During that terrible retreat, Georges, had been a part of a working,
fighting machine, tried to his utmost in mind and body. He had been
hammered, hammered into shape. Hunger and fatigue had hardened him.
Every day his nerves had been getting more tough and strong. If his
duty consisted of retreating, digging, sleeping three or four hours a
day, going without meat and often Without water or wine, he could do it.
On a post card, scrawled in haste from somewhere (no postmark, no date,
no indication of any locality being permitted), he wrote to his aunt:
DEAR AUNT: _If we keep on retreating like this, we may perhaps get to
Paris. I should be very glad to see you, of course, but I hope not.
There must soon be an end of all this digging and digging, and victory
will be ours. I am afraid you wouldn’t recognize your Georges._
Indeed, she wouldn’t have recognized him, but, not only because for
weeks he had the dirt caked in his hands and hair and ears, and his
uniform hung on him in rags, but partly too because already in his face
there was beginning to show something more unlike the old Coco we had
known than all that change in his outward self could make him. He had
learned patience, perseverance, caution, confidence in his officers,
and faith in the ultimate victory. He was uplifted by that great wave
of high idealism that was transforming France.
Why that steady retreat, further and further south? Georges and
Georges’s company, now that they were tempered by experience, now
that they were raging to attack, couldn’t understand. But still they
retreated and retreated. Back to Suippes they came.
It was a queer entrance that regiment made into Suippes. On the road,
they had overtaken a troop of refugees who, utterly exhausted, could
travel no further. The peasants had a panic of alarm at sight of the
column, thinking that the Germans were already upon them. It was hard
work reassuring them; and it ended in a comedy, the soldiers taking a
hand at the migration. Old women were mounted in the handcarts they
had been trying to pull and were given a ride into town. Soldiers
unharnessed the donkeys and put the children on their backs. They
pushed at the wagons, they helped along the graybeards, they carried
babies in their arms. Georges, I think, must have begun to realize
that he had grown up when he, a veteran now, marched into Suippes,
carrying a big basket for a lad of fifteen who looked up to his soldier
protector admiringly, and called him “M’sieu.”
No Frenchman will ever forget that dreadful first week of September,
1914. Every day the Germans grew nearer Paris, every day their cowardly
aeroplanes sailed over the capital and dropped their futile threats.
What was the French army doing? We hoped they were merely luring the
enemy toward the forts of Paris where the big guns could smash them.
But could the army hold the enemy back, even with that assistance?
Paris was all nervous apprehension. Then that astounding news—the
German army, almost within striking distance, was swerving to the
southeast! What did it mean?
To Georges Cucurou, retreating before those hammering, hammering guns,
that quick change in direction was quite as mysterious. From Suippes
his regiment, without stopping to entrench now, marching day and night,
instead of keeping on toward Paris, swung sharply to the east, along
the road to Ste. Menehould. Then, as suddenly, they turned back again
into Châlons.
Heavy cannonading was coming now from almost every direction except the
south. Every man was tense with excitement—battle was in the air—surely
_something_ was going to happen, _must_ happen! But further and further
south they marched; and along the roads, now, the automobiles were
flying like mad, night and day, some with officers, some flying the
Red Cross flag. Over their heads there were French aeroplanes, every
day the sky was never quite free of them. Georges caught his first
sight of a British soldier—a khaki-clad dispatch rider on a motorcycle
flying past, and another. They passed hundreds of Paris autobusses at
the Division Headquarters, a long, long line that filled the village
street at Sompuis, and ambulances, and cycle companies, and farriers’
wagons, the portable forges glowing red in the evening darkness.
Georges recognized the Senegalese spahis in red flowing robes, he saw
the Turcos from Morocco—big children they were, grinning black faces
with shiny white teeth. A wagon flew past, with men inside feeding out
telephone wire, hooking it with long poles into the ditch, or over
bushes, out of the way, as they galloped on. Best of all, he began to
get fresh meat for dinner, from the portable kitchens that hurried from
company to company along the road. But always, never stopping, night
or day, more exciting than all the rest, never forgotten, no matter
what happened, in the north, growing ever nearer—the steady rumbling
thunder of the German guns.