station-house on account of the danger of being observed by enemy
aircraft, but were halted at a distance down the road. We picked up the
chocolate cans and chased after them.
When every man in the First Battalion had had a drink, we hurried back
to the stone-house to get ready for the next trainload. As I stirred the
chocolate on one of the little stoves set up outside, several of the
train crew came to talk to me. I was the first “real honest-to-God
American girl” they had seen in months they told me; and they were just
as excited over me as I had been over their engine.
If the history of America in the Great War should ever be written down
in detail, surely one chapter should be given over to a Little Iliad of
the “Six Bit Railway” that runs from Sommeil to Dugny-Est, five
kilometers south of Verdun; how, as I had it from the lips of one of
those engineers, the English took it over from the French and tried to
run it and failed, how the Canadians took it after them and failed too,
how then the —— Engineers fell heir to it. How they lived with the
French, eating French rations which were gall and wormwood to them. How
they struggled with an alien tongue and finally reduced it to a weird
unholy gibberish which was yet somehow intelligible both to the French
and to themselves. How they came through shell-fire and gas and bombing
raids, seemingly bearing charmed lives. And how they worked forty-eight
hours at a stretch whenever the big drives and shifts were on.
Tonight one of the secretaries told us that, as he was standing by the
roadside watching while we ladled out the chocolate, one of the boys
said to him:
“I’m thinking of a toast.”
“And what might that be?”
“God bless American women,” the boy answered him.
Rattentout, March 16.
When we reached the station-house this morning we found everyone agog
over the night’s events. The detraining had gone on all night; at first
without incident. All precautions had been taken, no one was allowed to
so much as light a match. About midnight one of the marine soup-kitchens
had been unloaded and rolled down the road puffing sparks and scattering
coals. Some enterprising mess sergeant had evidently planned that his
men should have a hot meal. The French spectators in consternation had
followed the soup-kitchen down the road, extinguishing the trailing
embers, but the mischief was already done. There were German planes
scouting overhead, they noted, evidently, the sparks, and signaled the
range to the German gunners. Fifteen minutes later a six inch shell
exploded a few hundred yards from the little stone-house, then another
and another. One shell had fallen in the very center of the grass-plot
where Company D had lined up to eat their luncheon of cold corn-willy
sandwiches and hot chocolate. The gas-alarm had been sounded. A mule
team had become frantic and bolted, encountering the marine band’s big
base drum, had made toothpicks of it. Meanwhile confusion, it seemed,
had reigned in the little stone-house. One secretary, seizing an article
of underwear and putting it on his head in mistake for a helmet, had
dashed madly up and down the road as the shells fell, and ended by
bursting, in his _déshabille_, into the private dugout of a French
colonel.
No Americans were hurt, but one poilu had been injured and another
killed.
“They have our range now,” said everybody. “And look at those Boche
balloons, will you?”
We looked to the northeast; three German observation balloons were
hanging just above the hills.
We stirred the chocolate and served it to whatever boys happened to be
about, boys on detail, drivers of mule-teams. One can, having been kept
warm all night, had turned. Some bright soul suggested that it was the
concussion of the shelling that had soured the milk, just as
thunderstorms sometimes do. Two poilus leaned in at the window.
“What are you doing?” they asked curiously. We explained; they shook
their heads. “You spoil your soldiers.” Then, “Was anyone killed last
night?”
“Yes, one Frenchman.”
“Oh that’s nothing!” (_Ça ne fait rien._) They strolled away.
The friendly interpreter came in and told us that they were about to
hold the poilu’s funeral.
A troop-train pulled in. It was loaded with soldiers from my own
regiment, the Second Battalion. The chocolate was ready, smelt
delicious.
“You can’t serve it,” they told us. “On account of last night’s
shelling, the troops won’t be allowed to stop until they’re well beyond
the town.”
“Isn’t there _some_ way we can manage?” we teased.
“No, they’ve got our range.”
“Well at least we can say hello to them!”
We went down to the tracks where the men were spilling out of the box
cars. They were gathering up their equipment and forming in companies in
double time. One red-in-the-face sergeant was furiously demanding who in
blazes had stolen his revolver on him; it was evident that he found the
presence of ladies sadly hampering to his flow of language. Three
companies marched off. The last to go was H Company, the company that
had been billeted on the same street with us at Goncourt. We waved and
they smiled back at us. They marched down the road, disappeared over the
brow of the hill.
We stood chatting with two boys who were on a billeting detail.
There was a dull heavy detonation beyond the hills. A moment later a
strange whistling screech shrilled over our heads. I stared into the
air, trying to see—I knew of course it was a shell, but I had never
thought one would travel so slowly or be quite so noisy about it. The
whistling shriek passed over us, changed to a dropping whine. Down the
street there was a thunderous explosion followed instantly by a
shattering crash. Timbers, tiles, stones, a mass of debris splashed for
a moment up against the sky. The shell had fallen at the cross-roads. I
stared at M. I was cold all over.
“It must have got them,” I heard myself whispering. “My God! it must
have got them!”
We stared down the road. Everywhere figures in poilu blue and some in
khaki, were running like rabbits towards the dugouts. It seemed to me
the uncertainty was more than I could bear.
“I’m going to go and see.”
“I’ll go with you,” said M.
We stopped at the station-house and put on our helmets; then we started
down the road. Just beyond the station-house we passed a little cortege
of poilus carrying the body of their comrade on a stretcher-bier. They
were on their way to the church. When the first shell came over I had
seen the funeral procession waver, hesitate, seem uncertain for a few
moments whether to proceed or to seek shelter, now, their indecision
conquered, they were continuing their march with what seemed an added
dignity. A limousine drew up behind us, stopped. In the back seat sat an
American major.
“Give you a lift?”
We climbed in. Half way down the hill another shell shrieked over our
heads, burst in front of us. We reached the cross-roads.
“Let us out, please.”
The major stared, then stopped the car. We scrambled out. The car
whirled off. Two houses lay, crushed heaps of stone. In the road were
three dead horses and an automobile with a crumpled radiator. That was
all. Another shell struck, sending us cowering against the nearest
house-wall. As far as we could see the place was utterly deserted. There
was nothing to do but go back. Half-way up the hill we met a poilu, he
was carrying an O. D. blouse. He asked us where the wounded American
was; he had been carried into some house nearby; this was his coat. We
could of course tell him nothing. The wind which had been strong all
morning, was filling the air with blinding clouds of yellow dust. The
shells were coming over at regular intervals, so many minutes between
them; they were all falling, it seemed, in the vicinity of the
cross-roads. A little further up the hill and we began to meet mule
teams from the supply train driving down. The mule-skinners on their
high seats looked calm enough, but a number of the mules were becoming
quite unmanageable. I recognized the slim lad of seventeen with whom I
had driven into Bourmont from Goncourt once after a load of canteen
supplies. As each team passed, we waved our hands and wished them luck;
but all the time I kept repeating to myself:
“They’re going right down into it. God help them! Why does it have to
be?”
A French officer encountered us, asked us politely if we wouldn’t like
to step down into a dugout. I was amused at his manner which was as
casual as if he were offering us an umbrella in a shower. There were
some excellent dugouts up on the hill-side he assured us. “But I don’t
want to go into a dugout!” “_Mademoiselle a beaucoup d’esprit_,” he
observed, “_mais ce n’est pas prudent_.” Obediently we climbed the hill,
to come upon a little group of Americans gathered about the entrance to
a dugout, watching the shells as they came over. Taking a peep into the
dugout I found it had already been patronized by several poilus. We sat
on the ground and watched the shelling. On the other side of the town we
could see Company H flung out in skirmish line, marching over the open
fields.
Presently a boy in olive drab came panting and laughing up the hill. The
group welcomed him with a shout. He was one of the billeting detail.
They had been staying in a house at the cross-roads. When the others had
gone out this morning he had been left to clean up and get dinner. He
had washed all the dishes, he told us, and had just gone out and bought
a basketful of eggs to make an omelette for dinner, when crash! the
first shell had fallen demolishing the house next to theirs. He had
stepped out to look at the ruins and returned, when bang! went the house
on the other side of him! He began to think it might be time for him to
move, when, oh boy! zowie! a shell had wrecked the upper story of the
billet over him. Then he had left. But he was feeling very badly about
those eggs. Corporal G. also of the billeting detail looked at him with
widened eyes. “And I was half a mind to stay upstairs in bed and not get
up this morning!” he remarked. The boys found solace for the loss of the
omelette in the thought that all the effects of the very unpopular
captain billeted next door must surely have been annihilated.
After an hour or so the shelling stopped. One by one blue forms emerged
from the dugouts. The Chief had ordered the flivver to report at eleven.
It was noon and it hadn’t appeared.
“We must walk to Rattentout,” said the Chief. “No use our staying here.”
It was hot and dusty and my helmet weighed like a mountain on my head,
but at last we made it. Some two miles or so from Dugny we passed two
marines sitting in discouraged postures by the roadside.
“What’s the matter?”
“He’s had a fit,” growled one of the warriors, jerking his thumb in the
direction of his comrade’s back.
“He has ’em. They never ought ter let him come.”
There was nothing we could offer them but sympathy.
Rattentout, March 17.
Here I am sitting on a bench in the little garden back of our billet,
soaked in spring sunshine. Over my head the lilacs are leafing out
against a sky of Italian blue, at my feet are golden crocuses and the
first pale primroses. But the sky, as one gazes at it, has an odd trick
of breaking out in little puffy dots of white like nothing so much as
kernels of corn in a corn-popper. These are of course the bursting
shells fired by French anti-aircraft batteries at the enemy aviators
overhead; sometimes you can see the plane itself, skimming like a gnat
among the smoke puffs. “They don’t seem to get ’em often,” as a boy
remarked to me. “But golly they do make ’em move!”
Ever since the Americans began to arrive the German planes have been
constantly overhead. They are taking photographs; they say. Where, oh
where are our American aviators?
In my ears as I sit here is a curious sound, a sound like the pounding
of tremendous breakers on a stormy shore: it is the guns of Verdun, Les
Eparges and St. Mihiel. At rhythmic intervals this sound is punctuated
by heavy crashing thuds nearer at hand. They are shelling Dugny again.
All the civilians fled yesterday. A driver, coming in last night, told
us how they went, empty-handed, creeping along the edges of the roads
under the cover of trees or brush, fearing to step out in the open lest
they be spied and bombed by the German aeroplanes overhead. The church
where they held the poilu’s funeral has already been struck by a shell
and the steeple demolished.
In front of the house the street is quiet. All through the day the town
seems a sleepy deserted place, but at night it is a different matter;
then the real business of the day begins. Carts and camions may straggle
past at odd intervals during the daylight hours, but with darkness, the
traffic starts to pour by in a perfectly unbroken stream. One lies awake
and listens, it seems for hours, to the absolutely incessant rattle of
carts, trucks, caissons and gun carriages passing along the road, until
it seems as if the whole French Army must be on the move.
Little Pauline is better today. She has just come running into the
garden through the back gate, in company with a big curly dog.
Rattentout they tell us is the “Dog Town” for this sector; every dog
picked up near the front, lost mascots, faithful beasts looking for
their masters, strays of every sort, are sent back here for keeping.
Presently I must go in and help M. get the supper. Our food, over and
beyond what we brought from Bar-le-Duc in tins and sacks, is furnished
us by the French Army. Every morning a dapper little corporal calls to
take our orders. When the official interpreter is out it falls to me to
do the parleying. The corporal is patient and very military and oh so
polite! He brings us fresh butter, fresh eggs, even so much as a quart
of fresh milk, and the most delicious fresh French bread I have ever
tasted. The first day he came he was dreadfully distressed; he had no
fresh meat to offer us. This morning he shone with smiles. There was
plenty of fresh beef now, plenty! We ordered some and ate it stewed for
dinner. It was dark and tough and stringy. I could dare swear that I saw
that “beef” freshly slaughtered yesterday at Dugny cross-roads.
A French _liaison_ officer called here this afternoon. He told me that
it was quite true that a certain regiment of French infantry had gone
into battle, each man carrying with him the wooden cross which was to
mark his grave if he fell. To earn _le croix de bois_ is the current
slang phrase among the French to designate dying a soldier’s death.
Yesterday noon a detachment of marines arrived in Rattentout. During the
day they must keep under cover, but last night after sundown they came
out and played baseball in the street. When I looked out my window and
saw those lads in olive drab nonchalantly throwing and catching a
baseball under my window, I felt as if something safe and sane had
somehow appeared in the midst of a strange nightmare world.
Rattentout, March 18.
I have said; “Good-bye, Good luck!” to my boys.
Today we received word that the first battalion of my regiment was to
take its place in the trenches by Les Eparges at twelve o’clock tonight,
leaving Genicourt where they have been billeted, at eight. I breathed a
piteous appeal to the Chief. At five o’clock the car called for us.
Earlier in the afternoon there had been an air battle over Genicourt. I
heard the soft _whut_, _whut_ of the anti-aircraft guns, and later the
staccato rattle of machine-guns in the air. Looking out I could see the
planes, one German and two French darting among the shrapnel puffs, the
German escaping, sad to say, unharmed. Now a French observation balloon
was floating over Genicourt, a curious-looking thing shaped like a huge
ram’s head, and a dull green in color. As we neared the town they
started to haul the balloon in: it came down with astonishing rapidity.
We rolled into Genicourt, a sodden desolate village clinging under the
lea of a low hill, just now alive with suppressed vitality. The boys had
been ordered to keep their billets until the last moment, as any unusual
number of men about might be observed by an enemy aeroplane.
Nevertheless there were plenty of stragglers in the streets, while out
of the windows were leaning several hundred more, craning their necks in
order to get a glimpse of the descending balloon.
We went to the _Foyer du Soldat_, a bright clean barracks, the walls
covered with posters in vivid hues. It was full of our boys. They
laughed, joked, played checkers and pounded the piano, some were dancing
together. Yet through all the gaiety one had a sense of tension, of
nervous strain. Some of the boys asked us to sing, one lad evidently in
a more solemn mood repeatedly requested “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” We
sang the “Long, Long Trail” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” Then we
went out in the street again. The French, we gathered, were quite
astonished at the high spirits of the Americans. “Ah, but it’s their
first time,” they said. “After four years it will be different.”
In the public square they had been holding some sort of ceremony, an
interchange of formal greetings between the French and American
officers. A French military band had just finished its programme. As we
passed they played the Marseillaise and the Star Spangled Banner; we all
stood at attention.
We came to the street where Company A was billeted. The boys leaned out
of the windows and waved and called to me. Everywhere it was the same
question:
“What shall I bring you from the trenches?”
“Do you want a live Boche for a souvenir? I’ll get you one!” They
thought my gas-mask was a lovely joke. “What’s that strap across your
shoulder for?” they teased.
“That? Oh that’s my new Sam Browne belt!”
“Say! Bet you don’t know how to put it on!” Then they would yell “Gas!”
just to frighten me.
In the street a little crowd of boys were tossing coppers. Everybody was
anxious to get rid of his “clackers,” in order not to have to carry all
that useless weight into the trenches with him. They invited me to join.
I tried one penny while the boys all cheered, only to miss by a good
yard. Lieut. B. came by: “Will you take tea with me in my dugout?” he
asked.
The order was given for the companies to form. The streets filled up;
dusk was gathering. The Chief said that it was time to go. We found the
car in the public square. Slowly we moved out of town. I shall never
forget those long brown files drawn up against the dim grey houses. Five
hours hence and those very boys would be in the front line trenches,
face to face with the enemy. We passed Company A. I called out to them
to be sure not to stick their heads up over the top, and not to dare to
take off their gas-masks before they were ordered to. Never before did I
realize how much those boys meant to me. Each face I saw flashed some
vivid unforgettable association to my mind. “When you come back,” I
called, “I’ll be waiting for you with the hot chocolate ready.” They
smiled and waved Good-bye to me. Some of them held up their fingers to
show how many Germans they were going to account for. A turn in the road
shut it all from sight. On the way back to Rattentout we passed the
Third Battalion, who were marching in on their very heels to take over
their billets.
It’s eleven o’clock now. They must be almost in. They are marching, I
know, in darkness and silence; not a cigarette is to be lighted, not a
word spoken above a whisper. One hour more and the relief will be
completed.
Rattentout, March 19.
I am to be sent to Paris for reassignment. I have, it seems, been guilty
of conduct unbecoming a lady under shell-fire. This sentence has been
hanging over me ever since that day at Dugny. I knew of course that I
was in disgrace but never dreamed that it would come to this.
It seems, what no one had troubled to hint to me, that we have been
allowed to go farther front than any women of any of the Allied Nations
in France have been permitted to go to work before. Moreover that the
French, whose guests we are in this sector, were very much opposed to
the presence of women here, and only finally, after much persuasion,
allowed us to come here on trial. Now the Chief says that he is afraid
that my indiscreet action at Dugny in going down to the cross-roads
instead of into a dugout may have shocked the French. In order to
forestall any possible protest by our Allies I am to be made an example
of the discipline of the organization.
Etretat, Normandy. March 28.
I have been here a week on leave. Tomorrow I start back for Paris once
more. Where I am to go after that is uncertain.
It seems strange to be in France and not be wading through seas of mud,
but to have firm turf and dry roads beneath one’s feet. The hamlets
here, while picturesque, are quite spruce and tidy, amazingly different
from the quaint but indescribably dirty little mudpie muck-heap villages
to which I have been used.
This pretty little coast town, once a fishing village, then a summer
resort, is now chiefly a hospital. All the large hotels have been taken
over for wards and nurses’ quarters, the big casino filled with row on
row of iron cots. It is an American hospital with American doctors,
nurses and orderlies, but attached to the B. E. F. and filled of course
with British patients. As in all the English hospitals, as soon as a
patient is able to get out of bed he is dressed in a “suit of blues;”
trousers and jumper blouse of bright blue cotton, white shirt, scarlet
tie and handkerchief to match, making him look exactly like a grown-up
Greenaway boy. The men hate them, they tell me, but I for one am
grateful to the designer as the bright blue and scarlet makes wonderful
splotches of color in the landscape.
There may be a more disgusted set of boys in France than these here in
the hospital corps at Base No. 2, but if so I have yet to meet them. One
of the first units to come across, landing in May of 1917, every man
enlisted, so they tell me, because he thought it was the quickest means
of getting to the front in field hospital service and most of them
enlisted to do some form of specialized work; but, medical students,
college professors, and motor experts, they each and all were given the
job of hospital orderly which means scrubbing floors, washing windows,
shovelling coal, doing the hard and dirty work of a hospital, and, most
galling I fancy of all,—taking orders from girls with whom you are not
allowed to associate or even speak except in the line of business. The
X-ray expert has been delegated to the job of keeping the hospital pigs.
I saw him in a pair of grimy overalls trundling a well-worn wheelbarrow
down the street. The man who speaks eight languages, and enlisted as
interpreter, spends his days checking up clothes in the laundry. And
here as hospital orderlies in spite of their frantic efforts to get
transferred, it seems likely that they will stay.
But these are dark days for us all just now, with the news that comes in
every day of the German drive. “What do the officers in the hospital
think? What do they say about it?” I tease the nurses.
“They think that we will hold them,” they reply, but none too hopefully.
At the hotel where I am staying there is a French officer _en
permission_, with his wife and apparently unlimited offspring. With them
is an English governess. She is a little nervous thing all a-twitter
these days with excitement and apprehension. Will the Germans get
through to Paris? Monsieur’s aged mother is there. He is thinking of
going back to get her, together with a few essential household
treasures. She herself had fled with the family from Paris in 1914. It
was a dreadful experience; fourteen people crowded in a coach for six,
and nothing to eat. Oh dear! wasn’t it all just too terrible!
There is also an old French lady here who frankly fled from Paris to
escape the air-raids; now someone has taken all the joy out of life for
her by suggesting that Etretat might be shelled from the sea by a German
submarine.
The Tommies in the hospitals, they say, flatly refuse to believe that
Paris is being shelled. It isn’t possible, they declare, for a gun to
shoot as far as that, and to them that is the end of it. But tonight a
little crowd of the hospital boys who had gone on pass to Paris came
back as eye-witnesses. One of the first shells had fallen very close to
them, killing a number of people who were sitting drinking in a sidewalk
café. The boys had gone up to the Church of Sacré Cœur on Montmartre and
from the tower there had watched the shelling of the city. It had been a
beautiful clear day: they could see where each shell struck. One of the
boys brought back with him for a souvenir a piece of a French
lieutenant’s skull, picked up, after the shell had wrecked the café,
from the sidewalk.
Tonight there was a concert at the Y hut here. The hall was crowded; the
concert party, a group of pretty girls, had just completed, to much
applause, the first number, when a horn sounded in the distance.
Everybody started up. The Y man stepped forward and announced the
programme over. In a few minutes the hut was deserted. “The convoy is
in,” they said, which meant that a train load of wounded had arrived at
the station.
Paris, Easter Sunday.
On the way here from Etretat I saw a sight which brought the war closer
to me somehow than anything before; at the junction station connecting
the line to Le Havre with the line to Amiens, a string of box cars full
of women, little children and decrepit old men, packed in like cattle,
fleeing before the German drive, many of them empty-handed, others with
a few pathetic futile treasures, a hen or two, a copper cooking-pot,
snatched up evidently in a moment of half-witless panic haste.
Nor is Paris itself without its refugees. The German advance, the
air-raids, the shelling, culminating in the Good Friday horror, have
combined to render the city half deserted.
“Paris? We call Paris ‘the front’ now-a-days,” one Frenchman on the
journey had remarked to me.
Yesterday I went shopping. Everywhere it was the same reply. Nothing
could be made to order for an indefinite period, the workrooms were all
deserted, the workers fled. As for those who remain, they seem to take
life calmly enough; what else can they do? When, as yesterday, every
sixteen minutes a tremendous jarring crash tells you that a shell has
fallen somewhere in the city,—and the concussion is so great that it
always sounds as if it had fallen in the next block!—you see people turn
their heads as they walk, staring in the direction of the explosion;
others come out on the balconies to see what they can see and that is
all.
Of course the danger of all this lies in its effect on the civilian
morale. In connection with this I learned an interesting thing today.
While the hospitals outside are overcrowded, the hospitals in Paris with
their splendid equipment and staffs are left half empty, because they
dare not show the people of Paris too many wounded. And when convoys are
brought into the city, they are often detained outside, sometimes for
hours, in order that the wounded may be transferred to the hospitals at
night.
Yesterday at Brentano’s I got talking with a boy who belonged to the
American Ambulance Section which is attached to the French. He told me
an incident which struck my fancy:
One night, at the front, after a hard day’s work, he had just dropped
off to sleep when he was awakened. There was a _blessé_ to be taken back
to the hospital, he was in bad shape, they had placed him in an
ambulance. The boy rolled out of his blankets, started up the car. It
was a bitter night. Once he was on his way everything went wrong; the
water had frozen in the radiator, he had to get out and crawl along the
ditches on his hands and knees, trying, in the dark to find a pool that
was still unfrozen. And all the while he was tortured by the thought
that the life of the wounded man in the car depended probably on his
speed in reaching the hospital, and this urged him to an agony of haste.
Finally, as the dawn was breaking, he reached his goal. They came to
carry the blesse in. The wounded man was dead; he had been dead, it was
evident, some while before the boy started. At the front, he explained,
they hate to take the time and trouble to bury bodies. So whenever it is
possible they work this method of passing on the task to someone else.
You have to be constantly on the look-out for such tricks. This time
they had fooled him.
Last night there was an air-raid. It was a mild affair. I was awakened
by the sirens. They make what is to me quite the most fascinatingly
horrible sound I have ever heard. That long agonized wail, now sinking
to a shuddering whimper, now rising to a banshee screech, flashes
vividly to my mind’s eye a myriad little demons sitting on the roofs of
Paris, cowering, shivering, crying out their abject terror. I went to
the window and looked out, but although my room is on the top floor of
the hotel, I could see nothing and so went back to bed again. The
anti-aircraft guns put up a tremendous barrage; they have them mounted
on trucks now so they can quickly be shifted from point to point about
the city. I am sure there was a whole battery just in front of the
hotel. Today the papers inform us that the Gothas were driven back after
reaching the suburbs.
This morning I went to service at Notre Dame, entering through piles of
sand bags heaped so as to hide the carvings about the doorways. In that
vast cathedral only a few were present, a fair share of the congregation
being comprised of Americans.
Tonight an ambulance driver attached to one of the Paris hospitals came
to the hotel for dinner. He spread a startling tale. Every ambulance in
the city has been ordered to be in readiness; for tomorrow, it has been
learned, twenty-seven long-range guns are to be turned at once on Paris!
Aix-les-Bains, April 6.
When they said “Leave Area” to me my heart sank. The Lady in the Office
explained to me how very important she considered the work, and the
assignment, she added, need not be permanent. “Very well” I said, “I’m
willing to go there temporarily.”
I left Paris Tuesday, taking the night train. Getting off was something
of an ordeal. The lighting at the stations, as on the streets, has been
reduced almost to the vanishing point. The great Gare de Lyon was filled
with a mass of distraught humanity over whom the few violet-blue bulbs
cast a ghostly glimmer. There were no porters to take one’s luggage; a
number of women had possessed themselves of the baggage trucks and were
pushing them, heaped high with bags and household stuff, recklessly
through the crowds. I could find no officials anywhere about. All the
French orderliness and red tape seemed to have been swept clean away and
the result was chaos. Somehow, I don’t know quite how, I found my train
and reached my seat.
Three very fat old gentlemen and one old lady occupied the compartment
with me. The fat gentlemen had one little spoiled dog between them which
they kept passing from one to the other, in order that each in turn
might kiss him. The old lady had a bird in a cage; presently she opened
her hand-bag and brought out her supper, a loaf of bread, unwrapped,
together with a good-sized turtle. For a moment; such were her raptures
over her pet, I thought that she was going to kiss the turtle. The first
minute that one of my companions entered the compartment, each informed
all the rest that he or she was _not_ running away from the air-raids or
the long range guns. “I? I am not afraid of the Kaiser’s Gothas! I laugh
at them!” A few minutes later however they began: Ah, what a fearful
night, last night had been! Five hours in the _Caves_! No sleep at all!
One might as well be a mole and take up one’s dwelling underground. What
a life! Oh it was terrible, terrible! Then one old gentleman turned
proudly to the little fat canine. “But of a verity, my little Toto is
possessed of a sagacity extraordinary. The moment that he hears the
sirens, he will run down into the cellar, and nothing can induce him to
come up again until the ‘all clear’ has sounded!”
We pulled into Aix soon after dawn as the rising sun was touching the
tops of the mountains and the morning mists were hovering over the lake.
Whatever the work may prove to be like here, the place is surpassingly
lovely. It is too early for the summer resort pleasure seekers. The
French don’t care for it here until it grows really hot, they tell us.
But to me the season is at its most appealing moment. One glimpses pink
peach blossoms against the blue lake over which stand purple mountains
with snow still lying on their summits. Several of the large hotels and
casinos have been requisitioned for French convalescent hospitals, but
the largest of all has been taken over by the Y. From this canteen
excursions are constantly setting out, motor-boats on the lake, motor
cars to Chambery, the cog-wheel railway up Mt. Revard, picnics, hikes
and fishing parties, yet many of the boys seem to find it pleasantest to
do nothing,—just to sit around in lazy comfort all day long, watching
the others playing billiards, listening to the orchestra in the
afternoon Beneath the gold mosaic casino dome, sitting luxuriously in a
box at the vaudeville in the evening, gaining a maximum of pleasure with
a minimum of exertion. Many of the boys came here with their heads full
of pessimistic expectations.
“They told us it would be Reveille and Retreat and one day’s K. P. for
each of us,” confided one lad to me.
Some brought their mess-kits and some even their blankets. When they
find themselves guests in hotels that are among the finest in Europe,
lodged in comfortable rooms, eating real food off tables furnished with
china-ware and linen, at first they are fairly dazed.
“I’m feared somebody’ll pinch me an’ I’ll wake up,” declared one lad
today.
More than one has told me, that the first night he got here, he could
not go to sleep in bed at all and only finally achieved slumber by
rolling himself in blankets on the floor.
There are no troops from the line here at present; only boys from
forestry regiments, motor mechanics and a few lads from medical
detachments. They are holding up the leaves of all combatant troops on
account of the drive. It may be that presently they will hold up all
leaves altogether. Then we will have to shut up shop here temporarily.
It is the pleasant custom here for the Y ladies to go down to the train
every night to see the boys off.
“It’s a shame you can’t stay longer,” we say to them.
“I’ll say it is!”
“I’m awfully sorry you have to go.”
“You ain’t half so sorry as I am, Lady.”
“Maybe some day you’ll be coming back again.”
“I’ll tell the world one thing; I’m going to be good as gold when I get
back to camp, so they’ll let me.”
One of the Y women tonight repeated what one boy on leaving had confided
to her:
“If I said to you that this had been my happiest week since I joined the
army it wouldn’t mean much,” he told her, “but that’s not what I’m going
to say. What I’m going to say is that this has been the happiest week of
all my life.”
So far I have found just one man who wasn’t enjoying himself here. He
had been stationed for six months at Paris. Aix, he declared, “Weren’t
no town at all, nothin’ but a one-horse place.” He evidently had no soul
for the beauties of nature.
Paris, April 22.
They held the leaves up. The boys kept leaving; fewer and fewer came,
then finally none. Last week they disbanded the force of workers at Aix;
a few stayed to look after things until such time as the crowds should
start to pour in again; the rest were sent back to Paris to be
reassigned.
If I thought the trip down was a chore, it wasn’t a patch on the trip
back. We waited half the night for the train at the Aix railway station.
When it finally pulled in, I found my seat was in a compartment which
was full, and had evidently been so for hours, of French people. Now
life in France tends to cure you of belief in several popular
superstitions; one is the idea that it is dangerous to have wet feet,
and another that there is anything in the germ theory; but there is one
notion to which I still cling, an obstinate belief in the desirability
of fresh air. I put my head in the compartment, then withdrew, shutting
the door. For the twelve hours it took to reach Paris I stood up outside
in the corridor.
Arrived in Paris, they assigned me temporarily to the Avenue Montaigne
Club House. This is a beautiful building, the home of one of Napoleon’s
generals; but the best thing about it is the tea-room restaurant, for
here they serve apple-pie, chocolate cake and ice-cream. Since the
latest food restrictions were issued, forbidding the French to make
desserts employing milk, cream, sugar, eggs or flour, such dainties have
been unobtainable anywhere else in Paris; but the Americans drawing
supplies from their own commissary, are of course untouched by such
regulations. Indeed the saddest sign in France these days I often think
is that over the deserted shops which reads _Patisserie_. To be sure
some of these stores still make a show at doing business, filling their
windows with raisins, dried prunes and other prosaic edibles, together
with heaps of pseudo-chocolates wrapped gayly in tin-foil, but which
when purchased proved to be nothing but what one boy termed “the same
old camouflage,”—an unappetizing paste of dried fruits and ground nuts.
Yesterday a curly-headed lad, who looked about sixteen, came into the
canteen carrying a big bunch of pink carnations. These were for the
waitresses, he said, because they were the first American ladies that he
had seen in France. We each pinned a spray to the front of our pink
aprons, and then, since he pretended famine, let him have
“seconds”,—quite against the rules—on everything, with all the ice-cream
and cake that he could swallow.
Yesterday I saw Mr. T. who was with us for a while at Goncourt. He told
me that French troops _en repos_ were occupying that area at present.
They had asked for the use of our hut and of course it had been granted
them. A Y man, happening by the other day, had stopped in. They had
converted our beautiful hut into a regular French _Cantine_ with three
men to hand the bottles over the counter “and a smell enough to knock
you down.” Who shall say that this is the least of life’s little
ironies?
This morning I met N. who had reached Rattentout the day I left. She
tells me that all the villages occupied by our troops in the sector
have, one by one, been shelled. Rattentout was shelled and two
Frenchwomen killed. Because of the constant shelling all the Y women
workers had been withdrawn from the canteens and sent back to safety at
Souilly where they have nothing to do but sit and possess their souls in
patience.
Tonight they gave me my new assignment. It is at Gondrecourt. I leave
tomorrow. I am glad, so glad over the prospect of being back on a real
job once more! Here at the Avenue Montaigne as in the gilded casino at
Aix I have been desperately homesick, to be back in a real hut again!