I
The permission to visit a few ambulances and evacuation hospitals
behind the lines gave me, at the end of February, my first sight of
War.
Paris is no longer included in the military zone, either in fact or
in appearance. Though it is still manifestly under the war-cloud,
its air of reviving activity produces the illusion that the menace
which casts that cloud is far off not only in distance but in time.
Paris, a few months ago so alive to the nearness of the enemy, seems
to have grown completely oblivious of that nearness; and it is
startling, not more than twenty miles from the gates, to pass from
such an atmosphere of workaday security to the imminent sense of
war.
Going eastward, one begins to feel the change just beyond Meaux.
Between that quiet episcopal city and the hill-town of Montmirail,
some forty miles farther east, there are no sensational evidences of
the great conflict of September--only, here and there, in an
unploughed field, or among the fresh brown furrows, a little mound
with a wooden cross and a wreath on it. Nevertheless, one begins to
perceive, by certain negative signs, that one is already in another
world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and took
the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious
absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and
then a lonely ploughman and his team stood out against the sky, or a
child and an old woman looked from a doorway; but many of the fields
were fallow and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few carts
driven by peasants, a stray wood-cutter in a copse, a road-mender
hammering at his stones; but already the "civilian motor" had
disappeared, and all the dust-coloured cars dashing past us were
marked with the Red Cross or the number of an army division. At
every bridge and railway-crossing a sentinel, standing in the middle
of the road with lifted rifle, stopped the motor and examined our
papers. In this negative sphere there was hardly any other tangible
proof of military rule; but with the descent of the first hill
beyond Montmirail there came the positive feeling: _This is war!_
Along the white road rippling away eastward over the dimpled country
the army motors were pouring by in endless lines, broken now and
then by the dark mass of a tramping regiment or the clatter of a
train of artillery. In the intervals between these waves of military
traffic we had the road to ourselves, except for the flashing past
of despatch-bearers on motor-cycles and of hideously hooting little
motors carrying goggled officers in goat-skins and woollen helmets.
The villages along the road all seemed empty--not figuratively but
literally empty. None of them has suffered from the German invasion,
save by the destruction, here and there, of a single house on which
some random malice has wreaked itself; but since the general flight
in September all have remained abandoned, or are provisionally
occupied by troops, and the rich country between Montmirail and
Chalons is a desert.
The first sight of Chame is extraordinarily exhilarating. The old
town lying so pleasantly between canal and river is the
Head-quarters of an army--not of a corps or of a division, but of a
whole army--and the network of grey provincial streets about the
Romanesque towers of Notre Dame rustles with the movement of war.
The square before the principal hotel--the incomparably named "Haute
Mere-Dieu"--is as vivid a sight as any scene of modern war
can be. Rows of grey motor-lorries and omnibuses do not lend
themselves to as happy groupings as a detachment of cavalry, and
spitting and spurting motor-cycles and "torpedo" racers are no
substitute for the glitter of helmets and the curvetting of
chargers; but once the eye has adapted itself to the ugly lines and
the neutral tints of the new warfare, the scene in that crowded
clattering square becomes positively brilliant. It is a vision of
one of the central functions of a great war, in all its concentrated
energy, without the saddening suggestions of what, on the distant
periphery, that energy is daily and hourly resulting in. Yet even
here such suggestions are never long out of sight; for one cannot
pass through Chalons without meeting, on their way from the station,
a long line of "eclopes"--the unwounded but battered, shattered,
frost-bitten, deafened and half-paralyzed wreckage of the
awful struggle. These poor wretches, in their thousands, are daily
shipped back from the front to rest and be restored; and it is a
grim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare of
eyes that have seen what one dare not picture.
If one could think away the "'eclopes" in the streets and the
wounded in their hospitals, Chalons would be an invigorating
spectacle. When we drove up to the hotel even the grey motors and
the sober uniforms seemed to sparkle under the cold sky. The
continual coming and going of alert and busy messengers, the riding
up of officers (for some still ride!), the arrival of much-decorated
military personages in luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro of
orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of
grey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulances
and the passing of detachments for the front, all these are sights
that the pacific stranger could forever gape at. And in the hotel,
what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur coats and
haversacks, what a grouping of bronzed energetic heads about the
packed tables in the restaurant! It is not easy for civilians to get
to Chalons, and almost every table is occupied by officers and
soldiers--for, once off duty, there seems to be no rank distinction
in this happy democratic army, and the simple private, if he chooses
to treat himself to the excellent fare of the Haute Mere-Dieu, has
as good a right to it as his colonel.
The scene in the restaurant is inexhaustibly interesting. The mere
attempt to puzzle out the different uniforms is absorbing. A week's
experience near the front convinces me that no two uniforms in the
French army are alike either in colour or in cut. Within the last
two years the question of colour has greatly preoccupied the French
military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue; and
the range of their experiments is proved by the extraordinary
variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish
robin's-egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed. The
result attained is the conviction that no blue is really
inconspicuous, and that some of the harsh new slaty tints are no
less striking than the deeper shades they have superseded. But to
this scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added: the
poppy-red of the Spahis' tunics, and various other less familiar
colours--grey, and a certain greenish khaki--the use of which is due
to the fact that the cloth supply has given out and that all
available materials are employed. As for the differences in cut, the
uniforms vary from the old tight tunic to the loose belted jacket
copied from the English, and the emblems of the various arms and
ranks embroidered on these diversified habits add a new element of
perplexity. The aviator's wings, the motorist's wheel, and many of
the newer symbols, are easily recognizable--but there are all the
other arms, and the doctors and the stretcher-bearers, the sappers
and miners, and heaven knows how many more ramifications of this
great host which is really all the nation.
The main interest of the scene, however, is that it shows almost as
many types as uniforms, and that almost all the types are so good.
One begins to understand (if one has failed to before) why the
French say of themselves: "_La France est une nation guerriere._"
War is the greatest of paradoxes: the most senseless and
disheartening of human retrogressions, and yet the stimulant of
qualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no other
means of renewal. Everything depends, therefore, on the category of
impulses that war excites in a people. Looking at the faces at
Chalons, one sees at once in which [Page 54] sense the French are
"une nation guerriere." It is not too much to say that war has given
beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a
hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all
beautiful. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables--young or
old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average--have the same look
of quiet authority: it is as though all "nervosity," fussiness,
little personal oddities, meannesses and vulgarities, had been burnt
away in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful example
of the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance.
More than half of these men were probably doing dull or useless or
unimportant things till the first of last August; now each one of
them, however small his job, is sharing in a great task, and knows
it, and has been made over by knowing it.
Our road on leaving Chalons continued to run northeastward toward
the hills of the Argonne.
We passed through more deserted villages, with soldiers lounging in
the doors where old women should have sat with their distaffs,
soldiers watering their horses in the village pond, soldiers cooking
over gypsy fires in the farm-yards. In the patches of woodland along
the road we came upon more soldiers, cutting down pine saplings,
chopping them into even lengths and loading them on hand-carts, with
the green boughs piled on top. We soon saw to what use they were
put, for at every cross-road or railway bridge a warm sentry-box of
mud and straw and plaited pine-branches was plastered against a bank
or tucked like a swallow's nest into a sheltered corner. A little
farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies
of "Seventy-fives." Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain
of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always
attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant
gazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of woven
pine-boughs which stood near by might have been the huge huts of
their herdsmen.
The country between Marne and Meuse is one of the regions on which
German fury spent itself most bestially during the abominable
September days. Half way between Chalons and Sainte Menehould we
came on the first evidence of the invasion: the lamentable ruins of
the village of Auve. These pleasant villages of the Aisne, with
their one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofed
granaries with espaliered gable-ends, are all much of one pattern,
and one can easily picture what Auve must have been as it looked
out, in the blue September weather, above the ripening pears of its
gardens to the crops in the valley and the large landscape beyond.
Now it is a mere waste of rubble [Page 58] and cinders, not one
threshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruined
villages after Auve, but this was the first, and perhaps for that
reason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all the
separate terrors, anguishes, uprootings and rendings apart involved
in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The
photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the
crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the
bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered,
all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and
continuity to the present--of all that accumulated warmth nothing was
left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!
As we ran on toward Sainte Menehould the names on our map showed us
that, just beyond the parallel range of hills six or seven miles to
the north, the two armies lay interlocked. But we heard no cannon
yet, and the first visible evidence of the nearness of the struggle
was the encounter, at a bend of the road, of a long line of
grey-coated figures tramping toward us between the bayonets of their
captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh "bag" from the hills, of
a fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-worn than one
could have wished. Their broad blond faces were meaningless,
guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy: they seemed none too sorry
for their fate.
Our pass from the General Head-quarters carried us to Sainte
Menehould on the edge of the Argonne, where we had to apply to the
Head-quarters of the division for a farther extension. The Staff are
lodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, where
offices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, and
where, sitting in a bare passage on a frayed damask sofa surmounted
by theatrical posters and faced by a bed with a plum-coloured
counterpane, we listened for a while to the jingle of telephones,
the rat-tat of typewriters, the steady hum of dictation and the
coming and going of hurried despatch-bearers and orderlies. The
extension to the permit was presently delivered with the courteous
request that we should push on to Verdun as fast as possible, as
civilian motors were not wanted on the road that afternoon; and this
request, coupled with the evident stir of activity at Head-quarters,
gave us the impression that there must be a good deal happening
beyond the low line of hills to the north. How much there was we
were soon to know.
We left Sainte Menehould at about eleven, and before twelve o'clock
we were nearing a large village on a ridge from which the land swept
away to right and left in ample reaches. The first glimpse of the
outlying houses showed nothing unusual; but presently the main
street turned and dipped downward, and below and beyond us lay a
long stretch of ruins: the calcined remains of Clermont-en-Argonne,
destroyed by the Germans on the 4th of September. The free and lofty
situation of the little town--for it was really a good deal more
than a village--makes its present state the more lamentable. One can
see it from so far off, and through the torn traceries of its ruined
church the eye travels over so lovely a stretch of country! No doubt
its beauty enriched the joy of wrecking it.
At the farther end of what was once the main street another small
knot of houses has survived. Chief among them is the Hospice for old
men, where Sister Gabrielle Rosnet, when the authorities of Clermont
took to their heels, stayed behind to defend her charges, and where,
ever since, she has nursed an undiminishing stream of wounded from
the eastern front. We found Soeur Rosnet, with her Sisters,
preparing the midday meal of her patients in the little kitchen of
the Hospice: the kitchen which is also her dining-room and private
office. She insisted on our finding time to share the _filet_ and
fried potatoes that were just being taken off the stove, and while
we lunched she told us the story of the invasion--of the Hospice
doors broken down "a coups de crosse" and the grey officers bursting
in with revolvers, and finding her there before them, in the big
vaulted vestibule, "alone with my old men and my Sisters." Soeur
Gabrielle Rosnet is a small round active woman, with a shrewd and
ruddy face of the type that looks out calmly from the dark
background of certain Flemish pictures. Her blue eyes are full of
warmth and humour, and she puts as much gaiety as wrath into her
tale. She does not spare epithets in talking of "ces satanes
Allemands"--these Sisters and nurses of the front have seen sights
to dry up the last drop of sentimental pity--but through all the
horror of those fierce September days, with Clermont blazing about
her and the helpless remnant of its inhabitants under the perpetual
threat of massacre, she retained her sense of the little inevitable
absurdities of life, such as her not knowing how to address the
officer in command "because he was so tall that I couldn't see up to
his shoulder-straps."--"Et ils etaient tous comme ca," she added, a
sort of reluctant admiration in her eyes.
A subordinate "good Sister" had just cleared the table and poured
out our coffee when a woman came in to say, in a matter-of-fact
tone, that there was hard fighting going on across the valley. She
added calmly, as she dipped our plates into a tub, that an obus had
just fallen a mile or two off, and that if we liked we could see the
fighting from a garden over the way. It did not take us long to
reach that garden! Soeur Gabrielle showed the way, bouncing up the
stairs of a house across the street, and flying at her heels we came
out on a grassy terrace full of soldiers.
The cannon were booming without a pause, and seemingly so near that
it was bewildering to look out across empty fields at a hillside
that seemed like any other. But luckily somebody had a field-glass,
and with its help a little corner of the battle of Vauquois was
suddenly brought close to us--the rush of French infantry up the
slopes, the feathery drift of French gun-smoke lower down, and, high
up, on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightnings and white
puffs of the German artillery. Rap, rap, rap, went the answering
guns, as the troops swept up and disappeared into the fire-tongued
wood; and we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of having
stumbled on this visible episode of the great subterranean struggle.
Though Soeur Rosnet had seen too many such sights to be much moved,
she was full of a lively curiosity, and stood beside us, squarely
planted in the mud, holding the field-glass to her eyes, or passing
it laughingly about among the soldiers. But as we turned to go she
said: "They've sent us word to be ready for another four hundred
to-night"; and the twinkle died out of her good eyes.
Her expectations were to be dreadfully surpassed; for, as we learned
a fortnight later from a three column _communique,_ the scene we had
assisted at was no less than the first act of the successful assault
on the high-perched village of Vauquois, a point of the first
importance to the Germans, since it masked their operations to the
north of Varennes and commanded the railway by which, since
September, they have been revictualling and reinforcing their army
in the Argonne. Vauquois had been taken by them at the end of
September and, thanks to its strong position on a rocky spur, had
been almost impregnably fortified; but the attack we looked on at
from the garden of Clermont, on Sunday, February 28th, carried the
victorious French troops to the top of the ridge, and made them
masters of a part of the village. Driven from it again that night,
they were to retake it after a five days' struggle of exceptional
violence and prodigal heroism, and are now securely established
there in a position described as "of vital importance to the
operations." "But what it cost!" Soeur Gabrielle said, when we saw
her again a few days later.