THREE of us, correspondents, had gone up with a division of ours that
was taking over one of the Picardy sectors. The French, moved out by
degrees as we by degrees moved in. On the night when we actually came
into the front lines two of us slept--or tried to--in a house of a
village perhaps a mile and a half behind the forward trenches. The third
man went on perhaps a half mile nearer the trouble zone with a battalion
of an infantry regiment that on the morrow would relieve some sorely
battered poilus in the trenches. It is with an experience of this third
man I now mean to deal.
He found lodgment in a château on the outskirts of a village the name of
which does not matter--and probably never will matter again, seeing that
it fairly was blasted out of the earth by its foundations the next time
the Germans attempted to resume their advance toward the Channel. As for
the château, which likewise must be quite gone by now, it was more of a
château than some of the buildings that go by this high-sounding title
in the edges of Normandy.
A château may mean a veritable castle of a place, with towers upon it
and a moat and gardens and terraces and trout ponds round about it. Then
again on the other hand it may mean merely a sizable private residence,
standing somewhat aloof in its own plot from the close-huddled
clustering of lesser folks' cottages that make up the town proper. The
term is almost as elastic in its classifications as the word estate is
in America. In this instance, though, the château was a structure of
some pretensions and much consequence. Rather, it had been when its
owner fled before the great spring advance, leaving behind him all that
he owned except a few portable belongings. The neighbours had run
away, too, and for months now the only tenants of the vicinity had been
troops.
French officers and a few American officers were occupying the château.
Every room and every hallway was crowded already, but space for the
correspondent to spread down his bedding roll was provided in an inner
chamber on the second floor. At two o'clock in the morning, by consent
of the divisional commander, he was going out into the debatable land
between the trenches with a wire-mending party. There is always a chance
that a wire party will bump into a squad of enemies on the prowl or
surprise a raiding outfit from Fritzie's trenches, and then there are
doings to ensue.
Two o'clock was four hours off and the special guest hoped to get a
little sleep in the 'tween times. It was a vain hope, because, to judge
by their behaviour, the Germans had found out a relief division was on
its way in. Since nightfall they had been shelling the back areas of
the sector, and particularly the lines of communication, with might
and main--and six-inch guns. For the most part the shells were passing
entirely over and far beyond the château, but they made quite as much
noise as though they had been dropping in the courtyard outside--more
noise, as a matter of seeming, because the screech of a big shell in its
flight overhead racks the eardrums as the crash of the explosion rarely
does unless the explosion occurs within a few rods of one.
So for four hours or thereabouts our correspondent lay on his pallet,
wide-eyed, and with every nerve in his body standing on end and
wriggling. When the French liaison officer who had volunteered to escort
him on the adventure rapped upon his door he was quite ready to start.
He had taken off nothing except his trench helmet and his gas mask
before turning in, anyhow.
“Walk very quietly, if you please,” bade the Frenchman, leading the way
out, with a pocket flashlight in his hand.
Obeying the request the correspondent tiptoed along behind his guide.
To get outdoors they passed through two other rooms and down a flight of
stairs and along a hallway opening into the wrecked garden. In the beds
that were in the rooms and upon blankets on the floors of the rooms and
also in the hallway French officers were stretched, exhaling the heavy
breaths of men who have worked hard and who need the rest they are
taking. Only one man stirred, and that was downstairs as the pair who
were departing picked their way between the double rows of sleepers. A
loose plank creaked sharply under the weight of the American, and a man
stirred in his coverlids and opened his eyes for a moment; and then,
turning over, was off again almost instantly.
At that, understanding came to the correspondent--he knew now why the
thoughtful liaison officer had cautioned him to step lightly. To these
men lying here about him the infernal clamour of the shells had become
a customary part of their lives, whether waking or sleeping. To their
natures, accustomed as they were to it, this hideous din was a lullaby
song. But any small unusual sound, such as the noise of a booted foot
falling upon a squeaky board, might rouse them, and two men clumping
carelessly past them would have brought every one of them out of his
slumbers, sitting up.
Paradoxes such as this are forever cropping up in one's wartime
experiences. Indeed, war may be said to be made up of countless
paradoxes, overlapping and piled one upon another. To me the most
striking of the outstanding manifestations of war on its paradoxical
side is the fact that in this war nothing, or almost nothing, actually
turns out in accordance with what one's idea of it had been beforehand.
Looking backward on what I myself have viewed of its physical and
metaphysical aspects I can think of scarcely an element or a phase which
accorded with my preconceived brain image of the thing. I do not mean
by this that as a spectacle it has been disappointing, but that almost
invariably it has been different from what I was expecting it would be.
I found this to be true in 1914, back at the very beginning.
Take for example the fashion after which men bear themselves as they
go into battle; and, for a more striking illustration than that, their
customary deportment after they actually are in the battle. I figure
that beforehand my own notion of what these two demonstrations would be
like was based probably in part upon conceptions derived from old-time
pictures of Civil War engagements, highly coloured, highly imaginative
representations such as used to hang upon the parlour walls of every
orthodox rural home in our country; and in part upon fiction stories
with war for a background which I had read; and finally perhaps in some
lesser part upon the moving-picture man's ideas as worked out with
more or less artistic license in the pre-war films. I rather think the
average stay-at-home's notions in these regards must be pretty much what
mine were, because he probably derived them from the same sources. The
utter dissimilarity of the actual thing as I have repeatedly viewed it
in three countries of Europe astonished me at first, and in lessening
degree continued to astonish me until the real picture of it had
supplanted the conjured one in my mind.
If the reader's ideas are still fundamentally organised as mine formerly
were he thinks men on the edge of the fight, with the prospect before
them of very shortly being at grips with the enemy, maintain a sober and
a serious front, wearing upon them the look of men who are upborne and
inspired by a purpose to acquit themselves steadfastly and well. By the
same process of reasoning I take it that the reader, conceding he or she
has never been brought face to face with war, pictures men on the march
in periods of comparative immunity from immediate peril as singing
their way along, with jokes and catchwords flitting back and forth and
a general holidaying air pervading the scene presented by the swinging
column. Now my observation has been that the exact opposite is commonly
the case.
Men on the casual march, say, from one billeting place to another, are
apt to push ahead stolidly and for the most part in silence. It is hard
work, marching under heavy equipment is, and after a few hours of it the
strongest individual in the ranks feels the pangs of weariness in his
scissoring legs and along his burdened back. So he bends forward from
the hips and he hunches his shoulders and wastes mighty little of his
breath in idle persiflage. Only toward the end of the journey, when rest
and food are in impending prospect, do his spirits revive to a point
where he feels like singing and guying his mates. The thud-thud-thud of
the feet upon the highroad, the grunted commands of the officers, and
the occasional clatter of metal striking against metal as a man shifts
his piece are likely to be the only accompaniments of the hike for miles
on end; and there isn't much music really in such sounds as these.
But suppose the same men are moving into action and know whither they
are bound. The preliminary nervousness that possesses every normally
constituted man at the prospect of facing the deadliest forms of danger
now moves these men to hide their true emotions under a masking of
gaiety. This gaiety, which largely is assumed at the outset, presently
becomes their real mood. Nine men out of ten who pass are indulging in
quips and catches. Nine in ten are ready to laugh at trivialities
that ordinarily would go unnoticed. One standing by to watch them
must diagnose the average expression on the average face as betokening
exultation rather than exaltation. The tenth man is quiet and of a
thoughtful port. He is forcing himself to appraise the situation before
him in its right proportions, and so the infection that fills his
comrades passes him by. Yet it is safe to bet on it that the sober
one-tenth, in the high hour of the grapple, will contend with just as
much gallantry as the nine-tenths can hope to show.
Particularly is the mental slant that I have here sought to describe
true in its application to raw troops who have yet to taste of close-up
fighting. Seasoned veterans who have weathered the experience before
now and who know what it means, and know, too, that they may count
upon themselves and their fellows to acquit themselves valorously,
are upborne by a certain all-pervading cheerfulness--perhaps as a rule
confidence would be a better word than cheerfulness--but they are not
quite so noisy, not quite so enthusiastic as the greener hands. At this
moment they are not doing very much in the cheering line, though they
will yell just as loudly as any when the order is to fix bayonets and
charge.
Paradoxically the reaction upon men who have come whole out of the
inferno of battling at close quarters affects these two compared classes
of soldier-men differently--at least that has been my observation. The
unseasoned men, to whom the hell from which they have just emerged has
been for them a new kind of hell, are as likely as not almost downcast
in their outward demeanour, irritable and peevish in their language.
For one thing, they are dog-tired; for another, I would say, a true
appreciation of the ordeal through which they have passed is now coming
home to them; for still another, the shock of having seen their mates
wiped out all about them surely affects the general consciousness of
the survivors; and finally, as I appraise their sensations, the calm
following the tumult and the struggle leaves them well-nigh numbed.
Certainly it frequently leaves them inarticulate almost to dumbness.
Give them twenty-four hours for rest and mental adjustment, and the
coltishness of youth returns to them in ample measure, especially if
there is a victory to their credit.
On the contrasting hand, if you want to witness an exhibition of good
cheer at the end of a day of fighting seek for it among the veterans. On
a certain day in May when the second of the great German drives was in
progress I chanced to be at a spot where a brigade of French infantry--a
brigade with a magnificent record made earlier in the war--was thrown
into action to reenforce a hard-pressed and decimated British command.
Almost without exception the little dusty, rusty poilus went to the
fighting in a sort of matter-of-fact methodical silence more impressive
to me than loud outbursts could possibly have been. Quietly, swiftly,
without lost motion or vain exclamations, but moving all like men intent
upon the performance of a difficult and an unpleasant but a highly
necessary task, they took up their guns, adjusted their packs of
ammunition, set their helmets over their foreheads, and walked with no
undue haste but only with an assured and briskened serenity into the
awfulness that was beyond the clouds of smoke and dust, just yonder.
That same evening, by a streak of luck, I returned to approximately
the same spot at the moment when those who were left of the Frenchmen
prepared to bivouac on the edges of the same terrain where all the
afternoon they had fought. With the help of some skeleton formations
of British companies they had withstood the German onslaught; more than
that, they had broken two advancing waves of the gray coats and finally
had swept the ripped and riddled legions of the enemy back for a good
mile, so that now they held the field as victors. Elsewhere along that
fifty-mile front there might be a different story to tell, but here in
this small corner of the great canvas of the mighty battle a localised
success that was worth while had been achieved by these heroes. Under
them now their legs quivered from stark weariness. Some were black like
negroes; the stale sweat and the dried dirt and the powder grit had
caked them over. Some were red like Indians, where the crusted blood
from small unconsidered wounds dyed the skin on their faces and their
hands.
Now with the fog of fighting turning grey upon their unwashed bodies
they sprawled on the stained and trodden meadow grass alongside the
road, looking, with their figures foreshortened by lying, most absurdly
like exceedingly dirty small boys who had been playing at soldiering.
Yet spent and worn as they were they gibed us as we passed, and with
uplifted canteens they toasted us--presumably in the thin Pinard; and
they sang songs without number and they uttered spicy Gallic jokes at
the expense of the mess cooks for their tardiness in making ready the
supper stews. The job of the day was done with and ended; it was a fit
time for being merry, and these little men were most exceedingly merry.
Such was the excess of their jollifying that had one not known better
one might have suspected that they had been drinking something stronger
than the thin wine ration upon which no Frenchman ever gets drunk. I
recall one stunted chap who reeled and staggered as he made his way
toward our halted car to ask us for news from the eastward. He had stuck
into the sooted muzzle of his rifle a sheaf of wild flowers; and reeling
and rocking on his heels he sought to embrace us when we offered him
cigarettes. He was tipsy all right; but not with liquor--with emotion;
the sort of emotion that temporarily befuddles a fighting man who has
fought well and who is glad to have finished fighting for the time
being, at least. As we left him he was propped upon his short unsteady
legs at the roadside singing the song that your poilu always by
preference sings when his mood inclines to the blithesome; he sang the
Madelon.
Right here, I think, is a good enough time for me to say that in these
times the place to hear the Marseillaise hymn played or sung is not
France but America. In America one hears it everywhere--the hand organs
play it, the theatre orchestras play it, the military bands play it,
pretty ladies sing it at patriotic concerts. In France in seven months
I have heard it just twice--once in the outskirts of the great battle on
March twenty-sixth, just outside of Soissons, when a handful of French
soldiers hurrying up to the fight were moved by some passing fancy,
which we who heard them could not fathom, to chant a verse or two of the
song; and again on Memorial Day, when an American band played it in a
French burying ground at a coast town where the graves of three hundred
of our own soldiers were decorated.
It may be that the Frenchman has grown wearied of the sound of
his national air, or it may be--and this, I think, is the proper
explanation--that in this time of stress and suffering for his land the
Marseillaise hymn has for him become a thing so high and so holy that
he holds it for sacred moments, to be rendered then as the accompaniment
for a sacrificial rite of the spirit and of the soul. At any rate it is
true that except on the one occasion I have just mentioned I have yet to
hear the French soldier in the field sing the Marseillaise hymn. He much
prefers his cheerful chansons, and when an American band plays for him
it is a jazz tune that most surely may be counted upon to make him cry
“_Encore! _”
As illustrative of the difference in temperament between the veteran
and the beginner at war I should like to describe what many times I have
witnessed as an incident in the streets of Paris. All through the past
spring and the early part of the summer the members of the class of 1919
were holding celebrations in commemoration of the fact that they were
about to be called to the service. Their emblematic colour for this year
is red, and their chosen flower is the poppy, so the youngsters call
themselves Coquelicots, which is the French name for the crimson wild
poppy that grows everywhere in France. The class of 1918, who went
out last year, were Pâquerettes--white daisies; and those of 1917 were
Bluets, or cornflowers. Every three years the fancy repeats itself
in the same sequence and the same cycle, so that the trinity of the
national colours may be preserved.
Almost any hour, day or night, one might see troops of those about to
be mobilised--schoolboys of eighteen, apprentice lads, peasant youths,
cadets of military academies--parading the avenues. They wore all manner
of fantastic garbings, with enormous red neckties and red sashes, and
battered high hats banded with red, and with poppies stuck in their
buttonholes or festooned in garlands about their necks. And always
they were singing and skylarking, marching with fantastic jig steps in
grotesque queue formations, and playing pranks upon the pedestrians
who got in their way. The sight made an American think of college
fraternities conducting outdoor initiations. The scene gave colour and
the sparkle of youthful exuberance to a city where the sad sights are
commoner than the happy ones.
It was inevitable that in every few rods of their progress the
youngsters would encounter soldiers on leave, and then the boys,
dropping for a moment their joyousness, would gravely salute the
veterans, and the veterans as gravely would return the salute. Then the
roisterers would whirl off down the sidewalk waving their exaggerated
walking sticks and kicking up their heels as is the way with youth the
world over, and the soldiers in their stained patched tunics, and their
worn leather housings, and with their worn resolute faces--how often I
have seen this little byplay repeated!--would exchange swift expressive
glances with one another and smile meaning, sad little smiles, and shake
their heads in a sort of passive resignation to the inevitable, before
they went trudging on in their heavy, run-down, shabby boots. They
knew--these war-worn elders did--what the chosen man children of the
generation just emerging from the first stages of its adolescence would
very shortly be called upon to face; and so they shook their heads in
silent but regretful affirmation of the certain prospect of an added
burden of woefulness and suffering for the flowered youth of their
stricken land. For these men who had trod the paths of glory that are so
flinty and so hard could understand what must lie ahead so much better
than those stripling lads to whom the road to war was as yet a shining
and a golden highway!
Have you ever seen at the movies a film purporting to show an actual
scene in the trenches under hostile fire, wherein the men on guard there
all faced, with squinted eyes and scowling brows, across the parapets,
fingering their weapons nervously, and rarely or never glanced toward
the camera, but seemingly were so absorbed in their ambitions to pot the
foeman across the way they had no thought for anything except the tragic
undertaking in hand? Then again, have you ever seen another so-called
war reel with a similar setting, which brought before you the figures
of soldiers who from behind the shelter of the piled-up sandbags grinned
self-consciously in the direction of the machine that was recording
their forms and their movements for back-home consumption, and who
between intervals of loading and firing deported themselves pretty much
as any group of sheepishly pleased young men might while under the eye
of a photographing machine and who for the moment appeared to be more
inspired by a perfectly normal human impulse to show off than by any
other thought?
Now I have seen both these varieties of pictures and assuming that the
reader has, too, I put to him or her this question: Granting that one
of these films was the genuine article, namely, a view of a section of
a front-line trench taken at risk of the operator's life; and that the
other was a manufactured thing, with carefully rehearsed supers made up
as soldiers posing in obedience to a hired director's orders, which one,
in the reader's opinion, was the authentic thing and which the bogus?
If I have figured the probable answer aright the probable answer is
wrong. The picture in which the soldiers behaved in conformity with
the average civilian's notion of the way a soldier does behave under
fire--to wit, by being all intent upon the job of shooting, with no
regard for any lesser diversions--was the imitation; and the film in
which you saw the soldiers crowding forward in the narrow trench way in
order to be sure of getting into the focus area--the one where you saw
the soldiers grinning toward you and winking and nudging their fellows
and generally behaving like curious and embarrassed children--well, that
was the genuine article.
For the fact of the matter is that once the novelty of his new
environment has worn off--and it does wear off with marvellous
speed--the soldier in the front-line trench carries on after identically
the same patterns that would govern him under ordinary circumstances.
The detail that he is in a place of imminent danger becomes to him of
secondary importance. Except for the chance that any moment he may
stop a bullet his mode of habit resolves itself back to its familiar
elements. He is bored or he is interested by exactly the same things
that would bore him or excite him anywhere else. To him the shooting
back and forth across the top very soon becomes a more or less tedious
part of the daily routine of the trench life, but the intrusion into his
corner of a moving-picture man with a camera is a novelty, an event very
much' out of the ordinary; therefore he pays much more attention to
the taking of the picture than to what goes on pretty steadily during
practically all of his waking hours.
For added qualities of seeming indifference to externals in the midst
of great and stirring exertions, see the artillerymen who serve with the
heavies. Generally things are fairly lively among those dainty, darling,
death-dealing pets that are called the 75's. Under their camouflaging
they look like speckled pups when they do not look like spotted circus
ponies. It is a brisksome and a heartening thing to see how fast a crew
of Frenchmen can serve a battery of these little pintos, feeding the
three-inch shells into the pieces with such celerity that at a distance
the reports merge together so one might almost imagine he heard the
voice of an overgrown machine gun speaking, instead of the intermingled
voices of five separate trouble makers. Near Compiègne one day I watched
a battery of 75's at work on the Germans advancing in mass formation, I
keeping count of the reports; and the average number of shots per minute
per gun was twelve.
But the heavies work more slowly, and their crews have a sluggish look
about them as befitting men who do their fighting all at long range and
never see the foe; though I suspect the underlying reason to be that
they have learned to combine the maximum of efficiency and of accuracy
with the minimum of apparent effort and the minimum of apparent
enthusiasm. Particularly is this to be said in cases where the gunners
have become expert through long practice.
On the Montdidier Front on a gloriously beautiful afternoon of early
summer I kept company for two hours with three French batteries of
155's. The guns were ranged in dirt emplacements under a bank alongside
a sunken road that meandered out from the main street of a village that
was empty except for American and French soldiers. The Germans were four
miles away, beyond a ridge of low hills. By climbing to the crest of the
nearermost rise and lying there in the rank grass and looking through
glasses one could make out the German lines. Without glasses one could
mark fairly well where the shells from our side fell. But during the
time I stayed there no single man among the artillerymen manifested any
desire whatsoever to ascertain the visible effects of his handiwork.
Over the ground telephone an order would come from somewhere or other,
miles away. The officer in command of one of the batteries would sing
out the order to fire so many rounds at such and such intervals.
The angles--the deflections for charge temperature, air temperature,
barometer pressure and wind--had all been worked out earlier in the day,
and a few corrections for range were required. So all the men had to do
was to fire the guns. And that literally was all that they did do.
Not all the explosions in that immediate vicinity were caused by
“departs,” either. Occasionally there were to be heard the unmistakable
whistle and roar and the ultimate crack of an “arrive,” for the Germans'
counterbatteries did not remain silent under the punishment the French
were dealing out. But when an arrive fell anywhere within eye range the
men barely turned their heads to see the column of earth and dust and
pulverised chalk-rock go geysering up into the air. It was only by
chance I found out an enemy shell had fallen that morning among a gun
crew stationed near the westerly end of the line of guns, perhaps a
quarter of a mile away, and had blown seven men to bits and wounded as
many more.
Still, this apathy with regard to the potential consequences of being
where an arrive bursts is not confined to the gunners. When one has
had opportunity to see how many shells fall without doing any damage to
human beings, and to figure out for oneself how many tons of metal
it takes to kill a man, one likewise acquires a measure of this same
apparent nonchalance.
For sheer sang-froid it would be hard to match those whose work I
watched that day. In intervals of activity they lounged under the gun
wheels, smoking and playing card games; and when one battery was playing
and another temporarily was silent the members of the idle battery paid
absolutely no heed to the work of their fellows.
In two hours just one thing and only one thing occurred to jostle them
out of their calm. Something mysterious and very grievous befell a
half-grown dog, which, having been abandoned or forgotten by his owners,
still lived on in the ruins of the town and foraged for scraps among the
mess kitchens. Down the road past the guns came the pup, ki-yiing his
troubles as he ran; and at the sound of his poignant yelps some of the
gunners quit their posts and ran out into the road, and one of them
gathered up the poor beastie in his arms and a dozen more clustered
about offering the consolation of pats and soothing words to the
afflicted thing. Presently under this treatment he forgot what ailed
him, and then the men went back to their places, discussing the affair
with many gestures and copious speech. Ten German shells plumping down
near by would not have created half so much excitement as the woes of
one ownerless doggie had created. I said to myself that if the incident
was typically French, likewise it was typical of what might be called
the war temperament as exemplified among veteran fighters.
I should add, merely to fill out the settings of the scene, that
scarcely was there a ten-minute interlude this day in which German
observation planes did not scout over our lines or French observation
planes did not scout over theirs. Sometimes only a single plane would
be visible, but more often the airmen moved in squadron formations. Each
time of course that a plane ventured aloft its coursing flight across
the heavens would be marked by bursting pompons of downy white or black
smoke--white for shrapnel and black for explosive bursts--where the
antiaircraft guns of one side or the other took wing shots at the pesky
intruder. One time six sky voyagers were up simultaneously. Another time
ten, and still another no less than sixteen might be counted at once.
But to focus the attention of any of the persons then upon the earth
below, an aërial combat between the two groups would have been required,
and even this spectacle--which at the first time of witnessing it is
almost the most stirring isolated event that military operations have to
offer--very soon, with daily repetitions, becomes almost commonplace,
as I myself can testify. War itself is too big a thing for one detached
detail of it to count in the estimates that one tries to form of the
whole thing. It takes a charge in force over the top or something
equally vivid and spectacular to whet up the jaded mentality of the
onlooker.