women, and of children who had ceased to play and could not understand.
No one might see what was going on unless he carried a rifle. No one
might see even the wounded. Paris was spared this, isolated in the
midst of war. The wounded were sent out of reach of the Germans in case
they should come.
Then the indicator stopped falling. It throbbed upward. The
_communiqués_ became more definite; they told of positions regained,
and borne in the ether by the wireless of telepathy was something which
confirmed the _communiqués_. At first Paris was uneasy with the news,
so set had history been on repeating itself, so remorselessly certain
had seemed the German advance. But it was true, true--the Germans were
going, with the French in pursuit, now twenty, now thirty, now forty,
now fifty, sixty, seventy miles away from Paris. Yes, monsieur, seventy!
With the needle rising, did Paris gather in crowds and surge through
the streets, singing and shouting itself hoarse, as it ought to have
done according to the popular international idea? No, monsieur, Paris
will not riot in joy in the presence of the dead on the battlefields
and while German troops are still within the boundaries of France.
Paris, which had been with heart standing still and breathing hard,
began to breathe regularly again and the glow of life to run through
its veins. In the markets, whither Madame brought succulent melons,
pears, and grapes with commonplace vegetables, the talk of bargaining
housewives with their baskets had something of its old vivacity and
Madame stiffened prices a little, for there will be heavy taxes to pay
for the war. Children, so susceptible to surroundings, broke out of the
quiet alleys and doorways in play again.
A Sunday of relief, with a radiant September sun shining, followed a
Sunday of depression. The old taxicabs and the horse vehicles with
their venerable steeds and drivers too old for service at the front,
exhumed from the catacomb of the hours of doubt, ran up and down the
Champs Élysées with airing parties. At Nôtre Dame the religious
rejoicing was expressed. A great service of prayer was held by the
priests who were not away fighting for France, as three thousand are,
while joyful prayers of thanks shone on the faces of that democratic
people who have not hesitated to discipline the church as they have
disciplined their rulers. Groups gathered in the cafés or sauntered
slowly, talking less than usual, gesticulating little, rolling over the
good news in their minds as something beyond the power of expression.
How banal to say, “_C’est chic, ça!_” or, “_C’est épatant!_” Language
is for little things.
That pile of posters at the American Embassy was already historical
souvenirs which won a smile. The name of every American resident in
Paris and his address had been filled in the blank space. He had only
to put up the warning over his door that the premises were under the
Embassy’s protection. Ambassador Herrick, suave, decisive, resourceful,
possessed the gift of acting in a great emergency with the same ease
and simplicity as in a small one, which is a gift sometimes found
wanting when a crisis breaks upon the routine of official life.
He had the courage to act and the ability to secure a favour for an
American when it was reasonable; and the courage to say “No” if it were
unreasonable or impracticable. No one of the throngs who had business
with him was kept long at the door in uncertainty. In its organisation
for facilitating the home-going of the thousands of Americans in Paris
and the Americans coming to Paris from other parts of Europe, the
American Embassy in Paris seemed as well mobilised for its part in the
war as the German army.
In spite of ’70, France still lived. You noted the faces of the
women in fresh black for their dead at the front, a little drawn but
proud and victorious. The son or brother or husband had died for the
country. When a fast automobile bearing officers had a German helmet
or two displayed, the people stopped to look. A captured German in the
flesh on a front seat beside a soldier chauffeur brought the knots
to a standstill. “_Voilà! C’est un Allemand!_” ran the universal
exclamation. But Paris soon became used to these stray German
prisoners, left-overs from the German retreat coming in from the fields
to surrender. The batches went through by train without stopping for
Paris, southward to the camps where they were to be interned; and the
trains of wounded to winter resorts, whose hotels became hospitals, the
verandas occupied by convalescents instead of gossiping tourists. It is
_très à la mode_ to be wounded, monsieur--_très à la mode_ all over
Europe.
And, monsieur, all those barricades put up for nothing! They will not
need the cattle gathered on Longchamps race-track and in the parks at
Versailles for a siege. The people who laid in stocks of canned goods
till the groceries of Paris were empty of everything in tins--they
would either have to live on canned food or confess that they were
pigs, _hein_? Those volunteers, whether young men who had been excused
because they were only sons or for weak hearts which now let them past
the surgeons, whether big, hulking farmers, or labourers, or stooped
clerks, drilling in awkward squads in the suburbs till they are dizzy,
they will not have to defend Paris; but, perhaps, help to regain Alsace
and Lorraine.
Then there were stories going the rounds; stories of French courage and
_élan_ which were cheering to the ears of those who had to remain at
home. Did you hear about the big French peasant soldier who captured a
Prussian eagle in Alsace? They had him come to Paris to give him the
Legion of Honour and the great men made a ceremony of it, gathering
around him at the Ministry of War. The simple fellow looked from one to
another of the group, surprised at all this attention. It did not occur
to him that he had done anything remarkable. He had seen a Prussian
with a standard and taken the standard away from that Prussian.
“If you like this so well,” said that droll one, “I’ll try to get
another!”
_C’est un vrai Français_, that _garçon_. What?
V
ON THE HEELS OF VON KLUCK
An excursion to the front--The magic of a military pass--The
high-water mark of German shells--Return of the refugees--
Fate of the villages--War’s results--Burying the dead--The
victorious spirit of France--Approaching the line--Roll
and smoke of the guns--Passing the motor transports--Army
organisation--Line reserves--Newspapers and tobacco--Soissons
deserted--Stoicism of the townspeople--German prisoners--The
Sixth Army headquarters--A town in ruins--Character of French
women--French democracy and humanity.
Though the Germans were going, the siege by the cordon of French guards
around Paris had not been raised. To them every civilian was a possible
spy. So they let no civilians by. Must one remain forever in Paris,
screened from any view of the great drama? Was there no way of securing
a blue card which would open the road to war for an atom of humanity
who wanted to see Frenchmen in action and not to pry into generals’
plans?
Happily, an army winning is more hospitable than an army losing; and
bonds of friendship which stretch around the world could be linked with
authority which has only to say the word in order that one might have
a day’s glimpse of the fields where von Kluck’s Germans were showing
their heels to the French.
Ours, I think, was the pioneer of the sightseeing parties which
afterward became the accepted form of war correspondence with the
French. None could have been under more delightful auspices in
companionship or in the event. Victory was in the hearts of our
hosts, who included M. Paul Doumer, formerly president of the Chamber
of Deputies and governor of French Indo-China and now a senator, and
General Fevrier, of the French Medical Service, who was to have had
charge of the sanitation of Paris in case of a siege.
M. Doumer was acting as _Chef de Cabinet_ to General Gallieni, the
commandant of Paris, and he and General Fevrier and two other officers
of Gallieni’s staff, who would have been up to their eyes in work if
there had been a siege, wanted to see something of that army whose
valour had given them a holiday. Why should not Roberts and myself
come along? which is the pleasant way the French have of putting an
invitation.
The other member of the party was the veteran European correspondent
and representative of the Associated Press in Paris, Elmer Roberts, who
would not be doing his duty to Melville E. Stone if he did not arrange
for opportunities of this kind. I was really hanging onto Roberts’s
coat-tails. Other men may have publicity as individuals in a single
newspaper or magazine, but the readers of a thousand newspapers take
their news from Paris through him without knowing his name.
Oh, the magic of a military pass and the companionship of an officer in
uniform! It separates you from the crowd of millions on the other side
of the blank wall of military secrecy and takes you into the area of
the millions in uniform; it wins a nod of consent from that middle-aged
reservist on a road whose bayonet has the police power of millions of
bayonets in support of its authority.
At last one was to see; the measure of his impressions was to be his
own eyes and not the written reports. Other passes I have had since,
which gave me the run of trenches and shell-fire areas; but this
pass opened the first door to the war. That day we ran by Meaux and
to Château Thierry to Soissons and back by Senlis to Paris. We saw a
finger’s breadth of battle area; a pin point of army front. Only a ride
along a broad, fine road out of Paris, at first; a road which our cars
had all to themselves. Then at Claye we came to the high-water mark
of the German invasion. This close to Paris in that direction and no
closer had the Germans come.
There was the field where the skirmishers had turned back. Farther
on, the branches of the avenue of trees which shaded the road had
been slashed as if by a whirlwind of knives, where the French
_soixante-quinze_ field guns had found a target. Under that sudden
bath of projectiles, with the French infantry pressing forward on
their front, the German gunners could not wait to take away the cord
of five-inch shells which they had piled to blaze their way to Paris.
One guessed their haste and their irritation. They were within range of
the fortifications; within two hours’ march of the suburbs of the Mecca
of forty years of preparation. After all that march from Belgium, with
no break in the programme of success, the thunders broke and lightning
flashed out of the sky as Manoury’s army rushed upon von Kluck’s flank.
“It was not the way that they wanted us to get the shells,” said a
French peasant, who was taking one of the shell baskets for a souvenir.
It would make an excellent umbrella stand.
For the French it had been the turn of the tide; for that little
British army which had fought its way back from Mons it was the sweet
dream, which had kept men up on the retreat, come true. Weary Germans,
after a fearful two weeks of effort, became the driven. Weary British
and French turned drivers. A hypodermic of victory renewed their
energy. Paris was at their back and the German backs in front. They
were no longer leaving their dead and wounded behind to the foe; they
were sweeping past the dead and wounded of the foe.
But their happiness, that of a winning action, exalted and passionate,
had not the depths of that of the refugees who had fled before the
German hosts and were returning to their homes in the wake of their
victorious army. We passed farmers with children perched on top of
carts laden with household goods and drawn by broad-backed farm-horses,
with usually another horse or a milch cow tied behind. The real power
of France these peasants, holding fast to the acres they own, with the
fire of the French nature under their thrifty conservatism. Others on
foot were villagers who had lacked horses or carts to transport their
belongings. In the packs on their backs were a few precious things
which they had borne away and were now bearing back.
Soon they would know what the Germans had done to their homes. What
the Germans had done to one piano was evident. It stood in the yard of
a house where grass and flowers had been trodden by horses and men.
In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of the little
drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the intoxication
of a Paris gained, a France in submission. They did not know what
Joffre had in pickle for them. It had all gone according to programme
up to that moment. Nothing can stop us Germans! Champagne instead of
beer! Set the glass on top of the piano and sing! Haven’t we waited
forty years for this day?
Captured diaries of German officers, which reflect the seventh heaven
of elation suddenly turned into grim depression, taken in connection
with what one saw on the battlefield, reconstruct the scene around
that piano. The cup to the lips; then dashed away. How those orders to
retreat must have hurt!
The state of the refugees’ homes all depended upon the chances of war.
War’s lightning might have hit your roof tree and it might not. It
plays no favourites between the honest and the dishonest; the thrifty
and the shiftless. We passed villages which exhibited no signs of
destruction or of looting. The German troops had marched through in the
advance and in the retreat without being billeted. A hurrying army with
another on its heels has no time for looting. Other villages had been
points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight.
General _Mauvaise Chance_ had it in for them. Shells had wrecked some
houses; others were burned. Where a German non-commissioned officer
came to the door of a French family and said that room must be made for
German soldiers in that house and if any one dared to interfere with
them he would be shot, there the exhausted human nature of a people
trained to think that “_Krieg ist Krieg_” and that the spoils of war
are to the victor had its way.
It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is
the effect of war, when men live a day in a year, that he is demonised
in a month. Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken,
crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled. The soldiery which could
not have its Paris “took it out” of the property of their hosts.
Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is
organised destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities
when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are
aroused to the kind of insane passion which war arouses in human
beings. But some indecencies one could not understand in civilised men.
All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations
of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded
that will embarrass the enemy. A certain foully disgusting practice
was too common not to have the approval of at least some officers,
whose conduct in several châteaus includes them as accomplices. Not all
officers, not all soldiers. That there should be a few is enough to
sicken you of belonging to the human species. Nothing worse in Central
America; nothing worse where civilised degeneracy disgraces savagery.
But do not think that destruction for destruction’s sake was done in
all houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle
was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a
looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to
carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the
glass tops of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner
was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.
To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big,
conical haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to
the wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes the
harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to save the
forage for their own horses, and either they were running too fast to
stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.
It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open.
Occasionally one saw the hastily made shelter trenches of a skirmish
line; and again, the emplacements for batteries--hurried field
emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been open
fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then, pursued,
sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other to overtake.
Here, a rearguard made a determined action which would have had the
character of a battle in other days; there, a rearguard was pinched as
the French or the British got around it.
Swift marching and quick manœuvres of the type which gave war some
of its old sport and zest; the advance, all the while gathering
force, like the deep tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested
wheat-field or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day’s
rain will wash away the blood stains and liven trampled vegetation.
Nature hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done
by his murderous wrath.
The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order.
Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the
rifles and guns and hell-fire, were moving across the fields with
spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that were
war’s victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of battle
had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered mounds of fresh
earth where they were light; and sometimes, when the burying was
unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes like that in the
woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that Paris was saved and
Germans died knowing that they had failed to take Paris.
Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we have
difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he was out
of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some man whom he
knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At one place a private
soldier, a man of education by his speech, came running across the
street at sight of him.
“Son of an old friend of mine, from my town,” said our statesman. Being
a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All inequalities
are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.
Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and shelled,
the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their eyes.
Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to our car
in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who threw some
flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to the uniform of
the army that had saved France, had the spirit of victorious France--
France after forty years’ waiting throwing back a foe that had two
soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields and neat
gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling landscape,
basked in victory. Dead the spirit of any one who could not, for the
time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a Frenchman. Far
from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one seemed; in the midst
of the France of the farms and the villages which had saved Paris and
France.
The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom
we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead. Were we
never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our speed when a
French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete!
Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought
to our ears the thunder of guns, the firing so rapid that it was like
the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of
ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open
sweep of parklike country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see
against the background of the foliage throwing it into relief was a
continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shrapnel shells, renewed with
fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.
This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns in sight; only a
diaphanous, man-made nimbus against masses of autumn green which was
raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it
lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms hugging
the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall grass.
Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been able to
detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.
There was hard fighting; a lot of French and Germans were being killed
in the direction of Compiègne and Noyon to-day. Another dip into
another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the muffled firing
of a line of infantry were audible. Yes, we were getting up with the
army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road we were on.
Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.
Ahead was the army’s stomach on wheels; a procession of big motor
transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision
of a battleship fleet at sea. We should have known that they belonged
to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pass.
All army transports are like that. What the deuced right has anybody to
pass? They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front of
them. Our automobile in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut
that an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of;
which proves again how clearly European armies are tied to their fine
roads. We got out, and here was our statesman putting his shoulder to
the wheel again. That is the way of the French in war. Everybody tries
to help. By this time the transport chauffeurs also remembered that
they were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are polite even in time of war,
they let us by.
A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.
“Stop here!” he called.
Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard instantly
and obeyed. In front of them was a line of single horse-drawn carts,
with an extra horse in the rear. They could take paths that the
motor-trucks could not. Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as a
relic of how armies were fed in other days. For the first time I
was realising what the automobile means to war. It brings the army
impedimenta close up to the army’s rear; it means a reduction of road
space occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace
with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.
All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport
broken down. And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been
an army on the road. The valuable part of our experience was exactly
in this: a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all
the vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter-marching
and attack. Order one was to expect afterwards behind the siege line of
trenches when there had been time to establish a routine; organisation
and smooth organisation you had here at the climax of a month’s strain.
It told the story of the character of the French army and the reasons
for its success other than its courage. The brains were not all with
the German Staff.
That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the
town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours,
we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our advance
still continuing? For then, the winter trench-fighting was unforeseen
and the sightseers thought of the French army as following up success
with success. Paris, rising from gloom to optimism, hoped to see the
Germans put out of France. The appetite for victory grew after a week’s
bulletins which moved the flags forward on the map every day.