SEEKING for the thrills that experience had taught me would nevertheless
probably not be forthcoming anywhere in this so-called quiet sector, I
went that same day with a young American officer to a forward post of
command, which was another name for a screened pit dug in the scalp of a
fair-sized hillock, immediately behind our foremost rifle pits. Sitting
here upon the tops of our steel helmets, which the same make fairly
good perches to sit on when the ground is muddied, we could look through
periscope glasses right into the courtyard of a wrecked château held
by the enemy. Upon this spot some of the guns behind us were playing
industriously. We could see where the shells struck--now in the garden,
now near the shattered outbuildings, now ripping away a slice of the
front walls or a segment of the roof of the château itself; and we could
see too, after the dust of each hit had somewhat lifted, the small gray
figures of Germans scurrying about like startled ants.
A mile away, about, were those Germans, and yet to all intents and
purposes they might have been twenty miles away; for as things stood,
and with the forces that they had at this point, it would have taken
them days or perhaps weeks to bridge the gap between their lines and
ours, and it would have taken us as long to get to where they were. For
you see both forces had abundance of artillery, but each was holding its
front lines with small groups of infantry. To sit there and peer into
their defences was like looking into a distant planet peopled by men
thinking different thoughts from ours, and swayed by different ambitions
and moved by impulses all running counter to those of our breed.
Nevertheless, I must confess that the sensation of crouching in that
hole in the ground, spying upon the movements of those dwellers of that
other small world, while high above us the shells passed over, shrieking
their war-whoops as they travelled from or toward our back lines, very
soon lost for me the savour of interest, just as it had lost it a month
before when I did the same thing in front of Noyon, or two weeks before
near Verdun, or as afterward it was to do when I repeated the experience
near Rheims.
So after a bit my companion and I fell to enjoying the beauties of the
day. In front of us lay a strip of gentle pasture slope not badly marred
by shell craters, and all green except where lovely wide slashes of a
bright yellow flower cut across it like rifts of fallen sunshine. The
lower reaches of air were filled with the humming of bees, and every
minute the skylarks went singing up into the soft skies as though
filled with a curiosity to find out what those wailing demons that sped
crisscrossing through the heavens might be. Presently from a thicket
behind us sounded a bell-like bird note with a sort of melodious cluck
in it. I had never heard that note before except when uttered by wooden
clocks of presumably Swiss manufacture, but I recognised it for what it
was.
“Listen,” said my companion: “that's the second time within a week I've
heard it. A French liaison officer was with me then, and he said that
for three years now the cuckoo had been silent, and he said that the
French country people believed that since the cuckoo had begun calling
again it was a sign the war would soon be over--that the cuckoo was
calling for peace on earth.”
“I wonder if he was right,” I said.
“Well, he was right so far as he personally was concerned. This war for
him was nearly over. Night before last he was riding back to division
headquarters in a side car, and a shell dropped on him at a crossroads
and he and the driver were killed.”
We sat a minute or two longer and nothing was said.
“Well,” he said at length, “if you've had enough of this we'll be
getting back. It isn't very much of a show, once a fellow gets used to
it, and I guess the major will have supper ready for us pretty soon.
Ready to go?”
We got up cautiously and put our helmets on the proper ends of us and
started back through the shallow communication trench leading to the
village.
“Being where you can look right across and down into the German lines
makes a fellow wonder,” I suggested. “It makes a fellow wonder what
those men over yonder are thinking about and what their feelings toward
us are, and whether they hate us as deeply as they hate the British'.”
“I guess I can figure out what one of them thinks anyhow,” he said with
a quizzical side-wise glance at me. He flirted over his shoulder with
his thumb. “I've got a brother somewhere over yonder ways--if he's
alive.” He smiled at the look that must have come across my face. “Oh,
you needn't suspect me,” he went on. “I judge I'm as good an American
as you are or any man alive is, even if I do wear a German name. You
see I'm a youngest son. I was born in the good old U. S. A. all right
enough, but two of my brothers, older than I am, were born in Germany,
and they didn't come to America when the rest of the family migrated.
And one of them, last time I heard from him before we got into the mess,
was a lieutenant in a Bavarian field battery. Being a German subject
I suppose he figures he's only doing his duty, but how he can go on
fighting for that swine of a Kaiser beats me. But then, I don't suppose
I can understand; I'm an American citizen. Funny world, isn't it?
“Say, listen! That cuckoo is calling again. I wonder if there is
anything in the superstition of the French peasants that peace will come
this year. Well, so far as I am concerned I don't want it to come until
Uncle Sam has finished up this job in the right way. I only hope
the next time I hear the cuckoo sing it'll be in the outskirts of
Berlin--that is, providing a cuckoo can stand for the outskirts of
Berlin.”
I reminded him that the cuckoo was a bird that stole other bird's
nests--or tried to.
“That being so, I guess Berlin must be full of 'em,” said he.
The major's headquarters--he was a major of artillery--was in the chief
house of the little town. Curiously enough this was almost the only
house in the town that had not been hit, and two days later it was hit,
and in the ruins of it a friend of mine, another major, was crushed; but
that is a different story, not to be detailed here. It stood--the house,
I mean--in a little square courtyard of its own, as most village houses
in this part of France do, being flanked on one side by its stable and
on the other side by its cow barn and by its chicken houses. There was a
high wall to inclose it along the side nearest the street, with rabbit
hutches and pigeon cots tucked up under the wall. In the centre of the
court was a midden for manure. It had been a cosy little place once.
The dwelling was of red brick with a gay tiled roof, and the lesser
buildings and the wall were built of stones, as is the French way. Even
the rabbit hutches were stone, and the dovecot and the cuddy for the
fowls. Now, except for American artillerymen, it was all empty of
life. The paved yard was littered with wreckage; the doors of the empty
cubicles stood open.
I sat with the major and his adjutant on the doorstep of the cottage
waiting for the orderlies to call us in to eat our suppers. Through the
lolled gate in the wall an old man, a civilian, entered. He was tall
and lean like one of the lombard trees growing in the spoiled vegetable
garden at the back of the house, and he was dressed in a long frock coat
that was all powdered with a white dust of the roads. He had a grave
long face, and we saw that he limped a little as he came across the
close toward us. Nearing us he took off his hat and bowed.
“Pardon, 'sieurs,” he said in Norman French, “but could I look through
this house?”
“No civilians are permitted here now,” said the major. “How did you get
here?”
“I was given a pass to return,” he explained. “Your pardon again,
m'sieurs, but I am--I was--the mayor of this town, and this is my house.
I mean, it was my house. The Germans came upon us so rapidly we had to
leave on but two hours' notice, taking with us very little. Not until
to-day could I secure leave to come back. I wished to see what was left
of my home--I always had lived here before, you know--and to gather up
some of my belongings, if I might.”
“Where did you come from?” asked the major.
“From --------.” He named a town twenty-two miles away.
“And how did you get here?”
“I walked.” He lifted his shoulders in an expressive gesture. “There was
no other way. And I must walk back to-night. There is no shelter nearer
except for soldiers.”
He looked past us into the main room of the house. Its floor of tiles
was littered with dried mud. A table and three broken chairs that had
given way beneath the weight of heavy and careless men were its only
furniture now. The window panes had been shattered. It was hard to
picture that this once had been a cozy, comfortable room, clean and
tidy, smartened with pictures and ornaments upon the walls and with
curtains at the casement openings, which now gaped so emptily.
“Not much is left, eh?” said the old man, his face twitching. “Well
_c'est la guerre!_”
“I'm afraid your home is rather badly wrecked,” said the major. “Since
I came here my men have tried to do no more damage to it than they could
help, but Algerians were here before us; and the Algerians, as you know,
are rough in their habits and sometimes they loot houses. Do you wish
to enter? If so, go ahead. And if you are hungry I would be glad to have
you stay and eat with us.”
The stranger hesitated a moment.
“No, no,” he said; “of what use to go in? I have seen enough. And thank
you, m'sieur but I do not wish any food.”
He bowed once more and turned away from us; but he did not go away
directly. He went across the court to his barn and tugged at a door that
was half ajar. From within came the grumbled protest of a Yankee gunner
lying just inside on a pile of straw, and indignant at being roused from
a nap.
The man who owned the barn backed away, making his apologies. He picked
up a hay fork that lay upon the dungpile, and near the gate, under the
shadow of the wall, he stooped again and picked up a broken clock that
some one had tossed out of the house. Then, after one more glance all
about the place as though he strove to fix in his mind a picture of it,
not as now it was but as once it had been, he stepped through the gate,
and with his pitiable salvage tucked under his bony arms he vanished up
the road.
When that night I summed up my experiences the memories of the day that
stood out clearest in my mind were not of the guns nor the aëroplanes
nor the bursting shells nor yet the sight in the German lines, but of
the mistreated dog that howled and of the cuckoo that fluted in the
thicket and of the old man who had trudged so far, over perilous
roads, to look with his eyes for the last time, surely, upon the sorry
ruination of his home. And I felt that I, a man whose business it is
to see interesting things and afterward to put them down in black and
white, was acquiring in some degree the perspective of the soldier,
whose mental viewpoint is so foreshortened by the imminent presence
of the greater phases of war that he comes after a while to regard the
inconsequential, and so looks on the incidental phases of it as of
more account than the complexities of its vast, hurrying, overdriven
mechanism.
For the point I have been trying, perhaps clumsily, to make clear all
along is just this: As a general thing it may be set down that except
for those infrequent occasions when there is a charge to be made or
a charge to be repelled, or except when some freak of war, new to the
trooper's experience, is occurring or has just occurred, he in all
essential outer regards is exactly the same person that he was before he
went a-soldiering, with nothing about him to distinguish him from what
he was then, barring the fact that now he wears a uniform.
Spiritually he may have been transformed; indeed he must have been, but
it is a shading of spirituality that but rarely betrays itself in his
fashion of speech or in his physical expression or in his behaviour.
Doing the most heroic things he nevertheless does them without indulging
in any of the heroics with which the fiction of books and the fiction
of stagecraft love to invest the display of the finer and the higher
emotions of mankind.
Living where death in various guises is ever upon the stalk for him he
learns to regard it no more than in civil life he regards the commoner
manifestations of a code of civilised procedure that ethically is based
upon a plan to safeguard his life and his limb from mischance and ill
health. The habit of death becomes to him as commonplace as the habit of
life once was. He gets used to the incredible and it turns commonplace.
He gets used to the extraordinary, which after it has happened a few
times becomes most ordinary. He gets used to being bombed and is bored
thereby; gets used to gas alarms and bombardments; to high explosives,
spewing shrapnel, and purring bullets; gets used to eating his meals
standing up and taking his rest in broken bits. He gets used to all
of war's programme--its impossibilities and its contradictions, its
splendours, its horrors and its miseries. In short he gets used to
living in a world that is turned entirely upside down, with every
normal aspect in it capsised and every regular and ordained phase of it
standing upon its head.
For a fact it seems to me that in its final analysis the essence of
war is merely the knack of getting used to war. And the instantaneous
response of the average human being to its monstrous and preposterous
aspects is a lesson to prove the elasticity and the infinite
adaptability of the human mind. Because people can and do get used to
it is the reason why they do not all go mad in the midst of it. Getting
used to it--that's the answer. After a while one even gets used to the
phenomenon that war rarely or never looks as you would think war should
look--and that brings me by a roundabout way back again to the main text
of my article.
Troops travelling in numbers across country do not present the majestic
panoramic effect that one might expect. This in part, though, is due to
the common topography of France. Generally speaking, a given district
is so cut up with roads threading the fields that the forces, for
convenience in handling, are divided into short columns that move by
routes that are practically parallel, toward a common destination.
The sight of troops going into camp at night also is disappointing.
In France, thickly settled as it is, with villages tucked into every
convenient dip between the hills, the men are so rapidly swallowed up in
the billeting spaces under house and bam roots that an hour or even half
an hour after the march has ended you might traverse a district where,
let us say, twenty thousand soldiers are quartered, and unless you know
the correct figures the evidence offered to your eyes might deceive you
into assuming that not one-tenth of that number were anywhere in the
vicinity.
It is this failure of war, when considered as a physical thing, to
measure up to its traditional Impressiveness, that fills with despair
the soul of the writing man, who craves to put down on paper an adequate
conception of it in its entirety. Finally he comes to this: That either
he must throw away the delusions he himself nourished and content
himself by building together little mosaics with scraps gleaned from the
big, untellable, untranslatable enigma that it is, or for the reader's
sake must try to conjure up a counterfeit conception, which will
correspond with what he knows the average reader's mental vision of the
thing to be. In one event he is honest--but disappointing. In the other
he is guilty of a willful deceit, but probably turns out copy that is
satisfying to his audience. In either event, in his heart he is bound to
realise the utter impossibility of depicting war as it is.
It is one of the cumulating paradoxes of the entire paradoxical
procedure that the best place to get a reasonably clear and intelligible
idea of the swing and scope of a battle is not upon the site of the
battle itself, but in a place anywhere from ten to twenty miles behind
the battle. Directly at the front the onlooker observes only those small
segments of the prevalent hostilities that lie directly under his eyes.
He is hedged in and hampered by obstacles; his vision is circumscribed
and confined to what may be presented in his immediate vicinity.
Of course there are exceptions to this rule. I am speaking not of every
case but of the average case.
A fairish distance back, though, he may to an extent grasp the immensity
of the operation. He sees the hammered troops coming out and the fresh
troops going in; beholds the movements of munitions and supplies and
reserves; observes the handling of the wounded; notes the provisions
that are made for a possible advance and the preparations that have been
made for a possible retreat. Even so, to the uninitiated eye the scheme
appears jumbled, haphazard and altogether confused. It requires a mind
acquainted with more than the rudiments of military science to discern
purpose in what primarily appears to be so absolutely purposeless. There
is nothing of the checkerboard about it; the orderliness of a chess game
is lacking. The suggestion is more that of a whirlpool. So it follows
that the novice watches only the maelstrom on the surface and rarely can
he fathom out the guiding influences that ordain that each twistiwise
current moves in its proper channel without impairment or impediment lor
any one of the myriad of related activities.
Being a novice he is astonished to note that only infrequently do
wounded men act as his fictional reading has led him to believe they
would act. To me the most astounding thing about this has been not that
wounded men shriek and moan, but that nearly always they are so terribly
silent. At the moment of receiving his hurt a man may cry out; often he
does. But oftener than not he comes, mute and composed, to the dressing
station. The example of certain men who lock their lips and refuse
to murmur, no matter how great is their pain, inspires the rest to
do likewise. A man who in civil life would make a great pother over a
trivial mishap, in service will endure an infinitely worse one without
complaint. If war brings out all the vices in some nations it most
surely brings out the virtues in others. I hate to think back on the
number of freshly wounded men I have seen, but when I do think back on
it I am struck by the fact that barring a few who were delirious
and some few more who were just emerging into agonised consciousness
following the coma shock of a bad injury, I can count upon the fingers
of my two hands the total of those who screamed or loudly groaned.
Men well along the road to recovery frequently make more troublesome
patients than those who have just been brought to the field hospitals;
and a man who perhaps has lain for hours with a great hole in his flesh,
stoically awaiting his turn under the surgeon's hands, will sometimes,
as a convalescent, worry and fret over the prospect of having his hurts
redressed.
Among certain races the newly stricken trooper is more apt to be
concerned by the fear that he may be incapacitated from getting
back into the game than he is about the extent of his wound or the
possibility that he may die of it. As an American I am proud to be able
to say, speaking as a first-hand witness, that our own race should be
notably included in this category. The Irishman who had been shot five
times but was morally certain he would recover and return to the war
because he thought he knew the fellow who had plugged him has his
counterpart without number among the valorous lads from this side of the
ocean whose names have appeared on the casualty lists.