A VOLUNTEER POILU
by Henry Sheahan
To Professor Charles Townsend Copeland of Harvard University
Dear Copey,
At Verdun I thought of you, and the friendly hearth of Hollis 15 seemed
very far away from the deserted, snow-swept streets of the tragic city.
Then suddenly I remembered how you had encouraged me and many others to
go over and help in any way that we could; I remembered your keen
understanding of the Epic, and the deep sympathy with human beings which
you taught those whose privilege it was to be your pupils. And so you
did not seem so far away after all, but closer to the heart of the war
than any other friend I had.
I dedicate this book to you with grateful affection after many years of
friendship.
Henry
Topsfield, September, 1916
Preface
I have ventured to call this book A Volunteer Poilu principally because
we were known to the soldiers of the Bois-le-Prêtre as "les Poilus
Américains." Then, too, it was my ambition to do for my comrades, the
French private soldiers, what other books have done for the soldiers of
other armies. The title chosen, however, was more than complimentary; it
was but just. In recognition of the work of the Section during the
summer, it was, in October, 1915, formally adopted into the French army;
a French officer became its administrative head, and the drivers were
given the same papers, pay, and discipline as their French comrades.
I wish to thank many of my old friends of Section II, who have aided me
in the writing of this book.
HENRY SHEAHAN
Contents
I. THE ROCHAMBEAU S'EN VA-T-EN GUERRE
A war-time voyage--The Rochambeau--Loading ammunition and food
supplies--Personalities on board--The dyestuffs agent--The machine
lathes man--The Swede from Minnesota who was on his way to the Foreign
Legion--His subsequent history--The talk aboard--The French officer--His
philosophy of war--Ernest Psichari--Arrival at Bordeaux--The Arabs at
the docks--The convalescent soldiers-- Across La Beauce--The French
countryside in war-time.
II. AN UNKNOWN PARIS IN THE NIGHT AND RAIN.
Paris, rain, and darkness--The Gardens of the Tuileries--The
dormitory--The hospital at night--Beginning of the Champagne
offensive--The Gare de la Chapelle at two in the morning--The
wounded--The Zouave stretcher-bearers--The Arabs in the abandoned
school--Suburban Paris at dawn--The home of the deaconesses.
III. THE GREAT SWATHE OF THE LINES
Nancy--The porter's story--Getting to the front--What the phrase "the
front" really means--The sense of the front--The shell zone--The zone of
quiet--My quarters in the shelled house--The fire shells--Bombarded at
night--Death of the soldier fireman.
IV. LA FORET DE BOIS-LE-PRETRE
Le Bois-le-Prêtre--Description--History--Les Glycines, "Wisteria
Villa"--The Road to the trenches--At the trenches--The painter's idea of
"le sinistre dans l'art"--The sign post--The zone of violence--The
Quart-en-Réserve--The village caught in the torment of the lines--The
dead on the barbed wire--"The Road to Metz."
V. THE TRENCHES IN THE "WOOD OF DEATH."
The Trenches--Organization--Nature of the war--Food, shelters, clothing,
ammunition, etc.--A typical day in the trenches--Trench shells or
"crapouilots"--In the abri--The tunnel--The doctrinaire lieutenant of
engineers.
VI. THE GERMANS ATTACK
The piano at Montauville--An interrupted concert--At the Quart--The
battle for the ridge of the Wood--Fall of the German
aeroplane--Psychology of the men in the trenches--Religion in the
trenches--
VII. THE TOWN IN THE TRENCHES
Poor old "Pont"--Description of the town--A civilian's story--The house
of the Captain of the Papal Zouaves--Church of St. Laurent--The Cemetery
and its guardian.
VIII. MESSIEURS LES POILUS DE LA GRANDE GUERRE
En repos--A village of troops--Manners and morals--The concert--journal
of the Bois-le-Prêtre--Various poilus.
IX. PREPARING THE DEFENSE OF VERDUN
En permission--State of France--The France of 1905 and the France of
1915--The class of 1917--Bar-le-Duc--The air raid--Called to Verdun.
X. THE GREAT DAYS OF VERDUN
Verdun in 1912--Verdun on the night of the first great attack--The
hospital--The shelled cross road--The air shell--The pastry cook's
story--The cultivateur of the Valois and the crater at Douaumont--The
pompiers of Verdun--"Do you want to see an odd sight?"--Verdun in storm
and desolation.
A Volunteer Poilu
Chapter I
The Rochambeau S'en Va-t-en Guerre
Moored alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the land, the
cargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie Générale was
being loaded with American supplies for the France of the Great War. A
hot August sun struck spots and ripples of glancing radiance from the
viscous, oily surface of the foul basin in which she lay inert; the air
was full of sounds, the wheezing of engines, the rattling of cog-checks,
and the rumble of wheels and hoofs which swept, in sultry puffs of noise
and odor, from the pavements on the land. Falling from the exhausts, a
round, silvery-white cascade poured into the dark lane between the wharf
and the deck, and sounded a monotonous, roaring underchord to the
intermingled dins. At the sun-bathed bow, a derrick gang lowered bags of
flour into the open well of the hold; there were commands in French, a
chugging, and a hissing of steam, and a giant's clutch of dusty,
hundred-kilo flour-bags from Duluth would swing from the wharf to the
Rochambeau, sink, and disappear. In some way the unfamiliar language,
and the sight of the thickset, French sailor-men, so evidently all of
one race, made the Rochambeau, moored in the shadow of the sky-scrapers,
seem mysteriously alien. But among the workers in the hold, who could be
seen when they stood on the floor of the open hatchway, was a young,
red-headed, American longshoreman clad in the trousers part of a suit of
brown-check overalls; sweat and grime had befouled his rather foolish,
freckled face, and every time that a bunch of flour-bags tumbled to the
floor of the well, he would cry to an invisible somebody--"More
dynamite, Joe, more dynamite!"
Walking side by side, like ushers in a wedding procession, two of the
ship's officers made interminable rounds of the deck. Now and then they
stopped and looked over the rail at the loading operations, and once in
low tones they discussed the day's communiqué. "Pas grand' chose"
(nothing of importance), said he whom I took to be the elder, a bearded,
seafaring kind of man. "We have occupied a crater in the Argonne, and
driven back a German patrol (une patrouille Boche) in the region of
Nomény." The younger, blond, pale, with a wispy yellow mustache,
listened casually, his eyes fixed on the turbulence below. The derrick
gang were now stowing away clusters of great wooden boxes marked the
Something Arms Company. "My brother says that American bullets are
filled with powder of a very good quality" (d'une très bonne qualité),
remarked the latter. "By the way, how is your brother?" asked the
bearded man. "Very much better," answered the other; "the last fragment
(éclat) was taken out of his thigh just before we left Bordeaux." They
continued their walk, and three little French boys wearing English
sailor hats took their places at the rail.
As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a level with
the upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for farewells; and
little groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes. There was a good
deal of worrying about submarines; one heard fragments of
conversations--"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"--"Absolutely
safe, je t'assure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice,
"Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund,
snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for
"the success of his business." Two young Americans with the same
identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black
Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth,
paraded lonelily. A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back to
the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, wept at the going of
a younger woman, and ruined an elaborate make-up with grotesque
traceries of tears. "Give him my love," she sobbed; "tell him that the
business is doing splendidly and that he is not to buy any of Lafitte's
laces next time he goes to Paris en permission." A little later, the
Rochambeau, with slow majesty, backed into the channel, and turned her
bow to the east.
The chief interest of the great majority of her passengers was
commercial; there were American drummers keen to line their pockets with
European profits; there were French commis voyageurs who had been
selling articles of French manufacture which had formerly been made by
the Germans; there were half-official persons who had been on missions
to American ammunition works; and there was a diplomat or two. From the
sample trunks on board you could have taken anything from a pair of
boots to a time fuse. Altogether, an interesting lot. Palandeau, a
middle-aged Frenchman with a domed, bald forehead like Socrates or
Verlaine, had been in America selling eau-de-cologne.
"Then you are getting out something new?" I asked.
"Yes, and no," he answered. "Our product is the old-fashioned
eau-de-cologne water with the name 'Farina' on it."
"But in America we associate eau-de-cologne with the Germans," said I.
"Doesn't the bottle say 'Johann Maria Farina'? Surely the form of the
name is German."
"But that was not his name, monsieur; he was a Frenchman, and called
himself 'Jean Marie.' Yes, really, the Germans stole the manufacture
from the French. Consider the name of the article, 'eau-de-cologne,' is
not that French?"
"Yes," I admitted.
"Alors," said Palandeau; "the blocus has simply given us the power to
reclaim trade opportunities justly ours. Therefore we have printed a new
label telling the truth about Farina, and the Boche 'Johann Maria' is
'kapout.'"
"Do you sell much of it?"
"Quantities! Our product is superior to the Boche article, and has the
glamour of an importation. I await the contest without uneasiness."
"What contest?"
"When Jean Marie meets Johann Maria--après la guerre," said Palandeau
with a twinkle in his eye.
In the deck chair next to mine sat a dark, powerfully built young Iowan
with the intensely masculine head of a mediaeval soldier. There was a
bit of curl to the dark-brown hair which swept his broad, low forehead,
his brown eyes were devoid of fear or imagination, his jaw was set, and
the big, aggressive head rested on a short, muscular neck. He had been a
salesman of machine tools till the "selling end" came to a standstill.
"But didn't the munitions traffic boom the machine-tool industry?" I
asked.
"Sure it did. You ought to have seen what people will do to get a lathe.
You know about all that you need to make shells is a machine lathe. You
can't get a lathe in America for love or money--for anything"--he made a
swift, complete gesture--"all making shells. There isn't a junk factory
in America that hasn't been pawed over by guys looking for lathes--and
my God! what prices! Knew a bird named Taylor who used to make water
pipes in Utica, New York--had a stinking little lathe he paid two
hundred dollars for, and sold it last year for two thousand. My firm had
so many orders for months ahead that it didn't pay them to have
salesmen--so they offered us jobs inside; but, God, I can't stand indoor
work, so I thought I'd come over here and get into the war. I used to be
in the State Cavalry. You ought to have seen how sore all those Iowa
Germans were on me for going," he laughed. "Had a hell of row with a guy
named Schultz."
Limping slightly, an enormous, grizzled man approached us and sat down
by the side of the ex-machinist. Possibly a yellow-gray suit, cut in the
bathrobe American style, made him look larger than he was, and though
heavily built and stout, there was something about him which suggested
ill health. One might have thought him a prosperous American business
man on his way to Baden-Baden. He had a big nose, big mouth, a hard eye,
and big, freckled hands which he nervously opened and closed.
"See that feller over there?" He pointed to a spectacled individual who
seemed lost in melancholy speculation at the rail--"Says he's a Belgian
lieutenant. Been over here trying to get cloth. Says he can't get it,
the firms over here haven't got the colors. Just think of it, there
isn't a pound of Bernheim's blue in the whole country!"
"I thought we were beginning to make dyes of our own," said the Iowan.
"Oh, yes, but we haven't got the hang of it yet. The product is pretty
poor. Most of the people who need dyes are afraid to use the American
colors, but they've got to take what they can get. Friend of mine, Lon
Seeger, of Seeger, Seeger & Hall, the carpet people in Hackensack, had
twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats spoiled on him last week by
using home dyes."
The Belgian lieutenant, still standing by the rail, was talking with
another passenger, and some fragments of the conversation drifted to our
ears. I caught the words--"My sister--quite unexpected--barely
escaped--no doubt of it--I myself saw near Malines--perfectly
dreadful--tout-à-fait terrible."
"Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats all spoiled, colors ran,
didn't set, no good. This war is raising the devil with the United
States textiles. Maybe the Germans won't get a glad hand when they come
back. We hear that they're going to flood the market with good,
low-priced dyes so as to bust up the new American plants. Haven't you
heard them hollerin' for tariff protection? I'm going over to look up a
new green dye the French are getting out. We hear it's pretty good
stuff. What are you boys doing, looking for contracts?"
The Iowan replied that he hoped to get into an English cavalry regiment,
and I mentioned the corps I had joined.
"Well, don't get killed," exclaimed the dye-stuffs agent paternally, and
settled down in his chair for a nap.
It was the third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color of
the American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising and
falling under the August sun. From the rail I saw coming toward us over
the edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer marked with two white
blotches which, as the vessel neared, resolved themselves into painted
reproductions of the Swedish flag. Thus passed the Thorvald, carrying a
mark of the war across the lonely seas.
"That's a Swedish boat," said a voice at my elbow.
"Yes," I replied.
A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a downy
face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me. There was
something psychologically wrong with his face; it had that look in it
which makes you want to see if you still have your purse.
"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota," he continued.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Oscar Petersen," he answered.
"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded.
"You bet," he replied--and an instant later--"Are you?"
I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the same
kind of experience he later became communicative. He had run away from
home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reform
school, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago. I
can't imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed. At
length he "got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war," as he
expressed it, and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, but
received no answer. "My father was a Bible cuss," he remarked
cheerfully,--"never got over my swiping the minister's watch."
A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his going to
enlist in the Foreign Legion--"popular young man very well known in
the--th ward," said the article. He showed me, too, an extraordinary
letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil on
the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing five
dollars. "I hope you will try to avenge the Lusitania," it said among
other things. The letter was signed by a woman.
"Do you speak French?" I asked.
"Not a word," he replied. "I want to be put with the Americans or the
Swedes. I speak good Swedish."
Months later, on furlough, I saw in a hospital at Lyons a college
classmate who had served in the Foreign Legion. "Did you know a fellow
named Petersen?" I asked.
"Yes, I knew him," answered my friend; "he lifted a fifty-franc note
from me and got killed before I could get it back."
"How did it happen?"
"Went through my pockets, I imagine."
"Oh, no, I meant how did he get killed?" "Stray shell sailed in as we
were going through a village, and caught him and two of the other boys."
"You must not make your friend talk too much," mumbled an old Sister of
Charity rather crossly.
The two young men with the same identical oddity of gait were salesmen
of artificial legs, each one a wearer and demonstrator of his wares. The
first, from Ohio, had lost his leg in a railroad accident two years
before, and the second, a Virginian with a strong accent, had been done
for in a motor-car smashup. One morning the man from Ohio gave us a kind
of danse macabre on the deck; rolling his trouser leg high above his
artificial shin, he walked, leaped, danced, and ran. "Can you beat
that?" he asked with pardonable pride. "Think what these will mean to
the soldiers." Meanwhile, with slow care, the Virginian explained the
ingenious mechanism.
Strange tatters of conversation rose from the deck. "Poor child, she
lost her husband at the beginning of the war"--"Third shipment of
hosses"--"I was talking with a feller from the Atlas Steel
Company"--"Edouard is somewhere near Arras"; there were disputes about
the outcome of the war, and arguments over profits. A voluble French
woman, whose husband was a pastry cook in a New York hotel before he
joined the forces, told me how she had wandered from one war movie to
another hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband, and had finally seen
"some one who resembled him strongly" on the screen in Harlem. She had a
picture of him, a thin, moody fellow with great, saber whiskers like
Rostand's and a high, narrow forehead curving in on the sides between
the eyebrows and the hair. "He is a Chasseur alpin," she said with a
good deal of pride, "and they are holding his place for him at the
hotel. He was wounded last month in the shoulder. I am going to the
hospital at Lyons to see him." The day's sunset was at its end, and a
great mass of black clouds surged over the eastern horizon, turning the
seas ahead to a leaden somberness that lowered in menacing contrast to
the golden streaks of dying day. The air freshened, salvos of rain fell
hissing into the dark waters, and violet cords of lightning leaped
between sea and sky. Echoing thunder rolled long through unseen abysses.
In the deserted salon I found the young Frenchman with the star-shaped
scar reading an old copy of "La Revue." He had been an officer in the
Chasseurs-à-pied until a fearful wound had incapacitated him for further
service, and had then joined the staff of a great, conservative Parisian
weekly. The man was a disciple of Ernest Psichari, the soldier mystic
who died so superbly at Charleroi in the dreadful days before the Marne.
From him I learned something of the French conception of the idea of
war. It was not uninteresting to compare the French point of view with
the German, and we talked late into the night while the ship was
plunging through the storm. An article in the review, "La Psychologie
des Barbares," was the starting-point of our conversation.
"You must remember that the word 'barbarian' which we apply to the
Germans, is understood by the French intellectually," said he. "Not only
do German atrocities seem barbarous, but their thought also. Consider
the respective national conceptions of the idea of war. To the Germans,
war is an end in itself, and in itself and in all its effects perfect
and good. To the French mind, this conception of war is barbaric, for
war is not good in itself and may be fatal to both victor and
vanquished." (He spoke a beautiful, lucid French with a sort of military
preciseness.)
"It was Ernest Psichari who revealed to us the raison d'être of arms in
modern life, and taught us the meaning of war. To him, war was no savage
ruée, but the discipline of history for which every nation must be
prepared, a terrible discipline neither to be sought, nor rejected when
proffered. Thus the Boches, once their illusion of the glory of war is
smashed, have nothing to fall back on, but the French point of view is
stable and makes for a good morale. Psichari was the intellectual leader
of that movement for the regeneration of the army which has saved
France. When the doctrines of pacificism began to be preached in France,
and cries of 'A bas l'armée' were heard in the streets, Psichari showed
that the army was the only institution left in our industrialized world
with the old ideals and the power to teach them. Quand on a tout dit,
the military ideals of honor, duty, and sacrifice of one's all for the
common good are the fundamentals of. character. Psichari turned this
generation from a generation of dreamers to a generation of soldiers,
knowing why they were soldiers, glad to be soldiers. The army saved the
morale of France when the Church had lost its hold, and the public
schools had been delivered to the creatures of sentimental doctrinaire
government. Was it not a pity that Psichari should have died so young?"
"Did you know him?" I asked.
"Yes; I saw something of him in Africa. The mystery of the East had
profoundly stirred him. He was a dark, serious fellow with something of
the profile of his grandfather, Ernest Renan. At Charleroi, after an
heroic stand, he and every man of his squad died beside the guns they
served."
Long after, at the Bois-le-Prêtre, I went to the trenches to get a young
sergeant. His friends had with clumsy kindness gathered together his
little belongings and put them in the ambulance. "As tu trouvé mon
livre?" (Have you found my book?) he asked anxiously, and they tossed
beside the stretcher a trench-mired copy of Psichari's "L'Appel des
Armes."
One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and anchored
at the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde. A spindly lighthouse
was flashing, seeming more to reflect the sunlight from outside than to
be burning within, and a current the color of coffee and cream with a
dash of vermilion in it, went by us mottled with patches of floating
mud. From the deck one had an extraordinary view, a ten-mile sweep of
the strangely colored water, the hemisphere of the heavens all of one
greenish-blue tint, and a narrow strip of nondescript, sandy coast
suspended somehow between the strange sea and unlovely sky. At noon, the
Rochambeau began at a good speed her journey up the river, passing
tile-roofed villages and towns built of pumice-gray stone, and great
flat islands covered with acres upon acres of leafy, bunchy vines. There
was a scurry to the rail; some one cried, "Voilà des Boches," and I saw
working in a vineyard half a dozen men in gray-green German regimentals.
A poilu in a red cap was standing nonchalantly beside them. As the
Rochambeau, following the channel, drew incredibly close to the bank,
the Germans leaned on their hoes and watched us pass, all save one, who
continued to hoe industriously round the roots of the vines, ignoring us
with a Roman's disdain. "Comme ils sont laids" (How ugly they are), said
a voice. There was no surprise in the tone, which expressed the expected
confirmation of a past judgment. It was the pastry cook's voluble wife
who had spoken. The land through which we were passing, up to that time
simply the pleasant countryside of the Bordelais, turned in an instant
to the France of the Great War.
Late in the afternoon, the river, slowly narrowing, turned a great bend,
and the spires of Bordeaux, violet-gray in the smoky rose of early
twilight, were seen just ahead. A broad, paved, dirty avenue, with the
river on one side and a row of shabby houses on the other, led from the
docks to the city, and down this street, marching with Oriental dignity,
came a troop of Arabs. There was a picture of a fat sous-officier
leading, of brown-white rags and mantles waving in the breeze blowing
from the harbor, of lean, muscular, black-brown legs, and dark,
impassive faces. "Algerian recruits," said an officer of the boat. It
was a first glimpse at the universality of the war; it held one's mind
to realize that while some were quitting their Devon crofts, others were
leaving behind them the ancestral well at the edges of the ancient
desert. A faint squeaking of strange pipes floated on the twilight air.
There came an official examination of our papers, done in a businesslike
way, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were free to land in
France. That evening a friend and I had dinner in a great café opening
on the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried to analyze the difference
between the Bordeaux of the past and the Bordeaux of the war. The ornate
restaurant, done in a kind of Paris Exhibition style, and decorated with
ceiling frescoes of rosy, naked Olympians floating in golden mists and
sapphire skies, was full of movement and light, crowds passed by on the
sidewalks, there were sounds--laughter.
"Looks just the same to me," said my friend, an American journalist who
had been there in 1912. "Of course there are more soldiers. Outside of
that, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the town has not changed."
But there was a difference, and a great difference. There was a terrible
absence of youth. Not that youth was entirely absent from the tables and
the trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and unhealthy-looking, afraid
to meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the pitiable jeunesse that could
not pass the physical examination of the army. Most of the other young
men who bent over the tables talking, or leaned back on a divan to smoke
cigarettes, were strangers, and I saw many who were unquestionably
Roumanians or Greeks. A little apart, at a corner table, a father and
mother were dining with a boy in a uniform much too large for him;--I
fancied from the cut of his clothes that he belonged to a young squad
still under instruction in the garrisons, and that he was enjoying a
night off with his family. Screened from the rest by a clothes rack, a
larky young lieutenant was discreetly conversing with a "daughter of
joy," and an elderly English officer, severely proper and correct, was
reading "Punch" and sipping red wine in Britannic isolation. Across the
street an immense poster announced, "Conference in aid of the Belgian
Red Cross--the German Outrages in Louvain, Malines, and
Liège--illustrated."
We finished our dinner, which was good and not costly, and started to
walk to our hotel. Hardly had we turned the corner of the Place, when
the life of Bordeaux went out like a torch extinguished by the wind. It
was still early in the evening, there was a sound of an orchestra
somewhere behind, yet ahead of us, lonely and still, with its shops
closed and its sidewalks deserted, was one of the greater streets of
Bordeaux. Through the drawn curtains of second stories over little
groceries and baker-shops shone the yellow light of lamps. What had
happened to the Jean, Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the war
began? What tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these silent
windows not conceal? And every French city is much the same; one notices
in them all the subtle lack of youth, and the animation of the great
squares in contrast to the somber loneliness of streets and quarters
which once were alive and gay. At the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, the
whirlpool of Parisian life is still turning, but the great streets
leading away from the Place de l'Étoile are quiet. Young and old,
laborer and shopkeeper, boulevardier and apache are far away holding the
tragic lines.
The next morning at the station, I had my first glimpse of that mighty
organization which surrounds the militaire. There was a special entrance
for soldiers and a special exit for soldiers, and at both of these a
long file of blue-clad poilus waited for the countersigning of their
furlough slips and military tickets. The mud of the trenches still
stained the bottom edges of their overcoats, and their steel helmets
were dented and dull. There was something fine about the faces
collectively; there was a certain look of tried endurance and perils
bravely borne. I heard those on furlough telling the names of their home
villages to the officer in charge,--pleasant old names, Saint-Pierre aux
Vignes, La Tour du Roi.
A big, obese, middle-aged civilian dressed in a hideous greenish suit,
and wearing a pancake cap, sat opposite me in the compartment I had
chosen. There was a hard, unfriendly look in his large, fat-encircled
eyes, a big mustache curved straight out over his lips, and the short
finger nails of his square, puffy fingers were deeply rimmed with dirt.
He caught sight of me reading a copy of an English weekly, and after
staring at me with an interest not entirely free from a certain
hostility, retreated behind the pages of the "Matin," and began picking
his teeth. Possibly he belonged to that provincial and prejudiced
handful to whom England will always be "Perfidious Albion," or else he
took me for an English civilian dodging military service. The French
press was following the English recruiting campaign very closely, and
the system of volunteer service was not without its critics.
"Conscription being considered in England" (On discute la conscription
en Angleterre), announced the "Matin" discreetly.
It was high noon; the train had arrived at Angoulême, and was taking
aboard a crowd of convalescents. On the station platform, their faces
relentlessly illumined by the brilliant light, stood about thirty
soldiers; a few were leaning on canes, one was without a right arm, some
had still the pallor of the sick, others seemed able-bodied and hearty.
Every man wore on the bosom of his coat about half a dozen little
aluminum medals dangling from bows of tricolor ribbon. "Pour les
blessés, s'il vous plaît," cried a tall young woman in the costume and
blue cape of a Red-Cross nurse as she walked along the platform shaking
a tin collection box under the windows of the train.
To our compartment came three of the convalescents. One was a sturdy,
farmhand sort of fellow, with yellow hair and a yellow mustache--the
kind of man who might have been a Norman; he wore khaki puttees, brown
corduroy trousers, and a jacket which fitted his heavy, vigorous figure
rather snugly. Another was a little soul dressed in the "blue horizon"
from head to foot, a homely little soul with an egg-shaped head,
brown-green eyes, a retreating chin, and irregular teeth. The last,
wearing the old tenue, black jacket and red trousers, was a good-looking
fellow with rather handsome brown eyes. Comfortably stretched in a
corner, the Norman was deftly cutting slices of bread and meat which he
offered to his companions. Catching sight of my English paper, all three
stared at me with an interest and friendliness that was in psychological
contrast to the attitude of the obese civilian.
"Anglais?" asked the Norman.
The civilian watched for my answer.
"Non--Américain," I replied.
"Tiens," they said politely.
"Do you speak English?" asked the homely one.
"Yes," I answered.
The Norman fished a creased dirty letter and a slip of paper from his
wallet and handed them to me for inspection.
"I found them in a trench we shared with the English," he explained.
"These puttees are English; a soldier gave them to me." He exhibited his
legs with a good deal of satisfaction.
I examined the papers that had been given me. The first was a medical
prescription for an anti-lice ointment and the second an illiterate
letter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about somebody whom the
writer was having trouble to manage, "now that you aren't here." I
translated as well as I could for an attentive audience. "Toujours les
totos," they cried merrily when I explained the prescription. A spirit
of good-fellowship pervaded the compartment, till even the suspicious
civilian unbent, and handed round post-card photographs of his two sons
who were somewhere en Champagne. Not a one of the three soldiers could
have been much over twenty-one, but they were not boys, but men, serious
men, tried and disciplined by war. The homely one gave me one of his
many medals which he wore "to please the good Sisters"; on one side in
an oval of seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and on the other, the
determined features of General Joffre.
Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce. Distant
villages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black against
the burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the sweeping
golden plain. We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and shuttered, though
the harvests had been gathered and stacked. There was something very
tragic in those deserted, outlying farms. The train began to rattle
through the suburbs of Paris. By the window stood the Norman looking out
on the winking red and violet lights of the railroad yard. "This Paris?"
he asked. "I never expected to see Paris. How the war sets one to
traveling!"