Always, too, nothing but old men and women, these and children, working
in the broad fields, still partially cultivated, but no longer the
fields of that perfectly cared for France of the other peace days.
Women and children at the plough, old men bent double by age still
spending such strength as is left in the tasks that war has set for
them. This is the France behind the front, and, aside from the ruined
villages and graves, the France that stretches from the Pyrenees to the
Marne, a France from which youth and manhood are gone, in which age and
childhood remain with the women. Yet in this land we were passing how
much of the youth and manhood of France and Germany was buried in the
graves the crosses demonstrated at every kilometer.
But a hundred miles east of Paris there begins a new world. The
graves, the shell-cursed villages, remain, but this is no longer the
France of the Marne fighting and of the war of two years ago. At
Vitry-le-François you pass almost without warning into the region which
is the back of the front of to-day, the base of all the line of fire
from Rheims to the Meuse, and suddenly along the road appear the canvas
guideposts which bear the terse warning, "Verdun." You pass suddenly
from ancient to contemporary history, from the killing of other years
to the killing that is of to-day--the killing and the wounding--and
along the hills where there are still graves there begin to appear
Red Cross tents and signs, and ambulances pass you bearing the latest
harvest.
And now every village is a garrison town. For a hundred miles there
have been only women and old men, but now there are only soldiers; they
fill the streets; they crowd the doorways of the houses. The fields
are filled with tents, with horses, with all the impedimenta of an
army. The whole countryside is a place of arms. Every branch of French
service is about you--Tunisians, Turcos, cavalry, the black, the brown
and the white--the men who yesterday or last week were in the first
line, who rest and will return to-morrow or next day to fight again.
Unmistakably, too, you feel that this is the business of war; you are
in a factory, a machine shop; if the product is death and destruction,
it is no less a matter of machinery, not of romance, of glamour. The
back of the front is a place of work and of rest for more work, but of
parade, of the brilliant, of the fascinating there is just nothing.
Men with bright but plainly weary faces, not young men, but men of
thirty and above, hard bitten by their experience, patently fit, fed,
but somehow related to the ruins and the destruction around them, they
are all about you, and wherever now you see a grave you will discover
a knot of men standing before it talking soberly. Wherever you see the
vestiges of an old trench, a hill that was fought for at this time
twenty months ago, you will see new practice trenches and probably
the recruits ... the boys that are waiting for the call, listening to
an officer explaining to them what has been done here, the mistake or
the good judgment revealed by the event. For France is training the
youth that remains to her on the still recent battlefields and in the
presence of those who died to keep the ground.