We left the little Mairie, entered our machines and slid out swiftly
for the last miles, climbed and curved over the final hill and suddenly
looked down on a deep, trenchlike valley marching from east to west
and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz railroad, no longer available for
traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the guns ... not
steadily, but only from time to time, a distant boom, a faint billowing
up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles straight ahead there were
the lines of fire, beyond the brown hills that flanked the valley.
At the bottom of the valley we turned east, moved on for a mile and
stopped abruptly. The guns were sounding more clearly, and suddenly
there was a sense not of soldiers, but of an army. On one side of the
road a column was coming toward us, a column of men who were leaving
the trenches for a rest, the men who for the recent days had held the
first line. Wearily but steadily they streamed by; the mud of the
trenches covered their tunics; here and there a man had lost his steel
helmet and wore a handkerchief about his head, probably to conceal a
slight wound that but for the helmet had killed him.
These men were smiling as they marched; they carried their full
equipment and it rattled and tinkled; they carried their guns at all
angles, they wore their uniforms in the strangest of disorders; they
seemed almost like miners coming from the depths of the earth rather
than soldiers returning from a decisive battle, from the hell of modern
shell fire.
But it was the line on the other side of the road that held the eye.
Here were the troops that were going toward the fire, toward the
trenches, that were marching to the sound of the guns, and as one saw
them the artillery rumble took on a new distinctness.
Involuntarily I searched the faces of these men as they passed. They
were hardly ten feet from me. Platoon after platoon, company after
company, whole regiments in columns of fours. And seeing the faces
brought an instant shock; they all ... were in the thirties, not the
twenties; men still in the prime of strength, of health, but the
fathers of families, the men of full manhood.
Almost in a flash the fact came home. This was what all the graves
along the road had meant. This was what the battlefields and the
glories of the twenty months had spelled--France had sent her youth and
it was spent; she was sending her manhood now.
In the line no man smiled and no man straggled; the ranks were closed
up and there were neither commands nor any visible sign of authority.
These men who were marching to the sound of the guns had been there
before. They knew precisely what it meant. Yet you could not but feel
that as they went a little wearily, sadly, they marched willingly. They
would not have it otherwise. Their faces were the faces of men who had
taken the full measure of their own fate.