In spite of all this tragedy, the French soldier into whose soul
it sank, and who will never forget, wrote home with a gaiety which
gleamed through the sadness of his memories. There was a new series
of "Lettres de mon moulin" from a young officer of artillery keeping
guard in an old mill-house in an important position at the front. They
were addressed to his "dearest mamma," and, thoughtful of all the
pretty hands which had been knitting garments for him, he described his
endeavours to keep warm in them:
"To-night I have piled on to my respectable body a flannel waistcoat,
a flannel shirt, and a flannel belt going round three times, a jacket
with sleeves sent by mamma herself, a leather waistcoat from Aunt
Charlotte, a woolen vest which came to me from the unknown mother of a
young dragoon, a warm undercoat recently received from my tailor, and
a woolen jacket and wrap knitted by Madame P. J. So I prepare to sleep
in peace, if the 'Boches' will kindly allow me."
The enemy did not often allow the young gentleman to sleep and about
the windmill the shells were bursting.
They reached one Sunday morning almost as far as the little
twelfth-century church to which the young officer had stepped down from
his windmill to hear Mass in the middle of a crowd of soldiers chanting
the office, recited by a soldier, accompanied by a harmonium played by
another soldier. The windows were shattered, and a beautiful old house
next to the church lay in ruins.
The officer spent lonely hours in the windmill in charge of the
telephone exchange, from which the batteries were worked. The men in
the trenches and the gun-pits pitied his loneliness, and invented a
scheme to cheer him up. So after dark, when the cannonade slackened, he
put the receiver to his ears and listened to a Tyrolese ballad sung by
an orderly, and to the admirable imitation of a barking dog performed
by a sapper, and to a Parisian _chanson_ delightfully rendered by the
aviator.
"Bonne nuit, maman," wrote the officer of artillery at the end of each
letter from his windmill....
There was a little farm near Steinbach round which a battle raged for
many days. Leading to it was a sunken road, defended by the enemy,
until one day they put up a number of non-combatants from captured
villages to prevent a French attack.
"Among them we could distinguish a woman, with her hair falling to
her shoulders and her hands tied behind her back. This new infamy
inflamed the courage of our soldiers. A company rushed forward with
fixed bayonets. The road to the farm was swept by the enemy's fire, but
nothing stopped our men. In spite of our losses we carried the position
and are masters of the farm. There was no mercy in those moments of
triumph. The ghastly business of war was done to the uttermost."
There were ghastly things in some of the enemy's trenches. One of the
worst of them was seen in the forest of Apremont, in the district of
Woevre, where the enemy was strongly intrenched in some quarries quite
close to the French trenches, which sapped their way forward to those
pits. When the guns ceased firing the French soldiers often heard
the sound of singing. But above the voices of the Germans there came
sometimes a series of piercing cries like the screeching of an owl in
a terrible plaint, followed by strange and blood-curdling laughter.
It was the voice of a mad woman who was one of those captured from
neighbouring villages and brought into the trenches by the Germans. One
day the German soldiers carried her the length of their own trenches.
Only her head was visible above the ground. She wore a German helmet
above the wild hair which blew in wisps about her death-white face,
and it seemed like a vision of hell as she passed shrieking with the
laughter of insanity.