Part 13
The past week had been of a piece with the raw spring weather, lowering, foggy or sluicing water by the liquid ton out of a somber sky. With one accord we prayed for sunshine in order to view the surrounding heights, Côte 304, Saint Mihiel, Douaumont, Veau and Mort Homme. But the day that dawned was brother to the rest--bleak, dark, with a clinging fog, which muffled the landscape and grew ever thicker as the hours passed. Our passes had arrived from French Headquarters, but the final visé, the permission to enter Verdun itself, must be obtained at V----, fifteen kilometers from the citadel, and if there was heavy shelling either of the fort or of the surrounding roads we should certainly be refused.
It was six o’clock in the morning when as guests of the French Government and of M. Martin in particular we clambered into a military automobile, one of those lean, powerful drab monsters that go cycloning along the highways behind the lines at a stupefying rate of speed. We had estimated that, including necessary stops at French hospitals containing American wounded, we should arrive at Verdun about noon. Therefore we had taken the precaution to bring our luncheon, with the intention of picnicking among the ruins and perhaps obtaining some coffee from the poilus’ mess. The _chefs d’oeuvrès_ of the provisions were two tiny cold fowl de luxe weighing about a pound apiece, which had cost eight round silver dollars.
The next four hours on my part were given to the task of keeping my hair and my ears on. For the wind as it swooped by tried to drive us bodily from the car; the cold congealed us in cramped positions and the fog chilled us to the bone. We could not discern the road twenty yards ahead. The car roared forward into a barrage of thick mist which shredded on the hillcrests only to sag more heavily in the valleys. This, M. Martin assured us, was typical Picardy weather. At crossroads where we were stopped by the police M. Martin presented his card of identity, signed in Joffre’s own hand, and we were waved onward with honorable presentations of arms. As we neared our destination we diverged from the straight highroad, making a detour, for some routes are reserved for ingoing and some for outgoing traffic, and these routes are constantly altered in order to safeguard materials and confound the Hun.
Arrived at V---- we drew up in a long rank of machines in front of Headquarters and M. Martin vanished to make his felicitations to the commandant and to telephone in to Verdun. Our fate still hung in the balance. The minutes slipped by. Generals--French, American, British--dashed up in their automobiles, descended, saluted and vanished or stood talking in earnest groups. Americans, recognizing compatriots, saluted us from streets and doorways and strolled over to ask of home and how the Statue of Liberty fared. She was a pretty fine old girl, _quoi?_--as the French say.
An hour passed. And still M. Martin tarried. At the end of twenty minutes more he reappeared down the end of a street, his civilian black standing out in striking relief against the motley of khaki and horizon-blue uniforms and gold braid.
“_En avant!_” he exclaimed gayly, climbing into the car. “They got the commanding officer of the citadel on the wire. He expects us and asked us to mess with his officers in the citadel, but I refused, as it will be long past one by the time we arrive. This fog after all has served us well. They are not bombarding the fortress to-day.”
I do not recall the last fifteen kilometers of that journey, save that we sped like the wind, straining our eyes through the mist for the first glimpse of the famous stronghold. Presently “There! There!” broke simultaneously from our lips, and a few minutes later we were rolling under a noble stone archway, green and mossy with age, which looked as if it had been reared in the days of Uther Pendragon, and were being greeted by the commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun. We were to take everything out of the car, said he, and come right in. Lunch was waiting. In vain M. Martin protested. The colonel waved his protests aside with a smile. He led us into the fortress, down a long underground tunnel, which rang hollowly beneath our feet, to a set of guests’ dressing rooms, where we repaired the ravages of the long ride. A few minutes later he returned, conducted us through another series of corridors, through an enormous mess hall, where the men as he entered sprang clattering to their feet, and ushered us into the officers’ mess room.
It was small, that dining room situated forty feet underground in the stone heart of the citadel, seating scarce a dozen persons, and simple, lofty-ceiled, severe. And yet it was a veritable jewel, flashing with rich strong colors, magnificent with its brilliant sheaths of battle flags, and glittering with the steel and silver and gold of its souvenirs of valor--armor and medals and trophies which gleamed from cabinet and wall. Here had collected at one time and another all the great chiefs of the Allies; and here the presumptuous Crown Prince had sworn to eat his triumphal banquet.
Over the mantelpiece hung the pennants of all the Entente Powers, a bright formidable array, topped with the watchword of the impregnable fortress, “_On ne passe pas_,” a phrase descending from the days of the Little Corporal. The opposite wall bore medals of honor--the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille Militaire and the Legion d’Honneur bestowed by a grateful nation upon the citadel itself, as if it possessed a glorious soul. Here and there hung heavy-studded shields surrounded by rayons of ancient swords and battle-axes.
What we ate or whether we ate I cannot recall. The colonel had left us, bidding us genially to make haste, as there was much to see, much to recount, and we sat drinking in the spell of that wondrous little room, steeped in the atmosphere of valor, hearkening to the voice of the past, rejoicing in the brave prophecy of the future, and trying to realize that even as we sat French and American troops were rushing north to stem the furious onslaught of the Hun.
“Well, now,” said the colonel, opening the door, “if you are refreshed we will begin. We shall take first the view of the heights, then I shall show you the fortress, and after that the ruins of Verdun.”
We had asked M. Martin to recount the history of the great offensive, and he had turned over the appeal to the commanding officer of the citadel, who had promised to describe the climax of the decisive battle on the exact spot where the Germans made their final stubborn stand and were beaten back with stupendous loss.
Outside, the weather had settled to a continuous drizzle. We wound round the hill by a serpentine road and presently attained its crest. Here we abandoned the car and stumbled over a torn and wrenched terrain, pitted with shell holes fifty feet across and partially filled with black filthy water. Filled also with old dismantled cannon, unexploded cartridges, rusted bayonets, twisted iron fragments of great shells, and an occasional sodden képi. Between these craters the hummocks were dotted with graves marked with a cross and the simple French _cocarde_. Standing under that bleak sky and gazing out across that sinister smitten landscape with its gaunt shot-off trees and its deep gashes of trenches marked by blood-red earth was like looking upon some huge monster frozen in a horrible death agony. It had been foully murdered, that hill, and it lay like a mutilated corpse, stiffly outflung, uncovered, indecent, its hideous wounds gaping up to the sky.
The colonel came to a halt. “Here we are,” he began. “Here is the farthest point that the enemy penetrated. Here he was beaten back--just at your feet, mademoiselle.” He pointed with his cane, and I stared down, expecting to see I scarce know what, some visible sign, some chalk mark or whitewashed tennis-court line, to identify that tremendous check. But there was nothing. My feet were pressing down a clump of fresh blue violets, wet-eyed from the rain. I stepped off them hastily.
The colonel continued his narrative. The wind blew back the heavy skirts of his greatcoat; his sturdy, compact figure, firmly planted as a statue, defied the elements; his leonine white head, which reminded one of Joffre’s, glistened with rain drops; his voice, gentle, level, dispassionate, filled one with utter conviction. We knew what he said was true. Here came the enemy from that direction--he pointed--and from there, and there, all converging on this one point. And when they were very near, advancing shoulder to shoulder in dense mass formation, two concealed French batteries, one from either side, opened on their serried columns a terrific enfilading fire. It was close-range slaughter--such as was going on even now in the north. Their first ranks lay in windrows. Their dead covered this hill like a carpet. And still their thinning numbers were filled with rushing hosts from behind and they pressed on and on, wave upon wave, the farthest of which had broken just at the point where we stood. There it was pushed back by a spirited counter thrust by the French _fantassins_.
“And your own troops, _mon colonel_, I suppose they gave a good account of themselves?” queried M. Martin.
“You have said it,” replied the colonel with proud simplicity. “My brave men in that attack covered and recovered themselves with glory.”
In the meantime, he continued, down below--he would show us presently--another strong enemy force had tried to force an entrance to the fortress at one of the tunnel exits. This exit, leading by a series of passages on different levels to the very innermost heart of the citadel, gave on the outside upon a contracted open space between two ridges, and was protected first by a deep surrounding fosse filled with a maze of barbed wire, and second by a fifteen-foot stone wall which formed part of the outer fortifications. Down this wall the Germans had leaped like a tumbling cataract. The first wave fell into the fosse and was followed by another and another, until the ancient moat was heaped level with a writhing human bridge across which the hostile troops rushed and gained the narrow space before the mouth of the tunnel.
“And were there no French machine guns playing upon them from the entrance?”
“Oh, yes--there were two seventy-fives,” said the colonel quietly, “less than a hundred yards away.” We could perhaps imagine, he continued, what carnage they wrought in that confined space. Germans had dropped down from that height like overripe fruit trained against a wall. The French gunners obliterated the first, the second, the third and the fourth waves; and the fifth broke right on the flaming snouts of their guns. The sixth gained the tunnel entrance. Here the garrison counter-attacked, and the enemy turned tail and ran. But not far. The wall was before them and the guns were behind. That particular hostile force was wiped out to a man.
The colonel’s calm voice flowed on and on, describing the desperate details of that epic attack, and now and again he pointed with his stick into the fog, locating great enemy batteries which had poured a deadly hail of shells upon this hill. Altogether, he said, the French had lost in killed during that six months’ offensive one hundred and ten thousand; the Germans more than half a million. And most of them had fallen on and round this height on which we stood. I looked about that somber, brooding, ghost-haunted hill, where half a million souls slain violently in battle had flown upward in a thick mist--and as I looked it seemed that the fog had a ruddy under tinge as if a subtle crimson reek exuded from the blood-drenched ground.
As the colonel continued his narrative I tried in fancy to reconstruct the vision of the battlefield. Of German prisoners I had seen a-plenty with their close-cropped, bullet-shaped heads and furtive yet arrogant eyes. The French poilus also--those gay, stout-hearted little men, some of the greatest fighters and the greatest phrase-makers on earth--were familiar figures in my mind. So that all the ingredients of the picture were at hand. Nevertheless, all unconsciously I kept making a curious mental error. The intensity of the combat still raging to the north somehow drew the picture out of focus, causing it to appear, not past history but something which was still actually going on. I knew it was past, and still it fused in my mind with the unfinished present.
Added to that, my brain was so saturated with images of our American troops as I had seen them the past week, and those images were so vivid, powerful and real that I could visualize nothing else. Thus, when the colonel said “_nos soldats_,” my mind unconsciously translated “our soldiers”; and I saw, not the horizon blue of the poilus but the clean, lithe khaki-clad Americans with their fresh faces and good-humored eyes. And when he said “Our brave troops charged here--and here--and here,” my mind saw “our brave troops charging here--and here--and here.” I tried to rid my mind of that delusion--for it was too painful on that dusky death-smitten hill, with the knowledge that even at that very moment our own brave troops were indeed charging to the north upon some other hill. But the past week had etched the images too deeply on my mind; and I could not wipe them out.
M. Martin interrogated the colonel concerning their losses.
“Yes,” replied the colonel soberly, “one hundred and ten thousand of our men fell.”
“One hundred and ten thousand of our men fell!” reiterated my heart with a pang. Never before had that figure seemed so monstrous. Why, that was one, two, three, four, five whole divisions! Our first division, that I had seen, our second, all those fine Rainbow fellows--pshaw! It was incredible!
“One hundred and ten thousand are a great many men to die!” I remarked aloud.
And even as I spoke, my mind, righting itself, said within itself: “But of course those one hundred and ten thousand men were Frenchmen! Not Americans. Our men have only just gone north. Don’t you remember, you saw the --th Division on the move?” Thus mentally I righted myself. Nevertheless, one hundred and ten thousand were indeed a great many men to die, and I repeated my remark.
“_Pas trop!_”--not too many!--replied the colonel simply. And those two words, soberly spoken, were the epitome of the Verdun spirit.
Later he pointed out a cemetery on a distant hillside containing five thousand fallen heroes. “In that one cemetery,” said he, “lie thirty of my own officers.”
“And you, you have been wounded, my colonel?” inquired M. Martin.
“Three times only,” replied the colonel with a shrug. “Once seriously. But I would not leave the citadel. I do not like hospitals--those white places. They are not for me. If I die I die here where I belong, with my men.”
The rain still continued, a steady drenching downpour. “But you may be thankful,” remarked the colonel, wiping his streaming face, “as otherwise this hill would be impossible. To-day the cannon are giving us a rest.”
He led the way to the nearest tunnel entrance to the citadel. With the others I followed, eagerly listening to his explanations. But my mind was still in a whirl. That dark and desolate blood-soaked hill, the staunch old colonel, with the dewdrops in his white hair, recounting the valorous deeds of his fallen heroes, those acres on acres of graves, the ascending hosts of souls--were not some of them perhaps still lingering in this lonely spot, dazed by their violent severance from the flesh, ignorant that they had passed across? Would they not cry out at night for aid, for news of the battle front: “Why are we abandoned thus? Who wins? _Vaterland?_ _La Patrie?_”--the Americans, who had not engaged in this struggle, to be sure, but were now fighting in an even mightier struggle--all these things mingled confusedly in my mind like the unmatched parts of a puzzle.
Thanks to my classical education, I had no proper conception of what constitutes a modern fortress. I had vaguely imagined it as a city ringed round with a very substantial stone wall, crenelated and turreted, with dozens of peepholes for the doughty gunners to take pot shots at the enemy established outside. In the very heart of the city would be the citadel, which figured in my mind as a big, round, impregnable stone tower bristling with teethlike rows of cannon, its foundations naturally extending scores of feet underneath. Accordingly when we set out to traverse the long series of dimly-lit reverberating subterranean passages, descended flights of slimy stone stairs to lower and danker levels, stopped in gun and ammunition rooms, electric-plant rooms, kitchens, mess rooms, infirmaries, chapels, musées, cinema and rest rooms, dormitories, cavernous abodes, twenty, thirty and forty feet below ground, I began to wonder when we were going upstairs.
“But there is no upstairs,” responded M. Martin, laughing in answer to my query--“not in this citadel. Here it all is, just as you see, underground. You observed those big iron mushroom affairs six inches or so aboveground when we were up on the hill?”
“But I thought they were the observation posts of hidden guns--like that of the Big Bertha.”
“So they are--they are our own Big Berthas. Nevertheless, those observation posts are all the upstairs there is to this citadel. What do you suppose would happen to the superstructure of a fort if it were hit by a shell which made a crater as large as the one we saw on the hill--fifty feet across and twenty feet deep? Not much upstairs left, eh?”
So much for a classical education!
“And all the French troops eat and sleep and pray and drill down here? There are none billeted in Verdun?”
“There’s nobody in Verdun.”
“No old men and old women who still cling to their ruined firesides and creep out into the morning sunshine after a night’s bombardment?”
“Not a single soul. It’s a blanched city of the dead.”
By this time it was well upon six o’clock and we stopped for a moment to view a mess hall where, seated at long refectory tables, about four hundred poilus were taking sustenance from great steaming casseroles of ragout placed in the centers of the tables. Here indeed were the veritable heroes of Verdun! The indomitables! I looked for halos, but found none but the fragrant encircling wreaths of the smoking ragout, which the heroes were bolting down like one o’clock. These men, however, were no callow youths, but tough-muscled, tanned and bearded veterans--or if they were youths they were veteran youths with lines in their faces and gray in their hair. As the commanding officer loomed in the doorway they sprang to their feet as one man. The colonel waved them back to their stew, explaining that here were some of their allies--American friends. What a cheer it was that rose! Some of the Americans frankly wiped their eyes. The colonel beamed round upon us all with a kind of indulgent fatherly grace. His blue eyes caressed his troops with affectionate regard.
And as we departed he commented: “You will please note one thing: I did not order that cheer. It sprang spontaneously from the hearts of my men.”
He continued to speak of America, of the deep fraternal tenderness existing in the hearts of the French for the splendid young army from overseas; of the fine morale America was exhibiting in the business of food conservation; of the hope they had in American aviation. Simple, brave, friendly words from a brave, friendly soul.
We tramped on through vast resounding twilight caverns, slippery underfoot with mud and exuding large clammy dewdrops from the overarching walls. Sometimes it was pitch dark and a pocket torch or the outstretched hand of the colonel guided our course. Once we climbed by a kind of vertical ship’s ladder fastened against the solid wall up into the platform of a monstrous subterranean gun which hurled annihilation miles away. For months the Germans had been assiduously trying to locate that gun.
It was the colonel who suggested the idea of Verdun as a Mecca for tourist parties after the war.
“Here they will come,” he chuckled, “by train and ship loads from all over the civilized world to view this historic spot. They will passionately collect every old piece of shrapnel or cap or exploded cartridge, every stick, every brick, every stone. And when all of the veritable souvenirs have been snatched up doubtless our ingenious guardians of the citadel will resow the sacred ground with another artificial crop from a huge factory established hard by. ’Twill be an industry. They will charge--let me see--three francs admission.” And the colonel laughed heartily over his prophecy.
“But they will not have the commanding officer of the citadel for their guide!” interjected M. Martin slyly.
“If they have the commanding officer of the citadel for their guide it will be five francs,” said the colonel firmly. “Three francs for an ordinary tour; five francs with the commanding officer for guide. That is not too dear!”
They elaborated the idea with gayety. Instead of great rough soldiers with clattering bayonets and clumping boots, the hollow corridors would reverberate to soft, pretty laughter and the click-clack of ladies’ high-heeled boots. And downy college lads and pig-tailed misses, with bespectacled tutors bearing Baedekers--no, _mon Dieu_, not Baedekers; doubtless American histories!--and peaceful and portly papas and mammas who vaguely remembered the great war in their extreme youth would stroll through these echoing passages pensively, hand in hand. For it would then be a public musée, this impregnable citadel, and its tragic battles a troubled dream of yesterday.
“But in the meantime,” warned the colonel, laughing, “I am going to charge five francs!”
After the citadel he proceeded to show us the town, demolished beyond hope of reconstruction. Fine ancient façades with filigree stonework delicate as thread lace; matchless old cathedral closes of the fourteenth century designed and wrought in solid granite by a master mason who was also a master builder; fortification walls dating back to the days of the Cæsars; medieval turrets beneath which troubadour soldier lovers sang; glorious architecture of the Louis the Fourteenth period--ineffable masterpieces of structural art never to be reproduced on earth, they lay in smashed and huddled fragments on the ground.
We entered a church, its roof caved in, massive columns rent, holy statues razed, empty as an eggshell--the result of a single cannon shot.
“_Un coup de canon_--and there you are!” the colonel commented grimly.