CHAPTER III
THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE
_27th July, evening._
This afternoon Lieutenant Robin fetched us to the theatrical representation the _Division Marocaine_ was to give.
Generals thick as leaves in Vallombrosa were there in a hemicycle about the stage, pressed close by the flood of _poilus_. Terrible heat in the great, glass-roofed auditorium, a slanting afternoon sun pouring itself in like hot gold. Some thousands of spectators; thick odor of _poilu_; blind being led in; groups of one-legged men naturally gravitating to one another; groups of one-armed the same. A few _gardes-malades_ from the hospitals, and ourselves the only women in the audience.
We were presented at the door with some copies of a charming, really literary newspaper, _L’Horizon, Journal des poilus_, and there was a little paragraph, “_Hiérarchie française qu’on trouve au Théâtre des Armées_,” which also described the protocol of seating, “In the first row near the stage wounded men are lying, immediately behind them wounded men are sitting, then come ladies, if there are any—and then come officers!” General Goïgoux and General Abbevillers sat near us.
While waiting we looked at _L’Horizon_ and laughed with General Goïgoux over a paragraph showing the philosophy of a son of Mars under certain circumstances, and it was the following:
Nature is kind. She places the remedy near the ill and often cures, as one has seen, evil by evil.
A woman, too much loved, sent me a letter so cruel that I didn’t even have the strength to tear it up, but carried it around in my pocket for weeks.
One night, being quartered in a stable, I took my coat off and hung it up.
The next day, no letter. A cow had eaten it. Nature is kind.
When General Gouraud, first in command, entered, the “Marseillaise” sounded, a thrill went through the vast assemblage, and we all arose. _Le Lion d’Orient_ is tall, intensely straight, his whole thin, khaki-clad body on parallel lines with his perpendicular armless right sleeve. Long, straight, brown hair _en brosse_, bronzed skin. His entry was a thing not to be forgotten. I wondered “Is it the East that stamps great chiefs with such majesty, that can give them such calm?” and I thought of Gallipoli—blue seas, battles, wounds, hospital ships. Then the curtain rose on one of the most delightful theatrical representations I have ever seen, screamingly funny, and quite chaste.
But all that _entrain_, all that life, to be snuffed out to-morrow or the next day, or the next? At Craonne or Reims or Verdun or wherever it may be? And how natural that they should sing of love and women, and say witty things concerning food and raiment and the government, till the end!
After the performance, during which nobody had ever been so hot before, the sun moving across the hall and grilling each row in turn, we passed out in a great jam of _poilus_. One huge man, with the thickest of meridional accents and red cheeks, and eyes like two black lanterns, and a coal-black beard, was gesticulating at a small, hook-nosed, blond man.
“_Le Midi, le Midi—qu’est-ce que tu en sais, toi, bêta? Les Anglais t’ont déjà pris ton trou de Calais, aussi je te demande, sale type_, what army corps took the _plateau de Craonne_” and he burst into a great laugh of triumph. Then, borne on the blue waves, we found ourselves in the open air and realized what we had been breathing.
General Goïgoux presented us to General Gouraud standing by his motor with several other generals, while a squad of German prisoners, looking out of the corners of their eyes, were being marched by. His mien was dignity itself, and out under the sky one was even more conscious of that harmony of browns and straight lines, that something remote yet majestic in his being. As we turned to go I saw him speaking to a blind zouave, and he pressed his hand lingeringly on the man’s shoulder. _Oh, enfants de la patrie!_
_Saturday, July 28th, 10.30 a.m._
All last night the strange, recurring, sinister sound of the _sirènes_ over the plain of Châlons, and it seemed to me like cries of men of the Stone Age.
These two days I have been haunted by ghosts of beings of the twilight ages; elusive emanations, dim suggestions of their psychologies have at moments possessed me in this city of the Catalaunian Plains.
Rested in my pink-silk wrapper, dead tired—too tired to care whether “they” got here or not—and stayed in bed during the _alertes_, but I thought of airmen, attackers and defenders, in the soft summer sky, a golden half-moon lighting a dim heaven.
Dreamed, but only in snatches, of peace and the ways of peace.
At 4.30 I heard Joseph’s gas-bark and knew he was again with us, stretched out on the _chaise-longue_ under the chestnut-tree.
As I stood at the window my thoughts went twisting about the stars of the gorgeous night that was so soon to give way to another summer day, and I suddenly saw human beings, only as tiny specks, everywhere going forth at some word of command to their doom. There was a flinging back of my thoughts upon me, and I turned from my window, as suddenly the chill of early dawn and the boom of cannon came in, and I could see nothing for tears and I knew the beauteous earth for what it is—the abode of mad horrors.
_Later._
Paid my respects to General Goïgoux for an instant of time (I can always get out quickly) in the old gray house of the Rue Grande Étape, and found him as always, _distingué_, human, untired, cordial. Officers passing in and out of his room, and the walls tapestried with maps. Later Colonel Rolland of the 1st Zouaves, very jaunty in his red fez, adoring his men and adored by them, and flicking his leg with a short cane having a deadly knife on a spring in the top, took us to the railroad station, to inspect the great, dreary sheds that with time, labor, and much energy are to become _La Cantine Américaine_. Blue-clad men were lying around like logs in inert bundles on the earthen floor. One had to step over legs and motley equipment to get anywhere. A dreadful sound of hammering was echoing through the vast spaces, without, however, seeming to disturb the slumbers of those men, and I dare say was as a lullaby in comparison to the first-line trenches.
We stepped into the kitchen. A smiling, twinkling-eyed _cuistot_[11] who probably had something awful the matter with him—flat-foot or hernia or something of the kind, or he wouldn’t have been there—with pride asked us to partake of some of his coffee. He proceeded to dip it from a great, steaming caldron, pouring it into worn tin cups carefully wiped first on his much-used apron. My soul responding to echoes of fraternity enabled me to drink with a smile, which, though it started out rather sickly, behaved all right as I returned the cup with compliments. The _cuistot_ said he hoped the _cantine_ would soon be in order, and as he looked through the small opening through which he shoved the cups to the _poilus_, rendered still smaller by piles of bread and festoons of sausage, he added, “_Les têtes de ces dames seront plus consolantes que la mienne_.” He was a nice, human _cuistot_, though no lover of water except for making coffee, and then, as we fell into conversation, he added, “_Si la guerre pouvait finir; mais il y a un fossé de dignité et personne des deux côtés n’ose le sauter_.” These _poilus_ are astounding!
We then visited Lieutenant Tonzin, who is going to decorate the _cantine_ as never _cantine_ was decorated. He was at the camouflage grounds. As one knows, camouflage is _de l’art de la guerre le dernier cri_, but the grounds were discreetly veiled from public gaze, and we were directed into a little garden, green-treed and sun-flecked. In it was a trestle with a large, very clever, plaster cast of a _camion_ taking _poilus_ somewhere; they were hanging from every possible place except the wheels, just such a sight as one constantly sees on the roads near the front.
The gayest sounds of whistling and singing issued from the rather coquet sun-flooded house behind the garden. Several other young artists appeared on hearing women’s voices, loving life, adoring art with a new adoration, and who with something of wonder and much of thankfulness found themselves for a sweet, brief space in charge of the camouflage work, with brush and chisel again in hand instead of bayonets.
We looked at the designs for the _cantine_ decorations, quite charming—but we delicately suggested suppressing the figure of a too fascinating “mees” that was to embellish the entrance and point to the _poilus_ the way to those delights. We feared some confusion of thought.
Afterward went to church at Notre Dame, and, sitting there, drew my first quiet breath in Châlons, out of the hot streets. Beautiful music rolling through the gray, antique vaulting. A white bier near the altar; some beloved child was being laid away from sight and hearing and touch and earthly hope. As I looked about the lovely gray spaces I remembered how in _La Cathédrale_ Huysmans says the length symbolizes the patience of the Church during trials and persecutions; the width, that love which dilates the heart; and the height, our aspirations and our hopes—and some speechless gratitude overflowed my soul because of being one of the enduring community to whom, through the gorgeous, terrible ages, nothing human is foreign. I had a strange, complete sensation of brotherhood and I saw us all of the great laughing, weeping caravan, winding through the desert, and the Church compassionate the spot of living waters. And how “men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.” ...
On the same site had once been a pagan temple, and on its altar was the figure of a Virgin, and at her feet were graven the words, “_Virgini Parituri_” (“to the Virgin who shall bring forth”). And it had come to pass.
The most precious of the old windows have lately been put out of harm’s way, but the ogival tops remain with their jewels of medieval reds and blues; and on each side, as one looks through the lovely gray vaulting, are delicate windows of a later epoch, with designs in fawn and green and yellow.
As I came out behind the mourners following the little white bier, I noticed again with a sinking of the heart the revolutionary defacement of the splendid portals. Men in all ages have had seasons of madness, wherein they destroyed whatever mute and unresisting beauty was within their reach.
Again through the hot streets—an epic in themselves of war, dust, sun, blue-clad men, blue-gray automobiles, gallooned officers, and I realized among other things that without uniforms war would be impossible.
Bought _Le Champ de Bataille de l’Epopée_, also _Le Mannequin d’Osier_, out of a huge stock of Anatole France’s books, who is evidently a favorite here. I passed through the old courtyard of the museum, hermetically sealed _depuis la campagne_, as the porter told me when I sought his lodge, from which the most savory of noonday smells was issuing. Uninteresting and entirely beside the point, Buddhist sculptures fill one side of the court, and then, passing through the portal of a seventeenth-century church, transported there when the church itself was being done away with, one finds oneself in a narrow passage on the walls of which are hung quaint old fire-backs, _plaques de foyer_. The first is of the eighteenth century, “_l’amour désarmé_” (love was nearly always disarmed in those days), and this one represented Cupid supporting a languorous lady. “_Le retour du marché_” of Louis XVI depicted a housewife returning with a full basket on her arm, and evoked the odor of the porter’s _pot-au-feu_. A French soldier wounded in the Crimea, 1855, with his colonel bending over him, might have been any one of a hundred thousand scenes of to-day. On one were the arms of the King of Spain, and the date 1608, and on another those of Maria Theresa and her consort, Francis III, Duke of Lorraine. Their origins were as diverse as the history of Lorraine itself, and I glimpsed family groups sitting about hearths, looking at them through the flames.
_Later._
Met to-day two Englishwomen coming out of the hospital. One, nearing sixty, had something ardent in her charming blue eyes and under austerely brushed whitening hair; there was a suggestion of banked fires—banked under ashes of circumstance, probably, as well as time. The other, somewhat younger, in the full grip of _l’âge dangereux_, had something inexorable in her regard. When we passed on I asked who they were, and found they were daily doers of acts of mercy and devotion, and then I found myself looking for eternal reasons in transient things, under the impression made by those two women—met only in passing, but whose emanations I suddenly caught. And I thought: Among the innumerable phenomena of the war are these women of various ages (though the phenomenon is most apparent between thirty-five and sixty), brought for the first time into personal contact with man, other than father or brother, ministering to his wants, witness of his agonies, awed spectator of his continual apotheosis, and all the daily transmutations of the definite and ordinary into the infinite and divine. The world war gives the one chance for the twisting of conventional fives, lived along the straightest of fines, into completely unexpected shapes. They come from abodes of hitherto unescapable virginities, these elemental women of indescribable innocence, with that warm, wondering look, or sometimes that determined and inexorable look, upon their faces, these unchosen and unmated, to become part of the strange lining of the war, part of the vast patchwork. Not the least strange are these pale, thin bits, sewn into something riotous, reckless, multicolored, heroic. It’s a far cry from Shepherd’s Bush or Clapham Junction or Stepney Green to battle-fields, hospitals, vanishings, potent reminders of forces withdrawn forever from the world-sum, or, still more, of convalescences and evocations of returning forces, but _not_ re-established order.
Everywhere the subtle but deathless emanation of the male—his heroisms, his agonies, his needs, his weakness, and his strength.
Can one wonder at the mighty tide obeying nameless natural laws, like other tides, that flood the areas where the manhood of the world is concentrated?
Very hot. Out there in the _Champagne Pouilleuse_ men are marching in the white dust, resting in the white dust, giving up their lives in the white dust. Am sitting under the chestnut-tree. A soldier, in civil life a gardener, has been sent to tidy up our garden, and its _belle patine_ will soon give way to spick-and-spanness. I sensed such a passion of tenderness in the way he handled his rake that I went over to speak to him, and this is his history. He is from Cette—_une ville si jolie_—and he speaks with the heavy accent of his part of the world. He is a territorial and forms part of the _État-Civil des Champs de Bataille_ (civilian workers on the battle-fields). This doesn’t sound bad, but it really means that since he was called, eighteen months ago, he, who all his life has planted flowers, has been digging up dead bodies, hunting in a literal “body of death” to find the plaques, and then identifying by means of a map the place where they are found.
“_Madame, je rien pouvais plus._ It was too terrible. I am forty-seven years old, but I asked to be put among the attacking troops. They refused, but sent me here. Now in this garden I have found heaven again.” And his eyes, his soft, suffering eyes, filled with tears.
I asked him about his family—one son is fighting in the Vosges.
“He is six feet four and he so resembles Albert I that they call him _le roi des Belges_. I lost my daughter a few months ago—a beautiful girl with curling blond hair. After her fiancé fell at Verdun, she went into a decline. My other son is young, seventeen, but his turn is near. I had a beautiful family.” The gardener himself is straight-featured and straight-browed, caught up how terribly in the wine-press of the war. “All my life I have been gardener in great houses,” he added, with a shudder. “The work they gave me _là-bas_ is the most terrible of all. _On n’y résiste pas à la longue. O les pauvres restes qu’on trouve! O, Madame!_”
I asked him to bring me the photographs of his family, and his face brightened for a moment as he stood with his head uncovered. One speaks to any chance person, and immediately one gets a story that is fit only to be handled by some master of that incomparable thing, French prose.
_Later._
A while ago investigated the house. Up-stairs is a little room toward the north, papered in a yellow-and-white pin-stripe design of forty or fifty years ago. In it is a yellow baroque niche with a shell design at the top, having a temple or altar-like suggestion, in spite of the too-large, ugly, marble-topped mahogany wash-stand that fills it. Above the mahogany bed is a carved wooden holy water font, a little shelf in the corner for books, and another for a lamp, and there is a window looking out on small gardens cut up into bits for flowers and vegetables. As I entered it I seemed to know that some spirit rare and strong enough to project emanations, sensible even to a stranger long after, had lived, perhaps died, in it. I settled down immediately in a really not comfortable, too-small, brown, upholstered arm-chair, sloping forward, and felt somehow as if I were in choice company, and began to turn the pages of Bordeaux’s _Dernier jour du Fort de Vaux_, which I had in my hand as I entered. But something unseen held my attention, not the book. The room was gently, softly haunted, and the world of spirits was sensibly about me.... Anyway, the plain of Châlons gives me the creeps.
Joseph, reappearing this afternoon, brought the news that there had been another air raid on Bar-le-Duc at noon, and they had dropped pounds of leaflets telling of the Russian defeat, Rumanians retreating, in danger of being enveloped. The leaflets wound up by saying the Germans were sick of the war—they supposed the French were—and why not have peace?