came upon what looked like a leisurely family party of reserves. The
French army, a small section of French army along a road! And thus, if
one would see the whole it must be in bits along the roads when not
on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in the genial
afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to rest.
Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of the
last month.
The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being
done by the others at the front. These were waiting near a forks which
could take them to the right or the left, as the situation demanded. At
their rear, their supply of small arms ammunition; in front, caissons
of shells for a battery speaking from the woods near by; a troop of
cavalry drawn up, the men dismounted, ready; and ahead of them more
reserves ready; everything ready.
This was where the general wanted the body of men and equipment to be,
and here they were. There were no dragging ends in the rear, so far as
I could see; nobody complaining that food or ammunition was not up;
no aide looking for somebody who could not be found; no excited staff
officer rushing about shouting for somebody to look sharp for somebody
had made a mistake. The thing was unwarlike; it was like a particularly
well-thought-out route march. Yet at the word that company of cavalry
might be in the thick of it, at the point where they were wanted; the
infantry rushing to the support of the firing-line; the motor transport
facing around for withdrawal, if need be. It was only a little way,
indeed, into the zone of death from the rear of that compact column.
Thousands of such compact bodies on as many roads, each seemingly
a force by itself and each a part of the whole, which could be a
dependable whole only when every part was ready, alert, and up where it
belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle-line three hundred
miles long. The general must know what to depend on, mile by mile, in
his plans. Millions of human units are grouped in increasingly larger
units, harmonised according to set forms. The most complex of all
machines is that of a vast army, which yet must be kept most simple.
No unit acts without regard to the others; every one must know how to
do his part. The parts of the machine are standardised. One is like the
other in training, uniform, and every detail, so that one can replace
another. Oldest of all trades this of war; old experts the French.
What one saw was like manœuvres. It must be like manœuvres or the army
would not hold together. Manœuvres are to teach armies coherence; war
tries out that coherence, which you may not have if some one does not
know just what to do; if he is uncertain in his rôle. Haste leads to
confusion; haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to
hasten when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its
routine with the smoothness of a well-rehearsed play.
Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than
the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the
man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen
to understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the
offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the
value of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression
and to think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the
faults of his people and make the most of their virtues.
Thus, we had a French army’s historical part reversed: a French army
falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy blow.
Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had organised
in their mass offensive the _élan_ which means fast marching and hard
blows. Thus, we found the supposedly excitable French digging in to
receive the onslaught of the supposedly phlegmatic German. When the
time came for the charge--ah, you can always depend on a Frenchman to
charge!
Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it;
one thought that they realised it. Their individual intelligence and
democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and homogeneity,
rather than accepted the dictum of any war lord. Difficult to think
that each had left a vacancy at a family board; difficult to think that
they were not automatons in a process of endless routine of war; but
not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen once we had thrown our
bombs in the midst of the group.
Of old, one knew the wants of soldiers. One needed no hint of what was
welcome at the front. Never at any front were there enough newspapers
or tobacco. Men smoke twice as much as usual in the strain of waiting
for action, men who do not use tobacco at all get the habit. Ask the
G. A. R. men who fought in our great war if this is not true. Then,
too, when your country is at war, when back at home hands stretch for
every fresh edition and you at the front know only what happens in your
alley, think what a newspaper from Paris means out on the battle-line
seventy miles from Paris. So I brought a bundle of newspapers.
Monsieur, the sensation is beyond even the French language to express--
the sensation of sitting down by the roadside with this morning’s
edition and the first cigarette for twenty-four hours.
“_C’est épatant! C’est chic, ça! C’est magnifique! Alors, nom de Dieu!
Tiens! Hélas! Voilà! Merci, mille remerciements!_”--it was an army of
Frenchmen with ready words, quick, telling gestures, pouring out their
volume of thanks as the car sped by, and we tossed out our newspapers
at intervals, so that all should have a look.
An _Écho de Paris_ that fell into the road was the centre of a
flag-rush, which included an officer. Most unmilitary--an officer
scrambling at the same time as his men! In the name of the Kaiser, what
discipline!
Then the car stopped long enough for me to see a private give the paper
to his officer, who was plainly sensible of a loss of dignity, with the
courtesy which said, “A thousand pardons, _mon capitaine_!” and the
_capitaine_ began reading the newspaper aloud to his men. Scores of
human touches which were French, republican, democratic!
With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned,
native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth
gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing onto
the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our
reserve supply was not visible, and an officer’s sharp command saved us
from being invested by storm.
As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were kept
back out of range of the German shells, making the town a dead space
between them and the firing-line which was beyond. When the Germans
retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as it was
their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the main
square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German guns
when the French infantry passed through. Soissons was not a German town.
We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters
of shops that had not been torn down by shell-fire closed. Soissons
was as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War
seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the
roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which
was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the
ridge back of the town.
The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and see
the _soixante-quinze_ and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said
that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction
of the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the
longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom
of an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the
Germans. If that battery were on the opposite side under cover of any
one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another
shot--and we were not sure that the battery was not on the other side
of the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery
fire to one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were
scattered, according to the accepted practice, and from the central
firing-station word to fire was being passed first to one gun and then
to another.
Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian
Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town. Only
two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other
places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward and bullets
were waiting for them. They had rolled over on their backs, their rigid
hands still in the position of grasping their rifles after the manner
of crouching skirmishers.
Our statesman said that we had better give up trying to locate the
battery; and one of the officers called a halt to trying to go up to
the firing-line on the part of a personally conducted party, after we
stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With
his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and that
freedom in spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the
French call _élan_. Whenever one asked a question of a French private
you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know. This
definiteness, the result of military training, as well as the Gallic
lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an
efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know his
part. This young man, you realised, had tasted the “salt of life,” as
Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had
known the intoxication of a charge.
“Does everything go well?” M. Doumer asked.
“It is not going at all, now. It is sticking,” was the answer. “Some
Germans were busy up there in the stone quarries while the others were
falling back. They have a covered trench and rapid-fire gun positions
to sweep a zone of fire which they have cleared.”
Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dugouts as
shelter from shells!
There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private saying:
“Now this is what the general ought to do!” It was Napoleon’s own plan
revealed. “You keep still!” he said. “This army has too many generals.”
“They mean to make a stand,” the private went on. “It’s an ideal place
for it. There is no use of an attack in front. We’d be mowed down by
machine guns.” The br-r-r of a dozen shots from a German machine gun
gave point to his conclusion. “Our infantry is hugging what we have and
entrenching. You better not go up. One has to know the way, or he’ll
walk right into a sharpshooter’s bullet”--instructions that would have
been applicable a year later when you were about to visit a British
trench in almost the same location.
The siege warfare of the Aisne line had already begun. It was
singular to get the first news of it from a private in Soissons and
then to return to Paris and London, on the other side of the curtain
of secrecy, where the public thought that the Allied advance would
continue.
“_Allons!_” said our statesman, and we went to the town square, where
German guns had carpeted the ground with branches of shade trees and
torn off the fronts of houses, revealing sections of looted interior
which had been further messed by shell-bursts. Some women and children
and a crippled man came out-of-doors at sight of us. M. Doumer
introduced himself and shook hands all around. They were glad to meet
him in much the same way as if he had been on an election campaign.
“A German shell struck there across the square only half an hour ago,”
said one of the women.
“What do you do when there is shelling?” asked M. Doumer.
“If it is bad we go into the cellar,” was the answer; an answer which
implied that peculiar fearlessness of women, who get accustomed to
fire easier than men. These were the fatalists of the town, who would
not turn refugee; helpless to fight, but grimly staying with their
homes and accepting what came with an incomprehensible stoicism, which
possibly had its origin in a race-feeling so proud and bitter that they
would not admit that they could be afraid of anything German, even a
shell.
“And how did the Germans act?”
“They made themselves at home in our houses and slept in our beds,
while we slept in the kitchen,” she answered. “They said if we kept
indoors and gave them what they wanted we should not be harmed. But
if any one fired a shot at their troops or any arms were found in our
houses, they would burn the town. When they were going back in a great
hurry--how they scattered from _our_ shells! We went out in the square
to see _our_ shells, monsieur!”
What mattered the ruins of her home? _Our_ shells had returned
vengeance.
Arrows with directions in German, “This way to the river,” “This
way to Villers-Cotteret,” were chalked on the standing walls; and
on door-casings the names of the detachments of the Prussian Guard
billeted there, all in systematic Teutonic fashion.
“Prince Albrecht Joachim, one of the Kaiser’s sons, was here and I
talked with him,” said the Mayor, who thought we should enjoy a morsel
from court circles in exchange for a copy of the _Écho de Paris_ which
contained the news that Prince Albrecht had been wounded later. The
mayor looked tired, this local man of the people, who had to play the
shepherd of a stricken flock. Afterwards, they said that he deserted
his charge and a lady, Mme. Macherez, took his place. All I know is
that he was present that day; or at least a man who was introduced to
me as mayor; and he was French enough to make a _bon mot_ by saying
that he feared there was some fault in his hospitality because he had
been unable to keep his guest.
“May I have this _confiture_?” asked a battle-stained French orderly,
coming up to him. “I found it in that ruined house there--all the
Germans had left. I haven’t had a _confiture_ for a long time and,
monsieur, you cannot imagine what a hunger I have for _confitures_.”
All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again
rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a
table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started
back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the
landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts. The reserves were
around their campfires making savoury stews for the evening meal. They
would sleep where night found them on the sward under the stars, as in
wars of old. That scene remains indelible as one of many while the army
was yet mobile, before the contest became one of the mole and of the
beaver.
Though one had already seen many German prisoners in groups and
convoys, the sight of two on the road fixed the attention because of
the surroundings and the contrast suggested between French and German
natures. Both were young, in the very prime of life, and both Prussian.
One was dark-complexioned, with a scrubbly beard which was the product
of the war. He marched with such rigidity that I should not have been
surprised to see him break into a goose-step. The other was of that
mild, blue-eyed, tow-haired type from the Baltic provinces, with the
thin white skin which does not tan but burns. He was frailer than the
other and he was tired; oh, how tired! He would lag and then stiffen
back his shoulders and draw in his chin and force a trifle more energy
into his step.
A typical, lively French soldier was escorting the pair. He looked
pretty tired, too, but he was getting over the ground in the natural,
easy way in which man is meant to walk. The aboriginal races, who
have a genius for long distances on foot, do not march in the German
fashion, which looks impressive, but lacks endurance. By the same
logic, the cayuse’s gait is better for thirty miles day in and day out
than the high-stepping carriage horse’s.
You could realise the contempt which those two martial Germans had
for their captor. Four or five peasant women refugees by the roadside
unloosened their tongues in piercing feminine satire and upbraiding.
“You are going to Paris, after all! This is what you get for invading
our country; and you’ll get more of it!”
The little French soldier held up his hand to the women and shook his
head. He was a chivalrous fellow, with imagination enough to appreciate
the feelings of an enemy who has fought hard and lost. Such as he would
fight fair and hold this war of the civilisations up to something like
the standards of civilisation.
The very tired German stiffened up again, as his drill sergeant had
taught him, and both stared straight ahead, proud and contemptuous, as
their Kaiser would wish them to do. I should recognise the faces of
these two Germans and of that little French guard if I saw them ten
years hence. In ten years, what will be the Germans’ attitude toward
this war and their military lords?
It is not often that one has a senator for a guide; and I never knew
a more efficient one than our statesman. His own curiosity was the
best possible aid in satisfying our own. Having seen the compactness
and simplicity of an army column at the front, we were to find that
the same thing applied to high command. A sentry and a small flag
at the doorway of a village hotel: this was the headquarters of the
Sixth Army, which General Manoury had formed in haste and flung at von
Kluck with a spirit which crowned his white hairs with the audacity
of youth. He was absent, but we might see something of the central
direction of one hundred and fifty thousand men in the course of one
of the most brilliant manœuvres of the war, before staffs had settled
down to office existence in permanent quarters. That is, we might see
the little there was to see: a soldier telegrapher in one bedroom,
a soldier typewritist in another, officers at work in others. One
realised that they could pack up everything and move in the time it
takes to toss enough clothes into a bag to spend a night away from
home. Apparently, when the French fought they left red tape behind with
the bureaucracy.
From his seat before a series of maps on a sitting-room table an
officer of about thirty-five rose to receive us. It struck me that
he exemplified self-possessed intelligence and definite knowledge;
that he had coolness and steadiness plus that acuteness of perception
and clarity of statement which are the gift of the French. You felt
sure that no orders which left his hand wasted any words or lacked
explicitness. The Staff is the brains of the army, and he had brains.
“All goes well!” he said, as if there were no more to say. All goes
well! He would say it when things looked black or when they looked
bright, and in a way that would make others believe it.
Outside the hotel were no cavalry escorts or commanders, no hurrying
orderlies, none of the legendary physical activity that is associated
with an army headquarters. An automobile drove up, an officer got out;
another officer descended the stairs to enter a waiting car. The wires
carry word faster than the cars. Each subordinate commander was in his
place along that line where we had seen the puffs of smoke against
the landscape, ready to answer a question or obey an order. That
simplicity, like art itself, which seems so easy is the most difficult
accomplishment of all in war.
After dark, in a drizzling rain, we came to what seemed to be a
town, for our automobile lamps spread their radiant streams over wet
pavements. But these were the only lights. Tongues of loose brick
had been shot across the cobblestones and dimly the jagged skyline
of broken walls of buildings on either side could be discovered. It
was Senlis, the first town I had seen which could be classified as a
town in ruins. Afterwards, one became a sort of specialist in ruins,
comparing the latest with previous examples of destruction.
Approaching footsteps broke the silence. A small, very small, French
soldier--he was not more than five feet two--appeared and we followed
him to an ambulance that had broken down for want of gasoline. It
belonged to the Société de Femmes de France. The little soldier had
put on a uniform as a volunteer for the only service his stature would
permit. In those days many volunteer organisations were busy seeking
to “help.” There was a kind of competition among them for wounded.
This ambulance had got one and was taking him to Paris, off the regular
route of the wounded who were being sent south. The boot-soles of a
prostrate figure showed out of the dark recess of the interior. This
French officer, a major, had been hit in the shoulder. He tried to
control the catch in his voice which belied his assertion that he was
suffering little pain. The drizzling rain was chilly. It was a long way
to Paris yet.
“We will make inquiries,” said our kindly general.
A man who came out of the gloom said that there was a hospital kept by
some Sisters of Charity in Senlis which had escaped destruction. The
question was put into the recesses of the ambulance:
“Would you prefer to spend the night here and go on in the morning?”
“Yes, monsieur, I--should--like--that--better!” The tone left no
doubt of the relief that the journey in a car with poor springs was not
to be continued after hours of waiting, marooned in the street of a
ruined town.
While the ambulance passed inside the hospital gate, I spoke with an
elderly woman who came to a nearby door. Cool and definite she was as
a French soldier, bringing home the character of the women of France
which this war has made so well-known to the world.
“Were you here during the fighting?”
“Yes, monsieur, and during the shelling and the burning. The shelling
was not enough. The Germans said that some one fired on their
soldiers--a boy, I believe--so they set fire to the houses. One could
only look and hate and pray as their soldiers passed through, looking
so unconquerable, making all seem so terrible for France. Was it to be
’70 over again? One’s heart was of stone, monsieur. _Tiens!_ They came
back faster than they went. A mitrailleuse was down there at the end of
the street, our mitrailleuse! The bullets went cracking by. They crack,
the bullets; they do not whistle like the stories say. Then the street
was empty of Germans who could run. The dead they could not run, nor
the wounded. Then the French came up the street, running, too--running
after the Germans. It was good, monsieur, good, good! My heart was not
of stone then, monsieur. It could not beat fast enough for happiness.
It was the heart of a girl. I remember it all very clearly. I always
shall, monsieur.”
“_Allons!_” said our statesman. “The officer is well cared for.”
The world seemed normal again as we passed through other towns unharmed
and swept by the dark countryside, till a red light rose in our path
and a sharp “_Qui vive?_” came out of the night as we slowed down. This
was not the only sentry call from a French Territorial in front of a
barricade.
At a second halt we found a chain as well as a barricade across the
road. For a moment it seemed that even the suave parliamentarism of
our statesman or the authority of our general and our passes could
not convince one grizzled reservist, doing his duty for France at the
rear while the young men were at the front, that we had any right to
be going into Paris at that hour of the night. The password, which was
“Paris,” helped, and we felt it a most appropriate password as we came
to the broad streets of the city that was safe.
There is a popular idea that Napoleon was a super-genius who won all
his battles alone. It is wrong. He had a lot of Frenchmen along to
help. Much the same kind of Frenchmen live to-day. Not until they
fought again would the world believe this. It seems that the excitable
Gaul, whom some people thought would become demoralised in face of
German organisation, merely talks with his hands. In a great crisis
he is cool, as he always was. I like the French for their democracy
and humanity. I like them, too, for leaving their war to France and
Marianne; for not dragging in God as do the Germans. For it is just
possible that God is not in the fight. We don’t know that He even
approved of the war.
VI
AND CALAIS WAITS
Calais, the objective of a struggle for world power--Last reserves
of the British--A city of refugees--Heroic care of the
wounded--“Life going on as usual”--The cheerful Belgians--In a
French hospital--An astonished but happy Tommy.