The slopes of Hartmansweilerkopf were already washed by waves of blood
which surged round it for nine months and more, until its final capture
by the French. St. Mihiel and Les Eparges and the triangle which the
Germans had wedged between the French lines were a shambles before the
leaves had fallen from the autumn trees in the first year of war. In
the country of the Argonne men fought like wolves and began a guerrilla
warfare with smaller bodies of men, fighting from wood to wood, from
village to village, the forces on each side being scattered over a wide
area in advance of their main lines. Then they dug themselves into
trenches from which they came out at night, creeping up to each other's
lines, flinging themselves upon each other with bayonets and butt-ends,
killing each other as beasts kill, without pity and in the mad rage of
terror which is the fiercest kind of courage.
In Lorraine the tide of war ebbed and flowed over the same tracts of
ground, and neither side picked up its dead or its wounded. Men lay
there alive for days and nights, bleeding slowly to death. The hot sun
glared down upon them and made them mad with thirst. Some of them lay
there for as long as three weeks, still alive, with gangrened limbs in
which lice crawled, so that they stank abominably.
"I cannot tell you all the things I saw," said one of the young
soldiers who talked to me on his way back from Lorraine. He had a queer
look in his eyes when he spoke those words which he tried to hide
from me by turning his head away. But he told me how the fields were
littered with dead, decomposing and swarmed with flies, lying there
in huddled postures, yet some of them so placed that their fixed eyes
seemed to be staring at the corpses near them. And he told me how on
the night he had his own wound French and German soldiers not yet dead
talked together by the light of the moon, which shed its pale light
upon all those prostrate men, making their faces look very white. He
heard the murmurs of voices about him, and the groans of the dying,
rising to hideous anguish as men were tortured by ghastly wounds and
broken limbs. In that night enmity was forgotten by those who had
fought like beasts and now lay together. A French soldier gave his
water-bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst. The
German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who had been
his enemy. "There will be no war on the other side," he said.
Another Frenchman--who came from Montmartre--found lying within a yard
of him a Luxembourgeois whom he had known as his _chasseur_ in a big
hotel in Paris. The young German wept to see his old acquaintance. "It
is stupid," he said, "this war. You and I were happy when we were good
friends in Paris. Why should we have been made to fight each other?"
He died with his arms round the neck of the soldier who told me the
story, unashamed of his own tears.
Round this man's neck also were clasped the arms of a German officer
when a week previously the French _piou-piou_ went across the field of
a battle--one of the innumerable skirmishes--which had been fought and
won four days before another French retirement. The young German had
had both legs broken by a shell, and was wounded in other places. He
had strength enough to groan piteously, but when my friend lifted him
up death was near to him.
"He was all rotten," said the soldier, "and there came such a terrible
stench from him that I nearly dropped him, and vomited as I carried him
along."
I learned something of the psychology of the French soldier from this
young infantryman with whom I traveled in a train full of wounded soon
after that night in Lorraine, when the moon had looked down on the
field of the dead and dying in which he lay with a broken leg. He had
passed through a great ordeal, so that his nerves were still torn and
quivering, and I think he was afraid of going mad at the memory of the
things he had seen and suffered, because he tried to compel himself to
talk of trivial things, such as the beauty of the flowers growing on
the railway banks and the different badges on English uniforms. But
suddenly he would go back to the tale of his fighting in Lorraine and
resume a long and rapid monologue in which little pictures of horror
flashed after each other as though his brain were a cinematograph
recording some melodrama. Queer bits of philosophy jerked out between
this narrative. "This war is only endurable because it is for a final
peace in Europe." "Men will refuse to suffer these things again. It is
the end of militarism." "If I thought that a child of mine would have
to go through all that I have suffered during these last weeks, I would
strangle him in his cradle to save him from it."
Sometimes he spoke of France with a kind of religion in his eyes.
"Of course, I am ready to die for France. She can demand my life as a
right. I belong to her and she can do with me what she likes. It's my
duty to fight in her defense, and although I tell you all the worst of
war, Monsieur, I do not mean that I am not glad to have done my part.
In a few weeks this wound of mine will be healed and I shall go back,
for the sake of France, to that Hell again. It is Hell, _quand même_!"