CURIOUSLY enough there was at this moment and at this place no return
fire from the enemy. From this we deduced that the infantry in their
impetuous onrush had so far outtravelled the heavy and more cumbersome
arms of their service that the artillery had not caught up yet. However,
a little later projectiles from hostile field pieces began to drop on
our side of the stream.
Halfway of the length of the street our car halted. It did not seem the
part of wisdom for the four of us to go ahead in a group, so I walked
the rest of the way to spy out the land.
Behind the shattered stone and plaster houses French soldiers were
squatted or lying. In the hope of finding some one who could speak the
only language I knew I continued on until I came to the last two houses
in the row. They overhung the riverbank. Beyond them were two bridges
spanning the little river, one an old steel bridge with a concrete
roadbed, and the other a sagging wooden structure, evidently built by
soldier hands.
The mouth of the military bridge was stopped with a makeshift barricade
thrown together any which way. The backbone of the barrier was formed
of two tree trunks, but they were half hidden from sight beneath
a miscellaneous riffle of upturned motor lorries, wheelbarrows and
clustered household furniture, including many mattresses that plainly
had been filched from the villagers' abandoned homes. Midway of the
main bridge a handful of French engineers were pottering away, rather
leisurely, I thought, at some job or other. Two Tommies were standing
behind one of the farthermost buildings of the hamlet--a building which
in happier days had been a café. Now it was a broken shell, foul inside
with a litter of wreckage. The men wore the insignia of the Royal
Lancers.
As I approached them they saluted, evidently mistaking me, in my trench
coat and uniform cap, for an American officer. That an American officer
should be in this place, so far away from any American troops, did not
seem to surprise them in the least.
“What town is this?” was my first question.
“It's called Pontoise, sir,” answered one of them, giving to the name a
literal rendition very different from the French fashion of pronouncing
this word.
“What's going on out yonder on the bridge?” I inquired next.
“The Frenchmen is minin' it to blow it up, sir. They mined it once
already but the charge didn't explode, sir. Now they're goin' to give
it another try. They'll be letting off the charge pretty soon, sir, I
think--as soon as a few of their men and a few of ours who're over on
the other bank in them bushes 'ave fallen back to this side 'ere.”
“How close are the Germans?” I asked.
I figured they must be uncomfortably close. They were.
“Come along with me, sir, if you don't mind,” quoth my informant.
Quite in the most casual way he led me out from behind the shelter of
the ruined café. As we quitted its protection I could see over a broken
garden wall the British battery down below at the left, firing as fast
as the gunners could serve the pieces. Of all the men in sight these
shirt-sleeved artillerymen were the only ones who seemed to have any
urgent business in hand.
Together we advanced to the barricade, which at the spot where we halted
came up to our middles. Across the top of it my guide extended a soiled
hand.
“The beggars are right there, sir, in them bushes; about a 'undred and
fifty yards away, sir, or two 'undred at the most,” he said with the
manner of a hired guide. “You carn't see them now, sir, but a bit ago I
'ad a peep at a couple of 'em movin' about. The reason they ain't firin'
over 'ere is because they don't want us to locate 'em, I think, sir.”
“Oh!” I said, like that. “Oh!”
By mutual but unspoken consent we then retired to our former position.
The imperturbable Tommy fell back in good order, but I think possibly I
may have hurried somewhat. I always was a fairly brisk walker, anyhow.
Inside the breached building my companions joined me, and while the
shells from the battery and from the other batteries farther away went
racketing over us toward Noyon we held a consultation of war. Any desire
on the part of any one to stay and see what might happen after the
bridge had been blown up was effectually squelched by the sudden
appearance of two British officers coming through the village toward us.
Did they choose to interrogate us regarding our mission in this parlous
vicinity there might be embarrassment in the situation for us. So we
went away from there.
As we departed from the place a certain thing impressed itself upon
my consciousness. The men about me--the two Tommies certainly, the two
officers presumably, and probably the Frenchmen--had but newly emerged
from hard fighting. Of a surety they would very shortly be engaged
in more hard fighting, striving to prevent the on-moving Germans from
crossing the river. Over their head shells from their own guns were
racking the air. Shells from hostile batteries were beginning to
splatter down just beyond. This then was merely an interval, an
interlude between acts of a most dire and tremendous tragedy.
And yet so firmly had the chance of death and the habit of war become
a part of their daily and their hourly existence that in this brief
resting spell they behaved exactly as men engaged in some wearing but
peaceful labour might behave during a nooning in a harvest field. No one
in sight was crouching in a posture of defence, with his rifle
gripped in nervous hands and his face set and intent. Here were being
exemplified none of the histrionic principles of applied heroics as we
see them on the stage.
The Frenchmen were sprawled at ease behind the walls, their limbs
relaxed, their faces betokening only a great weariness. One or two
actually were asleep with their heads pillowed on their arms. Those who
spoke did so in level, unexcited tones. They might have been discussing
the veriest commonplaces of life. For all I knew to the contrary, they
were discussing commonplaces. The two British privates leaned upon their
rifles, with their tired legs sagging under them and with cigarette ends
in their mouths. One of the officers was lighting a pipe as we drove
past him. One of the Frenchmen was gnawing at a knuckle of bread.
Indeed there was nothing about the scene, except a knowledge of the
immediate proximity of German skirmishers, which would serve to invest
it with one-tenth of the drama that marked a hundred other sights we had
that day witnessed. Later, though, we learned we had blundered by chance
upon the very spot where the hinge of the greatest battle of history
next day turned.
It was south of Noyon at the Pontoise ford and at other fords above and
below Pontoise that the Germans designed to cross the river in their
onslaught southward against the defences of Paris. But there they
failed, thanks be to British desperation and French determination; and
it was then, according to what students of strategy among the Allies
say, that the hosts of the War Lord altered the plan of their campaign
and faced about to the westward in their effort to take Amiens and
sunder the line of communication between Paris and Calais--an effort
which still is being made as I sit here in Paris writing these pages for
the mail.
The day's journey was not over by any manner of means, but so far as I
personally was concerned its culminating moment passed when I walked out
on the bridge timbers with that matter-of-fact young Royal Lancer. What
followed thereafter was in the nature of a series of anticlimaxes, and
yet we saw a bookful before we rode back to Soissons for a second night
under bombardment in that sorely beset and beleaguered old city. Before
heading back we cruised for ten kilometres beyond Noyon, going west by
south toward Compiègne.
On this side jaunt we mostly skirted the river, which on our bank was
comparatively calm but which upon the farther bank was being contended
for at the bayonet's point by British and French against Germans. The
sound of the cannonading never ceased for a moment, and as dusk came on
the northern horizon was lit up with flickering waves of a sullen dull
red radiance. The nearer we came to Compiègne the more numerous were
the British, not in squads and detachments and bits of companies but in
regiments and brigades which preserved their formations even though some
of them had been reduced to skeletons of their former proportions. In
the fields alongside the way the artillerymen were throwing up earthen
banks for the guns; the infantrymen were making low sod walls behind
which they would sleep that night and fight on the morrow. From every
hand came the smell of brewing tea, for, battle or no battle, the Tommy
would have his national beverage. The troop horses were being properly
bestowed in the shaggly thickets, and camp fires threw off pungent
smells of wood burning. For the first time in a long time the campaign
was outdoors, under the skies.
I saw one fagged trooper squatting at the roadside, with a minute scrap
of looking-glass balanced before him in the twigs of a bare bush, while
he painfully but painstakingly was shaving himself in cold ditch water.
He had fought or marched all day, I imagine; his chances of being sent
to eternity in piecemeal before another sunset were exceedingly good;
but he would go, tidied and with scraped jowls, to whatever fate might
await him. And that, except for one other small thing, was the most
typically English thing I witnessed in the shank of this memorable
evening.
The other incident occurred after we had faced about for our return.
In a maze of byroads we got off our course. A lone soldier of the
Bedfordshires--a man near forty, I should say at an offhand guess--was
tramping along. Our driver halted our car and hailed him. He
straightened his weary back and came smartly to a salute.
“We've lost our way,” explained one of us.
He smiled at us whimsically.
“I'm afraid I can't help you, sirs,” he said in the tones of an educated
man. “I've lost my own way no less than six times to-day. I may add that
I'm rather a stranger in these parts myself.”
When we got to Blérincourt with an hour of daylight and another hour
of twilight yet ahead of us we turned north toward Chauny, which the
Germans now held and which the Allies were bombarding furiously. We
had come to a crossroads just back of a small village, when with a
low spiteful hiss of escaping air one of our rear tires went flat. We
stopped to replace the damaged tube with a better one. Behind us, a
quarter of a mile or so away, a British baggage train was making bivouac
for the night. Just in front of us a British battery was firing over the
housetops of the empty village toward Chauny.
We had the car jacked up and the old tire off the rim and the new one
half on when--bang! the heavens and the world seemed to come together
all about us. What happened was that a big shell of high explosives,
fired from an enemy mortar miles away, had dropped within seventy, sixty
yards of us in a field; what seemed to happen was that a great plug was
pulled out of the air with a smiting and a crashing and a rending. The
earth quivered as though it had taken a death wound. Our wind shield
cracked across under the force of the concussion. Gravel and bits of
clay descended about us in a pattering shower.
Speaking for myself, I may say that one of the most noticeable physical
effects of having a nine shell exploding in one's immediate vicinity is
a curious sinking sensation at the pit of the stomach, complicated with
a dryness of the mouth and sudden chill in the feet.
Two more shells dropped within a hundred yards of us before we got that
tire pumped up and departed. Even so, I believe the world's record for
pumping up tires was broken on this occasion. I am in position to speak
with authority on this detail, because I was doing the pumping.