The Germans Attack
The schoolmaster (instituteur) and the schoolmistress (institutrice) of
Montauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on the
second story of the schoolhouse. The kitchen of this fiat had been
struck by a shell, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and
glass, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of a
copper saucepan still hanging on the wall. In one of the rooms, else
quite bare of furniture, was an upright piano. Sometimes while stationed
at Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the trenches in
playing this instrument.
It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and thus far not a single call
had come in. The sun was shining very brightly in a sky washed clear by
a night of rain, the morning mists were rising from the wood, and up and
down the very muddy street walked little groups of soldiers. I drew up
the rickety stool and began to play the waltz from "The Count of
Luxembourg." In a short time I heard the sound of tramping on the stairs
voices. In came three poilus--a pale boy with a weary, gentle expression
in his rather faded blue eyes; a dark, heavy fellow of twenty-five or
six, with big wrists, big, muscular hands, and a rather unpleasant,
lowering face; and a little, middle-aged man with straightforward,
friendly hazel eyes and a pointed beard. The pale, boyish one carried a
violin made from a cigar box under his arm, just such a violin as the
darkies make down South. This violin was very beautifully made, and
decorated with a rustic design. I stopped playing.
"Don't, don't," cried the dark, big fellow; "we haven't heard any music
for a long time. Please keep on. Jacques, here, will accompany you."
"I never heard the waltz," said the violinist; "but if you play it over
for me once or twice, I'll try to get the air--if you would like to have
me to," he added with a shy, gentle courtesy.
So I played the rather banal waltz again, till the lad caught the tune.
He hit it amazingly well, and his ear was unusually true. The dark one
had been in Canada and was hungry for American rag-time. "'The Good Old
Summer Time'--you know that? 'Harrigan'--you know that?" he said in
English. The rag-time of "Harrigan" floated out on the street of
Montauville. But I did not care to play things which could have no
violin obligato, so I began to play what I remembered of waltzes dear to
every Frenchman's heart--the tunes of the "Merry Widow." "Sylvia" went
off with quite a dash. The concert was getting popular. Somebody wanted
to send for a certain Alphonse who had an occarina. Two other poilus,
men in the forties, came up, their dark-brown, horseshoe beards making
them look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on the
sunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, who
turned out to be a Norman, played a solo--some music-hall fantasy, I
imagine. The next number was the ever popular "Tipperaree," which every
single poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind of
English. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than the
"Merry Widow." I thanked Heaven that I was not called on to translate
it, a feat frequently demanded of the American drivers. The song is
silly enough in the King's English, but in lucid, exact French, it sinks
to positive imbecility.
"You play, don't you?" said the violinist to the small bearded man.
"A little," he replied modestly.
"Please play."
The little man sat down at the piano, meditated a minute, and began to
play the rich chords of Rachmaninof's "Prelude." He got about half
through, when Zip-bang! a small shell burst down the street. The dark
fellow threw open the French window. The poilus were scurrying to
shelter. The pianist continued with the "Prelude."
Zip-bang! Zip-bang! Zshh--Bang--Bang. Bang-Bang!
The piano stopped. Everybody listened. The village was still as death.
Suddenly down the street came the rattle of a volley of rifle shots.
Over this sound rose the choked, metallic notes of a bugle-call. The
rifle shots continued. The ominous popping of machine guns resounded.
The village, recovering from its silence, filled with murmurs. Bang!
Bang! Bang I Bang! went some more shells. The same knowledge took
definite shape in our minds.
"An attack!"
The violinist, clutching his instrument, hurried down the stairs
followed by all the others, leaving the chords of the uncompleted
"Prelude" to hang in the startled air. Shells were popping
everywhere--crashes of smoke and violence--in the roads, in the fields,
and overhead. The Germans were trying to isolate the few detachments en
repos in the village, and prevent reinforcements coming from Dieulouard
or any other place. To this end all the roads between Pont-à-Mousson and
the trenches, and the roads leading directly to the trenches, were being
shelled.
"Go at once to Poste C!"
The winding road lay straight ahead, and just at the end of the village
street, the Germans had established a tir de barrage. This meant that a
shell was falling at that particular point about once every fifty
seconds. I heard two rafales break there as I was grinding up the
machine. Up the slope of the Montauville hill came several of the other
drivers. Tyler, of New York, a comrade who united remarkable bravery to
the kindest of hearts, followed close behind me, also evidently bound
for Poste C. German bullets, fired wildly from the ridge of The Wood
over the French trenches, sang across the Montauville valley, lodging in
the trees of Puvenelle behind us with a vicious tspt; shells broke here
and there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Réserve, throwing the
small rocks of the road surfacing wildly in every direction. The French
batteries to our left were firing at the Germans, the German batteries
were firing at the French trenches and the roads, and the machine guns
rattled ceaselessly. I saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of the
slope of the Bois-le-Prêtre--vague masses of moving blue on the brown
ways. A storm of shells was breaking round certain points in the road
and particularly at the entrance to The Wood. I wondered what had become
of the audience at the concert. Various sounds, transit of shells,
bursting of shells, crashing of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! of
mitrailleuses played the treble to a roar formed of echoes and
cadences--the roar of battle. The Wood of Death (Le Bois de la Mort) was
singing again.
That day's attack was an attempt by the Germans to take back from the
French the eastern third of the Quart-en-Réserve and the rest of the
adjoining ridge half hidden in the shattered trees. At the top of the
plateau, by the rise in the moorland I described in the preceding
chapter, I had an instant's view of the near-by battle, for the focus
was hardly more than four hundred yards away. There was a glimpse of
human beings in the Quart--soldiers in green, soldiers in blue--the very
fact that anybody was to be seen there was profoundly stirring. They
were fighting in No Man's Land. Tyler and I watched for a second,
wondering what scenes of agony, of heroism, of despair were being
enacted in that dreadful field by the ruined wood.
We hurried our wounded to the hospital, passing on our way detachments
of soldiers rushing toward The Wood from the villages of the region.
Three or four big shells had just fallen in Dieulouard, and the village
was deserted and horribly still. The wind carried the roar of the attack
to our ears. In three quarters of an hour, I was back again at the same
moorland poste, to which an order of our commander had attached me.
Montauville was full of wounded. I had three on stretchers inside, one
beside me on the seat, and two others on the front mudguards. And The
Wood continued to sing. From Montauville I could hear the savage yells
and cries which accompanied the fighting.
Half an hour after the beginning of the attack, the war invaded the sky,
with the coming of the German reconnoitering aeroplanes. One went to
watch the roads leading to The Wood along the plateau, one went to watch
the Dieulouard road, and the other hovered over the scene of the combat.
The sky was soon dotted with the puffs of smoke left by the exploding
shells of the special anti-aircraft "seventy- fives." These puffs
blossomed from a pin-point of light to a vaporous, gray-white puff-ball
about the size of the full moon, and then dissolved in the air or blew
about in streaks and wisps. These cloudlets, fired at an aviator flying
along a certain line, often were gathered by the eye into arrangements
resembling constellations. The three machines were very high, and had a
likeness to little brown and silver insects.
The Boche watching the conflict appeared to hang almost immobile over
the Quart. With a striking suddenness, another machine appeared behind
him and above him. So unexpected was the approach of this second
aeroplane that its appearance had a touch of the miraculous. It might
have been created at that very moment in the sky. The Frenchman--for it
was an aviator from the parc at Toul, since killed at Verdun, poor
fellow--swooped beneath his antagonist and fired his machine gun at him.
The German answered with two shots of a carbine. The Frenchman fired
again. Suddenly the German machine flopped to the right and swooped
down; it then flopped to the left, the tail of the machine flew up, and
the apparatus fell, not so swiftly as one might expect, down a thousand
feet into The Wood. When I saw the wreckage, a few days afterwards, it
looked like the spilt contents of â waste-paper basket, and the
aviators, a pilot and an observer, had had to be collected from all over
the landscape. The French buried them with full military honors.
Thanks to the use of a flame machine, the Germans succeeded in regaining
the part of the ridge they had lost, but the French made it so hot for
them that they abandoned it, and the contested trenches now lie in No
Man's Land. All that night the whole Wood was illuminated, trench light
after trench light rising over the dark branches. There would be a
rocket like the trail of bronze-red powder sparks hanging for an instant
in the sky, then a loud Plop! and the French light would spread out its
parachute and sail slowly down the sky toward the river. The German
lights (fusées éclairantes), cartridges of magnesium fired from a gun
resembling a shotgun, burned only during their dazzling trajectory. At
midnight the sky darkened with low, black rain clouds, upon whose
surface the constant cannon fire flashed in pools of violet-white light.
Coming down from the plateau at two in the morning, I could see sharp
jabs of cannon fire for thirty miles along the front on the other side
of the Moselle.
Just after this attack a doctor of the army service was walking through
the trenches in which the French had made their stand. He noticed
something oddly skewered to a tree. He knocked it down with a stone, and
a human heart fell at his feet.
The most interesting question of the whole business is, "How do the
soldiers stand it?" At the beginning of my own service, I thought
Pont-à-Mousson, with its ruins, its danger, and its darkness, the most
awful place on the face of the earth. After a little while, I grew
accustomed to the décor, and when the time came for me to leave it, I
went with as much regret as if I were leaving the friendliest, most
peaceful of towns. First the décor, growing familiar, lost the keener
edges of its horror, and then the life of the front--the violence, the
destruction, the dying and the dead--all became casual, part of the
day's work. A human being is profoundly affected by those about him;
thus, when a new soldier finds himself for the first time in a trench,
he is sustained by the attitude of the veterans. Violence becomes the
commonplace; shells, gases, and flames are the things that life is made
of. The war is another lesson in the power of the species to adapt
itself to circumstances. When this power of adaptability has been
reinforced by a tenacious national will "to see the thing through," men
will stand hell itself. The slow, dogged determination of the British
cannot be more powerful than the resolution of the French. Their
decision to continue at all costs has been reached by a purely
intellectual process, and to enforce it, they have called upon those
ancient foundations of the French character, the sober reasonableness
and unbending will they inherit from Rome.
And a new religion has risen in the trenches, a faith much more akin to
Mahomet than to Christ. It is a fatalism of action. The soldier finds
his salvation in the belief that nothing will happen to him until his
hour comes, and the logical corollary of this belief, that it does no
good to worry, is his rock of ages. It is a curious thing to see
poilus--peasants, artisans, scholars--completely in the grip of this
philosophy. There has been a certain return to the Church of Rome, for
which several reasons exist, the greatest being that the war has made
men turn to spiritual things. Only an animal could be confronted with
the pageant of heroism, the glory of sacrifice, and the presence of
Death, and not be moved to a contemplation of the fountain-head of these
sublime mysteries. But it is the upper class which in particular has
returned to the Church. Before the war, rationalist and genial skeptic,
the educated Frenchman went to church because it was the thing to do,
and because non-attendance would weaken an institution which the world
was by no means ready to lay aside. This same educated Frenchman,
brought face to face with the mystery of human existence, has felt a
real need of spiritual support, and consequently returned to the Church
of his fathers.
The religious revival is a return of upper-class prodigals to the fold,
and a rekindling of the chilled brands of the faith of the amiably
skeptical. The great mass of the nation has felt this spiritual force,
but because the mass of the nation was always Catholic, nothing much has
changed. I failed to find any trace of conversions among the still
hostile working men of the towns, and the bred-in-the-bone Socialists.
The rallying of the conservative classes about the Cross is also due to
the fact that the war has exposed the mediocrity and sterile windiness
of the old socialistic governments; this misgovernment the upper classes
have determined to end once they return from the trenches, and
remembering that the Church of Rome was the enemy of the past
administrations, cannot help regarding her with a certain friendliness.
But this issue of past misgovernment will be fought out on purely
secular grounds, and the Church will be only a sympathizer behind the
fray. The manner in which the French priests have fought and died is
worthy of the admiration of the world. Never in the history of any
country has the national religion been so closely enmeshed in the
national life. The older clergy, as a rule, have been attached to the
medical services of the front, serving as hospital orderlies and
stretcher-bearers, but the younger priests have been put right into the
army and are fighting to-day as common soldiers. There are hundreds of
officer-priests--captains and lieutenants of the regular army.
But the real religion of the front is the philosophy of Mahomet. Life
will end only when Death has been decreed by Fate, and the Boches are
the unbelievers. After all, Islam in its great days was a virile faith,
the faith of a race of soldiers.