Part 2

“But--my word!--does she know nothing, then, of the laws of Nature--the old Anglaise!--that ashes always tumble downward, not upward; and that fire always burns? Can I make the ashes go upward into the air? I am not God. I am only a Frenchman.”

An hour later he would beckon me secretly over to his side, point to a fresh perforation of his _chemise_, a fresh sprinkling of ashes, and whisper gleefully:

“Tell the old _mitrailleuse_ to come and sweep me out again!”

He enjoyed the encounters! And as they were, indeed, his sole distraction through weary days, I sometimes humored him.

The dressings, meantime, continued, with their unceasing accompaniment of groans and cries of “_Doucement!_” A young surgeon told me that _doucement_ was the first French word he acquired; and undeniably it is the word oftenest heard during the dressings period. This does not signify that the patients are, as a rule, given to outcry. On the contrary, these young Frenchmen endure the intensest pain with a kind of smiling white fortitude that brings a furtive tear to the eye.

Let me take, for example, the demeanors of the three whose beds are on a little sleeping porch on the terrace--Claudius, François, Emile. Their being on the terrace carries its own significant hint of special weakness. Of these three, Claudius, when under extreme stress, shuts tightly his one eye, thrusts his knuckles into his mouth and bites them until they bleed. If the pain has shaken him unendurably, when the doctor and the nurses depart he puts a pillow over his face and weeps into it silently.

François, on the other hand, an idyllically handsome aristocratic youth of twenty-one, with a smashed arm and leg, takes an opposite course. He looks his pain squarely in the face as if it were an adversary, with an assumption of nonchalant scorn. Under a particularly painful dressing or probe his eyes grow steely and narrow, while his lips under the little golden brown mustache begin to smile sternly. As the pain increases, that smile becomes more distinct, more contemptuous and challenging. I have a notion that secretly François loves pain for the opportunity it affords him to test the fine unblunted steel of his young courage.

Emile, a Breton lad of twenty-two, with a ball through his lungs, has a different reaction. He hoists himself painfully up in bed, stares out upon the garden with his mystical blue eyes, coughs, winces; and at the end he lays himself down again, gasping, and says gently, “Sank you, mees!” That is all, a soft “Sank you, mees!” spoken in English to please me! Of those three reactions Emile’s is the hardest to bear.

In lively contrast to these is the conduct of Grandpère. Grandpère no longer has any romantic illusions to sustain, no youthful reticences. The first article in his creed is that if you suffer pain you should yell. If it makes you feel better, begin to yell beforehand. And curse! Use all the powers of protest the good God has given you. Accordingly from the first to the last moment of a dressing he lets himself out, so to speak, and the entire ward chuckles over his choice list of epithets.

But, despite the amount of concentrated pain that it holds, the big airy ward is much more a place of laughter than of depression and gloom. When the dressings are finished, and the aftermath of painful throbbing has died down, the natural life and vivacity of fifty Frenchmen reassert themselves. They banter and chaff each other and discuss every discussible or undiscussible subject under the sun. Naturally the present struggle comes in for the lion’s share of debate; nor is the feeling concerning it by any means unanimous. In that small bedfast community are ardent imperialists, conservatives, radicals, syndicalists and philosophic anarchists; and each one of them takes a hack at the great conflict from his own angle of vision. Nor have they within them the hate for the German that seems to animate some of the spectators on the side lines. At any rate he is not a monster; in fact, one was forced to believe from their many stories of good will that the average German was really almost human!

“What do you think of the Germans?” a young soldier asked me suddenly one day as I was taking his temperature.

“Their methods, you mean? I thought there were no two opinions on that.”

“Very well!” he retorted. “Then you take the French side and I’ll take the German side, and we’ll discuss the subject. Begin, if you please.”

“No; you begin!” I said, rather curious to hear what a wounded Frenchman would have to say in defense of his foe.

He talked for ten minutes, brilliantly, earnestly, caustically, holding the thermometer like a cigarette in one corner of his mouth; and at the end of that time he had proved not indeed that the Germans were right, but that war itself was so intrinsically degrading and hellish--despite what romanticists might say to the contrary of its elevating spiritual effect on the soul--that it exerted a debasing influence on whoever engaged in it, be he German, French, English, Russian or American.

“War is a rotten business for the individual,” he wound up soberly. “And don’t let them sidetrack you by saying it’s the Germans. They’re not monsters. It’s war itself that’s the monster. It’s a bad microbe. A mean little soul it poisons, and a big soul it poisons also. The physical wounds--like this,” he touched his bandaged shoulder--“you can see. The wounds on the soul are invisible. But, believe me, they exist just the same, and are even more ghastly. I know!” And he handed back the thermometer with a smile.

The real word-battles, however, take place between themselves. Sometimes an argument lasts for weeks, and they have a go at it every fine afternoon, wrestling with each other like the conversational experts they are. Sometimes it is only a brief but hot dispute. It was one of the latter that took place about a month after my arrival, between François and Claudius. That particular afternoon a concert was impending. It was to be given in the garden by a crack Belgian military band, and programs had just been handed round.

Claudius looked over his card and I saw his expressive face darken.

“The Marseillaise isn’t down!” he exclaimed. “If they haven’t the courtesy to play the French national air to wounded French soldiers in a French military hospital, I, for one, shall not listen to their old concert. I shall sleep!”

Saying which, he scornfully tossed the program over into the garden and composed himself for slumber. But François, who was feeling gay that day, could not permit such a remark to pass.

“I don’t think so highly of that Marseillaise!” he remarked languidly, but with the light of battle in his eyes. “It’s not a good song. On the contrary, it’s a very bad song.”

Claudius’ one eye popped wide open. He fairly leaped into the combat.

“What!” he exclaimed, flushing with anger. “You say the Marseillaise is not a good song? You say this is not good?” And, propping himself up on one elbow, his eye still blazing, he chanted the immortal battle cry:

“‘_Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! Marchons! Marchons! Qu’un sang impur, Abreuve nos sillons._’

“_Voilà!_” cried Claudius, his voice shaky with emotion. “You dare to say that is not a good song?”

“Ah, the music’s all right,” admitted François loftily. “It’s the words.”

“And what’s the matter with the words? Why aren’t they good?”

“Why?” said François coolly. “Because they incite to carnage! ‘_Formez vos bataillons!_’ But what for? To kill somebody! No, no; such words are not good.”

The irrefutable logic of this, Claudius chose to ignore.

“You are not a true Frenchman,” he declared scornfully.

François began to smile--the cold distinct smile of the dressing hour. He glanced round for a weapon. A cup of wine stood on his bedside table. His fingers closed round it.

“Say that again!” he remarked pleasantly.

Claudius’ hand had likewise gripped his wineglass. Of the two he was much more passionate. He glared hardily and began:

“You’re not a----”

The head nurse appeared opportunely on the threshold.

“François,” she said severely, “you know you mustn’t drink that wine when you’re going up for operation!”

François looked at the nurse, at me, at the wine in his cup, and from thence to Claudius, who by now was grinning broadly.

“I wasn’t going to drink it,” he observed mildly. “I was going to give it to the _camarade_, there!”

And he proffered it gravely to Claudius, who drank it down with equal politeness; then suddenly both of them tumbled back on their pillows and went off into boyish little yips of laughter under the startled eyes of the nurse. And, to finish off the episode, the Belgian band really played the Marseillaise after all.

The first few weeks I was in the ward we were enlivened each morning by the performance of Clarice. Clarice was a hen; and every day, at precisely ten o’clock, she laid an egg. It happened in this way: There was a young one-armed soldier, an opera singer before the war, who, for the amusement of his companions, would lie upon his bed and with his voice conjure all the animals of the farmyard into lively existence. The deep growl of the watchdog, the grunting of a pig, the whickering of horses down in the meadow, the lordly crow of the cock, the busy cackling of the hen--he reproduced them all with startling realism. The hen, in particular, he loved to delineate.

The sound would start suddenly under one of the hospital beds--the low Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! of a hen talking softly to herself as she scratched in the hay.

“Sh! It’s Clarice! She’s going to lay an egg!” somebody would cry; and all the ward held its breath during the operation.

After a period of soft clucking--Tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck!--which Clarice required to dispose herself suitably and discreetly upon her nest, a profound silence ensued. Clarice was laying her egg! The men lay perfectly still, smiling expectantly, glancing now and again at the clock. The hush was absolute. It was Clarice’s moment.

Presently a loud, triumphant cackle issued forth: Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! The egg was an accomplished fact. And Clarice, her proud duty done, flew straight to her lord and master, who added his crow of patronizing approbation. The illusion of the performance was perfect, and little Clarice was a source of great delight to the men, who built round her all sorts of romances.

“That’s our little Clarice!” Emile explained to me the first time I heard her. “But she is admirable, that Clarice! She lays an egg each morning; and we give it to a sick _camarade_ for his _déjeuner_!”

By the time the beds are made, clean bandages adjusted, vacant beds disinfected, the individual tables scrubbed and hot drinks fetched from the diet kitchen, the day is well under way. The dressings, meantime, proceed steadily down the ward. Sometimes, after a new offensive, when the big war hospital has received a fresh influx of the wounded, every bed contains a battered wreck, these dressings fill the entire morning and continue straight through the afternoon.

Those are trying days for heart and head and feet. Through all the hours the busy stream of traffic flows constantly through this, the heaviest ward. There are men going up to operations on stretchers; men coming down from operations, unconscious, on stretchers; men being discharged, with their meager little sack of possessions, also on stretchers. Good-bys are shouted--“_Bon voyage!_” “All aboard!” “_En voiture!_” Or the orderly enters with a batch of letters--letters from home.

“Simondon!” he bawls cheerily.

“Present!”

“Girod!”

“Present!”

“Coussin!”

“Discharged!” a voice volunteers.

“Morel!... Morel!... Morel?”

“Give me that letter,” says the head nurse quietly, for Morel cannot receive it; Morel is dead.

At about half past ten, when the ward is in fair order, and the _blessés_ under their fresh linen look like rows of good children in bed, the _médicin chef_, or chief surgeon, makes his rounds. As he approaches a bed its occupant salutes, and then listens with intense concentration to the strange English jargon of the ward doctor, who is making his daily report. Perhaps he catches the word “operation”--which every soldier knows. After the surgeon has passed he beckons and whispers eagerly:

“What did he say? What did the _médicin chef_ say? Operation?”

I nod. “Only a little one. But no lunch to-day. No good _pinard_!”

_Pinard_ is the trench slang for wine, corresponding to the English “booze.” That word, upon my lips, will nearly always bring a laugh from a _poilu_. But no laugh greets me this time. He sinks back upon his pillow, a little white and very quiet. The day has suddenly lost its color for him.

After the great _médicin chef_--or God, as he is irreverently termed in the ward--has departed, with his halo of dread, _déjeuner_ is the next important feature of the day. Serving a community of fifty a three-course meal--soup, meat and vegetables, and dessert--is a man-size proposition. Serving it on bed tables, often cutting up the food and feeding the armless patients, further complicates the task. The first day I completely lost my head. My clamorous young brood, nine of whom were under twenty-two, reminded me of nothing so much as a nestful of yawping baby robins waiting to be fed.

It was: “Look out for my leg, mees!” “More bread, mees!” “My _serviette_, mees!” “Have you forgotten me, mees?” “My God, my soup’s tipped into my bed! I’m afloat, mees!” And all in a rapid bubble of French that made my head spin. At last, in sheer desperation, I addressed them in the American language: “You darned kids--shut up!” As was usual in those first days, it was old Justin who came to my aid and disentangled me.

The patients’ _déjeuner_ over, the _auxiliaires_ have three-quarters of an hour off for their own, which they may get at the hospital or at some of the neighboring _pâtisseries_. As for me, that first day I choked down a few mouthfuls and then retired to the _vestiaire_ to rest my feet.

The afternoon was cut off the same piece of cloth as the morning--more beds, more dressings, more bandages, more high shrill cries, more gayety and laughter. But about four o’clock in the afternoon something began to happen. It began to happen in bed Number Ten. Its occupant, a handsome dark lad of eighteen, had a gangrenous arm, the sight of which, with its deep gashes to let out the poison, turned one faint with horror. All the morning, at intervals, I had held a basin while he retched, or fetched hot-water bottles.

About four o’clock he began to babble of his mother, his brothers and sisters, and his home in the country. He laughed, chatted, cried out “_Maman!_” repeatedly, and tried to rise to go to her. Presently it was found necessary to strap his supple, strong young body to the mattress. At the time I had not the faintest notion that he was already in the antechamber of death, so alive he was, so palpitant with restless energy.

Suddenly he lay still. I had turned to get another hot-water bottle. “Never mind!” said the nurse, and at some quality in her voice I paused, startled, and looked again. He was gone. His passing had been as light and unpretentious as a breath of air through the open window.

After he was carried out I disinfected his bed and made it afresh, in a strange convulsion of soul. Thus I had my first glimpse of that vast, interminable procession which must haunt the dreams of ambitious kings.

As yet, I have been to no battlefronts. I have letters, to be sure, which if presented in the proper quarters, I am told, would result in personally conducted trips to lines not engaged in an actual offensive. But those letters still lie, unsent, in my trunk. I may use them some day. But at present there is within me a reluctance to visiting ruins and battlefields. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many ruins who have returned from those battlefields.

Moreover, I have already been to the Front and I have made a charge. It was a hand-grenade charge, under the leadership of one Sergeant Girod, who since then has been awarded the Croix de Guerre. The announcement of the award reads, “For conspicuous bravery in leading a brilliant hand-grenade attack against the enemy while under fire from our own _mitrailleuses_.” I know it was a brilliant attack, for I made it with him. It happened in this way:

It was six o’clock in the evening, and the big _salle_, with its forest of overhead apparatus, was wrapped in warm darkness, through which the bright, glowing ends of cigarettes bloomed like tiny stars. The electricity was out of order and the sole lights--two tall candles on the head nurse’s desk in the middle of the room, with their straight still flames--lent an air of enchantment to the place. The men, their suppers over, lay smoking tranquilly, or chatted in undertones. To me it was the pleasantest hour of the day. I had lingered to make up another bed, the occupant for which, a fresh arrival, had not yet come down from the operating room.

“Can you stay a few minutes?” called the head nurse as she hurried past me. “I am called away; the nurses are down at first supper, and someone should be here when your man arrives.”

I promised to remain. A few minutes later the big double doors were flung open and a dark jumbled mass appeared. The same instant a loud shout shattered the quiet gloom:

“_En avant, mes enfants! Vive la France! En avant! Toujours en avant! Ils approchent! Les Boches! Les infidels! Les brigands! Ils approchent à gauche! Regardez à gauche! A gauche!_--They’re approaching on the left! Look out on the left--_En avant, mes enfants! Toujours en avant!_”

It was a shout that would send a thrill along a dead man’s spine. A ripple of laughter went round the room. Raised heads peered eagerly. The _brancardiers_ came forward, two wheeling the stretcher and two more holding down the occupant, who was struggling convulsively to raise himself and shouting hoarse commands in a voice that could be heard a block away.

“Where does he go, mees?” came Justin’s steady tones.

“Here--Bed Eight.”

“_En avant! En avant, mes enfants! Regardez à gauche! A gauche! Ils approchent à gauche! Les Boches, ils approchent!_” The hoarse shouts did not cease for an instant.

“He’s leading a charge,” said Justin, grimly pleased, as they paused beside me. “Hand grenades! He’s a terrible fellow. He killed ten Boches coming down the stairs!”

Then, all together, with a “_Un, deux, trois--Allez!_” the four lifted him from the stretcher into bed.

He was a powerfully built man, fair, with blue eyes and a blond mustache, and his _chemise_, torn away in the struggle, revealed a torso that gleamed like ivory. Suddenly he looked up and gripped me with a hand of iron.

“_Criez avec moi: ‘Vive la France!’_”

“_Vive la France!_” I repeated in a low voice, to soothe him.

“Louder! Shout louder: ‘_Vive la France!_’”

“_Vive la France!_” I said more loudly. “Lie still now. It’s over. The attack is finished.”

“And the Boches?” he queried eagerly. “They are gone?”

“All gone.”

“No, no!” he cried violently, trying to rise. “They’re not gone! They’re still coming on! My God, see them! Wave on wave! _Regardez à gauche, mes enfants! Les Boches! Les brigands!_ Ah, my poor comrades!” he murmured. “See them fall!” He turned to me, whom evidently he took for one of his grenadiers: “Citronne went down just then. Did you see him? Was he killed?”

“No; only wounded. Be quiet now. It’s done.”

“But not well done,” he retorted impatiently. “We hadn’t enough balls. To-night we attack again. Listen well!”

And then he gave me my orders. It appeared that on each side of us were Moroccan troops who were to follow our attack with a charge. For a few minutes Girod was silent. Suddenly he broke out:

“Boom! _Soixante-quinze!_”--the French seventy-fives. “Boom! _Les canons!_” He appeared to be listening to the bombardment. Presently he sighed. “Ah, my poor wife! My poor Cécilie! You know, I have a wife and three children--two boys and a girl.”

It was evident to me that the sergeant had a presentiment that he was going to fall in the attack. After a long silence his voice came to me abruptly out of the dark:

“What time is it?”

I named the hour.

“Well, then, my friend, we have still ten minutes. Let us smoke a cigarette before we part.” A second later he was shouting at the top of his powerful voice:

“_En avant, mes enfants! Ils approchent! Les Boches! Regardez à gauche! A gauche!_”

Over and over he issued his commands to his grenadiers; over and over he shouted his warning cry, calling frantically for bombs that were not forthcoming; and always he was driven back, despairing, by the tide of Germans on his left. His brain, like a talking-machine record, had recorded faithfully every detail of that last wild, brilliant attack, terminating so disastrously because of the shortage of balls; and in his delirium he played that one record ceaselessly, with no thought, action or sensation omitted. But as the hours went by the record played slowly and more slowly, with gaps of silence in between. Finally he slept.

There is another chapter to add to this episode concerning Girod. It happened some three weeks later. And as this is not fiction, but a plain reporting of facts, I hasten to add that Girod did not die.

Passing his bed, however, one afternoon, I laid my hand casually on the iron bed-frame. It was trembling. The entire bed was vibrating steadily, gently, as if to the oscillation of some remote earthquake. Astonished, I looked at Girod. And Girod was trembling too. It was he who caused the tremor of the bed. Beneath the white coverlet his big body shook with a ceaseless, mysterious agitation.

“What is the matter?” I cried. “Why are you trembling like that?”

He gave a faint, apologetic smile.

“I’m afraid!” he said simply. “I’m afraid of that operation this afternoon.”

“But it’s nothing,” I assured him--“really nothing at all. Only a slight incision in the shoulder.”

“I know. But--I’m afraid! You see----” He broke off, knitting his brows. “It was not always thus. Once I did not know what fear was--before---- That’s why they made me leader of the bombing squad. I was reckless. But now--I’m afraid. I’m afraid of that little operation!”

“You’ve been under a strain,” I said.

I recalled Girod’s history. He had narrated it to me one rainy afternoon. From his wife, Cécilie, and his three children, he had not heard a word since the war opened, as they lived in the invaded territory. For the last six weeks before he was wounded he and his comrades had been in the first-line trenches, unrelieved, without food save for their reserve stores; and without water, unless one crawled on one’s belly at night to a spring in the dangerous strip of No Man’s Land between them and the enemy’s trenches.

Each night he crawled to the spring, filled his canteen and crawled back to his wounded companions. And then came one night when the spring failed.

“I crawled out there, as usual,” Girod related, “and found it full of cadavers!”

“And after that?” I persisted.

But Girod made no reply.

“It’s the strain, the heavy strain,” I said again.