we hear a prelude of sound, a tremendous, hollow uproar, something like
the rumbling of a terrible thunderstorm, near at hand and unceasing. And
yet the evening sky is so clear! Ah yes, we were warned, we know whence
it comes; it is the bombardment of our heavy artillery, which was
expected half an hour after sunset, directed at the barbarians'
trenches. This is a change for us from the silence, this cataclysmal
music, and it contributes to our walk a different kind of sadness,
another form of horror. And we continue to gaze at the wonderful stone
carving overhanging us--the bold little arches, the immense pointed
arches, so frail and so exquisite. Indeed how does it all still hold
together? Up above there are little columns which have lost their base
and remain, as it were, suspended in the air by their capitals. The
windows are no more; the lovely rose-windows have been destroyed; the
nave has huge fissures from top to bottom. In the twilight the whole
cathedral assumes more and more its phantom-like aspect, and that noise
which causes everything to vibrate is still increasing. It is a question
whether so many vibrations will not bring about the final downfall of
those too fragile carvings which hitherto have held on so persistently
at such great heights above our heads.
Here comes the first wayfarer in that solitude, a well-dressed person.
He is hurrying, actually running.
"Do not stay there," he shouts to us; "do you not see that they are
going to bombard?"
"But it is we, the French, who are firing. It is our own artillery.
Come, do not run so fast."
"I know very well that it is we, but each time the enemy revenge
themselves on the cathedral. I tell you that there will be a rain of
shells here immediately. Look out for yourselves."
He goes on. So much the better; it was kind of him to warn us, but his
jacket and his billy-cock jarred upon the melancholy grandeur of the
scene.
Where a street opens into the square two girls now appear; they stop and
hesitate. Evidently they are aware, these two, that the barbarians have
a habit of taking a noble revenge upon the cathedral, and that shells
are about to fall. But doubtless they have to cross this square in order
to reach their home, to get down into their cellar. Will they have time?
They are graceful and pretty, fair, bare-headed, with their hair
arranged in simple bands. They gaze into the air with their eyes raised
well up towards the heavens, perhaps to see if death is beginning to
pass that way, but more likely to send up thither a prayer. I know not
what last brightness of the twilight, in spite of the encroaching gloom,
illumines so delightfully their two upturned faces, and they look like
saints in stained-glass windows. Both make the sign of the cross, and
then they make up their minds, and hand in hand they run across the
square. With their religious gestures, their faces expressing anxiety,
yet courage too and defiance, they suddenly seem to me charming symbols
of the girlhood of France; they run away, indeed, but it is clear that
they would remain without fear if there were some wounded man to carry
away, some duty to perform. And their flight seems very airy in the
midst of this tremendous uproar like the end of the world.
We are going away too, for it is wiser. In the streets there are a very
few wayfarers who are running to take shelter, running with their backs
hunched up, although nothing is falling yet, like people without
umbrellas surprised by a shower. One of them, who nevertheless does not
mind stopping, points out to us the last hotel still remaining open, a
"perfectly safe" hotel, he says, over there in a quarter of the town
where no shell has ever fallen.
God forbid that I should dream of laughing at them, or fail to admire as
much as it deserves their persistent and calm heroism in remaining here,
in defiance of everything, in their beloved town, which is suffering
more and more mutilations. But who would not be amused at that instinct
which causes the majority of mankind to hunch their backs against hail
of whatever description? And then, is it because the air is fresh and
soft and it is good to be alive that after the unspeakable heartache at
the sight of the cathedral and the passion verging on tears, a calm of
reaction sets in and in that moment everything amuses me?
At the end of a quiet street, where the noise of the cannonade is
muffled, in the distance, we find the hotel which was recommended to us.
"Rooms," says the host, very pleasantly, standing on his doorstep, "oh,
as many as you like, the whole hotel if you wish, for you will
understand that in times such as these travellers---- And yet as far as
shells go you have nothing to fear here."
An appalling din interrupts his sentence. All the windows in the front
of the house are shivered to fragments, together with tiles, plaster,
branches of trees. In his haste to run away and hide he misses the step
on the threshold and falls down flat on his face. A dog who was coming
along jumps upon him, full of importance, recalling him to order with a
fierce bark. A cat, sprung from I know not where, flies through space
like an aerolith, uses my shoulder for a jumping-off place, and is
swallowed up by the mouth of a cellar. But words are too tedious for
that series of catastrophes, which lasts scarcely as long as two
lightning flashes. And they continue to bombard us with admirable
regularity, as if timing themselves with a metronome; the wall of the
house is already riddled with scars.
It is very wrong, I admit, to take these things as a jest, and indeed
with me that impression is only superficial, physical, I might say; that
which endures in the depth of my soul is indignation, anguish, pity. But
at this entry which the Germans made into our hotel, that peaceful spot,
with flourish of their great orchestra, in the presence of so many
surprises, how retain one's dignity? There is a fair number of little
shells, it seems, but no heavy shells; they travel with their long
whistling sound, and burst with a harsh din.
"Into the cellar, gentlemen," cries the innkeeper, who has picked
himself up unhurt. Apparently there is nothing else to be done. I should
have come to that conclusion myself. So I turn round to order in my
three soldiers too, who had remained outside to look at a hole made by
shrapnel in the body of the car. But upon my word I believe they are
laughing, the heartless wretches; and then I can restrain myself no
longer, I burst out laughing too.
Yes, it is very wrong of us, for presently there will be bloodshed and
death. But how resist the humour of it all: the good man fallen flat on
his face, the self-importance of the dog, who thought he must put a stop
to the situation, and especially the cat, the cat swallowed up by an
air-hole after showing us as a supreme exhibition of flight its little
hindquarters with its tail in the air.
XIX
THE DEATH-BEARING GAS
_November, 1915._
It is a place of horror, conceived, it might be thought by Dante. The
air is heavy, stifling; two or three nightlights, which seem to be
afraid of shining too brightly, scarcely pierce the vaporous, overheated
darkness which exhales an odour of sweat and fever. Busy people are
whispering there anxiously, but the principal sound that is heard is an
agonised gasping for breath. This gasping comes from a number of cots,
in rows, touching one another, on which are lying human forms, their
chests heaving with rapid and laboured breathing, lifting the bedclothes
as though the moment of the death-rattle had come.
This is one of our advance field hospitals, improvised, as best might
be, the day after one the most damnable abominations committed by the
Germans. The nature of their affliction made it impossible to transfer
all these sons of France, from whom seems to come the noise of the
death-rattle without hope of recovery, to a place farther away. This
large hall with dilapidated walls was yesterday a wine cellar for
storing barrels of champagne; these cots--about fifty in number--were
made in feverish haste of branches which still retain their bark, and
they resemble the kind of furniture in our gardens that we call rustic.
But why is there this heat, in which it is almost impossible to draw a
natural breath, pouring out from those stoves? The reason for it is that
it is never hot enough for the lungs of persons who have been
asphyxiated. And this darkness: wherefore this darkness, which gives a
Dantesque aspect to this place of torment, and which must be such a
hindrance to the gentle, white-gowned nurses? It is because the
barbarians are there in their burrows, quite near this village, with the
shattering of whose houses and church spire they have more than once
amused themselves; and if, at the gloomy fall of a November night,
through their ever watchful field-glasses, they saw a range of lighted
windows indicating a long hall, they would at once guess that there was
a field hospital, and shells would be showered down upon the humble
cots. It is well known, this preference of theirs for shelling
hospitals, Red Cross convoys, churches.
And so there is scarcely light enough to see through that misty vapour
which rises from water boiling in pans. Every minute nurses fetch huge
black balloons, and the patients nearest to suffocation stretch out
their poor hands for them; they contain oxygen, which eases the lungs
and alleviates the suffering. Many of them have these black balloons
resting on chests panting for breath, and in their mouths they are
holding eagerly the tube through which the life-saving gas escapes. They
are like big children with feeding bottles; it adds a kind of grisly
burlesque to these scenes of horror. Asphyxia has different effects upon
different constitutions, and calls for variety in treatment. Some of the
sufferers, lying almost naked on their beds, are covered with
cupping-glasses, or painted all over with tincture of iodine. Others
even--these alas! are very seriously affected indeed--others are all
swollen, chest, arms, and face, and resemble toy figures of blown-up
gold-beater's skin. Toy figures of gold-beater's skin, children with
feeding bottles--although these comparisons alone are true, yet indeed
it seems almost sacrilege to make use of them when the heart is wrung
with anguish and you are ready to weep tears of pity and of wrath. But
may these comparisons, brutal as they are, engrave themselves all the
more deeply upon the minds of men by reason of their very unseemliness,
to foster there for a still longer time indignant hatred and a thirst
for holy reprisals.
For there is one man who spent a long time preparing all this for us,
and this man still goes on living; he lives, and since remorse is
doubtless foreign to his vulturine soul, he does not even suffer, unless
it be rage at having missed his mark, at least for the present. Before
thus unloosing death upon the world he had coldly combined all his
plans, had foreseen everything.
"But nevertheless supposing," he said to himself, "my great
rhinoceros-like onrushes and my vast apparatus of carnage were by some
impossible chance to hurl itself in vain against a resistance too
magnificent? In that case I should dare perhaps, calculating on the
weakness of neutral nations, I should dare perhaps to defy all the laws
of civilisation, and to use other means. At all hazards let us be
prepared."
And, to be sure, the onrush failed, and, timidly at first, fearing
universal indignation, he tried asphyxiation after exerting himself, be
it understood, to mislead public opinion, accusing, with his customary
mendacity, France of having been the originator. His cynical hope was
justified; there has been, alas! no general arousing of the human
conscience. No more at this than at earlier crimes--organised pillage,
destruction of cathedrals, outrage, massacres of children and
women--have the neutral nations stirred; it seems indeed as if the
crafty, ferocious, deathly look of his Gorgon-like or Medusa-like head
had frozen them all to the spot. And at the present hour in which I am
writing the last to be turned to stone by the Medusa glare of the
monster is that unfortunate King of Greece, inconsistent and bungling,
who is trembling on the brink of a precipice of most terrible crimes.
That some nations remain neutral from fear, that indeed is comprehensive
enough; but that nations, otherwise held in the highest repute, can
remain pro-German in sentiment, passes our understanding. By what arts
have they been blinded, these nations; by what slanders, or by what
bribe?
Our dear soldiers with their seared lungs, gasping on their "rustic"
cots, seem grateful when, following in the major's footsteps, someone
approaches them, and they look at the visitor with gentle eyes when he
takes their hand. Here is a man all swollen, doubtless unrecognisable by
those who had only seen him before this terrible turgidity, and if you
touch his poor, distended cheeks however lightly, the fingers feel the
crackling of the gases that have infiltrated between skin and flesh.
"Come, he is better than he was this morning," says the major, and in a
low voice meant for the nurse's ear, he continues, "This man too, nurse,
I am beginning to think that we shall save. But you must not leave him
alone for one moment on any account."
Oh, what unnecessary advice, for she has not the smallest intention of
leaving him alone, this white-gowned nurse, whose eyes have already
black rings around them, the result of a watch of forty-eight hours
without a break. Not one of them will be left alone, oh no! To be sure
of this, it is sufficient to glance at all those young doctors and all
those nurses, somewhat exhausted, it is true, but so attentive and
brave, who will never let them out of their sight.
And, thank heaven, nearly all of them will be saved.[2] As soon as they
are well enough to be moved they will be taken far away from this
Gehenna at the Front, where the Kaiser's shells delight to hurl
themselves upon the dying. They will be put more comfortably to bed in
quiet field hospitals, where indeed they will suffer greatly for a week,
a fortnight, a month, but whence they will emerge without excessive
delay, better advised, more prudent, in haste to return once more to the
battle.
It may be said that the scheme of gas attacks has failed, like that
other scheme of attacks in great savage onrushes. The result was not
what the Gorgon's head had expected, and yet with what accurate
calculation the time for these attacks has been selected, always at the
most favourable moment. It is well knows that the Germans, past masters
of the art of spying, and always informed of everything, never hesitate
to choose for their attacks of whatever kind, days of relief, hours when
newcomers in the trenches opposite to them are still in the disorder of
their arrival. So on the evening on which the last crime was committed
six hundred of our men had just taken up their advanced position after a
long and tiring march. Suddenly in the midst of a volley of shells which
surprised them in their first sleep, they could distinguish, here and
there, little cautious sibilant sounds, as if made stealthily by sirens.
This was the death-bearing gas which was diffusing itself around them,
spreading out its thick, gloomy, grey clouds. At the same time their
signal lights suddenly ceased to throw out through that mist more than a
little dim illumination. Then distracted, already suffocating, they
remembered too late those masks which had been given them, and in which
in any case they had no faith. They were awkward in putting them on;
some of them, feeling the scorching of their bronchia, urged by an
irresistible impulse of self-preservation, even yielded to a desire to
run, and it was these who were most terribly affected, for, breathing
deeply in the effort of running, they inhaled vast quantities of
chlorine gas. But another time they will not let themselves be caught in
this way, neither these nor any others of our soldiers. Wearing masks
hermetically closed, they will station themselves immovably around piles
of wood, prepared beforehand, whence sudden flames will arise,
neutralising the poisons in the air, and the upshot of it all will be
hardly more than an uncomfortable hour, unpleasant while it lasts, but
almost always without fatal result. It is true that in those accursed
dens which are their laboratories, Germany's learned men, convinced now
that the neutral nations will acquiesce in anything, are making every
effort to discover worse poisons still for us, but until they have found
them, as on so many other occasions, the Gorgon gaze will have missed
its mark. So much is certain. We, alas! have as yet found no means of
returning them a sufficiently cruel equivalent; we have no defence other
than the protective mask, which, however, is being perfected day by day.
And, after all, in the eyes of neutral nations, if they still have eyes
to see, it is perhaps more dignified to make use of nothing else. At the
same time, how very different our position would be if we succeeded in
asphyxiating them too, these plunderers, assassins, aggressors, who
broke into our country like burglars, and who, despairing of ever
bursting through our lines, attempt to smoke us out ignominiously in
our own home, in our own dear country of France, as they might smoke out
rabbits in their burrows, rats in their holes. No language of man had
ever anticipated such transcendent acts of infamy which would revolt the
most degraded cannibals, and so there are no names for such acts. Our
poor victims of their gas, panting for breath in their cots, how
ardently I wish that I could exhibit them to all the world, to their
fathers, sons, and brothers, to excite in them a paroxysm of sacred
indignation and thirst for vengeance. Yes, exhibit them everywhere, to
let everyone hear the death-rattle, even those neutral nations who are
so impassive; to convict of obtuseness or of crime all those obstinate
Pacifists, and to sound throughout the world the alarm against the
barbarians who are in eruption all over Europe.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Of six hundred who were gassed that night, more than five hundred
are out of danger.
XX
ALL-SOULS' DAY WITH THE ARMIES AT THE FRONT
_2nd November, 1915._
Two or three days ago all along the front of the battle began the great
festival in honour of our soldiers' graves. No matter where they lie,
grouped around churches in the ordinary village cemeteries, ranged in
rows with military precision in little special cemeteries consecrated to
them, or even situated singly at the side of a road, in a corner of a
wood, or alone and lost in the midst of fields, everywhere, seen from
afar off, under the gloomy sky of these November days and against the
greyish background of the countryside, they attract the eyes with the
brilliant newness of their decorations. Each grave is decked with at
least four fine tricolours, their flagstaffs planted in the ground, two
at the head, two at the foot, and an infinite number of flowers and
wreaths tied with ribbons. It was the officers and the comrades of our
dead soldiers who subscribed together to give them all this, and who,
sometimes in spite of great difficulties, sent to the neighbouring towns
for the decorations, and then arranged them all with such pious care,
even on the graves of those of whom little was known, and of those poor
men, few in number, whose very names have perished.
Here in this village where I chance to be staying in the course of my
journey, the cemetery is built in terraces, and forms an amphitheatre on
the side of a hill, and the corner dedicated to the soldiers is high up,
visible to all the neighbourhood. There are fifteen of these graves,
each with its four flags, making sixty flags in all. And in the bitter
autumn wind they flutter almost gaily, unceasingly, all these strips of
bunting, they wanton in the air, intermingle, and their bright colours
shine out more conspicuously. For the matter of that, no three other
colours in combination set off one another so gaily as our three dear
colours of France.
And these tombs, moreover, have such quantities and quantities of
flowers, dahlias, chrysanthemums and roses, that they seem to be covered
with one and the same richly decorated carpet. During these days of
festival, the rest of the cemetery is also very full of flowers, but it
looks dull and colourless compared with that corner sacred to our
soldiers. It is this favoured corner which is visible at first sight,
from a distance, from all the roads leading to the village, and
wayfarers would ask themselves:
"What festival can they be celebrating with all those flags fluttering
in the air?"
Two days before, I remember coming to see the preparations for these
ingenious decorations. _Chasseurs_, with their hands full of bunches of
flowers, were working there rapidly and thoughtfully, speaking in low
tones. In the distance could be heard, though much muffled, the
orchestra of the incessant battle in which the magnificent, great voice
of our heavy artillery predominated; it seemed like the muttering of a
storm all along the distant horizon. It was very gloomy in that
cemetery, under an overcast sky, whence fell a semi-darkness already
wintry in aspect. But the zeal of these _chasseurs_, who were decking
the tombs so well, must yet have solaced the souls of the youthful dead
with a little tender gaiety.
And what beautiful, moving Masses were sung for them all along the front
on the day of their festival. All the little churches--those at least
that the barbarians have not destroyed--had been decorated that day
with all that the villages could muster in the way of flags, banners,
tapers and wreaths. And they were too small, these churches, to hold the
crowds that flocked to them. There were officers, soldiers, civil
population, women mostly in mourning, whose eyes under their veils were
reddened with secret tears. Some of the soldiers, of their own accord,
desiring to honour the souls of their comrades with a very special
concert, had taken pains to learn the Judgment hymns, the _Dies irae_,
the _De profundis_, and their voices, unskilfully led though they were,
vibrated impressively in the unison of plain-song, which the organ
accompanied. Indeed what could better prepare them for the supreme
sacrifice and for a death nobly met than these prayers, this music and
even these flowers?
They sang this morning, these improvised choristers, with a solemn
transport. Then after Mass, in spite of the icy rain and the muddy
roads, the crowds that issued from each church in procession betook
themselves to the cemeteries, in attendance on the priests bearing the
solemn crucifix. And again, as on the day of the funerals, all the
little graves were blessed.
If I record these scenes, it is for the sake of mothers and wives and
families, living far from here in other provinces of France, whose
hearts no doubt grow heavier at the thought that the grave of someone
dear to them may be neglected and very soon become unrecognisable. Oh
let them take comfort! In spite of the simplicity of these little wooden
crosses, almost all alike, nowhere are they cared for and honoured so
well as at the front; in no other place could they receive such touching
homage, such tribute of flowers, of prayers, of tears.
XXI
THE CROSS OF HONOUR FOR THE FLAG OF THE NAVAL BRIGADE!
Paris, which is above all other towns famous for its noble impulses, was
feting some days ago our Naval Brigade from the Yser--or rather the last
survivors of the heroic Brigade, the few who had been able to return. It
was well done thus to make much of them, but alas! how soon it will all
be forgotten.
To-day, in honour of the Brigade, of which three-quarters were
annihilated, our well-beloved and eminent Minister of Marine, Admiral
Lacaze, has given instructions that the glorious Order of the Day, in
which the commander-in-chief bade them farewell, should be posted up on
all our ships of war. It ends with these words:
"The valiant conduct of the Naval Brigade on the plains of the Yser, at
Nieuport, and at Dixmude will always be to the Forces an example of
warlike zeal and devotion to their country. The Naval Brigade and their
officers may well be proud of this new and glorious page which they have
inscribed on their records."
Indeed this Order posted up on board the ships will be more permanent
than the welcome that Paris gave them; but alas! this likewise will be
forgotten, too soon forgotten.