Part 12
Well, now we knew the partial answer to those three questions. For the shadow of the menace of the long months was beginning to realize itself; it had become flesh and dwelt among us, a fabulous red monster of carnage and slaughter up there in the north.
When the Germans struck their first sledge-hammer blow and the Fifth British Army recoiled before the blow the entire line from north to south felt the thrill of the shock. Paris, the goal of the enemy, felt it, too, and there went up from the city a kind of big sigh, a long exhalation, which was almost a breath of relief. At any rate the long suspense was past. At the end of the third or fourth day refugees began to pour in by thousands, a poor, tragic, dazed procession, twice bereft of their scanty possessions. They brought with them wild, incoherent, garbled accounts of the terrible sanguinary losses on both sides.
Paris, perhaps all France, possesses the feminine temperament. In hours of ease she is willful, coy and hard to please--especially with strangers; she is charming, baffling, impatient, outspoken over the foibles of her best friends and allies, keenly aware of the ridiculous, gay with a spice of maliciousness; her caricatures, often grossly unjust, are masterpieces of fine satirical wit. But in the hour of trial she gathers herself together with a courage, a poise and a profound tenderness for those of her people who have been stricken that are exceedingly good to see.
And that is what happened now. Paris found immediate food and shelter for the fugitives; printed proclamations that appeared all over the city, bidding the citizens to remain steadfast and unshaken in their faith of victory and put no credence in lying rumors; and at the same time, as the Big Berthas continued their vehement spitting at intervals, and the air raids harried and took toll of the city’s innocent poor--for it is chiefly the workers, the servants, the little people of Paris living in the top stories up under the roofs who had to descend each night to the caves at the call of the siren--the newspapers urged all families who could afford it, all those who had children or old or sick to remove themselves out of the new zone of danger to the tranquillity of the country. And thousands followed the wise advice. Hôtels de luxe were emptied inside of a week. Shopkeepers and workers who could manage to leave ordained a spring holiday and departed to their relatives in the provinces. It was an exodus. There were left the big wide empty places of Paris, filled with a gray-blue gossamer mist soft as chiffon, which wrapped all the city in an enchanted web; the tranquil garden walks deserted by children, vivid with rhododendrons and the drifting pink and white petals of chestnut blooms; and the good solid block of reliable Paris citizens, neither frightened nor fugitive, who had lived through the Marne and the Mons and the Champagne and the Verdun attacks, and who read the disquieting communiqués with composed faces and went about their affairs as usual.
[Illustration:
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information._ _Copyright, 1918, by The Curtis Publishing Company._ _Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._
THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF THE CITADEL OF VERDUN. NEXT, ON LEFT, MISS FRAZER, IN HELMET, CARRYING GAS MASK. THE TUNNEL-ENTRANCE TO THE FORTRESS IS IN THE BACKGROUND.]
Practically no troops are now routed through the capital, but occasionally one saw small detachments of _fantassins_ with their heavy marching equipment filing through the empty squares. They did not look warlike, those poilus, veterans of four years, when they appeared in the streets of Paris. They marched slowly, laboriously, one foot lagging after the other, shoulders bent beneath the weight of the kit, their eyes fixed on the ground. The horizon-blue uniforms were faded and patched and their clumsy storm coats with the skirts buttoned back gave them an indescribably pathetic air. Seen thus at twilight and melting into the dusky background there was something about these somber, slow-plodding, burdened figures that hurt the heart. One felt an overwhelming tenderness, a pity for these brave little men. And yet these were the selfsame poilus who a few days later stemmed the furious German tide--and they sang as they went into battle. And nearly four years they sang!
It would not be untrue to say that underneath her courageous calm Paris did not feel the cruel strain of that first uncertain week of the offensive. The strain of the situation was brought home to me, waiting for my passes, by several incidents. Naomie, the trim little _femme de chambre_, pretty as a pink camellia, whose voice has the soft deep throb of a cello, went about with a face as pale as the linen she bore on her arm. And as she made the bed and swept and aired the room she wept, quietly, steadily, the silvery globules stealing silently one by one down her cheeks. When they obstructed her vision she stopped, brushed them away methodically and went on. My pillow was wet with Naomie’s tears.
“I am ashamed, mademoiselle; I ask pardon to be like this,” she murmured one morning when I had caught her outright drying her eyes. “One must be strong these days. But my husband, he has been transferred up north on the British line. And now I have not heard from him, here it is over a week. Before he always sent me a little word each day. He never failed--some little word each day.” She plaited the counterpane with unseeing eyes as she muttered: “Ten days! Yes, it is that--just. And not one little word. But one must be strong, _n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle_?”
The next disturbing thing that happened was the news that B---- had deserted. His wife was my friend. B---- was a Frenchman in a famous fighting regiment, sensitive, fine-strung, none too strong, who had been in the trenches since 1914. What evil of fear, irritation, revolt or sheer brain collapse led to the decision we shall never know. But one day he threw down his gas mask in the midst of an attack and walked out of the trenches. His battalion had been incessantly shelled for weeks. In the front-line trenches they were hammered by the guns. In the back areas, _en repos_, they caught the bombs. No sleep in either place. This kept up week after week. And suddenly, like an elephant, B---- had “gone bad.”
He appeared suddenly in Paris at a time when not a single Frenchman was on leave; and he walked the boulevards with the number of that famous fighting regiment on the collar of his tunic blazing forth for all the world to see. It was a miracle he was not instantly caught. As it was he was a prisoner; for he had no papers, and therefore he could not send a telegram or register at a hotel or take a train or leave the city. A friend telegraphed for B----’s wife, who was in the country, sending a noncommittal wire so as not to alarm B----’s mother, an ardent patriot, who would have instantly handed over her recreant son to the police. The wife arrived. To her B---- declared his intention of joining the Foreign Legion. That meant that his brain flare or momentary cowardice had passed.
Anyone may join the Foreign Legion. There no embarrassing questions are asked. They take on all comers, and then pitch them headlong into the very hottest hell of the battle. Accordingly B----, knowing that if he could once win to their offices he would be safe from arrest, stole out from his doorway one morning and, avoiding officers and gendarmes, gained the recruiting bureau.
But here an unexpected blow fell. The recruiting end of the bureau had been shifted to Lyons. But how to get there! He could not ride in a train or a public conveyance. He could not dine openly in a restaurant or sleep in a hotel. And to be seen tramping south in this crisis meant certain arrest and death. However, there was nothing for it but to make the attempt--to walk by night and lie hidden in the day. He started forth--and no word has been heard of him since.
In time the news of his desertion leaked out. And the gendarme on the beat took it upon himself to rebuke Madame B---- for having such a villain husband. He is a fat, greasy, bald-headed little man, this gendarme, who sits long over his grenadine, and has never been nearer the Front than the city fortifications.
Madame B flew at him like a fury.
“Have you ever been out there--fat _embusqué_?” she shrilled, shaking her finger under his nose. “Have you fought four years in that hell? Been wounded five times, had fever, rheumatism, suffered from shell shock, been made deaf from bombardment, had your nerves shattered so that you never sleep? Is your hair turned gray at twenty-five years? Oh, my God! No? Then keep your mouth shut! ’Tis not for such as you to speak of this war! ’Tis for those who have endured.”
It was this courage made human by the private griefs of the people of France, who after four weary, crucifying years were still bearing the cross, filling the breach, saving the day, and saving it with a superb dash despite individual heartbreaks, that filled my mind as, our passes obtained, we journeyed northward. It seemed to me that perhaps the month of March, 1918, was to be made memorable by the fact that at that particular time America began definitely to shift to her own young shoulders the weight of the agonizing burden France had borne so long. For this reason the opening offensive marked a transition period, for theretofore we had held only quiet sectors.
But it was not the fact of the shifting of the outward burden that interested me so much as to discover if possible whether that shift was to extend also to the spirit--whether the soul of France, the soul of her soldiers, her poilus, was to pass into the soul of this new, strong, eager young Army. For the quality that distinguishes the poilu from his enemies and from his allies alike is not brute force, or body fitness, or stubborn pride, or stiff resistance, or obedience, or cohesion, or physical valor--but sheer spiritual stamina. He has an invincible come-back. His soul can’t be beat. The French, who are an extremely clannish race, say that they feel a closer bond with Americans than with any other people on earth. This is not mere diplomatic balder-dash. They declare that aside from possessing the same democratic ideals, the same passion for scientific research, there is a decided similarity of temperament. In both peoples there are the same swiftness of perception, the same suppleness of mind, lightness of wit and comradeliness toward life and toward each other which have made France like one great family. And now that the two nations in this offensive are fighting side by side and brigade by brigade, the French in their speeches and editorials and communiqués have announced that the spiritual metal of the two armies is the same; that the spontaneous, unquenchable, “_En avant! Toujours en avant!_” quality of attack, attack, and again attack of the French poilu is also the salient characteristic of the newcomers. It was this particular declaration that put a keener edge on my observations during my journey. I was on the lookout for signs in our men of the conquering will of the poilu.
It is not germane to the subject to describe in detail that eight-day motor trip through the heart of the American war zone in France. We covered each day hundreds of kilometers of the lovely rolling meadow and hill country of Lorraine--orchards, fields and woods radiant in shimmering green, clothed in primal light of leaf. We passed scores of red-tiled hamlets, each the identical facsimile of the other, with steaming manure heaps adorning the front yards of prominent citizens, hens and bouncing babies scratching therein, and toothless old dames sitting on the doorsteps peering out upon the world with faded eyes.
We stopped at numerous American base-hospital centers, some in stone cantonments, formerly army barracks turned over by the French; some former hotel resorts; and still others brand-new frame buildings, entire villages with duck-board streets. We motored through endless series of _repos_ stations, one following hard upon another like beads on a string, of English, American, French, Italian, Portuguese, Annamite and Senegalese troops. At the close of the day in the rosy smolder of the afterglow we hunted aviation camps in the advanced war zone, and found the vast aërodromes so shrewdly camouflaged that we could scarcely discern them from the dappled landscape. We passed through the center where is situated the training school for army officers, a beautiful old fortressed town set like a coronet high on a wooded hill. We stayed the night at Army Headquarters in a hotel packed with the hierarchy of the General Staff, where automobiles with flags drew up before the door and mackintoshed generals beribboned and bestarred strode in out of the lashing rain.
Our quest took us from the drowsy, tranquil rear of the war zone clear up to the Luneville sector beyond Toul, where we witnessed two air fights in the course of one morning. It was the portion of France given over to the American effort. We traversed and crisscrossed it back and forth and from end to end. And everywhere we met the same phenomenon--the lithe, clean-limbed, khaki-clad American soldier. The land was alive with him! Several months previously I had been over this same territory, and then even a Red Cross man was a rare animal which the natives paused to regard. Now, after eight months, the entire countryside hummed and buzzed like a vast beehive. It was the visible result before our eyes of all the sweat and labor and strain of a mighty nation intent on a single goal--to transport men to France.
Well, here were the men, hundreds of thousands of them, scattered over a vast camp ground. We met battalions of them swinging along the roads in step and singing a lively marching air. We came across them in sunny fields prodding dummy Huns with bayonets; we passed groups of them in remote and peaceful valleys picking off targets at rifle ranges. We met them at lonely crossroads, together with a French comrade, acting as military police. They gave us the salute that is known as the Pershing--bringing the hand smartly up to the forage cap in an abrupt little gesture full of style. And they invariably followed the salute with an infectious aftergrin. The salute was Pershing’s. The grin was all their own. We saw them tearing along roads at a breakneck clip in those snorting demons of motor-cycles called “wife-killers.” We overtook them driving camions and transports and mule teams.
Later we met an entire division on the move--artillery, infantry, ammunition and cook wagons--a long strung-out procession against the drab sky line. They were bound up there, they vaguely told us. But we knew and they knew that they were going to participate in a struggle compared to which life in the drowsy Toul sector was as but a holiday fête. We glimpsed them driving powerful American locomotives, beside which the diminutive French engines seemed like toys that one could pick up in the palm of the hand--and they leaned far out of their cabooses to cheer. We saw them packed like herrings in the dingy low-ceiled dining-rooms of provincial towns, drinking their _pinard_ diluted with water in true poilu style, then fetching out their makings and rolling a smoke in true American style. We saw them in camp, _en repos_, in hospital, on the march.
There is a pageantry about war when one sits back thus and views its effects from the outside--a kind of large, glittering nobility which thrills and quickens the blood despite oneself--until one sees the wrecks. And in the hospitals we began to get the wrecks. In ----, a famous old town turned into a hospital center, we stopped to look up some missing men. The other members of the party went to visit the wards, but I wandered about the streets and presently came upon a squad of privates in wrinkled, freshly disinfected uniforms, the tunics skin-tight, revealing the owners’ slim waists and finely swelling shoulder muscles. But they had a pale washed-out look, as if they themselves had undergone the ordeal of disinfection along with their uniforms. A lieutenant was calling the roll.
Aside from the line-up a few paces stood a husky private with a sulky lowering face. He had crowded his battered sombrero down over his bloodshot eyes and was scowling like a movie pirate. “What’s happening to those men?” I asked, nodding at the squad.
“They’ve been gassed and now they’re declared O. K. and are going back to the Front.”
He spoke in a curious broken rasping whisper, which I recognized.
“You’ve been gassed, too?” I hazarded.
“Yes,” he croaked. “And I’m just as well as any fellow in that gang. We all got it at the same time. But the doc, when he heard my voice, wouldn’t let me go. But damn it all, a guy don’t fight with his voice!”
“He’s playing favorites, that doc,” whispered another lank, humorous-eyed young giant strolling up, his peaked forage cap drawn low so as to shelter, if possible, those bloodshot eyes. “Wouldn’t let me out, either! Durn the durned docs, I say!”
“But you were burned as well as gassed,” I objected, for the entire lower part of his face and neck was an angry red peeling blister. “What kind of gas was it?” I demanded.
“Mustard. Burns your insides out if you get a bad case. I tell you I’ve had enough to last me one life. No more mustard on cold beef for mine!”
“And how is the gas-mask discipline?”
“Well, that depends on the battalion. In my battalion the commander was strong for drills. We had them morning, noon and night, and in the middle of the night. Seemed as if the old man had gone crazy on gas discipline. But when the big gas attack came we had only a four per cent casualty list, and the battalion alongside, which had been going easy on drills, caught it something fierce. Our battalion got recommended to G. H. Q. I caught my gas in a dugout the next day.”
“And you are still keen to get back into all that?”
“Am I?” he repeated, his eyes hardening. “I’ll tell you how I feel: When I first came over I had a kind of sneaking notion that Heinie wasn’t so dusky as he was painted. But I lost that notion pretty quick when I got up front and saw my lieutenant shot in the back by a boche prisoner who had thrown up his hands. Now I want to lick the Huns till they holler, and then keep on licking them for a year after that for the good of their souls.”
Inside of the hospital were grimmer cases. In one of the wards we came on a Texan with the bright, clear-gazing eyes that one sometimes finds in old sailors. They had taken his leg off. When we asked how he was making it he turned on us those straight deep eyes, and there was trouble in them.
“There’s just one thing I’m sorry for,” said he.
“What is that?”
“That I didn’t have more time.”
Time for what, I wondered. And then looking down on that wrecked body, with the covers lifted high over apparatus so as not to touch the tormented nerves, I thought I understood. He was sorry he didn’t have more time to get out of the way. That was it. It was what anybody would wish for--two, three, five seconds of grace to have gotten out of the way. Lying here through the long hours empty of everything but pain, he had doubtless worked out the problem to the finest precision, and he knew to the last trick just how much more time it would have taken to have dropped to the ground, to have eluded that exploding shell. Now all his life long he was going to regret the lack of those few precious seconds.
“Yes,” he repeated slowly, laboriously, the trouble still in his eyes, “I’d like to have had more time. Don’t seem right somehow. ’Tain’t fitting to be lying here with the show just begun. I’d like to have done more damage. But,” he brightened, “I’ve figured there’s still some jobs a peg-legged man can do over here. And I tell you one thing: I’m not going home till we’ve licked the Huns or the Huns have licked us.”
He laughed at the latter impossibility, and the laughter shook his body and turned him pale. And still he laughed on. I thought when he wished for more time that he was thinking in terms of self and personal safety, and all the time he had been thinking in the biggest terms of service to mankind.
It was not until the fifth day of our trip that Verdun loomed on the horizon as a rosy possibility. We were dining in Nancy at Voltaire’s with M. Martin, the _sous-préfet_ of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. M. Martin, it appeared, had never been in Verdun. Since we had business at a French hospital fifteen kilometers from the citadel he thought it possible, probable--of course, nothing was sure; absolutely no Verdun passes had been issued for ten days--still, one never could tell; and if we would like him to try--he paused to beam and smile--if we would give him our papers he would send them in to the Grand Quartier General, together with his own, and then--well, in short we would await the turn of events.
“Whether we shall be accorded permission at this crucial moment is doubtful,” he concluded. “But at any rate we may hope.”
So we turned in our papers and we hoped. To see Verdun at this crisis, when to the north millions of men were crashing together in terrific combat, with an appalling sanguinary back tide of wounded and dead, lent the occasion a deep significance, for Verdun to the whole world has become a symbol of confidence, a kind of ark of the covenant to battling mankind. I did not conceal from myself that what gave Verdun its specific interest to me was the news that our troops round Montdidier and Amiens were now engaged in the present titanic struggle. That fact took the famous fortress out of the list of mere great monuments of history; it made it in short our own, part and parcel of America, its glories our glories, its defense our defense, its high challenge our challenge, its victory our victory. But there was something more than that in the back of my mind. Verdun was behind the French, so to speak, finished history. Our Verduns were still of to-morrow, a promise, a prophecy. The actors were those humorous-eyed khaki-clad soldiers standing at lonely crossroads who had given us the smart little salute with the friendly aftergrin. Thus it was with the feeling of reading ahead of time a page of history not yet evoked but inevitable that I prepared to go to Verdun.