A REARPOST OF WAR
After a year or more of war, even a latter-day war correspondent who
gets a personally restricted war office Cook's tour to the front
semi-occasionally, may yearn for peace. This is especially true in
the case of a regular correspondent with the French army, because to
France there come so many senators, statesmen and "molders of neutral
opinion," bearing letters from President, King or Prelate, that the
regular correspondent has hard work to edge in even his legitimate
number of tours.
One morning I awoke early, far from the firing line, safe in my
Paris flat. Before breakfast I read the hotel arrivals listed in the
newspaper. The names of several molders were there. I knew that all
their letters stated definitely what whales they were. I knew that the
tour directors would not be able to resist them and that my seat in the
next front-going limousine would probably be held in another name. So
in the words of the ancient British music-hall classic I decided that
"I didn't like war and all that sort of thing."
Twelve hours later I was standing on an old stone jetty that runs out
to meet the forty-foot tides on the north coast of Brittany. It was
as far away as I could get and still retain an official connection
as correspondent with the French army. The tiny hamlet at the end of
the jetty has an official name. The name does not matter. There is no
railroad, no post office, no telegraph. But the place is known because
it was there that Pierre Loti wrote his great story of the Iceland
Fisherman. There was nothing to disturb the thoughts, nothing to jar
the nerves. All was quiet and peace; of war there was not the slightest
suspicion.
The water at the end of the jetty was thirty feet deep, but so clean
that one could see through it as through air. I watched a crab waddle
along the bottom and disappear under a rock. Then I got out my army
glasses and swept the coast. For miles tremendous headlands stuck out
in the sea, rolling over treacherous rocks. Before me was the Ile de
Bréhat, the ancient home of the pirates, which thrusts an arm far out
into the Atlantic--an arm that holds a lighthouse to tell mariners
returning from Iceland that they are almost home.
Between the island and the mainland the outgoing tide swirled along at
a rate of twelve sea miles per hour. I turned the glasses to the coast
where the tiny Breton stone cottages were tucked behind rocks and hills
that shelter them from storms and the long and terrible winter. Now
they were bowers of color; clusters of roses and geraniums bloomed on
garden walls, tall hollyhocks stood sentinel before the doors.
I dropped the glasses and sighed contentedly. Here I had found peace.
Near the old stone jetty a man was swimming. Suddenly he sat bolt
upright on the water. His legs spread straight before him and his hands
flapped idly at little waves. Occasionally he tugged at a long drooping
walrus mustache, then rubbed the salt spray from his lips. He was a
long angular individual and from my position on the jetty he appeared
to be entirely unclad.
"He is sitting on the top of a rock that is flooded at high tide," some
one near me remarked. As the words were spoken, the bather flopped from
his place and swam toward us. He was puffing heavily when he grasped
the stone side of the jetty and pulled himself up. I then saw that
I was mistaken as to his nudity, for he wore the strangest bathing
costume that I had ever beheld. It consisted of white cotton trunks
about eight inches wide. On one side, embroidered in yellow silk was a
vision of the rising sun; skin tight against the other side was a blue
pansy.
I was fascinated, and watched the man trudge up the winding road
that led from the jetty. A ray of the lowering sun flashed on the
embroidered pansy rapidly drying against his flanks as he disappeared
in the doorway of a cottage. I turned to an old fisherman who was
puttering about a sail boat:
"It looks Japanezy, that bathing suit," I said. The old man puffed at
his pipe: "No; his wife made it," he replied. "He wrote to her that he
had learned to swim so she made it and sent it up to him. He had never
seen the ocean before he came here. He is from the Midi."
"Ah," I replied, "and what did he wear before she sent it?"
The old man shrugged his shoulders. "About here, you know, it doesn't
much matter about bathing suits. There aren't many folks about."
"Who is he?" I asked. "Is he a summer visitor?"
"Summer visitor!" the old man gasped. "Summer visitor--why he hates
this place and everything in it. He only learned to swim because he had
nothing else to do and because he hates it so."
"Hates it!" I ejaculated. "Well, why on earth is he here then?"
"He's here because he's got to be here," the old chap replied. "He's
mobilized here. He's a soldier!"
A cigarette that I had just taken from its case, fell from my nerveless
fingers into the water and swirled out with the tide.
A soldier--a soldier in my retreat. How unspeakably annoying. And in
that bathing suit I never would have suspected him at all.
The old fisherman explained, while I lugubriously leaned over the jetty
and watched that crab puddling about his rock. There were eleven more
of them--soldiers, I mean--they all lived in the little cottage near
the jetty. They were there to guard the cable between the mainland and
the Ile de Bréhat, two miles away. They guarded it the twenty-four
hours of the day--those twelve. Every two hours one of them mounted
guard where the cable comes up from the sea and solemnly guarded it
from German attack.
The old fisherman pointed behind me. I turned and there, even as he had
explained, I saw a man in the blue coat and red pants of the French
territorial army. From the trenches the red pants have gone into the
historic past. Nowadays the red pants are only for the territorials.
This particular cable sentry was also from the Midi, my fisherman
explained. He too disliked the sea. He sat there and stared moodily
into the sun that was just in the act of gloriously descending into the
water. A last ray caught the steel bayonet of the Lebel rifle lying
across his knees.
I left the jetty and walked up the winding road to the village. I went
to the single store to buy tobacco and to hear the talk of the people.
There were no newspapers, I thought, so their talk could not be about
the war. Also there I would avoid the sight of the soldiers, because
the store had liquor on its list of commodities. It is forbidden to
soldiers to enter such places except at certain hours.
A fresh-faced Breton girl served out the tobacco. Cigars at two cents
each were the most expensive tobacco purchase in the shop. I purchased
a dozen and immediately became a celebrity and a millionaire. We
talked. I asked her about the countryside, about the people and about
the wonderful lace coiffures of the peasant women. She told me how
the women of one hamlet wear an entirely different "coif" from those
even of the neighboring farms and that throughout Brittany there are
hundreds of different styles.
Then I asked her about the men folks, the few who work in the fields
and the great majority who go off in the boats to Iceland in the spring
and come back ten months later--those who ever do come back at all.
Then quite naturally we talked about the war. For she explained that to
her people the war was not so terrible as the times of peace. Then it
was impossible to get letters from a fishing schooner off the Iceland
banks--now it was quite easy to get letters from the trenches every
few days. The men suffered far greater losses from the perils of the
northern ocean than since they were all mobilized to fight the Germans.
Some were killed--that was natural enough--but not half so many as the
number who just sailed out and disappeared.
I was beginning to feel that perhaps the war was a benefit to this part
of the world.
An old woman entered the store to buy tobacco. She was bent and
withered and her hand trembled as she drew the few coppers from her
purse. Her voice was high and quavery when she spoke to the girl. She
said that her son had just been wounded near Verdun. His condition was
desperate, but they were bringing him home--to her--to die on the old
Brittany farm, on the hillside overlooking the sea.
"Ah, la guerre," she murmured, "c'est terrible."
She explained that her other boys had been lost on a fishing schooner
five years ago. She had tried to keep this one--had wanted him so much
and tried so hard. But if she could see him again it would be better.
She sighed and tucked purse and tobacco under her apron and clattered
out on her heavy wooden sabots--her head bowed under her years and her
woe. "C'est pour la patrie," she murmured as she passed through the
door.
The next day was a Sunday. On Sunday all Brittany goes to church,
and when one is in Brittany--well, one goes to church too. After the
service I walked through the churchyard, which is also the graveyard
of the village. It was so quiet, so restful and far removed from the
world and the war, that I was content to remain there, for the eleven
soldiers not guarding the cable were disporting themselves on the beach.
I found a wonderful old wall at one end of the graveyard. It was very
old and overgrown with moss and ivy. It was a dozen feet high and
crumbling in places. I did not know then that the wall was one of the
sights of that countryside, but I did know when I saw it that I was
looking upon the record of mighty tragedies. For it was covered over
with little slabs, sometimes almost lost to view under the climbing
vines. On the slabs were written the names of the men of the village
who had gone to sea and never been heard of again. The dates were
all there and the names of the ships. On several were the names of
two or more brothers--on another slab were listed the males of three
generations of one house. There were hundreds of names, the dates going
back nearly a hundred years. Over many slabs with more recent dates
were hung wreaths of flowers.
It is called the wall of the disappeared.
I read all the slabs with keenest interest; this record of toll taken
by an element more resistless even than war. Indeed the battles of the
nations seemed puny against the evidences of inexorable might written
on the wall of the disappeared.
Near the end of the wall a woman was praying. She was all in black,
with the huge Breton widow's cowl drawn over her head, so that she
looked like a witch in Macbeth. Above her head I noticed a freshly
painted slab newly fixed in the wall. I read the inscription over
her shoulder. The date was September, 1915. Instead of the name of a
fishing boat that went to pieces in a gale off Iceland, was recorded
the man's regiment, followed by his name and the words, "disappeared in
the battle of the Marne."
The morning following I awoke early, with the sun and the sea sparkling
at my window. I got into a regulation bathing suit and rushed down
the old stone jetty for a plunge before breakfast. The water was so
fresh--so full of life--the day was so wonderful--that I forgot all
about the twelve soldiers, the old woman whose wounded son was coming
home to die, the soldier of the battle of the Marne whose name was on
the wall of the disappeared.
There was no such thing as war as I dived off the jetty's end, deep
into the cold, clean water. I opened my eyes under the water and could
see the rocks on the bottom, still many feet below.
Suddenly a roar struck my ears and I struck up to the surface. I knew
how sound travels under water; and I knew this sound. It was a dull,
terrifying boom. I rubbed the salt from my eyes and looked across the
straits to the Ile de Bréhat. Crouched under the towering rocks of the
island, and lying low in the water, was an ugly black torpedo destroyer
flying the tricolor. A cruiser flying the Union Jack, her masts just
visible across a far reach of the island, was picking her way slowly
through the channel. The sound was a signal gun.
I floated on the water and looked up at the sky. Up there, perhaps, is
peace, I thought; and then I glanced hastily about for aeroplanes.
As for this village, my thoughts continued, this insignificant village
of L'Arcouëst, par Ploubazlanec, Côtes du Nord, Brittany--that is the
sonorous official address of my tiny hamlet by the sea--why even if
it is not in the "zone of military activity," it has all the elements
that war brings, from the faded uniforms of blue and red to the black
mouths of cannon. It has all the anxiety, all the sorrow, all the hopes
and all the prayers. It has all the zeal and all the despair. All the
horror and all the pomp and empty glory. It may only be a rearpost--way
out where Europe kneels to the Atlantic--and where one can pray for
peace. But war is there, after all.