"Wasn't that your daughter I met?"
I didn't quite fall through the gate backwards. I am accustomed to
saying that I am old. I am not yet accustomed to have people notice it
when I do not call their attention to it. Amelie is only ten years
younger than I am, but she has got the figure and bearing of a girl.
The lad recovered himself at once, and said, "Why, of course not,--she
doesn't speak any English." I was glad that he didn't even apologize,
for I expect that I look fully a hundred and something. So with a
reiterated "Don't worry--you are all safe here now," he mounted his
wheel and rode up the hills.
I watched him making good time across to the route to Meaux. Then I came
into the house and lay down. I suddenly felt horribly weak. My house
had taken on a queer look to me. I suppose I had been, in a sort of
subconscious way, sure that it was doomed. As I lay on the couch in the
salon and looked round the room, it suddenly appeared to me like a thing
I had loved and lost and recovered--resurrected, in fact; a living thing
to which a miracle had happened. I even found myself asking, in my
innermost soul, what I had done to deserve this fortune. How had it
happened, and why, that I had come to perch on this hillside, just to
see a battle, and have it come almost to my door, to turn back and leave
me and my belongings standing here untouched, as safe as if there were
no war,--and so few miles away destruction extending to the frontier.
The sensation was uncanny. Out there in the northeast still boomed the
cannon. The smoke of the battle still rose straight in the still air. I
had seen the war. I had watched its destructive bombs. For three days
its cannon had pounded on every nerve in my body; but none of the horror
it had sowed from the eastern frontier of Belgium to within four miles
of me, had reached me except in the form of a threat. Yet out there on
the plain, almost within my sight, lay the men who had paid with their
lives--each dear to some one--to hold back the battle from Paris--and
incidentally from me. The relief had its bitterness, I can tell you. I
had been prepared to play the whole game. I had not even had the chance
to discover whether or not I could. You, who know me fairly well, will
see the irony of it. I am eternally hanging round dans les coulisses, I
am never in the play. I instinctively thought of Captain Simpson, who
had left his brother in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, and still had in
him the kindly sympathy that had helped me so much.
When Amelie returned, she said that every one was out at the Demi-Lune
to watch the troups going to Meaux, and that the boys in the
neighborhood were already swimming the Marne to climb the hill to the
battlefield of Saturday. I had no curiosity to see one scene or the
other. I knew what the French boys were like, with their stern faces,
as well as I knew the English manner of going forward to the day's work,
and the hilarious, macabre spirit of the French untried lads crossing
the river to look on horrors as if it were a lark.
I passed a strangely quiet morning. But the excitement was not all
over. It was just after lunch that Amelie came running down the road to
say that we were to have a cantonnement de regiment on our hill for the
night and perhaps longer--French reinforcements marching out from the
south of Paris; that they were already coming over the crest of the hill
to the south and could be seen from the road above; that the advance
scouts were already here. Before she had done explaining, an officer
and a bicyclist were at the gate. I suppose they came here because it
was the only house on the road that was open. I had to encounter the
expressions of astonishment to which I am now quite accustomed--a
foreigner in a little hole on the road to the frontier, in a partially
evacuated country. I answered all the usual questions politely; but
when he began to ask how many men I could lodge, and how much room there
was for horses in the outbuildings, Amelie sharply interfered, assuring
him that she knew the resources of the hamlet better than I did, that
she was used to "this sort of thing" and "madame was not"; and simply
whisked him off.
I can assure you that, as I watched the work of billeting a regiment in
evacuated houses, I was mighty glad that I was here, standing, a willing
hostess, at my door, but giving to my little house a personality no
unoccupied house can ever have to a passing army. They made quick work,
and no ceremony, in opening locked doors and taking possession. It did
not take the officer who had charge of the billeting half an hour,
notebook in hand, to find quarters for his horses as well as his men.
Before the head of the regiment appeared over the hill names were
chalked up on all the doors, and the number of horses on every door to
barn and courtyard, and the fields selected and the number of men to be
camped all over the hill. Finally the officer returned to me. I knew
by his manner that Amelie, who accompanied him, had been giving him a
"talking to."
"If you please, madame," he said, "I will see now what you can do for
us"; and I invited him in.
I don't suppose I need to tell you that you would get very little idea
of the inside of my house from the outside. I am quite used now to the
little change of front in most people when they cross the threshold. The
officer nearly went on tiptoes when he got inside. He mounted the
polished stairs gingerly, gave one look at the bedroom part-way up,
touched his cap, and said: "That will do for the chef-major. We will
not trouble you with any one else. He has his own orderly, and will eat
outside, and will be no bother. Thank you very much, madame"; and he
sort of slid down the stairs, tiptoed out, and wrote in chalk on the
gatepost, "Weitzel."
By this time the advance guard was in the road and I could not resist
going out to talk to them. They had marched out from the south of Paris
since the day before,--thirty-six miles,--without an idea that the
battle was going on the Marne until they crossed the hill at Montry and
came in sight of its smoke. I tell you their faces were wreathed with
smiles when they discovered that we knew the Germans were retreating.
Such talks as I listened to that afternoon--only yesterday--at my gate,
from such a fluent, amusing, clever French chap,--a bicyclist in the
ambulance corps,--of the crossing the Meuse and the taking, losing,
re-taking, and re-losing of Charleroi. Oddly enough these were the
first real battle tales I had heard.
It suddenly occurred to me, as we chatted and laughed, that all the time
the English were here they had never once talked battles. Not one of
the Tommies had mentioned the fighting. We had talked of "home," of the
girls they had left behind them, of the French children whom the English
loved, of the country, its customs, its people, their courage and
kindness, but not one had told me a battle story of any kind, and I had
not once thought of opening the subject. But this French lad of the
ambulance corps, with his Latin eloquence and his national gift of humor
and graphic description, with a smile in his eyes, and a laugh on his
lips, told me stories that made me see how war affects men, and how
often the horrible passes across the line into the grotesque. I shall
never forget him as he stood at the gate, leaning on his wheel,
describing how the Germans crossed the Meuse--a feat which cost them so
dearly that only their superior number made a victory out of a disaster.
"I suppose," he said, "that in the history of the war it will stand as a
success--at any rate, they came across, which was what they wanted. We
could only have stopped them, if at all, by an awful sacrifice of life.
Joffre is not doing that. If the Germans want to fling away their men
by the tens of thousands--let them. In the end we gain by it. We can
rebuild a country; we cannot so easily re-create a race. We mowed them
down like a field of wheat, by the tens of thousands, and tens of
thousands sprang into the gaps. They advanced shoulder to shoulder.
Our guns could not miss them, but they were too many for us. If you had
seen that crossing I imagine it would have looked to you like a disaster
for Germany. It was so awful that it became comic. I remember one
point where a bridge was mined. We let the first divisions of artillery
and cavalry come right across on to our guns--they were literally
destroyed. As the next division came on to the bridge--up it went--men,
horses, guns dammed the flood, and the cavalry literally crossed on
their own dead. We are bold enough, but we are not so foolhardy as to
throw away men like that. They will be more useful to Joffre later."
It was the word "comic" that did for me. There was no sign in the fresh
young face before me that the horror had left a mark. If the thought
came to him that every one of those tens of thousands whose bodies
dammed and reddened the flood was dear to some one weeping in Germany,
his eyes gave no sign of it. Perhaps it was as well for the time being.
Who knows?
I felt the same revolt against the effect of war when he told me of the
taking and losing of Charleroi and set it down as the most "grotesque"
sight he had ever seen. "Grotesque" simply made me shudder, when he
went on to say that even there, in the narrow streets, the Germans
pushed on in "close order," and that the French mitrailleuses, which
swept the street that he saw, made such havoc in their ranks that the
air was so full of flying heads and arms and legs, of boots, and
helmets, swords, and guns that it did not seem as if it could be
real--"it looked like some burlesque"; and that even one of the gunners
turned ill and said to his commander, who stood beside him: "For the
love of God, colonel, shall I go on?" and the colonel, with folded arms,
replied: "Fire away."
Perhaps it is lucky, since war is, that men can be like that. When they
cannot, what then? But it was too terrible for me, and I changed the
subject by asking him if it were true that the Germans deliberately
fired on the Red Cross. He instantly became grave and prudent.
"Oh, well," he said, "I would not like to go on oath. We have had our
field ambulance destroyed. But you know the Germans are often bad
marksmen. They've got an awful lot of ammunition. They fire it all
over the place. They are bound to hit something. If we screen our
hospital behind a building and a shell comes over and blows us up, how
can we swear the shell was aimed at us?"
Just here the regiment came over the hill, and I retreated inside the
gate where I had pails of water ready for them to drink. They were a
sorry-looking lot. It was a hot day. They were covered with dirt, and
you know the ill-fitting uniform of the French common soldier would
disfigure into trampdom the best-looking man in the world.
The barricade was still across the road. With their packs on their
backs, their tin dippers in their hands for the drink they so needed,
perspiring in their heavy coats, they crawled, line after line, under
the barrier until an officer rode down and called sharply:--
"Halt!"
The line came to a standstill.
"What's that thing?" asked the officer sternly.