Chapter 12 of 23 · 2666 words · ~13 min read

CHAPTER II

THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC

_Epitaphe_

_Bénis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en victimes,_ _Et n’ayant de la guerre éprouvé que l’horreur._ _Bénis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cœur_ _La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes._

_Bénis ceux qui sont morts comme ils avaient vécu:_ _Assidus noblement à de modestes tâches._ _Bénis ceux qui, n’étant ni très braves, ni lâches,_ _N’ont su que résigner leur corps pauvre et vaincu._

_Bénis ceux qui sont morts pour servir et défendre_ _Des honneurs et des biens dont ils n’ont point leur part._ _Bénis ceux qui se sont donnés sans rien attendre_ _De leur postérité, de l’histoire ou de l’art._

_Bénis ceux qui, luttant seulement pour la vie,_ _Ont ignoré les lois qui reposent sur eux,_ _Mais compris en mourant qu’ils sont les malheureux_ _En qui depuis toujours Jésus se sacrifie._

_Bénis, ils le sont tous, et saints entre les morts,_ _Ceux qu’on ne pleure guère et que nul ne renomme:_ _Car, devant les héros, ils ne sont rien que l’Homme;_ _Car, parmi tant de gloire, ils fondent le remords;_

_Car leur don si naïf, ce don de tout leur être,_ _Mêle aux vertus du sol les grâces d’un sang pur,_ _Pour composer, avec tout l’or du blé futur,_ _Les moissons d’un esprit dont l’Amour sera maître._

GEORGES PIOCH.

CHÂLONS, _27th July_.

Half past four. Half an hour ago, _alerte, sirènes_. We hastily arose from resting, and have just come up from a really charming cellar, with nice vaulting, evidently much older than the house itself.

Returned from Bar-le-Duc this morning rather sketchy in my mind, blurred with fatigue, in a compartment with five silent, dead-tired officers. It’s a great human document, night shift in a canteen. From ten o’clock till six I watched the _poilus_ fill the _Foyer des Alliés_, in and out, in and out. From time to time the voice of the station-master called out some fateful destination. I was thankful for any momentary slackening of the rush, so that when one gives coffee, chocolate, or bouillon one can also give a word, the precious word, where all is so anonymous. Between three and four there was a lessening, and a short, haggard, deep-eyed, scraggy-mustached man of forty-six, leaning on the counter, said to me, “I am father of five,” and, showing his blue trousers tucked in his boots, added, “I am of the attacking troops.” He then shifted his accoutrement and dug out from his person the photographs of the five children and his _épouse_, and I think more and more, “it is for the young to fight.” I can’t bear the look on the faces of the middle-aged going up to battle.

The _poilu_ trying to find his purse or the photographs of his family, among everything else in the world that he carries on his person, pressed tightly against other men carrying the same, feels doubtless the way a sardine trying to turn over would feel!

The next with whom I spoke was a _gaillard_ with a glancing blue eye, reddish mustache and high color, from Barcelona, of French parents, and he insisted on speaking Spanish with me. His brother is professor at Saint-Nazaire.

“Every time he writes me it is about Mr. Lloyd George instead of about the family.”

This is a delicate tribute to my supposed English nationality.

“Do you think we are going to win, señorita?”

“Of course,” I answer, “with the help of God. _Dios y victoria_,” I add, piously.

But as he tosses off his coffee he says, with a gleam, “_Victoria y Dios_,” and then gives way to a comrade who was at Craonne in April.

He was a man with a softish eye and full-lipped mouth and was probably naturally flesh-loving, and wanted his coffee very hot, and looked approvingly at me as I said:

“_Mon ami_, I know all about it, if coffee isn’t _too_ hot, it isn’t hot enough.”

He ended a conversation about an engagement he had been in by saying: “The most awful sensation is to see the dust raised by the mitrailleuses and to know that you have got to walk into it and to see the men ahead of you stepping with strange steps—and some falling.”

As I said, he was naturally ease-loving and pain-fearing, yet that is the way _his_ dust may be called on to return to dust.

There are many jokes about shrapnel and shells, but nobody ever jokes about a bullet. It’s a thing with a single purpose—and you may be it.

Our headquarters are at ——, not far away, and it was at Bar-le-Duc that I first saw our own men among the French for the same strange purpose. Something stirred deeply in my heart, with an accompanying searing, scorching consciousness of what an elemental thing they have come across the seas to do—quite simply kill or be killed. It’s all to come, for “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,” and it is for the young to fight.

At 3.30 they come into the canteen and ask for eighteen fried eggs; they are oozing with money, and _they_ aren’t feeling sentimental. One of the four young spread-eagles (he proved to be from Texas, and was changing a big plug of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other) said, with an appraising look at the counter, that he could “buy us out,” and a second added, “And more, too.”

“How about those coming in later?” I suggest, and then I ask how long they’ve been here.

“Been here? Just five hundred years,” a small one answers, promptly, “and the next time the ‘Call’ comes they won’t get me. They can take the house and the back fence, too, but they won’t get little Joe. This loving another country’s one on me!”

“Don’t listen to him, lady; he’s homesick. We’re out to can the Kaiser, and he’ll take some canning yet, but I say next July he will be about as welcome as a skunk at a lawn-party.”

And then even the homesick one cheered up. The simile made me think of summer evenings in New England, but I only asked when they were to go back to ——.

“We ought to have been there at 10.15.”

I gave a stern glance at the big canteen clock. The hands pointed to 3.30. They were then five and a quarter hours late.

“You don’t know ‘_Gun_court.’ It’s a fierce place,” said one, in answer to the look.

“Aren’t you busy?”

“Holy smoke! She says _are we busy_! Why, we dig ourselves in all day, and we dig ourselves out all night, and somebody after you all the time. I don’t call this war. We’re out for real trouble.”

“Well, you’ll get it when you see your officer,” I remarked, unfeelingly.

Just then a _poilu_ whom they seemed to know approached with his ten centimes. One of the Sammies knocks it out of his hand onto the counter, points to his own chest, says, “On me, a square meal,” and opens his bursting purse for me to take whatever is necessary.

The _poilu_, hearing the chink of coin and rustle of paper, says to me, with eyes the size of saucers, “_Sont-ils tous millionaires?_” ...

Apart from his “private resources,” which seem unlimited, the American receives just twenty times a day what the Frenchman does.

But how my heart goes out to them, so young, so untried, so generous—and a sea of blood awaiting them!

Toward morning, when a chill was in the air, a thin-faced, dark-eyed man with glasses shiveringly drinks his hot chocolate. “It’s too long, the war,” he says, “two years—even three—_mais cela traîne trop, nos bonnes qualités s’usent et se perdent_.”

“What were you before the war?”

“My father has a book-shop at Chartres, _j’adorais les livres et une bonne lampe_,” he added, so simply.

And then a trench-stained comrade came up to him and they talked after this fashion—one couldn’t have done better oneself—while I mopped up the counter and refilled my jugs:

“This country pleases me. I will come back and take a turn about after the war.”

“_Mon vieux_, one should never return to a place where one has been happy; one is apt to find only regrets and disillusions. You are thinking of the young _boulangère_ here, but she herself will leave the town after the hostilities! And then what? _Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé!_ But nothing, however, counsels one to return to a place where one has suffered.”

From this point of view one must say that the life of the _poilu_ is ideal, for when he will have tried all the fronts, including those of the Orient, the war will perhaps be over.

And then they slung everything except the kitchen stove on their persons, and, thanking me, went out to be killed, or, in the very best event, to get _la bonne blessure_.

One in a thousand, one in ten thousand gets it, _la bonne blessure_, indeed, not disfiguring, not incapacitating, and afterward, sometimes, decorations, honors. On the other side they say, “_Glück muss der Soldat haben_.”

A strange, intense blue, like some outer curtain to the windows, announced the coming of dawn, and out of it appeared nine men shivering.

“Why are you so cold?” I ask.

“_Il fait du brouillard_,” said one, with a beard in a point and wearing a _béret_, such a man as would have gone into an inn of Rabelais’s time, _en route_ for some seat of war; and as he drank his big bowl of chocolate he added, “_Cela console_; toward dawn one’s courage is low.”

Then a young, stone-deaf man with blue eyes and delicate, pink-skinned face came in with something vague and searching in his look. I didn’t realize in the first moment what was the matter, as I asked, did he want coffee or chocolate, but a comrade pointed to his ears and said, “Verdun.” He himself smiled, a dear young smile, but sudden tears came to my eyes and I slopped the coffee.

A little before six we closed the canteen, which is always swept and garnished between six and seven, and went back to the house where Miss Worthington, who so admirably runs it in conjunction with Miss Alexander, lives.

I lay me on a sofa with my shoes unlaced—my feet by that time were feeling like something boneless and bruised, mashed into something too small.

Seven-thirty a great knocking at the door.

“_L’alerte! A la cave, madame!_”

I was then in a state where a bomb couldn’t hurry me, but, the knocks continuing, I finally got up and went down-stairs to find the lower floor full of people, too _blasé_ to go into the vaulted cellar below.

“_Quelle comédie!_” said one woman. “_Moi, je m’en vais._”

“_Quelle tragédie, si c’est pour vous cette fois_,” answered another, pressing her baby to her breast.

“The bits of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns firing at the aeroplanes make more victims than the bombs,” said another.

Miss Worthington appeared at that moment, but decided, however, to go back to bed. I went out into the hot streets; the early sun was shining in a faultless sky. The _Foyer des Alliés_ had been hastily evacuated at the _alerte_, according to orders, so I asked for the nearest church, where I could sit down in peace, or comparative peace, out of the glare and the heat, not to mention the enemy airplanes. I was directed up the principal street, told to turn down by the river, and was proceeding under the dusty poplars to the church of St.-Jean, when suddenly some beauty of the morning touched my face and a feeling almost of joy succeeded the fatigue of the night. I was turned from thoughts of men going to their doom, and destruction coming from the lovely sky, and I could receive only the morning light, and the glory of the shining river and the rolling hills was for the moment mine; and I saw how “dying, they are not dead.” ...

Mass was over when I got to church, but I sat down, crossed myself, and commended, with a suddenly quiet heart, the world of battle to its God, and then, instead of _un_lacing my shoes in the sanctuary, I proceeded to lace them _up_, having walked from my abode with the laces tied about my ankles; it wasn’t as sloppy as it sounds, considering what was going on overhead. But I found myself thinking of praying-carpets, and rows of sandals outside of dim mosques, and things and ways far from Bar-le-Duc.

After twenty minutes of a somewhat hazy contemplation of other than war mysteries, I went back to the canteen.

Betwixt the time I had left it and my return a bomb had fallen between it and the station; a large piece of roof had been removed from the station, and a very neat nick had been made in the corner of the canteen where we kept our hats and coats and hung up our aprons. The street in between looked like an earthquake street. I stood quite still for a second of time—not thinking—you don’t think on such occasions. The Barrisiens, or, in plain English, the Bar-le-Dukites, were engaged in business as usual.

I then began the cutting up and buttering of endless large slices of bread, with a Scotchwoman, who has unmodifiable opinions about Americans—any and all Americans. Even when she only remarks, “I saw two new people in town yesterday, _very_ American-looking, _very_,” you feel there’s something the matter with the States, and if you had time you’d get argumentative, even perhaps annoyed.

Soldiers were coming in again. To one tired, deep-eyed man, sitting listlessly, with the heavy load slipping, I said:

“_Vous avez le cafard,[10] mon ami?_”

And he answered, suddenly, as if the words had been ejected by a great force from his soul:

“_Je monte demain_—and I can’t bear the sound the bayonet makes going in.”

I answered, “A hot cup of coffee and you will feel all right again.” But to myself I said, “There’ll be trouble for him; he _can’t_ any more.”

And then a huge Senegalese, all spinal column and hip, waving a generous five-franc note in his hands, came along and wanted to know if there was anybody _bas mariée_ among the ministrants, as he had a day off. The service is quite variegated, as will be seen from these random specimens.

Last night we walked up the hill of the ancient town. A yellow half-moon, hanging behind the fourteenth-century tower, further decorated the scene. We sat on immemorial steps, in a little V-shaped place that framed the valley and the town, and talked of war and wars. I thought how the legendary Gaul had wandered over these hills and these wooded stretches, with his battle-ax and skin about him, and long-haired women had waited his return, and children had played in front of caves. As the clock on the tower struck nine a woman appeared, waving her arms and calling out, “_Une incendie!_” and we went higher up the steps and saw masses of smoke and flames on one of the hills. It was the huge barracks for refugees that was burning, and the flames were blowing toward the near-by encampment for German prisoners. Then we went down the ancient roadway through the dim, warm, summer streets to the canteen overflowing with blue-clad men, singing, drinking, disputing. A blue mist of smoke and breath hung about them, with a smell of hot wool and worn leather—and it was the war. As I put on my apron I found myself repeating the words: