he does. He knows that if he dies he will not leave wife and children
penniless. His son, not yet old enough to fight, will come on to take
his place. Men at home who are twenty-two or three and unmarried, men
who are twenty-eight or thirty and not long married, and men of forty
with some money put by, will, in turn, understand how their own class
feels.
In ten minutes you had entered into the hearts of this single company
in a way that made you feel that you had got into the heart of the
whole French army. When you asked them if they would like to go home
they didn’t say “No!” all in a chorus, as if that were what the colonel
had told them to say. They obey the colonel, but their thoughts are
their own. Otherwise, these ruddy, healthy men, representing the people
of France and not the cafés of Paris, would not keep France a republic.
Yes, they did want to go home. They did want to go home. They wanted
their wives and babies; they wanted to sit down to morning coffee at
their own tables. Lumps rose in their throats at the suggestion. But
they were not going until the German peril was over forever. Why stop
now, only to have another terrible war in thirty or forty years? A
peace that would endure must be won. They had thought that out for
themselves. They would not stick to their determination if they had
not. This is the way of democracies. Thus every one was conscious that
he was fighting not merely to win, but for future generations.
“It happened that this great struggle which we had long feared came
in our day, and to us is the duty,” said one. You caught the spirit
of comradeship passing the time with jests at one another’s expense.
One of the men who was not a full thirty-third degree _poilu_ had
compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his shock
of hair.
“I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way
for the Zeppelins,” said a comrade.
“Envy! Sheer envy!” was the retort. “Look at him!” and he pointed at
some scraggly bunches on chin and cheeks which resembled a young grass
plat that had come up badly.
“I don’t believe in air-tight beards,” was the response.
When I produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is
with soldiers at the front. They all wanted to be in the photograph,
on the chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or
father looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this:
“Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry, 18th Company, 5th Battalion,
299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121,” by which you will
know the rural free delivery methods along the French front. This
address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides
the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army knows
the sector and the number of the regiment in that sector. By the same
kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on any one of
his millions, each a human being with all a human being’s individual
emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of the vast
multitude of obedient chessmen.
“We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word,” all
agreed. Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means the
enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy’s intelligence.
“If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot
here,” said _mon capitaine_.
These were the men who had not been long married. They were not yet
past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home; perhaps
they had become fathers since they went to war. The younger men of the
first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of youth which makes
comradeship easy.
But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late
thirties and early forties, have settled down in life. Their families
are established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may
enjoy a vacation from the wife, for you know madame, in France, with
all her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this
is not a proper tonic for her lord. So the old boys seem the most
content in the fellowship of winter quarters. What they cannot stand
are repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of
rifle and pack. But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one
very practical reason why they will fight well--and they have fought
better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in
their blood.
“_Allons, messieurs!_” said the tall major, who wanted us to see
battle-fields. It required no escort to tell us where the battle-field
was. We knew it when we came to it as you know the point reached by
high tide on the sands--this field where many Gettysburgs were
fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early
September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in the
balance--as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a decisive
victory over the French army. Where destruction ended there the German
invasion reached its limit.
Forests and streams and ditches and railroad culverts played their
part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery
walls, too. In all my battle-field visits in Europe I have not seen
a single cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which
throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen to
the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields lay
in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and girls
in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.
We stopped at a crossroads where charges met and wrestled back and
forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of shells appeared as steps
scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old French cap,
with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his end, and
near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty lying in
the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over. Millions
of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those who
died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him out in
this fighting across these fields and through the forests, in a tug
of war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days under
fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-laden,
blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder breaking
forth into hell when the war was only a month old and passion was at a
white heat.
Hasty shelter trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless
men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that
they carry on their backs, to give them a little cover. And there is
the trench that stopped the Germans--the trench which they charged
but could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can
step from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means
that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their
places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German courage
could not endure. Thus far and no farther the invasion came in that
wheat-field which will be ever memorable.
We went up a hill once crowned by one of those clusters of farm
buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and granaries
are close together. All around were bare fields. Those farm buildings
stood up like a mountain peak. The French had the hill and lost it and
recovered it. Whichever side had it, the other was bound to bathe it in
shells because it commanded the country around. The value of property
meant nothing. All that counted was military advantage. Because
churches are often on hilltops, because they are bound to be used for
lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces. When two men are fighting for
life they don’t bother about upsetting a table with a vase, or notice
any “Keep off the grass” signs; no, not even if the family Bible be
underfoot.
None of the roof, none of the superstructure of these farm buildings
was left; only the lower walls, which were eighteen inches thick and
in places penetrated by the shells. For when a Frenchman builds a
farmhouse he builds it to last a few hundred years. The farm windmill
was as twisted as a birdcage that has been rolled under a trolley car,
but a large hayrake was unharmed. Such is the luck of war. I made up my
mind that if I ever got under shell-fire I’d make for the hayrake and
avoid the windmill.
Our tall major pointed out all the fluctuating positions during the
battle. It was like hearing a chess match explained from memory by an
expert. Words to him were something precious. He made each one count as
he would the shots from his cannon. His narrative had the lucidity of a
terse judge reviewing evidence. The battle-field was etched on his mind
in every important phase of its action.
Not once did he speak in abuse of the enemy. The staff officer who
directs steel ringing on steel is too busy thrusting and keeping guard
to indulge in diatribes. To him the enemy is a powerful impersonal
devil who must be beaten. When I asked about the conduct of the Germans
in the towns they occupied, his lip tightened and his eyes grew hard.
“I’m afraid it was pretty bad!” he said; as if he felt, besides the
wrong to his own people, the shame that men who had fought so bravely
should act so ill. I think his attitude toward war was this: “We will
die for France, but calling the Germans names will not help us to win.
It only takes breath.”
“_Allons, messieurs!_”
As our car ran up a gentle hill we noticed two soldiers driving a load
of manure. This seemed a pretty prosaic, even humiliating, business,
in a poetic sense, for the brave _poilus_, veterans of Lorraine’s
great battle. But Father Joffre is a true Frenchman of his time. Why
shouldn’t the soldiers help the farmers whose sons are away at the
front and perhaps helping farmers back of some other point of the line?
Over the crest of the hill we came on long lines of soldiers bearing
timbers and fascines for trench building, which explained why some of
the villages were empty. A fascine is something usually made of woven
branches which will hold dirt in position. The woven wicker cases for
shells which the German artillery uses and leaves behind when it has to
quit the field in a hurry, make excellent fascines, and a number that
I saw were of this ready-made kind. After carrying shells for killing
Frenchmen they were to protect the lives of Frenchmen. Near by other
soldiers were turning up a strip of fresh earth against the snow, which
looked like a rip in the frosting of a chocolate cake.
“How do you like this kind of war?” we asked. It is the kind that
irrigationists and subway excavators do.
“We’ve grown to be very fond of it,” was the answer. “It is a
cultivated taste, which becomes a passion with experience. After you
have been shot at in the open you want all the earth you can get
between you and the bullets.”
Now we alighted from the automobile and went forward on foot. We
passed some eight lines of trenches before we came to the one where
we were to stop. A practised military eye had gone over all that
ground; a practised military hand had laid out each trench. After
the work was done the civilian’s eye could grasp the principle. If
one trench were taken, the men knew exactly how to fall back on the
next, which commanded the ground they had left. The trenches were not
continuous. There were open spaces left purposely. All that front was
literally locked, and double and triple locked, with trenches. Break
through one barred door and there is another and another confronting
you. Considering the millions of burrowing and digging and watching
soldiers, it occurred to one that if a _marmite_ (saucepan) came along
and buried our little party, our loss would not be as much noticed as
if a piece of coping from a high building had fallen and extinguished
us on Broadway, which would be a relatively novel way of dying. Being
killed in war had long ceased to be a novelty on the continent of
Europe.
We seemed in a dead world, except for the leisurely, hoarse, muffled
reports of a French gun in the woods on either side of the open space
where we stood. Through our glasses we could see quite clearly the line
of the German front trench, which was in the outskirts of a village
on higher ground than the French. Not a human being was visible. Both
sides were watching for any move of the other and meanwhile lying tight
under cover. By day they were marooned. All supplies and all reliefs of
men who are to take their turn in front go out by night.
There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would man it
in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had only to
cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as in a winter
resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might receive a call--
which meant death for many. But they were used to that, and their card
games went on none the less merrily.
“No farther?” we asked our major.
“No farther!” he said. “This is risk enough for you. It looks very
peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some _marmites_ if it pleased
him.” Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic
effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks
enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another
part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from the
officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given not to
do so--which adds another reason for military suspicion of the press.
The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected with the
front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade headquarters,
to apprehend two men of such-and-such description. They were taken as
easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a wooden leg and red hair,
would be in trying to get out of police headquarters when the doorman
had his Bertillon photograph and measurements to go by.
That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept
up its slow firing at intervals. It was “bothering” one of the German
trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on,
and so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a shell, swing a
breechlock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not respond
because they could not locate the French battery. They may have known
that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or three hundred
acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns heavily protected by
earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea from the top of the
Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a four-leafed clover on
the lawn below.
Our little group remained, not standing in the trench, but back of
it in full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to
play for realism by sending us a _marmite_. Probably they had seen us
through the telescope at the start and concluded we weren’t worth a
shot. In the first months of the war such a target would have received
a burst of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else.
Then ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost
its zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition.
The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer campaign.
There must be fifteen dollars’ worth of target in sight, say, for the
smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the more
valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had become as
commonplace a function to both French and German gunners as getting up
to put another stick of wood in the stove or going to open the door to
take a letter from the postman.
We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this
book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of
them later. We are going direct to Gerbeviller, which was--emphasis
on the past tense--a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred
inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road,
and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing on
sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.
“I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!” I exclaimed.
“There was no such fighting in Belgium,” was the answer.
Of course not, except in the southwestern corner, where the armies
still face each other.
“Not all the damage was done by the Germans,” the major explained.
“Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a house,
our guns let drive at that house,” he went on. “The owners of the
houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud--proud of our
marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to
swallow.”
For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbeviller. They tore it to pieces
before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the
population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here,
unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss
cheese from shell-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation
post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it. But the
brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the
brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians knew
that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian will
not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after
they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian reserves not
far back of where their firing-line had been.
“However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins
does not prove that a brewery is better than a church. It only proves
which is the Lord’s side in this war,” said Sister Julie. But I get
ahead of my story.
In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened
houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction,
with doors and windows intact, facing gaps where doors and windows had
been. We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had spared
these buildings.
“Sister Julie!” the major called.
A short, sturdy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and appeared
in the dark hall. She led us into the sitting-room, where she spryly
placed chairs for our little party. She was smiling; her eyes were
sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt,
on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets
some celebrated person for the first time--a curiosity no less keen
than if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.
Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day
or night, with shells screaming overhead and crashing into houses;
through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and her
four sister associates remained in Gerbeviller. When the town was fired
they moved from one building to another. They nursed both wounded
French and Germans, also wounded townspeople who could not flee with
the others.
“You were not frightened? You did not think of going away?” she was
asked.
“Frightened?” she answered. “I had not time to think of that. Go away?
How could I when the Lord’s work had come to me?”
President Poincaré went in person to give her the Legion of Honour,
the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman,
and here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the
kitchen at the time, very busy cooking the meal for the sick whom the
sisters are still caring for. So Sister Julie took the President of
France into the kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take
you or me. A human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be
treated courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to
burn. After the complexity of French politics, President Poincaré was
anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.
“He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could
be President,” she said. “I thought that the president of France would
be a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise. Then
there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel, who was
president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-du--yes,
that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in Paris. They
were very agreeable, too.”
“And your Legion of Honour?”
“Oh, my medal that M. le Président gave me! I keep that in a drawer. I
do not wear it every day when I am in my working clothes.”
“Have you ever been to Paris?”
“No, monsieur.”
“They will make a great ado over you when you go.”
“I must stay in Gerbeviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when
the Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbeviller is my home.
There is much to do here, and there will be more to do when the people
who were driven away return.”
These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot;
they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war’s
horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town, who
had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in
the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the
stoicism to witness.
What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie’s
mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the
boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no
inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his cow
to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything wrong in
that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for he broke a
military regulation. He might have been a spy using the cow as a blind.
War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.
Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her
cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw
long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant
temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal. Though
her hair is white, youth’s optimism and confidence in the future and
the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present. The town and
church would be rebuilt; children would play in the streets again;
there was a lot of the Lord’s work to do yet.
In every word and thought she is French--French in her liveliness
of spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the
borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town,
she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved France
fought and why she was happy to have remained in Gerbeviller to welcome
them back.
In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle
slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds as
thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was a
temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded walk and a
fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here they had been
laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had made that monument;
and, in memory of what the dead had fought for, the living said that
they were not yet ready to quit fighting.
Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the edge
of a woods. German aeroplanes had seen the French massing for a charge
under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes could not see what
was in the woods. Rifles and machine guns poured a spray of lead across
the crest when the French appeared. But the French, who were fighting
for Sister Julie’s town, would not stop their rush at first. They kept
on, as Pickett’s men did when the Federal guns riddled their ranks with
grapeshot. This accounts for many of the mounds being well beyond the
crest. The Germans made a mistake in firing too soon. They would have
made a heavier killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther.
After the French fell back, for two days and nights their wounded lay
out on that field without water or food, between the two forces, and if
their comrades approached to give succour the machine guns blazed more
death, because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench
on the crest. After two days the French forced the Germans out of the
woods by hitting them from another point.