IMMEDIATELY after breakfast, in accordance with a plan already
formulated, we quietly took possession of one of those small
American-made cars, the existence of which has been responsible for the
addition of an eighth joke to the original seven jokes in the world. We
didn't know it then, but for us the real adventure was just starting.
There were four of us in the flivver--the driver, a young American
in uniform, whose duties were of such a nature that he travelled on a
roving commission and need necessarily report to none concerning his
daily movements; and for passengers, our own three selves. For warrant
to fare abroad we had a small American flag painted on the glass
wind shield, one extra tire, and an order authorising us to borrow
gasoline--simply these and nothing more. Very unostentatiously we rode
out of Soissons, steering a northwesterly course. We might not know
exactly where we were going or when we should be back, but we were on
our way.
At the same time, be it here said, there was method of a sort in our
scheme of things, for we were aiming, as closely as we might, at the
point where approximately the main French command jointed on to the
right wing of the British, we figuring that at the junction place,
where the overlapping and intermingled areas of control met, and more
especially in a confused period when one army was falling back and
the other bringing up its reserves, we stood a better chance in our
credential-less and unaccredited state of wriggling on up from the back
lines to the Front than would elsewhere be possible.
We reckoned the prospect after this fashion: If the French find us
traversing the forbidden lands they may take it for granted that the
British permitted us to pass. If we fall under the eyes of British
guardians of the trail they are equally likely to assume that the French
let us through. And so it turned out; which I claim is added proof that
the standing luck of the American newspaper reporter on a difficult
assignment is not to be discounted.
In stock we had one trump card, and only one, and we played it many a
time during that somewhat crowded day. All of us were in khaki with tin
helmets upon our heads and gas masks swung over our shoulders. The heavy
trench coats in which we were bundled prevented betrayal to the casual
eye of the fact that none of us wore badges denoting rank, upon our
collars or shoulder straps. Outfitted thus we might have been major
generals or we might have been second lieutenants of the American
Expeditionary Forces. Who, on a cursory scrutiny of us, was to say?
So we decided among ourselves that ours must be a rôle suggestive of
great personal importance and urgent business. Did any wayside sentinel,
whether British or French, move out upon the crown of the road as though
he meant to halt us, one of us, with an authoritative arm, would wave
him clear of our path and we would go flitting imperiously by as though
the officiousness of underlings roused in us only a passing annoyance.
It proved a good trick. It may never work again in this war, but I bear
witness that it has worked once.
In the very first leg of this expedition good old Madame Bonneaventure
stood our friend. The River Aisne skirts the city of Soissons. At the
far side of the bridge, spanning the stream, which bridge we must cross,
stood a French noncom, charged, as we knew, with the duty of examining
the passes of those outbound. If we disregarded his summons to halt,
complications of a painful nature would undoubtedly ensue. But as the
car slowed up, all of us with our fingers figuratively crossed,
he either recognised the driver as one who passed him often or was
impressed by our bogusly impressive mien, or possibly accepted the
painted flag on Tin Lizzie's weather-beaten countenance as warrant of
our authenticity.
As he waved to us to proceed and then came to a salute, we, returning
the salute in due form, were uttering three silent but nonetheless
vehement cheers. I think we also shook hands. We were past the first
and by long side the most formidable barrier. The farther we proceeded
toward the battle the greater would be our chances of proceeding, it
being generally assumed that no one gets very deeply into the district
of active hostilities unless he has a proper errand there and has proved
it to the satisfaction of the highway warders behind.
Through several villages that were reduced by shell fire to litter heaps
and tenanted only by detachments of French soldiers we passed. Next we
skirted up the sides of a steep hill and rounded the crest to where,
spread out before our eyes, was a glorious panorama of the terrain below
and beyond.
We drew in our breaths. Each one of us had seen something of the panoply
of warfare in the making, but nothing in my own experience since
Belgium in 1914 had equalled this. All the world appeared to have put on
cartridge belts and gone to war. As far as the eye could reach, away
off yonder to where sky line and earth line met behind the dust screen,
cavalry, artillery, infantry, supply trains, munition trains, and all
imaginable branches of the portable machinery of an army were in sight
and in motion. Their masses hid the earth with a shifting pattern as
though a vast blue-grey carpet were magically weaving itself. Overhead,
singly, in pairs and in formations, like flights of wild fowl, the scout
planes, the observation planes and the battle planes went winging. They
were like silver gulls escorting limitless schools of porpoise through
placid waters.
Usually there is a seemingly interminable confusion in the vision of
a great force upon the forward go. To the lay eye it appears that the
whole movement has got itself inextricably snarled. This line travels
one course, that line goes in exactly the opposite direction, a third
one is bisecting the first two at cross angles. But here one great
compelling influence was sending all the units forward along a common
current. The heavy vehicles held to the roads which threaded the plain;
the infantry took short cuts across lots, as it were; the cavalry
traversed the fields and penetrated the occasional thickets; the sky
craft trod the alleys of the air--but they all headed toward the same
unseen goal. There was no doubt about it--France was hurrying up a most
splendid army to reenforce the hard-pressed defenders of French soil,
where the Hun pushed against the line of the inward-bending and battered
but yet unbroken British battalions.
We coasted down off the heights into the plateau, and now as we came
in among them we had opportunity for appraising the temper of those men
hurrying on their forward march to the killing pits. Who says France is
war wearied or that her sons are tired of fighting? No suggestion was
there here of dumb oxen driven to slaughter. Why, these men were like
bridegrooms bound for the marriage feast. They sang as they marched or
as they rode. Usually what they sang was a snatch of some rollicking
chanson, and through the dirt masks they grinned into our faces as we
went slithering by.
There were hails and friendly gestures for us. It might be a boy private
with a sprig of early spring wild flowers jauntily stuck in his cap who
waved at us. It might be a cook balancing himself on the tailboard of
a travelling field kitchen who raised a sweaty visage from his steaming
soup caldron and made friendly circles in the air with a dripping iron
instrument that was too big for a spoon and too small for a spade; or
it might be a gunner on a bouncing ammunition truck with enough of
potential death and disaster bestowed under his sprawled legs to blow
him and, incidentally, us into ten million smithereens if ever it went
off.
Kilometre after kilometre we skihooted through the press, and it was a
comic thing to see how a plodding regiment would swing over or a battery
would bounce and jolt off the fairway into the edges of the ditch at the
insistent toot-toot of our penny whistle of a horn to let us by. It
made one think of whales making room in a narrow tideway for an impudent
black minnow to pass. And always there was the drone of the questing
aëroplanes overhead and the thunderous roaring of the guns in front. We
overtook one train of supply trucks with the markings of the U. S. A.
and manned by dusty lads in the khaki fustian of Yankeeland--evidence
that at least one arm of our service would have a hand in the epochal
task confronting our allies. All the rest of it was French.
For us there was no halt until we reached Blérencourt. Now this place
was a place having a particular interest for us, since it was at
Blérencourt that the organisation known as the American Fund for French
Wounded, which is headed by Miss Anne Morgan and which has for its field
personnel American women exclusively, had during the past nine months
centred its principal activities.
In the outskirts of the town, now evacuated of almost all its civilian
residents, stand the massive stone gateways and the dried moat of the
magnificent château of Blérencourt, which was destroyed by the peasants
in the time of the Terror and never rebuilt. What remains constitutes
one of the most picturesque physical reminders of the French Revolution
that is to be found in the country to-day. We rode under the arched
stone portals--and lo, it was almost as though we had come into the
midst of a smart real-estate development somewhere on Long Island within
easy communicating distance of New York City.
French francs, provided by the state, and American dollars, donated
by the folks back home, had been used under American supervision to
construct a model colony upon the exact site of the ancient castle
of some vanished noble family of the old régime. There was a model
barracks, a model dormitory, a model schoolhouse, two model cottages and
an office building that was a model among models--all built of planking,
all glistening and smart with fresh paint, all with neat doorsteps in
front of them and trim flower plots and vegetable gardens about them.
There was a chicken house and a chicken run, dotted with the shapes of
plump fowls. There was a storeroom piled high with clothing and food
sent over from America to the A. F. F. W. for distribution among
destitute natives of the devastated districts, of which this, until a
year ago, had been the centre.
These incongruously modern structures snuggled right up under the
venerable walls of the battlements. Indeed several of the buildings
were cunningly built into the ruins, so that on one side the composite
edifice would show a withered stone face, with patches of furze growing
in the chinks of the crumbled masonry like moles on the forehead of a
withered crone, and on the other would present a view of a smart cottage
with a varnished shingle roof and a painted front door which apparently
had just arrived from some planing mill in the States. Underneath the
floor was a cellar four hundred years old, but the curtains in the
window had seemingly been cut and stitched only yesterday. Somehow,
though, the blended effect was immensely effective. It made me think of
Home-dale-on-the-Sound grafted upon a background of Louis the Grand; and
for a fact that was exactly what it was.
This creation, representing as it did nine months of hard work on the
part of devoted American women, had been closed only the day before.
It stayed in operation until it seemed probable that the German legions
might penetrate this far south in their effort to ford the River Oise.
The little pupils of the kindergarten had been sent away in trucks,
the main dormitory had been turned into a temporary resting place
for refugees, and the American ranges in the kitchen had done valiant
service in the cooking of hot meals for exhausted women and children
tramping in from the north and west. Before the managers and teachers
left at dusk of the preceding evening two crippled French soldiers,
specially detailed for work here by the government, had been assigned
to place vessels of kerosene in each building, with instructions to fire
the oil at the first signs of approaching Germans.
The cans of inflammables were still in their places when we arrived
and the maimed watchmen, one of them a one-armed man and the other a
one-legged, had camped all night on the premises ready on warning to
apply the torch and destroy this frontier outpost of American charity
and American efficiency. But in the forenoon word was come that the
enemy had been brought to bay seven miles away and that he might not
break through the British-French line. He did break through, but that
is another story. So Mrs. Dike, of New York, and Miss Blagden, of
Philadelphia, two of Miss Morgan's assistants, had motored in from
below, filled with thanksgiving that the patient work of their hands and
their hearts would almost certainly be spared.
While Mrs. Dike, with tears in her eyes, was telling us of the things
that had been accomplished here and while the troopers poured in
unceasing streams along the main road beyond the gateway, a handful of
belated refugees crept in under the weathered armorial bearings on the
keystonp of the archway, to be fed and cared for and then sent along in
the first empty truck that came by going toward Soissons.
In this group of newcomers was an elderly little man in a worn high hat
and a long frock coat with facings of white dust upon its shiny seams,
who looked as though he might be the mayor of some inconsequential
village. He carried two bulging valises and a huge umbrella. With him
was his wife, and she had in one hand a cage housing two frightened
canaries and under the other arm a fat grey tabby cat which blinked its
slitted eyes contentedly.
The most pitiable figure of them all to my way of thinking was an
old woman--yes, a very old woman--she must have been all of eighty.
Alongside one of the buildings I came upon her sitting in a huddle of
her most treasured possessions. She was bent forward, with her gnarled
hands folded in the lap of her dress, which was silk and shiny, for
naturally when she fled from her home she had put on her back the best
that she owned. Under the cope of a queer little old black bonnet with
faded purple cloth flowers upon it her scanty hair lay in thin neat
folds, as white and as soft as silk floss. Her feet in stiff, new, black
shoes showed beneath her broad skirts. Her face, caving in about the
mouth where her teeth were gone and all crosshatched with wrinkles, was
a sweet, kindly, most gentle old face--the kind of face that we like to
think our dead-and-gone grandmothers must have had.
She sat there ever so patiently in the soft sunlight, waiting for the
truck which would carry her away to some strange place among stranger
folk. When I drew near to her, wishing with all my heart that I knew
enough of her tongue to express to her some of the thoughts I was
thinking, she looked up at me and smiled a friendly little smile, and
then raising her hands in a gesture of resignation dropped them again in
her lap. But it was only with her lips that she smiled, for all the time
her chin was quivering and her faded old blue eyes were brimming with a
sorrow that was past telling in words.
She still sat there as we got into our car and drove off toward the
battle. Looking back, the last thing I saw before we rounded the corner
of the wall was her small black shape vivid in the sunshine. And I told
myself that if I were an artist seeking to put upon canvas an image that
would typify and sum up the spirit of embattled France to-day I would
not paint a picture of a wounded boy soldier; nor yet one of a winged
angel form bearing a naked sword; nor yet one of the full-throated cock
of France, crowing his proud defiance. I would paint a picture of that
brave little old withered woman, with the lips that smiled and the chin
that quivered the while she smiled.