A Volunteer Poilu
by Henry Sheahan




To
Professor Charles Townsend Copeland of Harvard University

Dear Copey,

At Verdun I thought of you, and the friendly hearth of Hollis 15
seemed very far away from the deserted, snow-swept streets of the
tragic city. Then suddenly I remembered how you had encouraged
me and many others to go over and help in any way that we could; I
remembered your keen understanding of the Epic, and the deep
sympathy with human beings which you taught those whose privilege
it was to be your pupils. And so you did not seem so far away after all,
but closer to the heart of the war than any other friend I had.

I dedicate this book to you with grateful affection after many years of
friendship.

Henry





Topsfield, September, 1916

Preface

I have ventured to call this book A Volunteer Poilu principally because
we were known to the soldiers of the Bois-le-Prtre as "les Poilus
Amricains." Then, too, it was my ambition to do for my comrades,
the French private soldiers, what other books have done for the
soldiers of other armies. The title chosen, however, was more than
complimentary; it was but just. In recognition of the work of the
Section during the summer, it was, in October, 1915, formally
adopted into the French army; a French officer became its
administrative head, and the drivers were given the same papers,
pay, and discipline as their French comrades.

I wish to thank many of my old friends of Section II, who have aided
me in the writing of this book.

HENRY SHEAHAN



Contents

I. THE ROCHAMBEAU S'EN VA-T-EN GUERRE

I A war-time voyage--The Rochambeau--Loading ammunition and
food supplies--Personalities on board--The dyestuffs agent--The
machine lathes man--The Swede from Minnesota who was on his
way to the Foreign Legion--His subsequent history--The talk aboard--
The French officer--His philosophy of war--Ernest Psichari--Arrival at
Bordeaux--The Arabs at the docks--The convalescent soldiers--
Across La Beauce--The French countryside in war-time.


II. AN UNKNOWN PARIS IN THE NIGHT AND RAIN.

Paris, rain, and darkness--The Gardens of the Tuileries--The
dormitory--The hospital at night--Beginning of the Champagne
offensive--The Gare de la Chapelle at two in the morning--The
wounded--The Zouave stretcher-bearers--The Arabs in the
abandoned school--Suburban Paris at dawn--The home of the
deaconesses.


III. THE GREAT SWATHE OF THE LINES

Nancy--The porter's story--Getting to the front--What the phrase "the
front" really means--The sense of the front--The shell zone--The zone
of quiet--My quarters in the shelled house--The fire shells--
Bombarded at night--Death of the soldier fireman.


IV. LA FORET DE BOIS-LE-PRETRE

Le Bois-le-Prtre--Description--History--Les Glycines, "Wisteria Villa"--
The Road to the trenches--At the trenches--The painter's idea of "le
sinistre dans l'art"--The sign post--The zone of violence--The Quart-
en-Rserve--The village caught in the torment of the lines--The dead
on the barbed wire--"The Road to Metz."


V. THE TRENCHES IN THE "WOOD OF DEATH."

The Trenches--Organization--Nature of the war--Food, shelters,
clothing, ammunition, etc.--A typical day in the trenches--Trench
shells or "crapouilots"--In the abri--The tunnel--The doctrinaire
lieutenant of engineers.


VI. THE GERMANS ATTACK

The piano at Montauville--An interrupted concert--At the Quart--The
battle for the ridge of the Wood--Fall of the German aeroplane--
Psychology of the men in the trenches--Religion in the trenches--


VII. THE TOWN IN THE TRENCHES

Poor old "Pont"--Description of the town--A civilian's story--The house
of the Captain of the Papal Zouaves--Church of St. Laurent--The
Cemetery and its guardian.


VIII. MESSIEURS LES POILUS DE LA GRANDE GUERRE

En repos--A village of troops--Manners and morals--The concert--
journal of the Bois-le-Prtre--Various poilus.


IX. PREPARING THE DEFENSE OF VERDUN

En permission--State of France--The France of 1905 and the France
of 1915--The class of 1917--Bar-le-Duc--The air raid--Called to
Verdun.


X. THE GREAT DAYS OF VERDUN

Verdun in 1912--Verdun on the night of the first great attack--The
hospital--The shelled cross road--The air shell--The pastry cook's
story--The cultivateur of the Valois and the crater at Douaumont--The
pompiers of Verdun--"Do you want to see an odd sight?"--Verdun in
storm and desolation.





I

A Volunteer Poilu

Chapter I

The Rochambeau S'en Va-t-en Guerre

Moored alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the land,
the cargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie
Gnrale was being loaded with American supplies for the France of
the Great War. A hot August sun struck spots and ripples of glancing
radiance from the viscous, oily surface of the foul basin in which she
lay inert; the air was full of sounds, the wheezing of engines, the
rattling of cog-checks, and the rumble of wheels and hoofs which
swept, in sultry puffs of noise and odor, from the pavements on the
land. Falling from the exhausts, a round, silvery-white cascade
poured into the dark lane between the wharf and the deck, and
sounded a monotonous, roaring underchord to the intermingled dins.
At the sun-bathed bow, a derrick gang lowered bags of flour into the
open well of the hold; there were commands in French, a chugging,
and a hissing of steam, and a giant's clutch of dusty, hundred-kilo
flour-bags from Duluth would swing from the wharf to the
Rochambeau, sink, and disappear. In some way the unfamiliar
language, and the sight of the thickset, French sailor-men, so
evidently all of one race, made the Rochambeau, moored in the
shadow of the sky-scrapers, seem mysteriously alien. But among the
workers in the hold, who could be seen when they stood on the floor
of the open hatchway, was a young, red-headed, American
longshoreman clad in the trousers part of a suit of brown-check
overalls; sweat and grime had befouled his rather foolish, freckled
face, and every time that a bunch of flour-bags tumbled to the floor of
the well, he would cry to an invisible somebody--"More dynamite, Joe,
more dynamite!"

Walking side by side, like ushers in a wedding procession, two of the
ship's officers made interminable rounds of the deck. Now and then
they stopped and looked over the rail at the loading operations, and
once in low tones they discussed the day's communiqu. "Pas grand'
chose" (nothing of importance), said he whom I took to be the elder, a
bearded, seafaring kind of man. "We have occupied a crater in the
Argonne, and driven back a German patrol (une patrouille Boche) in
the region of Nomny." The younger, blond, pale, with a wispy yellow
mustache, listened casually, his eyes fixed on the turbulence below.
The derrick gang were now stowing away clusters of great wooden
boxes marked the Something Arms Company. "My brother says that
American bullets are filled with powder of a very good quality" (d'une
trs bonne qualit), remarked the latter. "By the way, how is your
brother?" asked the bearded man. "Very much better," answered the
other; "the last fragment (clat) was taken out of his thigh just before
we left Bordeaux." They continued their walk, and three little French
boys wearing English sailor hats took their places at the rail.

As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a level
with the upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for farewells; and
little groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes. There was a
good deal of worrying about submarines; one heard fragments of
conversations--"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"--"Absolutely
safe, je t'assure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice,
"Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a
rotund, snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery,
honest wishes for "the success of his business." Two young
Americans with the same identical oddity of gait walked to and fro,
and a little black Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the
corner of his mouth, paraded lonelily. A middle-aged French woman,
rouged and dyed back to the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of
perfume, wept at the going of a younger woman, and ruined an
elaborate make-up with grotesque traceries of tears. "Give him my
love," she sobbed; "tell him that the business is doing splendidly and
that he is not to buy any of Lafitte's laces next time he goes to Paris
en permission." A little later, the Rochambeau, with slow majesty,
backed into the channel, and turned her bow to the east.

The chief interest of the great majority of her passengers was
commercial; there were American drummers keen to line their
pockets with European profits; there were French commis voyageurs
who had been selling articles of French manufacture which had
formerly been made by the Germans; there were half-official persons
who had been on missions to American ammunition works; and there
was a diplomat or two. From the sample trunks on board you could
have taken anything from a pair of boots to a time fuse. Altogether,
an interesting lot. Palandeau, a middle-aged Frenchman with a
domed, bald forehead like Socrates or Verlaine, had been in America
selling eau-de-cologne.

"Then you are getting out something new?" I asked.

"Yes, and no," he answered. "Our product is the old-fashioned eau-
de-cologne water with the name 'Farina' on it."

"But in America we associate eau-de-cologne with the Germans,"
said I. "Doesn't the bottle say 'Johann Maria Farina'? Surely the form
of the name is German."

"But that was not his name, monsieur; he was a Frenchman, and
called himself 'Jean Marie.' Yes, really, the Germans stole the
manufacture from the French. Consider the name of the article, 'eau-
de-cologne,' is not that French?"

"Yes," I admitted.

"Alors," said Palandeau; "the blocus has simply given us the power to
reclaim trade opportunities justly ours. Therefore we have printed a
new label telling the truth about Farina, and the Boche 'Johann Maria'
is 'kapout.'"

"Do you sell much of it?"

"Quantities! Our product is superior to the Boche article, and has the
glamour of an importation. I await the contest without uneasiness."

"What contest?"

"When Jean Marie meets Johann Maria--aprs la guerre," said
Palandeau with a twinkle in his eye.

In the deck chair next to mine sat a dark, powerfully built young Iowan
with the intensely masculine head of a mediaeval soldier. There was
a bit of curl to the dark-brown hair which swept his broad, low
forehead, his brown eyes were devoid of fear or imagination, his jaw
was set, and the big, aggressive head rested on a short, muscular
neck. He had been a salesman of machine tools till the "selling end"
came to a standstill.

"But didn't the munitions traffic boom the machine-tool industry?" I
asked.

"Sure it did. You ought to have seen what people will do to get a
lathe. You know about all that you need to make shells is a machine
lathe. You can't get a lathe in America for love or money--for
anything"--he made a swift, complete gesture--"all making shells.
There isn't a junk factory in America that hasn't been pawed over by
guys looking for lathes--and my God! what prices! Knew a bird
named Taylor who used to make water pipes in Utica, New York--had
a stinking little lathe he paid two hundred dollars for, and sold it last
year for two thousand. My firm had so many orders for months ahead
that it didn't pay them to have salesmen--so they offered us jobs
inside; but, God, I can't stand indoor work, so I thought I'd come over
here and get into the war. I used to be in the State Cavalry. You
ought to have seen how sore all those Iowa Germans were on me for
going," he laughed. "Had a hell of row with a guy named Schultz."

Limping slightly, an enormous, grizzled man approached us and sat
down by the side of the ex-machinist. Possibly a yellow-gray suit, cut
in the bathrobe American style, made him look larger than he was,
and though heavily built and stout, there was something about him
which suggested ill health. One might have thought him a prosperous
American business man on his way to Baden-Baden. He had a big
nose, big mouth, a hard eye, and big, freckled hands which he
nervously opened and closed.

"See that feller over there?" He pointed to a spectacled individual
who seemed lost in melancholy speculation at the rail--"Says he's a
Belgian lieutenant. Been over here trying to get cloth. Says he can't
get it, the firms over here haven't got the colors. Just think of it,
there isn't a pound of Bernheim's blue in the whole country!"

"I thought we were beginning to make dyes of our own," said the
Iowan.

"Oh, yes, but we haven't got the hang of it yet. The product is pretty
poor. Most of the people who need dyes are afraid to use the
American colors, but they've got to take what they can get. Friend of
mine, Lon Seeger, of Seeger, Seeger & Hall, the carpet people in
Hackensack, had twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats spoiled
on him last week by using home dyes."

The Belgian lieutenant, still standing by the rail, was talking with
another passenger, and some fragments of the conversation drifted
to our ears. I caught the words--"My sister--quite unexpected--barely
escaped--no doubt of it--I myself saw near Malines--perfectly
dreadful--tout--fait terrible."

"Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats all spoiled, colors ran,
didn't set, no good. This war is raising the devil with the United States
textiles. Maybe the Germans won't get a glad hand when they come
back. We hear that they're going to flood the market with good, low-
priced dyes so as to bust up the new American plants. Haven't you
heard them hollerin' for tariff protection? I'm going over to look up a
new green dye the French are getting out. We hear it's pretty good
stuff. What are you boys doing, looking for contracts?"

The Iowan replied that he hoped to get into an English cavalry
regiment, and I mentioned the corps I had joined.

"Well, don't get killed," exclaimed the dye-stuffs agent paternally, and
settled down in his chair for a nap.

It was the third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color of the
American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising and
falling under the August sun. From the rail I saw coming toward us
over the edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer marked with two
white blotches which, as the vessel neared, resolved themselves into
painted reproductions of the Swedish flag. Thus passed the Thorvald,
carrying a mark of the war across the lonely seas.

"That's a Swedish boat," said a voice at my elbow.

"Yes," I replied.

A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a
downy face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me.
There was something psychologically wrong with his face; it had that
look in it which makes you want to see if you still have your purse.

"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota," he continued.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Oscar Petersen," he answered.

"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded.

"You bet," he replied--and an instant later--"Are you?"

I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the same
kind of experience he later became communicative. He had run away
from home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reform
school, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago. I
can't imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed. At
length he "got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war," as he
expressed it, and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, but
received no answer. "My father was a Bible cuss," he remarked
cheerfully,--"never got over my swiping the minister's watch."

A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his going
to enlist in the Foreign Legion--"popular young man very well known
in the--th ward," said the article. He showed me, too, an extraordinary
letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil on
the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing five
dollars. "I hope you will try to avenge the Lusitania," it said among
other things. The letter was signed by a woman.

"Do you speak French?" I asked.

"Not a word," he replied. "I want to be put with the Americans or the
Swedes. I speak good Swedish."

Months later, on furlough, I saw in a hospital at Lyons a college
classmate who had served in the Foreign Legion. "Did you know a
fellow named Petersen?" I asked.

"Yes, I knew him," answered my friend; "he lifted a fifty-franc note
from me and got killed before I could get it back."

"How did it happen?"

"Went through my pockets, I imagine."

"Oh, no, I meant how did he get killed?" "Stray shell sailed in as we
were going through a village, and caught him and two of the other
boys."

"You must not make your friend talk too much," mumbled an old
Sister of Charity rather crossly.

The two young men with the same identical oddity of gait were
salesmen of artificial legs, each one a wearer and demonstrator of his
wares. The first, from Ohio, had lost his leg in a railroad accident two
years before, and the second, a Virginian with a strong accent, had
been done for in a motor-car smashup. One morning the man from
Ohio gave us a kind of danse macabre on the deck; rolling his trouser
leg high above his artificial shin, he walked, leaped, danced, and ran.
"Can you beat that?" he asked with pardonable pride. "Think what
these will mean to the soldiers." Meanwhile, with slow care, the
Virginian explained the ingenious mechanism.

Strange tatters of conversation rose from the deck. "Poor child, she
lost her husband at the beginning of the war"--"Third shipment of
hosses"--"I was talking with a feller from the Atlas Steel Company"--
"Edouard is somewhere near Arras"; there were disputes about the
outcome of the war, and arguments over profits. A voluble French
woman, whose husband was a pastry cook in a New York hotel
before he joined the forces, told me how she had wandered from one
war movie to another hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband, and
had finally seen "some one who resembled him strongly" on the
screen in Harlem. She had a picture of him, a thin, moody fellow with
great, saber whiskers like Rostand's and a high, narrow forehead
curving in on the sides between the eyebrows and the hair. "He is a
Chasseur alpin," she said with a good deal of pride, "and they are
holding his place for him at the hotel. He was wounded last month in
the shoulder. I am going to the hospital at Lyons to see him." The
day's sunset was at its end, and a great mass of black clouds surged
over the eastern horizon, turning the seas ahead to a leaden
somberness that lowered in menacing contrast to the golden streaks
of dying day. The air freshened, salvos of rain fell hissing into the dark
waters, and violet cords of lightning leaped between sea and sky.
Echoing thunder rolled long through unseen abysses. In the deserted
salon I found the young Frenchman with the star-shaped scar reading
an old copy of "La Revue." He had been an officer in the Chasseurs-
-pied until a fearful wound had incapacitated him for further service,
and had then joined the staff of a great, conservative Parisian weekly.
The man was a disciple of Ernest Psichari, the soldier mystic who
died so superbly at Charleroi in the dreadful days before the Marne.
From him I learned something of the French conception of the idea of
war. It was not uninteresting to compare the French point of view with
the German, and we talked late into the night while the ship was
plunging through the storm. An article in the review, "La Psychologie
des Barbares," was the starting-point of our conversation.

"You must remember that the word 'barbarian' which we apply to the
Germans, is understood by the French intellectually," said he. "Not
only do German atrocities seem barbarous, but their thought also.
Consider the respective national conceptions of the idea of war. To
the Germans, war is an end in itself, and in itself and in all its effects
perfect and good. To the French mind, this conception of war is
barbaric, for war is not good in itself and may be fatal to both victor
and vanquished." (He spoke a beautiful, lucid French with a sort of
military preciseness.)

"It was Ernest Psichari who revealed to us the raison d'tre of arms in
modern life, and taught us the meaning of war. To him, war was no
savage rue, but the discipline of history for which every nation must
be prepared, a terrible discipline neither to be sought, nor rejected
when proffered. Thus the Boches, once their illusion of the glory of
war is smashed, have nothing to fall back on, but the French point of
view is stable and makes for a good morale. Psichari was the
intellectual leader of that movement for the regeneration of the army
which has saved France. When the doctrines of pacificism began to
be preached in France, and cries of 'A bas l'arme' were heard in the
streets, Psichari showed that the army was the only institution left in
our industrialized world with the old ideals and the power to teach
them. Quand on a tout dit, the military ideals of honor, duty, and
sacrifice of one's all for the common good are the fundamentals of.
character. Psichari turned this generation from a generation of
dreamers to a generation of soldiers, knowing why they were soldiers,
glad to be soldiers. The army saved the morale of France when the
Church had lost its hold, and the public schools had been delivered to
the creatures of sentimental doctrinaire government. Was it not a pity
that Psichari should have died so young?"

"Did you know him?" I asked.

"Yes; I saw something of him in Africa. The mystery of the East had
profoundly stirred him. He was a dark, serious fellow with something
of the profile of his grandfather, Ernest Renan. At Charleroi, after an
heroic stand, he and every man of his squad died beside the guns
they served."

Long after, at the Bois-le-Prtre, I went to the trenches to get a young
sergeant. His friends had with clumsy kindness gathered together his
little belongings and put them in the ambulance. "As tu trouv mon
livre?" (Have you found my book?) he asked anxiously, and they
tossed beside the stretcher a trench-mired copy of Psichari's "L'Appel
des Armes."

One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and
anchored at the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde. A spindly
lighthouse was flashing, seeming more to reflect the sunlight from
outside than to be burning within, and a current the color of coffee
and cream with a dash of vermilion in it, went by us mottled with
patches of floating mud. From the deck one had an extraordinary
view, a ten-mile sweep of the strangely colored water, the
hemisphere of the heavens all of one greenish-blue tint, and a narrow
strip of nondescript, sandy coast suspended somehow between the
strange sea and unlovely sky. At noon, the Rochambeau began at a
good speed her journey up the river, passing tile-roofed villages and
towns built of pumice-gray stone, and great flat islands covered with
acres upon acres of leafy, bunchy vines. There was a scurry to the
rail; some one cried, "Voil des Boches," and I saw working in a
vineyard half a dozen men in gray-green German regimentals. A poilu
in a red cap was standing nonchalantly beside them. As the
Rochambeau, following the channel, drew incredibly close to the
bank, the Germans leaned on their hoes and watched us pass, all
save one, who continued to hoe industriously round the roots of the
vines, ignoring us with a Roman's disdain. "Comme ils sont laids"
(How ugly they are), said a voice. There was no surprise in the tone,
which expressed the expected confirmation of a past judgment. It
was the pastry cook's voluble wife who had spoken. The land through
which we were passing, up to that time simply the pleasant
countryside of the Bordelais, turned in an instant to the France of the
Great War.

Late in the afternoon, the river, slowly narrowing, turned a great bend,
and the spires of Bordeaux, violet-gray in the smoky rose of early
twilight, were seen just ahead. A broad, paved, dirty avenue, with the
river on one side and a row of shabby houses on the other, led from
the docks to the city, and down this street, marching with Oriental
dignity, came a troop of Arabs. There was a picture of a fat sous-
officier leading, of brown-white rags and mantles waving in the breeze
blowing from the harbor, of lean, muscular, black-brown legs, and
dark, impassive faces. "Algerian recruits," said an officer of the boat.
It was a first glimpse at the universality of the war; it held one's mind
to realize that while some were quitting their Devon crofts, others
were leaving behind them the ancestral well at the edges of the
ancient desert. A faint squeaking of strange pipes floated on the
twilight air.

There came an official examination of our papers, done in a
businesslike way, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were free
to land in France. That evening a friend and I had dinner in a great
caf opening on the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried to
analyze the difference between the Bordeaux of the past and the
Bordeaux of the war. The ornate restaurant, done in a kind of Paris
Exhibition style, and decorated with ceiling frescoes of rosy, naked
Olympians floating in golden mists and sapphire skies, was full of
movement and light, crowds passed by on the sidewalks, there were
sounds--laughter.

"Looks just the same to me," said my friend, an American journalist
who had been there in 1912. "Of course there are more soldiers.
Outside of that, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the town has
not changed."

But there was a difference, and a great difference. There was a
terrible absence of youth. Not that youth was entirely absent from the
tables and the trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and unhealthy-
looking, afraid to meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the pitiable
jeunesse that could not pass the physical examination of the army.
Most of the other young men who bent over the tables talking, or
leaned back on a divan to smoke cigarettes, were strangers, and I
saw many who were unquestionably Roumanians or Greeks. A little
apart, at a corner table, a father and mother were dining with a boy in
a uniform much too large for him;--I fancied from the cut of his clothes
that he belonged to a young squad still under instruction in the
garrisons, and that he was enjoying a night off with his family.
Screened from the rest by a clothes rack, a larky young lieutenant
was discreetly conversing with a "daughter of joy," and an elderly
English officer, severely proper and correct, was reading "Punch" and
sipping red wine in Britannic isolation. Across the street an immense
poster announced, "Conference in aid of the Belgian Red Cross--the
German Outrages in Louvain, Malines, and Lige--illustrated."

We finished our dinner, which was good and not costly, and started to
walk to our hotel. Hardly had we turned the corner of the Place, when
the life of Bordeaux went out like a torch extinguished by the wind. It
was still early in the evening, there was a sound of an orchestra
somewhere behind, yet ahead of us, lonely and still, with its shops
closed and its sidewalks deserted, was one of the greater streets of
Bordeaux. Through the drawn curtains of second stories over little
groceries and baker-shops shone the yellow light of lamps. What had
happened to the Jean, Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the
war began? What tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these
silent windows not conceal? And every French city is much the same;
one notices in them all the subtle lack of youth, and the animation of
the great squares in contrast to the somber loneliness of streets and
quarters which once were alive and gay. At the Place de l'Opra in
Paris, the whirlpool of Parisian life is still turning, but the great
streets leading away from the Place de l'toile are quiet. Young
and old, laborer and shopkeeper, boulevardier and apache are
far away holding the tragic lines.

The next morning at the station, I had my first glimpse of that mighty
organization which surrounds the militaire. There was a special
entrance for soldiers and a special exit for soldiers, and at both of
these a long file of blue-clad poilus waited for the countersigning of
their furlough slips and military tickets. The mud of the trenches still
stained the bottom edges of their overcoats, and their steel helmets
were dented and dull. There was something fine about the faces
collectively; there was a certain look of tried endurance and perils
bravely borne. I heard those on furlough telling the names of their
home villages to the officer in charge,--pleasant old names, Saint-
Pierre aux Vignes, La Tour du Roi.

A big, obese, middle-aged civilian dressed in a hideous greenish suit,
and wearing a pancake cap, sat opposite me in the compartment I
had chosen. There was a hard, unfriendly look in his large, fat-
encircled eyes, a big mustache curved straight out over his lips, and
the short finger nails of his square, puffy fingers were deeply rimmed
with dirt. He caught sight of me reading a copy of an English weekly,
and after staring at me with an interest not entirely free from a certain
hostility, retreated behind the pages of the "Matin," and began picking
his teeth. Possibly he belonged to that provincial and prejudiced
handful to whom England will always be "Perfidious Albion," or else
he took me for an English civilian dodging military service. The
French press was following the English recruiting campaign very
closely, and the system of volunteer service was not without its critics.
"Conscription being considered in England" (On discute la
conscription en Angleterre), announced the "Matin" discreetly.

It was high noon; the train had arrived at Angoulme, and was taking
aboard a crowd of convalescents. On the station platform, their faces
relentlessly illumined by the brilliant light, stood about thirty soldiers;
a few were leaning on canes, one was without a right arm, some had
still the pallor of the sick, others seemed able-bodied and hearty.
Every man wore on the bosom of his coat about half a dozen little
aluminum medals dangling from bows of tricolor ribbon. "Pour les
blesss, s'il vous plat," cried a tall young woman in the costume and
blue cape of a Red-Cross nurse as she walked along the platform
shaking a tin collection box under the windows of the train.

To our compartment came three of the convalescents. One was a
sturdy, farmhand sort of fellow, with yellow hair and a yellow
mustache--the kind of man who might have been a Norman; he wore
khaki puttees, brown corduroy trousers, and a jacket which fitted his
heavy, vigorous figure rather snugly. Another was a little soul dressed
in the "blue horizon" from head to foot, a homely little soul with an
egg-shaped head, brown-green eyes, a retreating chin, and irregular
teeth. The last, wearing the old tenue, black jacket and red trousers,
was a good-looking fellow with rather handsome brown eyes.
Comfortably stretched in a corner, the Norman was deftly cutting
slices of bread and meat which he offered to his companions.
Catching sight of my English paper, all three stared at me with an
interest and friendliness that was in psychological contrast to the
attitude of the obese civilian.

"Anglais?" asked the Norman.

The civilian watched for my answer.

"Non--Amricain," I replied.

"Tiens," they said politely.

"Do you speak English?" asked the homely one.

"Yes," I answered.

The Norman fished a creased dirty letter and a slip of paper from his
wallet and handed them to me for inspection.

"I found them in a trench we shared with the English," he explained.
"These puttees are English; a soldier gave them to me." He exhibited
his legs with a good deal of satisfaction.

I examined the papers that had been given me. The first was a
medical prescription for an anti-lice ointment and the second an
illiterate letter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about somebody
whom the writer was having trouble to manage, "now that you aren't
here." I translated as well as I could for an attentive audience.
"Toujours les totos," they cried merrily when I explained the
prescription. A spirit of good-fellowship pervaded the compartment, till
even the suspicious civilian unbent, and handed round post-card
photographs of his two sons who were somewhere en Champagne.
Not a one of the three soldiers could have been much over twenty-
one, but they were not boys, but men, serious men, tried and
disciplined by war. The homely one gave me one of his many medals
which he wore "to please the good Sisters"; on one side in an oval of
seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and on the other, the determined
features of General Joffre.

Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce. Distant
villages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black against
the burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the
sweeping golden plain. We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and
shuttered, though the harvests had been gathered and stacked.
There was something very tragic in those deserted, outlying farms.
The train began to rattle through the suburbs of Paris. By the window
stood the Norman looking out on the winking red and violet lights of
the railroad yard. "This Paris?" he asked. "I never expected to see
Paris. How the war sets one to traveling!"


Chapter 2

An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain


It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I was
strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun was
drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods and
athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn,
so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of the
mighty vista of the Champs lyses, the Arc de Triomphe rose,
brown and vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an
aeroplane was maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a
moving speck of white and silver in the soft, September blue. From a
near-by Punch and Judy show the laughter of little children floated
down the garden in outbursts of treble shrillness. "Villain, monster,
scoundrel," squeaked a voice. Flopped across the base of the stage,
the arms hanging downwards, was a prostrate doll which a fine
manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored with a stick; suddenly it
stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted its puzzled, wooden head to the
laughing children. Beneath a little Prussian helmet was the head of
William of Germany, caricatured with Parisian skill into a scowling,
green fellow with a monster black mustache turned up to his eyes.
"Lie down!" cried the Zouave doll imperiously. "Here is a love pat for
thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche." And he struck him down
again with his staff.

Soldiers walked in the garden,--permissionnaires (men on furlough)
out for an airing with their rejoicing families, smart young English
subalterns, and rosy-fleshed, golden-haired Flemings of the type that
Rubens drew. But neither their presence nor the sight of an
occasional mutil (soldier who has lost a limb), pathetically clumsy on
his new crutches, quite sent home the presence of the war. The
normal life of the city was powerful enough to engulf the disturbance,
the theaters were open, there were the same crowds on the
boulevards, and the same gossipy spectators in the sidewalk cafs.
After a year of war the Parisians were accustomed to soldiers,
cripples, and people in mourning. The strongest effect of the war was
more subtle of definition, it was a change in the temper of the city.
Since the outbreak of the war, the sham Paris that was "Gay Paree"
had disappeared, and the real Paris, the Paris of tragic memories and
great men, had taken its place. An old Parisian explained the change
to me in saying, "Paris has become more French." Deprived of the
foreigner, the city adapted itself to a taste more Gallic; faced with the
realities of war, it exchanged its artificiality for that sober
reasonableness which is the normal attitude of the nation.

At noon I left the garden and strolled down the Champs lyses to
the Porte Maillot. The great salesrooms of the German motor-car
dealers had been given by the Government to a number of military
charities who had covered the trade signs with swathes and rosettes
of their national colors. Under the banner of the Belgians, in the
quondam hop of the Mercedes, was an exhibition of leather
knickknacks, baskets, and dolls made by the blind and mutilated
soldiers. The articles--children's toys for the most part, dwarfs that
rolled over and over on a set of parallel bars, Alsatian lasses with
flaxen hair, and gay tops--were exposed on a row of tables a few
feet back from the window. By the Porte Maillot, some of the iron saw-
horses with sharpened points, which had formed part of the barricade
built there in the days of the Great Retreat, lay, a villainous, rusty
heap, in a grassy ditch of the city wall; a few stumps of the trees that
had been then cut down were still visible, and from a railroad tie
embedded in the sidewalk hung six links of a massive chain. Through
this forgotten flotsam on the great shore of the war, the quiet crowds
went in and out of the Maillot entrance to the Bois de Boulogne.
There was a sense of order and security in the air. I took a seat on
the terrace of a little restaurant. The garon was a small man in the
fifties, inclined to corpulence, with a large head, large, blue-gray eyes,
purplish lips, and blue-black hair cut pompadour. As we watched the
orderly, Sunday crowds going to the great park, we fell into
conversation about the calmness of Paris. "Yes, it is calm," he said;
"we are all waiting (nous attendons). We know that the victory will be
ours at the finish. But all we can do is to wait. I have two sons at the
front." He had struck the keynote. Paris is calmly waiting--waiting for
the end of the war, for victory, for the return of her children.

Yet in this great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty blues,
and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was another
Paris, a terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early in the
afternoon a dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest. It began
to rain.

In a great garret of the hospital, under a high French roof, was the
dormitory of the volunteers attached to the Paris Ambulance Section.
At night, this great space was lit by only one light, a battered electric
reading-lamp standing on a kind of laboratory table in the center of
the floor, and window curtains of dark-blue cambric, waving
mysteriously in the night wind, were supposed to hide even this
glimmer from the eyes of raiding Zeppelins. Looking down, early in
the evening, into the great quadrangle of the institution, one saw the
windows of the opposite wing veiled with this mysterious blue, and
heard all the feverish unrest of a hospital, the steps on the tiled
corridors, the running of water in the bathroom taps, the hard clatter
of surgical vessels, and sometimes the cry of a patient having a
painful wound dressed. But late at night the confused murmur of the
battle between life and death had subsided, the lights in the wards
were extinguished, and only the candle of the night nurse, seen
behind a screen, and the stertorous breathing of the many sleepers,
brought back the consciousness of human life. I have often looked
into the wards as I returned from night calls to the station where we
received the wounded, and been conscious, as I peered silently into
that flickering obscurity, of the vague unrest of sleepers, of the
various attitudes assumed, the arms outstretched, the upturned
throats, and felt, too, in the still room, the mystic presence of the
Angel of Pain.

It was late at night, and I stood looking out of my window over the
roofs of Neuilly to the great, darkened city just beyond. From
somewhere along the tracks of the "Little Belt" railway came a series
of piercing shrieks from a locomotive whistle. It was raining hard,
drumming on the slate roof of the dormitory, and somewhere below a
gutter gurgled foolishly. Far away in the corridor a gleam of yellow
light shone from the open door of an isolation room where a nurse
was watching by a patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who
had been to the movies at the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy
began to talk in sibilant whispers of the evening's entertainment, and
one of them said, "That war film was a corker; did you spot the big
cuss throwing the grenades?" "Yuh, damn good," answered the other
pulling his shirt over his head. It was a strange crew that inhabited
these quarters; there were idealists, dreamers, men out of work,
simple rascals and adventurers of all kinds. To my right slept a big,
young Westerner, from some totally unknown college in Idaho, who
was a humanitarian enthusiast to the point of imbecility, and to the left
a middle-aged rogue who indulged in secret debauches of alcohol
and water he cajoled from the hospital orderlies. Yet this obscure and
motley community was America's contribution to France. I fell asleep.

"Up, birds!"

The lieutenant of the Paris Section, a mining engineer with a
picturesque vocabulary of Nevadan profanity, was standing in his
pajama trousers at the head of the room, holding a lantern in his
hand. "Up, birds!" he called again. "Call's come in for Lah Chapelle."
There were uneasy movements under the blankets, inmates of
adjoining beds began to talk to each other, and some lit their bedside
candles. The chief went down both sides of the dormitory, flashing his
lantern before each bed, ragging the sleepy. "Get up, So-and-So.
Well, I must say, Pete, you have a hell of a nerve." There were
glimpses of candle flames, bare bodies shivering in the damp cold,
and men sitting on beds, winding on their puttees. "Gee! listen to it
rain," said somebody. "What time is it?" "Twenty minutes past two."
Soon the humming and drumming of the motors in the yard sounded
through the roaring of the downpour.

Down in the yard I found Oiler, my orderly, and our little Ford
ambulance, number fifty-three. One electric light, of that sickly yellow
color universal in France, was burning over the principal entrance to
the hospital, just giving us light enough to see our way out of the
gates. Down the narrow, dark Boulevard Inkerman we turned, and
then out on to a great street which led into the "outer" boulevard of
De Batignolles and Clichy. To that darkness with which the city, in
fear of raiding aircraft, has hidden itself, was added the continuous,
pouring rain. In the light of our lamps, the wet, golden trees of the
black, silent boulevards shone strangely, and the illuminated
advertising kiosks which we passed, one after the other at the
corners of great streets, stood lonely and drenched, in the swift, white
touch of our radiance. Black and shiny, the asphalt roadway
appeared to go on in a straight line forever and forever.

Neither in residential, suburban Neuilly nor in deserted Montmartre
was there a light to be seen, but when we drew into the working
quarter of La Chapelle, lights appeared in the windows, as if some
toiler of the night was expected home or starting for his labor, and
vague forms, battling with the rain or in refuge under the awning of a
caf, were now and then visible. From the end of the great, mean rue
de La Chapelle the sounds of the unrest of the railroad yards began
to be heard, for this street leads to the freight-houses near the
fortifications. Our objective was a great freight station which the
Government, some months before, had turned into a receiving-post
for the wounded; it lay on the edge of the yard, some distance in from
the street, behind a huddle of smaller sheds and outbuildings. To our
surprise the rue de La Chapelle was strewn with ambulances rushing
from the station, and along two sides of the great yard, where the
merchandise trucks had formerly turned in, six or seven hundred
more ambulances were waiting. We turned out of the dark, rain-swept
city into this hurly-burly of shouts, snorting of engines, clashing of
gears, and whining of brakes, illuminated with a thousand inter-
neshing beams of headlights across whose brilliance the rain fell in
sloping, liquid rods. "Quick, a small car this way!" cried some one in
an authoritative tone, and number fifty-three ran up an inclined plane
into the enormous shed which had been reserved for the loading of
the wounded into the ambulances.

We entered a great, high, white-washed, warehouse kind of place,
about four hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, built of wood
evidently years before. In the middle of this shed was an open space,
and along the walls were rows of ambulances. Brancardiers
(stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were loading wounded
into these cars, and as soon as one car was filled, it would go out of
the hall and another would take its place. There was an infernal din;
the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was full of blue gasoline
fumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was increasing every
minute, were carried the wounded, often nothing but human bundles
of dirty blue cloth and fouled bandages. Every one of these wounded
soldiers was saturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly
to their overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with
its powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over
in a puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a
sinister mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a
wounded soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our
human relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven,
smelling of the trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his
wounds, the soldier comes from the train a sight for which only the
great heart of Francis of Assisi could have adequate pity.

Oiler and I went through an opening in a canvas partition into that part
of the great shed where the wounded were being unloaded from the
trains. In width, this part measured four hundred feet, but in length it
ran to eight hundred. In two rows of six each, separated by an aisle
about eight feet wide, were twelve little houses, about forty feet
square, built of stucco, each one painted a different color. The
woodwork of the exterior was displayed through the plaster in the
Elizabethan fashion, and the little sheds were clean, solidly built, and
solidly roofed. In one of these constructions was the bureau of the
staff which assigned the wounded to the hospitals, in another was a
fully equipped operating-room, and in the others, rows of stretcher-
horses, twenty-five to a side, on which the wounded were laid until a
hospital number had been assigned them. A slip, with these hospital
numbers on it, the names of the patients, and the color of the little
house in which they were to be found, was then given to the
chauffeur of an ambulance, who, with this slip in hand and followed by
a number of stretcher-bearers, immediately gathered his patients. A
specimen slip might run thus--"To Hospital 32, avenue de Ina,
Paul Chaubard, red barraque, Jules Adamy, green barraque, and
Alphonse Fort, ochre barraque."

To give a French touch to the scene, this great space, rapidly filling
with human beings in an appalling state of misery, as the aftermath of
the offensive broke on us, was decorated with evergreen trees and
shrubs so that the effect was that of an indoor fair or exhibition; you
felt as if you might get samples of something at each barraque, as
the French termed the little houses. To the side of these there was a
platform, and a sunken track running along the wall, and behind, a
great open space set with benches for those of the wounded able to
walk. Some fifty great, cylindrical braziers, which added a strange bit
of rosy, fiery color to the scene, warmed this space. When the
wounded had begun to arrive at about midnight, a regiment of
Zouaves was at hand to help the regular stretcher-bearers; these
Zouaves were all young, "husky" men dressed in the baggy red
trousers and short blue jacket of their classic uniform, and their
strength was in as much of a contrast to the weakness of those
whom they handled as their gay uniform was in contrast to the miry,
horizon blue of the combatants. There was something grotesque in
seeing two of these powerful fellows carrying to the wagons a dirty
blue bundle of a human being.

With a piercing shriek, that cut like a gash through the uproar of the
ambulance engines, a sanitary train, the seventh since midnight,
came into the station, and so smoothly did it run by, its floors on a
level with the main floor, that it seemed an illusion, like a stage train.
On the platform stood some Zouaves waiting to unload the
passengers, while others cleared the barraques and helped the
feeble to the ambulances. There was a steady line of stretchers going
out, yet the station was so full that hardly a bit of the vast floor space
was unoccupied. One walked down a narrow path between a sea of
bandaged bodies. Shouldering what baggage they had, those able to
walk plodded in a strange, slow tempo to the waiting automobiles. All
by themselves were about a hundred poor, ragged Germans,
wounded prisoners, brothers of the French in this terrible fraternity of
pain.

About four or five hundred assis (those able to sit up) were waiting on
benches at the end of the hall. Huddled round the rosy, flickering
braziers, they sat profoundly silent in the storm and din that moved
about them, rarely conversing with each other. I imagine that the
stupefaction, which is the physiological reaction of an intense
emotional and muscular effort, had not yet worn away. There were
fine heads here and there. Forgetful of his shattered arm, an old
fellow, with the face of Henri Quatre, eagle nose, beard, and all, sat
with his head sunken on his chest in mournful contemplation, and a
fine-looking, black-haired, dragoon kind of youth with the wildest of
eyes clung like grim death to a German helmet. The same expression
of resigned fatalism was common to all.

Sometimes the chauffeurs who were waiting for their clients got a
chance to talk to one of the soldiers. Eager for news, they clustered
round the wounded man, bombarding him with questions.

"Are the Boches retreating?"

"When did it begin?"

"Just where is the attack located?"

"Are things going well for us?"

The soldier, a big young fellow with a tanned face, somewhat pale
from the shock of a ripped-up forearm, answered the questions good-
naturedly, though the struggle had been on so great a scale that he
could only tell about his own hundred feet of trench. Indeed the
substance of his information was that there had been a terrible
bombardment of the German lines, and then an attack by the French
which was still in progress.

"Are we going to break clear through the lines?"

The soldier shrugged his shoulders. "They hope to," he replied.

Just beyond us, in one of the thousand stretchers on the floor, a
small bearded man had died. With his left leg and groin swathed in
bandages, he lay flat on his back, his mouth open, muddy, dirty, and
dead. From time to time the living on each side stole curious, timid
glances at him. Then, suddenly, some one noticed the body, and two
stretcher-bearers carried it away, and two more brought a living man
there in its place.

The turmoil continued to increase. At least a thousand motor-
ambulances, mobilized from all over the region of Paris, were now on
hand to carry away the human wreckage of the great offensive.
Ignorant of the ghastly army at its doors, Paris slept. The rain
continued to fall heavily.

"Eh la, comrade."

A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed me from
his stretcher.

"You speak French?"

I nodded.

"I am going to ask you to do me a favor--write to my wife who is
here in Paris, and tell her that I am safe and shall let her know at
once what hospital I am sent to. I shall be very grateful."

He let his shoulders sink to the stretcher again and I saw him now
and then looking for me in the crowd. Catching my eye, he smiled.

A train full of Algerian troops came puffing into the station, the uproar
hardly rising above the general hubbub. The passengers who were
able to walk got out first, some limping, some walking firmly with a
splendid Eastern dignity. These men were Arabs and Moors from
Algeria and Tunisia, who had enlisted in the colonial armies. There
was a great diversity of size and racial type among them, some being
splendid, big men of the type one imagines Othello to have been,
some chunkier and more bullet-headed, and others tall and lean with
interesting aquiline features. I fancy that the shorter, rounder-skulled
ones were those with a dash of black blood. The uniform, of khaki-
colored woolen, consisted of a simple, short-waisted jacket, big
baggy trousers, puttees, and a red fez or a steel helmet with the lunar
crescent and "R.F." for its device. We heard rumors about their
having attacked a village. Advancing in the same curious tempo as
the French, they passed to the braziers and the wooden benches.
Last of all from the train, holding his bandaged arm against his chest,
a native corporal with the features of a desert tribesman advanced
with superb, unconscious stateliness. As the Algerians sat round the
braziers, their uniforms and brown skins presented a contrast to the
pallor of the French in their bedraggled blue, but there was a marked
similarity of facial expression. A certain racial odor rose from the
Orientals.

My first assignment, two Algerians and two Frenchmen, took me to
an ancient Catholic high school which had just been improvised into a
hospital for the Oriental troops. It lay, dirty, lonely, and grim, just to
one side of a great street on the edge of Paris, and had not been
occupied since its seizure by the State. Turning in through an
enormous door, lit by a gas globe flaring and flickering in the torrents
of rain, we found ourselves in an enormous, dark courtyard, where a
half-dozen ambulances were already waiting to discharge their
clients. Along one wall there was a flight of steps, and from
somewhere beyond the door at the end of this stair shone the faintest
glow of yellow light.

It came from the door of a long-disused schoolroom, now turned into
the receiving-hall of this strange hospital. The big, high room was lit
by one light only, a kerosene hand lamp standing on the teacher's
desk, and so smoked was the chimney that the wick gave hardly
more light than a candle. There was just enough illumination to see
about thirty Algerians sitting at the school desks, their big bodies
crammed into the little seats, and to distinguish others lying in
stretchers here and there upon the floor. At the teacher's table a little
French adjutant with a trim, black mustache and a soldier interpreter
were trying to discover the identity of their visitors.

"Number 2215," (numro deux mille deux cent quinze), the officer
cried; and the interpreter, leaning over the adjutant's shoulder to read
the name, shouted, "Mhmet Ali."

There was no answer, and the Algerians looked round at each other,
for all the world like children in a school. It was very curious to see
these dark, heavy, wild faces bent over these disused desks.

"Number 2168" (numro deux mille cent soixante huit), cried the
adjutant.

"Abdullah Taleb," cried the interpreter.

"Moi," answered a voice from a stretcher in the shadows of the floor.

"Take him to room six," said the adjutant, indicating the speaker to a
pair of stretcher-bearers. In the quieter pauses the rain was heard
beating on the panes.

There are certain streets in Paris, equally unknown to tourist and
Parisian--obscure, narrow, cobble-stoned lanes, lined by walls
concealing little orchards and gardens. So provincial is their
atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to believe
one's self on the fringe of an old town, just where little bourgeois
villas begin to overlook the fields; but to consider one's self just
beyond the heart of Paris is almost incredible. Down such a street,
in a great garden, lay the institution to which our two Frenchmen
were assigned. We had a hard time finding it in the night and rain,
but at length, discovering the concierge's bell, we sent a vigorous
peal clanging through the darkness. Oiler lifted the canvas flap
of the ambulance to see about our patients.

"All right in there, boys?"

"Yes," answered a voice.

"Not cold?"

"Non. Are we at the hospital?"

"Yes; we are trying to wake up the concierge."

There was a sound of a key in a lock, and a small, dark woman
opened the door. She was somewhat spinstery in type, her thin, black
hair was neatly parted in the middle, and her face was shrewd, but
not unkindly.

"Deux blesss (two wounded), madame," said I.

The woman pulled a wire loop inside the door, and a far-off bell
tinkled.

"Come in," she said. "The porter will be here immediately."

We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and a
carbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall.

"Are they seriously wounded?" she asked.

"I cannot say."

A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a
small, beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber
boots, and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room.

"Two wounded have arrived," said the lady. "You are to help these
messieurs get out the stretchers."

The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance,
glowing red behind its curtain of rain.

"Mon Dieu, what a deluge!" he exclaimed, and followed us forth. With
an "Easy there," and "Lift now," we soon had both of our clients out of
the ambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, little
room, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy, stolid,
young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small,
nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes. The
mud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed,
beside the Victorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A
middle-aged servant--a big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature,
probably the porter's wife--entered, followed by two other women,
the last two wearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and
the same pattern of white wristlets and collar. We then carried the two
soldiers upstairs to a back room, where the old servant had filled a
kind of enamel dishpan with soapy water. Very gently and deftly the
beefy old porter and his wife took off the fouled, blood-stained
uniforms of the two fighting men, and washed their bodies, while she
who had opened the door stood by and superintended all. The
feverish, bright-eyed fellow seemed to be getting weaker, but the big
peasant conversed with the old woman in a low, steady tone, and told
her that there had been a big action.

When Oiler and I came downstairs, two little glasses of sherry and a
plate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us. There was something
distinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in the demeanor
of the two prim ladies who stood by. It roused my curiosity. Finally one
of them said:--

"Are you English, gentlemen?"

"No," we replied; "Americans."

"I thought you might be English," she replied in that language, which
she spoke very clearly and fluently. "Both of us have been many
years in England. We are French Protestant deaconesses, and this is
our home. It is not a hospital. But when the call for more
accommodations for the wounded came in, we got ready our two best
rooms. The soldiers upstairs are our first visitors."

The old porter came uneasily down the stair. "Mademoiselle Pierre
says that the doctor must come at once," he murmured, "the little
fellow (le petit) is not doing well."

We thanked the ladies gratefully for the refreshment, for we were cold
and soaked to the skin. Then we went out again to the ambulance
and the rain. A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning. Later in the
morning, I saw a copy of the "Matin" attached to a kiosk; it said
something about "Grande Victoire."

Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris,
bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle. For
three days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance
squads drove continuously. It was a terrible phase of the conflict to
see, but he who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the
soul of the war. Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that
were spiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in
its essence, profoundly animal.



Chapter III

The Great Swathe of the Lines

The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region
whence came the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself,
share the life of the French soldier. Late one evening in October, I
arrived in Nancy and went to a hotel I had known well before the war.
An old porter, a man of sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair,
and a florid face almost devoid of expression, carried up my luggage,
and as I looked at him, standing in the doorway, a simple figure in his
striped black and yellow vest and white apron, I wondered just what
effect the war had had on him. Through the open window of the room,
seen over the dark silhouette of the roofs of Nancy, shone the
glowing red sky and rolling smoke of the vast munition works at
Pompey and Frouard.

"You were not here when I came to the hotel two years ago," said I.

"No," he answered; "I have been here only since November, 1914."

"You are a Frenchman? There was a Swiss here, then."

"Yes, indeed, I am Franais, monsieur. The Swiss is now a waiter in a
caf of the Place Stanislas. It is something new to me to be a hotel
porter."

"Tiens. What did you do?"

"I drove a coal team, monsieur."

"How, then, did you happen to come here?"

"I used to deliver coal to the hotel. One day I heard that the Swiss
had gone to the caf to take the place of a garon whose class had
just been called out. I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks of
coal, and being always out of doors, so I applied for the porter's job."

"You are satisfied with the change."

"Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur."

"I suppose you have kinsmen at the front."

"Only my sister's son, monsieur."

"In the active forces?"

"No, he is a reservist. He is a man thirty-five years of age. He was
wounded by a shrapnel ball in the groin early in the spring, but is now
at the front again."

"What does he do en civil?"

"He is a furniture-maker, monsieur."

He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off down
the green velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator. In the
street below a crowd was coming out of the silky white radiance of the
lobby of a cinema into the violet rays thrown upon the sidewalk from
the illuminated sign over the theater door. There are certain French
cities to which the war has brought a real prosperity, and Nancy was
then one of them. The thousands of refugees from the frontier
villages and the world of military officials and soldier workmen
mobilized in the ammunition factories had added to the population till
it was actually greater than it had been before the war, and with this
new population had come a development of the city's commercial life.
The middle class was making money, the rich were getting richer, and
Nancy, hardly more than eighteen or nineteen miles from the
trenches, forgot its danger till, on the first day of January, 1916, the
Germans fired several shells from a giant mortar or a marine piece
into the town, one of which scattered the fragments of a big five-story
apartment house all over Nancy. And on that afternoon thirty
thousand people left the city.

The day on which I was to go across the great swathe of the front to
the first-line trenches dawned cool and sunny. I use the word
"swathe" purposely, for only by that image can the real meaning of
the phrase "the front" be understood. The thick, black line which
figures on the war-maps is a great swathe of country running, with a
thousand little turns and twists that do not interfere with its general
regularity, from the summits of the Vosges to the yellow dunes of the
North Sea. The relation of the border of this swathe to the world
beyond is the relation of sea to land along an irregular and indented
coast. Here an isolated, strategic point, fiercely defended by the
Germans, has extended the border of the swathe beyond the usual
limits, and villages thirteen and fourteen miles from the actual lines
have been pounded to pieces by long-range artillery in the hope of
destroying the enemy's communications; there the trenches cross an
obscure, level moor upon whose possession nothing particular
depends, and the swathe narrows to the villages close by the lines.
This swathe, which begins with the French communications, passes
the French trenches, leaps "No Man's Land," and continues beyond
the German trenches to the German communications, averages
about twenty-two miles in width. The territory within this swathe is
inhabited by soldiers, ruled by soldiers, worked by soldiers, and
organized for war.

Sometimes the transition between civilian life and the life of the
swathe is abrupt, as, for instance, at Verdun, where the villages
beyond the lines have been emptied of civilian inhabitants to make
room for the soldiery; but at other times the change is gradual and the
peasants continue to work fields almost in the shadow of the
trenches. Since the line of trenches was organized by the Germans
only after a series of engagements along the front, during which the
battle-line oscillated over a wide territory, the approach to the swathe
is often through a region of desolated villages sometimes far
removed from the present trenches. Such is the state of affairs in the
region of the Marne, the Argonne, and on the southern bank of the
Moselle. Moss-overgrown and silent, these villages often stand
deserted in the fields at the entrance to the swathe, fit heralds of the
desolation that lies beyond.

Imagine, then, the French half of the swathe extending from the edge
of the civilian world to the barbed-wire entanglements of No Man's
Land. Within this territory, in the trenches, in the artillery positions, in
the villages where troops are quartered (and they are quartered in
every village of the swathe), and along all the principal turns and
corners of the roads, a certain number of shells fall every twenty-four
hours, the number of shells per locality increasing as one advances
toward the first lines. There are certain disputed regions, that of
Verdun in particular, where literally the whole great swathe has been
pounded to pieces, till hardly one stone of a village remains on
another, and during the recent offensive in the Somme the British are
said to have systematically wiped out every village, hamlet, and road
behind the German trenches to a depth of eighteen miles. Yet,
protected from rifle bullets and the majority of shells by a great
wooded hill, the inhabitants of M------, one mile from the lines of the
Bois-le-Prtre, did a thriving business selling fruit to the soldiers, and
I once saw an old peasant woman, who was digging potatoes in her
garden when a small shell burst about two hundred feet from her,
shake her fist toward the German lines, mutter something, and plod
angrily home to her cellar. There are rarely any children close to the
trenches, but in villages that are only occasionally shelled, the school
is open, and the class hurries to the cellar at the first alarm.

The lieutenant of the American Section,  young Frenchman who
spoke English not only fluently, but also with distinction, came to
Nancy to take me to the front. It was a clear, sunny morning, and the
rumble of the commercial life of Nancy, somewhat later in starting
than our own, was just beginning to be heard. Across the street from
the breakfast-room of the hotel, a young woman wearing a little black
cape over her shoulders rolled up the corrugated iron shutter of a
confectioner's shop and began to set the window with the popular
patriotic candy boxes, aluminum models of a "seventy-five" shell tied
round with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a white
apron and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his
head; and from the nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant
dressed in a black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the
morning I was contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit
Nancy; that night I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire shells.

"Please give me all your military papers," said my officer. I handed
over all the cards, permits, and licenses that had been given me, and
he examined them closely.

"Allons, let us go," he said to his chauffeur, a young soldier wearing
the insignia of the motor-transportation corps.

"How long does it take us to get to the lines, mon lieutenant?"

"About an hour. Our headquarters are thirty kilomtres distant."

The big, war-gray Panhard began to move. I looked round, eager to
notice anything that marked our transition from peace to war. Beyond
the Nancy, built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay the
industrial Nancy which has grown up since the development of the
iron mines of French Lorraine in the eighties. Through this ugly
huddle we passed first: there were working men on the sidewalks,
gamins in the gutters,--nothing to remind one of the war.

"Halt!"

At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small,
gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car. From the door of a
neighboring wineshop, a hideous old woman, her uncombed, tawny
yellow hair messed round her coarse, shiny face, came out to look at
us.

"Your papers, please," said a red-faced, middle-aged sergeant
wearing a brown corduroy uniform, who, walking briskly on enormous
fat legs, had followed the sentry out into the street. The lieutenant
produced the military permit to travel in the army zone--the ordre de
mouvement, a printed form on a blue sheet about the size of a leaf of
typewriter paper.

"Pass," said the sergeant, and saluted. The sentry retired to his post
on the sidewalk. At the door of the wineshop the woman continued to
stare at us with an animal curiosity. Possibly our English-like uniforms
had attracted her attention; the French are very curious about les
Anglais. Over the roof of an ugly row of working men's barracks, built
of mortar and trimmed with dingy brick, came the uproar of a great
industry, the humming clang of saws, the ringing of iron on iron, and
the heart-beat thump of a great hammer that shook the earth. In a
vast, detached building five great furnaces were crowned with tufts of
pinkish fire, workmen were crossing the cindery yard dragging little
carts and long strips of iron, and a long line of open freight cars was
being emptied of coal.

"They are making shells," said the lieutenant in the tone that he might
have said, "They are making candy."

Another sentry held us up at the bridge where the road crosses the
Moselle as it issues from the highlands to the southwest.

Beyond the bridge, running almost directly north to Metz, lay the
historic valley of the Moselle. Great, bare hills, varying between seven
hundred and a thousand feet in height, and often carved by erosion
into strange, high triangles and abrupt mesas, formed the valley wall.
The ground color of the hills was a warm buff-brown with a good deal
of iron-red in it, and the sky above was of a light, friendly blue. A
strange, Egyptian emerald of new wheat, a certain deep cobalt of
cloud shadows, and a ruddy brownness of field and moor are the
colors of Lorraine. Here and there, on the meadows of the river and
the steep flanks of the hills, were ancient, red-roofed villages. Across
the autumnal fields the smoke and flame of squalid Pompey loomed
strangely.

There were signs of the war at Marbache, fourteen kilomtres from
Nancy, slight signs, to be sure, but good ones--the presence of a
military smithy for the repair of army wagons, several of which stood
by on rusty wheels, and a view of some twenty or thirty artillery
caissons parked under the trees. But it was at B------, sixteen
kilomtres from Nancy, and sixteen from the lines, that I first felt the
imminence of the war. The morning train from Nancy had just
stopped, to go no farther for fear of shells, and beyond the station the
tracks of the once busy Nancy-Metz railroad advanced, rusty,
unused, and overgrown with grass, into the danger zone. Far behind
now lay civilian Pompey, and Marbache shared by soldiers and
civilians. B------ was distinctly a village of the soldiery. The little
hamlet, now the junction where the wagon-trains supplying the
soldiery meet the great artery of the railroad, was built on the banks of
a canal above the river. The color of these villages in Lorraine is
rather lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the local buff-yellow
stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown tone that goes well with
the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown landscape. A glorious sky of
silvery white cloud masses, pierced with sunlight and islanded with
soft blue, shone over the soldier village. There were no combatants in
it when we passed through, only the old poilus who drove the wagons
to the trenches and the army hostlers who looked after the animals.
There were pictures of soldier grooms leading horses down a narrow,
slimy street between brown, mud-spattered walls to a drinking-trough;
of horses lined up along a house wall being briskly curry-combed by
big, thick-set fellows in blousy white overalls and blue fatigue caps;
and of doors of stables opening on the road showing a bedding of
brown straw on the earthen floor. There was a certain stench, too, the
smell of horse-fouled mud that mixed with that odor I later was able to
classify as the smell of war. For the war has a smell that clings to
everything miltary, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, and cantonments,
and saturates one's own clothing, a smell compounded of horse,
chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human beings. At the guarded exit
of the village to the shell zone was a little military cemetery in which
rows of wooden crosses stood with the regularity of pins in a paper.

Two kilomtres farther on, at Dieulouard, we drew into the shell zone.
A cottage had been struck the day before, and the shell, arriving by
the roof, had blown part of the front wall out into the street. In the
faade of the house, to the left of a door hanging crazily on its hinges,
an irregular oval hole, large enough to drive a motor-car through, rose
from the ground and came to a point just below the overhang of the
roof. The edges of the broken stone were clean and new in contrast
to the time-soiled outer wall of the dwelling.

A pile of this clean stone lay on the ground at the outer opening of the
orifice, mixed with fragments of red tiles.

"They killed two there yesterday," said the lieutenant, pointing out the
dbris.

The village, a farming hamlet transformed by the vicinity of a great
foundry into something neither a village nor a town, was full of
soldiers; there were soldiers in the streets, soldiers standing in
doorways, soldiers cooking over wood fires, soldiers everywhere. And
looking at the muddy village-town full of men in uniforms of blue, old
uniforms of blue, muddy uniforms of blue, in blue that was blue-gray
and blue-green from wear and exposure to the weather, I realized
that the old days of beautiful, half-barbaric uniforms were gone
forever, and that, in place of the old romantic war of cavalry charges
and great battles in the open, a new, more terrible war had been
created, a war that had not the chivalric externals of the old.

After Dieulouard began the swathe of stillness.

Following the western bank of the canal of the Moselle the road made
a great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and
then mounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur the road
went through lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses
surrounded by acres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in
their weedy profusion. Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great
burlap screens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect
of a continuous line when seen from a certain angle.

"What are those for?"

"To hide the road from the Germans. Do you see that little village
down there on the crest? The Boches have an observatory there,
and shell the road whenever they see anything worth shelling."

A strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and
decay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued to shine
on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the world
was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed. A
village lay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells and half deserted.
Beyond the still, shell-spattered houses, a great wood rose, about a
mile and a half away, on a ridge that stood boldly against the sky.
Running from the edge of the trees down across an open slope to the
river was a brownish line that stood in a little contrast to the yellower
grass. Suddenly, there slowly rose from this line a great puff of
grayish-black smoke which melted away in the clear, autumnal air.

"See," said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he
would have shown at a bonfire--"those are the German trenches. We
have just fired a shell into them."

Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of Pont--
Mousson. The road was now everywhere screened carefully with
lengths of light-brown burlap, and there was not a single house that
did not bear witness to the power of a shell. The sense of "the front"
began to possess me, never to go, the sense of being in the vicinity
of a tremendous power. A ruined village, or a deserted town actually
on the front does not bring to mind any impression of decay, for the
intellect tends rather to consider t\& means by which the destruction
has been accomplished. One sees villages of the swathes so
completely blown to pieces that they are literally nothing but earthy
mounds of rubbish, and seeing them thus, in a plain still fiercely
disputed night and day between one's own side and the invisible
enemy, the mind feels itself in the presence of force, titanic, secret,
and hostile.

Beyond Pont--Mousson the road led directly to the trenches of the
Bois-le-Prtre, less than half a mile away. But the disputed trenches
were hidden behind the trees, and I could not see them. Through the
silence of the deserted town sounded the muffled boom of shells and
trench engines bursting in the wood beyond, and every now and then
clouds of gray-black smoke from the explosion would rise above the
brown leaves of the ash trees. The smoke of these explosions rose
straight upwards in a foggy column, such as a locomotive might make
if, halted on its tracks somewhere in the wood, it had put coal on its
fires.

With the next day I began my service at the trenches, but the war
began for me that very night.

A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted apartment
house had been assigned me. It was nine o'clock, and I was getting
ready to roll up in my blankets and go to sleep. Beneath the starlit
heavens the street below was black as pitch save when a trench
light, floating serenely down the sky, illuminated with its green-white
glow the curving road and the line of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous
villas. There was not a sound to be heard outside of an occasional
rifle shot in the trenches, sounding for all the world like the click of
giant croquet balls. I went round to the rear of the house and looked
out of the kitchen windows to the lines. A little action, some quarrel of
sentries, perhaps, was going on behind the trees, just where the
wooded ridge sloped to the river. Trench light after trench light rose,
showing the disused railroad track running across the un-harvested
fields. Gleaming palely through the French window at which I was
standing, the radiance revealed the deserted kitchen, the rusty stove,
the dusty pans, and the tarnished water-tap above the stone sink.
The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke upon my ears.

My own room was lit by the yellow flame of a solitary candle, rising,
untroubled by the slightest breath of wind, straight into the air. A large
rug of old-rose covered the floor, an old-rose velvet canopy draped a
long table, hanging down at the corners in straight, heavy creases,
and the wallpaper was a golden yellow with faint stripes of silvery-gray
glaze. By the side of the wooden bed stood a high cabinet holding
about fifty terra-cotta and porcelain figurines, shiny shepherdesses
with shiny pink cheeks, Louis XV peasants with rakes on their
shoulders, and three little dogs made of a material the color of cocoa.
The gem of the collection was an eighteenth-century porcelain of a
youth and a maid sitting on opposite sides of a curved bench over
whose center rose a blossoming bush. The youth, dressed in black,
and wearing yellow stockings, looked with an amorous smile at the
girl in her gorgeous dress of flowering brocade.

A marbly-white fireplace stood in the corner, overhung by a great
Louis XV mirror with a gilt frame of rich, voluptuous curves. On the
mantel lay a scarf of old-rose velvet smelling decidedly musty. Alone,
apart, upon this mantel, as an altar, stood a colored plaster bust of
Jeanne d'Arc, showing her in the beauty of her winsome youth. The
pale, girlish face dominated the shadowy room with its dreamy,
innocent loveliness.

There came a knock at the door, and so still was the town and the
house that the knock had the effect of something dramatic and
portentous. A big man, with bulging, pink cheeks, a large, chestnut
mustache, and brown eyes full of philosophic curiosity, stood in the
doorway. The uniform that he was wearing was unusually neat and
clean.

"So you are the American I am to have as neighbor," said he.

"Yes," I replied.

"I am the caporal in charge of the dpt of the engineers in the
cellar," continued my visitor, "and I thought I'd come in and see how
you were."

I invited him to enter.

"Do you find yourself comfortable here, son?"

"Yes. I consider myself privileged to have the use of the room. Have
a cigarette?"

"Are these American cigarettes?"

"Yes."

"Your American tobacco is fine, son. But in America everybody is a
millionaire and has the best of everything--isn't that so? I should like
to go to America."

"A Frenchman is never happy out of France."

Comfortably seated in a big, ugly chair, he puffed his cigarette and
meditated.

"Perhaps you are right," he admitted. "We Frenchmen love the good
things, and think we can get them in France better than anywhere
else. The solid satisfactions of life--good wine--good cheese." He
paused. "You see, son, all that (tout a) is an affair of mine--in
civilian life (dans le civil) I am a grocer at Macon in Bourgogne."

For a little while we talked of Burgundy, which I had often visited in my
student days at Lyons. There came another pause, and the
Burgundian said:--

"Well, what do you think of this big racket (ce grand fracas)?"

"I have not seen enough of it to say."

"Well, I think you are going to get a taste of it to-night. I heard our
artillery men (nos artiflots) early this morning firing their long-range
cannon, and every time they do that the Boches throw shells into
Pont--Mousson. I have been expecting an answer all day. If they
start in to-night, get up and come down cellar, son. This house was
struck by a shell two weeks ago."

The shadowy, candlelit room and the dark city became at his words
more mysterious and hostile. The atmosphere seemed pervaded by
some obscure, endless, dreadful threat. It was getting toward ten
o'clock.

"Is this the only room you have? I have never been in this suite."

"No, there is another room. Would you like to see it?"

He followed me into a small chamber from which everything had been
stripped except a bedside table, a chair, and a crayon portrait of a
woman. The picture, slightly tinted with flesh color, was that of a
bourgeoise on the threshold of the fifties, and the still candle-flame
brought out in distinct relief the heavy, obese countenance, the hair
curled in artificial ringlets, and the gold crucifix which she wore on her
large bosom. The Burgundian's attention centered on this picture,
which he examined with the air of a connoisseur of female beauty.

"Lord, how ugly she is!" he exclaimed. "She might well have stayed.
Such an old dragon would have no reason to fear the Boches." And
he laughed heartily from his rich lips and pulled his mustache.

"Don't forget to hurry to the cellar, son," he called as he went away.

At his departure the lonely night closed in on me again. Far, far away
sounded the booming of cannon.

I am a light sleeper, and the arrival of the first shell awakened me.
Kicking off my blankets, I sat up in bed just in time to catch the swift
ebb of a heavy concussion. A piece of glass, dislodged from a broken
pane by the tremor, fell in a treble tinkle to the floor. For a minute or
two there was a full, heavy silence, and then several objects rolled
down the roof and fell over the gutters into the street. It sounded as if
some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto the house-roof from the
height of the clouds. Another silence followed. Suddenly it was
broken by a swift, complete sound, a heavy boom-roar, and on the
heels of this noise came a throbbing, whistling sigh that, at first faint
as the sound of ocean on a distant beach, increased with incredible
speed to a whistling swish, ending in a HISH of tremendous volume
and a roaring, grinding burst. The sound of a great shell is never a
pure bang; one hears, rather, the end of the arriving HISH, the
explosion, and the tearing disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one
grinding hammer-blow of terrific violence. On the heels of this second
shell came voices in the dark street, and the rosy glow of fire from
somewhere behind. More lumps, fragments of shell that had been
shot into the air by the explosion, rained down upon the roof. I got up
and went to the kitchen window. A house on one of the silent streets
between the city and the lines was on fire, great volumes of smoke
were rolling off into the starlit night, and voices were heard all about
murmuring in the shadows. I hurried on my clothes and went down to
the cellar.

The light of two candles hanging from a shelf in loops of wire revealed
a clean, high cellar; a mess of straw was strewn along one wall, and a
stack of shovels and picks, some of them wrapped in paper, was
banked against the other. In the straw lay three oldish men, fully clad
in the dark-blue uniform which in old times had signaled the Engineer
Corps; one dozed with his head on his arm, the other two were
stretched out flat in the mysterious grossness of sleep. A door from
the cellar to a sunken garden was open, and through this opening
streamed the intense radiance of the rising fire. At the opening stood
three men, my visitor of the evening, a little, wrinkled man with
Napoleon III whiskers and imperial, and an old, dwarfish fellow with a
short neck, a bullet head, and close-clipped hair. Catching sight of
me, the Burgundian said:--

"Well, son, you see it is hammering away (a tape) ce soir."

Hearing another shell, he slammed the door, and stepped to the right
behind the stone wall of the cellar.

"Very bad," croaked the dwarf. "The Boches are throwing fire shells."

"And they will fire shrapnel at the poor bougres who have to put out
the fires," said the little man with the imperial.

"So they will, those knaves," croaked the dwarf in a voice entirely free
from any emotion. "That fire must be down on the Boulevard Ney,"
said the bearded man.

"There is another beginning just to the right," said the Burgundian in
the tone of one retailing interesting but hardly useful information.

"There will be others," croaked the dwarf, who, leaning against the
cellar wall, was trying to roll a cigarette with big, square, fumbling
fingers. And looking at a big, gray-haired man in the hay, who had
turned over and was beginning to snore, he added: "Look at the new
man. He sleeps well, that fellow" (ce type l).

"He looks like a Breton," said the man with the imperial.

"An Auvergnat--an Auvergnat," replied the dwarf in a tone that was
meant to be final.

The soldier, who had just been sent down from Paris to take the
place of another recently invalided home, snored on, unconscious of
our scrutiny. The light from the fires outside cast a rosy glow on his
weather-worn features and sparse, silvery hair. His own curiosity
stirred, the corporal looked at his list.

"He came from Lyons," he announced. "His name is Alphonse
Reboulet."

"I am glad he is not an Auvergnat," growled the dwarf. "We should
have all had fleas."

A shell burst very near, and a bitter odor of explosives came swirling
through the doorway. A fragment of the shell casing struck a window
above us, and a large piece of glass fell by the doorway and broke
into splinters. The first fire was dying down, but two others were
burning briskly. The soldiers waited for the end of the bombardment,
as they might have waited for the end of a thunderstorm.

"Tiens--here comes the shrapnel," exclaimed the Burgundian. And he
slammed the door swiftly.

A high, clear whistle cleaved the flame-lit sky, and about thirty small
shrapnel shells burst beyond us.

"They try to prevent any one putting out the fires," said the
Burgundian confidentially. "They get the range from the light of the
flames."

Another dreadful rafale (volley) of shrapnel, at the rate of ten or
fifteen a minute, came speeding from the German lines.

"They are firing on the other house, now."

"Who puts out the fires?"

"The territorials who police and clean up the town. Some of them live
two doors below."

The Burgundian pointed down the garden to a door opening, like our
own, on to an area below the level of the street. Suddenly, a gate
opening on a back lane swung back, and two soldiers entered, one
carrying the feet and the other the shoulders of a third. The body
hung clumsily between them like a piece of old sacking.

"Tiens--someone is wounded," said the Burgundian. "Go, thou,
Badel, and see who it is."

The dwarf plodded off obediently.

"It is Palester," he announced on his return, "the type that had the
swollen jaw last month."

"What's the matter with him?"

"He's been killed."




Chapter IV

La Fort De Bois-Le-Pretre


Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare,
desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to
the river in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to the
northward-flowing stream. The town of Pont--Mousson lies an apron
of meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of
Puvenelle and the ridge of the Bois-le-Prtre. The latter is the highest
of all the spurs of the valley. Rising from the river about half a mile to
the north of the city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, and
was seen from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking
the sky-line to the northwest. The hamlet of Maidires, in which our
headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a
point where the amphitheater of Pont--Mousson, crowding between
the two ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the
west.

The Bois-le-Prtre dominated at once the landscape and our minds.
Its existence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty thousand
Frenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled Americans; it had
dominated and ended the lives of the dead; it would dominate the
imagination of the future. Yet, looking across the brown walls and
claret roofs of the hamlet of Maidires, there was nothing to be seen
but a grassy slope, open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a
villa burned by a fire shell, and a wood. The autumn had turned the
leaves of the trees, seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown,
and in almost all lights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish
slate. Such was the forest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost
more lives than any other point along the line. The wood had been
contested trench by trench, literally foot by foot. It was at once the key
to the Saint-Mihiel salient and the city of Metz.

The Saint-Mihiel salient--"the hernia," as the French call it--begins at
the Bois-le-Prtre. Pivoting on The Wood, the lines turn sharply
inland, cross the desolate plateau of La Woevre, attain the Meuse at
Saint-Mihiel, turn again, and ascend the river to the Verdunois. The
salient, as dangerous for the Germans as it is troublesome for the
French, represents the limit of a German offensive directed against
Toul in October, 1914. That the French retreated was due to the fact
that the plateau was insufficiently protected, many of the regiments
having been rushed north to the great battle then raging on the Aisne.

Only one railroad center lies in the territory of the salient, Thiaucourt
in Woevre. This pleasant little moorland town, locally famous for its
wine, is connected with Metz by two single-track railroad lines, one
coming via Conflans, and the other by Arnaville on the Moselle. At
Vilcey-sur-Mad, these lines unite, and follow to Thiaucourt the only
practicable railroad route, the valley of the Rupt (brook) de Mad.

Thus the domination of Thiaucourt, or the valley of the Rupt de Mad,
by French artillery would break the railroad communications between
the troops keeping the salient and their base of supplies, Metz. And
the fate of Metz itself hangs on the control of the Bois-le-Prtre.

Metz is the heart of the German organization on the western front: the
railroad center, the supply station, the troop dpt. A blow at Metz
would affect the security of every German soldier between Alsace
and the Belgian frontier. But if the French can drive the Germans out
of the Bois-le-Prtre and establish big howitzers on the crest the
Germans are still holding, there will soon be no more Metz. The
French guns will destroy the city as the German cannon destroyed
Verdun.

When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the battles
of September and October, 1914, they took to the ground on the
heights of the Bois-le-Prtre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt
and Metz to preserve these centers from the danger of being shelled.
On the crest of the highest ridge along the valley, admirably
ambushed in a thick forest, they waited for the coming of the French.
And the French came.

They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster,
rich young noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood,
upheld by one vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from
behind the German lines to the town of Thiaucourt. In the trenches
behind the slaty trunks of the great ash trees, Bavarian peasants,
Saxons, and round-headed Wurttem-burgers, the olive-green, jack-
booted Boches, awaited their coming, determined to hold the wood,
the salient, and the city.

A year later the Bois-le-Prtre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume of
ecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in an old
church, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of Death).

The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer
residence of a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the beginning
of the war. If there is an architectural style of German origin known as
the "Neo-Classic," which affects large, windowless spaces framed in
pilasters of tile, and decorations and insets of omelet-yellow and
bottle-green glazed brick, "Wisteria Villa" is of that school. It stood
behind a high wall of iron spikes on the road leading from Maidires
to the trenches, a high, Germano-Pompeian country house, topped
by a roof rich in angles, absurd windows, and unexpected gables.
There are huge, square, French-roofed houses in New England
villages built by local richessmes of Grant's time, and still called by
neighbors "the Jinks place" or the "Levi Oates place"; Wisteria Villa
had something of the same social relation to the commune of
Maidires. Grotesque and ugly, it was not to be despised; it had
character in its way.

Our social center was the dining-room of the villa. Exclusive of the
kitchen range, it boasted the only stove in the house, a queerly
shaped "Salamandre," a kind of Franklin stove with mica doors. The
walls were papered an ugly chocolate brown with a good deal of red
in it, and the borders, doors, and fireplace frame were stained a color
trembling between mission green and oak brown. The room was
rectangular and too high for its width. There were pictures. On each
side of the fireplace, profiles toward the chimney, hung concave
plaques of Dutch girls. To the left of the door was a yellowed etching
of the tower of the chteau of Heidelberg, and to the right a very small
oil painting, in an ornate gilt frame three inches deep, of a beach by
moonlight. About two or three hundred books, bound in boards and
red leather, stood behind the cracked glass of a bookcase in the
corner; they were very "jeune fille," and only the romances of
Georges Ohnet appeared to have been read. The thousand
cupboards of the house were full of dusty knickknacks, old umbrellas,
hats, account-books, and huge boxes holding the dbris of sets of
checkers, dominoes, and ivory chessmen. An enlarged photograph
of the family hung on the walls of a bedroom; it had been taken at
somebody's marriage, and showed the group standing on the front
steps, the same steps that were later to be blown to pieces by a shell.
One saw the bride, the groom, and about twenty relatives, including a
boy in short trousers, a wide, white collar, and an old-fashioned, fluffy
bow tie. Anxious to be included in the picture, the driver of the bridal
barouche has craned his neck forward. On the evidence of the
costumes, the picture had been taken about 1902.

Our bureau in the cellar of Wisteria Villa was connected directly with
the trenches. When a man had been wounded, he was carried to the
poste de secours in the rear lines, and it was our duty to go to this
trench post and carry the patient to the hospital at the nearest rail-
head. The bureau of the Section was in charge of two Frenchmen
who shared the labor of attending to the telephone and keeping the
books.

A hundred yards beyond Wisteria Villa, at a certain corner, the
principal road to the trenches divided into three branches, and in
order to interfere as much as possible with communications, the
Germans daily shelled this strategic point. A comrade and I had the
curiosity to keep an exact record of a week's shelling. It must be
remembered that the corner was screened from the Germans, who
fired casually in the hope of hitting something and annoying the
French. The cannons shelling the corner were usually "seventy-
sevens," the German quick-firing pieces that correspond to the
French "seventy-fives."

Monday, ten shells at 6.30, two at 7.10, five at 11.28, twenty at
intervals between 2.15 and 2.45, a swift rafale of some sixteen at
4.12, another rafale of twenty at 8, and occasional shells between 9
and midnight.

Tuesday, two big shells at mid-day.

Wednesday, rafales at 9.14, 11, 2.18, 4.30, and 6.20.

Thursday--no shells.

Friday, twelve at intervals between 10.16 and 12.20. Solitary big shell
at 1.05. Another big shell at 3. Some fifteen stray shells between 5
and midnight.

Saturday--no shells.

Sunday--About five shells an hour between 4 in the afternoon and
midnight.

I give the number of shells falling at this corner as a concrete
instance of what was happening at a dozen other points along the
road. The fire of the German batteries was as capricious as the play
of a search-light; one week, the corner and three or four other points
would catch it, the next week the corner and another set of localities.
And there were periods, sometimes ten days to two weeks long,
when hardly a shell was fired at any road. Then, after a certain sense
of security had begun to take form, a rafale would come screaming
over, blow a horse and wagon to pieces, and leave one or two blue
figures huddled in the mud. But the French replied to each shell and
every rafale, in addition to firing at random all the day and a good
deal of the night. There was hardly a night that Wisteria Villa did not
rock to the sound of French guns fired at 2 and 3 in the morning. But
the average day at Pont--Mousson was a day of random silences.
The war had all the capricious-ness of the sea--of uncertain weather.
There were hours of calm in the day, during which the desolate
silence of the front flooded swiftly over the landscape; there were
interruptions of great violence, sometimes desultory, sometimes
beginning, in obedience to a human will, at a certain hour. The
outbreak would commence with the orderliness of a clock striking,
and continue the greater part of the day, rocking the deserted town
with its clamor. Hearing it, the soldiers en repos would say, talking of
The Wood, "It sings (a chante)," or, "It knocks (a tape) up there to-
day." The smoke of the bursting shells hung over The Wood in a
darkish, gray-blue fog. But since The Wood had a personality for us,
many would say simply, "Listen to The Wood."

The shell expresses one idea--energy. The cylinder of iron, piercing
the air at a terrific speed, sings a song of swift, appalling energy, of
which the final explosion is the only fitting culmination. One gets, too,
an idea of an unbending volition in the thing. After a certain time at
the front the ear learns to distinguish the sound of a big shell from a
small shell, and to know roughly whether or not one is in the danger
zone. It was a grim jest with us that it took ten days to qualify as a
shell expert, and at the end of two weeks all those who qualified
attended the funeral of those who had failed. Life at The Wood had
an interesting uncertainty.

A quarter of a mile beyond the corner, on the slope of Puvenelle
opposite The Wood, stood Montauville, the last habitable village of
the region. To the south of it rose the wooded slopes of Puvenelle; to
the north, seen across a marshy meadow, were the slope and the
ridge of the Bois-le-Prtre. The dirty, mud-spattered village was
caught between the leathery sweeps of two wooded ridges. Three
winding roads, tramped into a pie of mire, crossed the grassy slope of
The Wood, and disappeared into the trees at the top. Though less
than a mile from the first German line, the village, because of its
protection from shells by a spur of the Bois-le-Prtre, was in
remarkably good condition; the only building to show conspicuous
damage being the church, whose steeple had been twice struck. It
was curious to see pigeons flying in and out of the belfry through the
shell rents in the roof. Here and there, among the uncultivated fields
of those who had fled, were the green fields of some one who had
stayed. A woman of seventy still kept open her grocery shop; it was
extraordinarily dirty, full of buzzing flies, and smelled of spilled wine.

"Why did you stay?" I asked her.

"Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course my daughter
wanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I, who have been
to Nancy only once! A fine figure I should make in Dijon in my
sabots!"

"And you are not afraid of the shells?"

"Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But I
never leave my shop."

And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front,
Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate.
But Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a man
killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of twenty-
one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of weariness. He
complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartily that the whole
affaire--meaning the war in general--was finished. He was very
anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going to
win. Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the
Boches seemed to be in his mind. I assured him that American
opinion was optimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and
strolled away. Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a "seventy-seven"
shell, arriving without warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch
to the wall, I saw the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he
were a rubber effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had
suddenly ripped the envelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending
from the waist, leaned face down into the mud. I was the first to get to
him. The young, discontented face was full of the gray street mud,
there was mud in the hollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the fluffy
mustache. A chunk of the shell had ripped open the left breast to the
heart. Down his sleeve, as down a pipe, flowed a hasty drop, drop,
drop of blood that mixed with the mire.

Several times a day, at stated hours, the numbers of German
missiles that had fallen into the trenches of the Bois-le-Prtre,
together with French answers to them, would be telephoned to
headquarters. The soldier in charge of the telephone was an
instructor in Latin in a French provincial university, a tall, stoop-
shouldered man, with an indefinite, benevolent smile curiously framed
on thin lips. Probably very much of a scholar by training and feeling,
he had accepted his military destiny, and was as much a poilu as
anybody. During his leisure hours he was busy writing a "Comparison
of the Campaign on the Marne and the Aisne with Caesar's battles
against the Belgian Confederacy." He had a paper edition of the
Gallic Wars which he carried round with him. One day he explained
his thesis to me. He drew a plan with a green pencil on a piece of
paper.

"See, mon ami," he exclaimed, "here is the Aisne, Caesar's Axona;
here is Berry-au-Bac; here was Caesar, here were the invaders, here
was General French, here Foch, here Von Kluck. Curious, isn't it--two
thousand years afterward?" His eyes for an instant filled with dreamy
perplexity. A little while later I would hear him mechanically
telephoning. "Poste A--five 'seventy-seven' shells, six mines, twelve
trench shells; answer--ten 'seventy-five' shells, eight mines, eighteen
trench shells; Poste B--two 'seventy-seven' shells, one mine, six
grenades; answer--fifteen 'seventy-five' shells; Poste C--one 'two
hundred and ten' shell, fifty mines; answer--sixty mines; Poste D--"

At Dieulouard I had entered the shell zone; at Pont--Mousson, I
crossed the borders of the zone of quiet; at Montauville began the
last zone--the zone of invisibility and violence. Civilian life ended at
the western end of the village street with the abruptness of a man
brought face to face with a high wall. Beyond the village a road was
seen climbing the grassy slope of Puvenelle, to disappear as it
neared the summit of the ridge in a brown wood. It was just an
ordinary hill road of Lorraine, but the fact that it was the direct road
to the trenches invested this climbing, winding, silent length with
extraordinary character. The gate of the zone of violence, every foot
of it bore some scar of the war, now trivial, now gigantic--always
awesome in the power and volition it revealed. One passed from the
sight of a brown puddle, scooped in the surface of the street by an
exploding shell, to a view of a magnificent ash tree splintered by
some projectile. It is a very rare thing to see a sinister landscape, but
this whole road was sinister. I used to discuss this sinister quality with
a distinguished French artist who as a poilu was the infirmier, or
medical service man, attached to a squad of engineers working in a
quarry frequently shelled. In this frightful place we discussed la qualit
du sinistre dans l'art (the sinister in art) as calmly as if we were two
Parisian critics sitting on the benches of the Luxembourg Gardens.
As the road advanced into the wood, there was hardly a wayside tree
that had not been struck by a shell. Branches hung dead from trees,
twigs had been lopped off by stray fragments, great trunks were split
apart as if by lightning. "Nature as Nature is never sinister," said the
artist; "it is when there is a disturbance of the relations between
Nature and human life that you have the sinister. Have you ever seen
the villages beyond Ravenna overwhelmed by the bogs? There you
see the sinister. Here Man is making Nature unlivable for Man." He
stroked his fine silky beard meditatively--"This will all end when the
peasants plant again." As we talked, a shell, intended for the batteries
behind, burst high above us.

Skirting the ravine, now wooded, between Puvenelle and the Bois-le-
Prtre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon the high
plateau of La Woevre; the last kilomtre being in full view of the
Germans entrenched on the ridge across the rapidly narrowing, rising
ravine. Along this visible space the trees and bushes by the roadside
were matted by shell fire into an inextricable confusion of destruction,
and through the wisps and splinters of this ruin was seen the ridge of
the Bois-le-Prtre rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At length the
forest of Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Prtre ended together
in a rolling sweep of furzy fields cut off to the west and north by a vast
billow of the moor which, like the rim of a saucer, closed the wide
horizon. Continuing straight ahead, the Puvenelle road mounted this
rise, dipped and disappeared. Halfway between the edge of the forest
of Puvenelle and this crest stood an abandoned inn, a commonplace
building made of buff-brown moorland stone trimmed with red brick.
Close by this inn, at right angles to the Puvenelle road, another road
turned to the north and likewise disappeared over the lift in the moor.
At the corner stood a government signpost of iron slightly bent back,
bearing in gray-white letters on its clay-blue plaque the legend--
Thiaucourt, 12 kilomtres Metz, 25 kilomtres.

There was not a soul anywhere in sight; I was surrounded with
evidences of terrific violence--the shattered trees, the shell holes in
the road, the brown-lipped craters in the earth of the fields, the
battered inn; but there was not a sign of the creators of this
devastation. A northwest wind blew in great salvos across the
mournful, lonely plateau, rippling the furze, and brought to my ears
the pounding of shells from behind the rise. When I got to this rim a
soldier, a big, blond fellow of the true Gaulois type with drooping
yellow mustaches, climbed slowly out of a hole in the ground. The
effect was startling. I had arrived at the line where the earth of France
completely swallows up the army. This disappearance of life in a
decor of intense action is one of the most striking things of the war. All
about in the surface of the earth were little, square, sooty holes that
served as chimneys, and here and there rectangular, grave-like
openings in the soil showing three or four big steps descending to a
subterranean hut. Fifty feet away not a sign of human life could be
distinguished. Six feet under the ground, framed in the doorway of a
hut, a young, black-haired fellow in a dark-brown jersey stood smiling
pleasantly up at us; it was he who was to be my guide to the various
postes and trenches that I had need to know. He came up to greet
me.

"Better bring him down here," growled a voice from somewhere in the
earth. "There have been bullets crossing the road all afternoon."

"I am going to show him the Quart-en-Rserve first."

The Quart-en-Rserve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of the
Bois-le-Prtre which, because of its situation on the crest of the great
ridge, had been the most fiercely contested. We crept up on the edge
of the ridge and looked over. An open, level field some three hundred
yards wide swept from the Thiaucourt road to the edges of the Bois-
le-Prtre; across this field ran in the most confused manner a strange
pattern of brown lines that disappeared among the stumps and poles
of the haggard wood to the east. To the northwest of this plateau, on
the road ahead of us, stood a ruined village caught in the torment of
the lines. Here and there, in some twenty or thirty places scattered
over the scarred plateau, the smoke of trench shells rose in little
curling puffs of gray-black that quickly dissolved in the wind.

"The Quart is never quiet," said my guide. "It is now half ours, half
theirs."

Close to the ground, a blot of light flashed swifter than a stroke of
lightning, and a heavier, thicker smoke rolled away.

"That is one of ours. We are answering their trench shells with an
occasional 'one hundred and twenty."

"How on earth is it that everybody is not killed?"

"Because the regiment has occupied the Quart so long that we know
every foot, every turn, every shelter of it. When we see a trench shell
coming, we know just where to go. It is only the newcomers who get
killed. Two months past, when a new regiment occupied the Quart
during our absence en repos, it lost twenty-five men in one day."

The first trench that I entered was a simple trench about seven feet
deep, with no trimmings whatsoever, just such a trench as might
have been dug for the accommodation of a large water conduit. We
walked on a narrow board walk very slippery with cheesy, red-brown
mire. From time to time the hammer crash of a shell sounded
uncomfortably near, and bits of dirt and pebbles, dislodged by the
concussion, fell from the wall of the passage. The only vista was the
curving wall of the long communication trench and the soft sky of
Lorraine, lit with the pleasant sunlight of middle afternoon, and
islanded with great golden-white cloud masses. My guide and I might
have been the last persons left in a world of strange and terrible
noises. The boyau (communication trench) began to turn and wind
about in the most perplexing manner, and we entered a veritable
labyrinth. This extraordinary, baffling complexity is due primarily to the
fact that the trenches advance and retreat, rise and fall, in order to
take advantage of the opportunities for defense afforded by every
change in the topography of the region. I remember one area along
the front consisting of two round, grassy hills divided by a small,
grassy valley whose floor rose gently to a low ridge connecting the
two heights. In this terrain the defensive line began on the first hill as
a semicircle edging the grassy slopes presented to the enemy, then
retreated, sinking some forty feet, to take advantage of the
connecting link of upland at the head of the ravine, and took
semicircular form again on the flat, broad summit of the second hill. In
the meadows at the base of these hills a brook flowing from the
ravine had created a great swamp, somewhat in the shape of a
wedge pointing outward from the mouth of the valley. The lines of the
enemy, edging this tract of mire, were consequently in the shape of
an open V. Thus the military situation at this particular point may be
pictorially represented by a salient semicircle, a dash, and another
salient semicircle faced by a wide, open V. Imagine such a situation
complicated by offensive and counter-offensive, during which the
French have seized part of the hills and the German part of the plain,
till the whole region is a madman's maze of barbed wire, earthy lines,
trenches,--some of them untenable by either side and still full of the
dead who fell in the last combat,--shell holes, and fortified craters.
Such was something of the situation in that wind-swept plain at the
edge of the Bois-le-Prtre. I leave for other chapters the account of
an average day in the trenches and the story of the great German
attack, preferring to tell here of the general impressions made by the
appearance of the trenches themselves. Two pictures stand out,
particularly, the dead on the barbed wire, and the village called "Fey
au Rats" at night.

"The next line is the first line. Speak in whispers now, for if the Boches
hear us we shall get a shower of hand-grenades."

I turned into a deep, wide trench whose floor had been trodden into a
slop of cheesy, brown mire which clung to the big hobnailed boots of
the soldiers. Every foot or so along the parapet there was a rifle slit,
made by the insertion of a wedge-shaped wooden box into the wall of
brownish sandbags, and the sentries stood about six feet apart. The
trench had the hushed quiet of a sickroom.

"Do you want to see the Boches? Here; come, put your eye to this
rifle slit."

A horizontal tangle of barbed wire lay before me, the shapeless gully
of an empty trench, and, thirty-five feet away, another blue-gray
tangle of barbed wire and a low ripple of the brownish earth. As I
looked, one of the random silences of the front stole swiftly into the
air. French trench and German trench were perfectly silent; you could
have heard the ticking of a watch.

"You never see them?"

"Only when we attack them or they attack us."

An old poilu, with a friendly smile revealing a jagged reef of yellow
teeth, whispered to me amiably:--

"See them? Good Lord, it's bad enough to smell them. You ought to
thank the good God, young man, that the wind is carrying it over our
heads."

"Any wounded to-day?"

"Yes; a corporal had his leg ripped up about half an hour ago."

At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of a
rifle box. No Man's Land had widened to some three hundred feet of
waving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind passed as over the
surface of the sea. About fifty feet from the German trenches was a
swathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five stout, wooden
posts. So thickly was the wire strung that the eye failed to distinguish
the individual filaments and saw only the rows of brown-black posts
filled with a steely purple mist. Upon this mist hung masses of
weather-beaten blue rags whose edges waved in the wind.

"Des camarades" (comrades), said my guide very quietly.

A month later I saw the ruined village of Fey-en-Haye by the light of
the full golden shield of the Hunters' Moon. The village had been
taken from the Germans in the spring, and was now in the French
lines, which crossed the village street and continued right on through
the houses. "The first village on the road to Metz" had tumbled, in
piles and mounds of rubbish, out on a street grown high with grass.
Moonlight poured into the roofless cottages, escaping by shattered
walls and jagged rents, and the mounds of dbris took on fantastic
outlines and cast strange shadows. In the middle of the village street
stood two wooden crosses marking the graves of soldiers. It was the
Biblical "Abomination of Desolation."

Looking at Fey from the end of the village street, I slowly realized that
it was not without inhabitants. Wandering through the grass, scurrying
over the rubbish heaps, running in and out of the crumbling
thresholds were thousands and thousands of rats.

Across the bright sky came a whirring hum, the sound of the motors
of aeroplanes on the way to bombard the railroad station at Metz. I
looked up, but there was nothing to be seen. The humming died
away. The bent signpost at the corner of the deserted moorland road,
with its arrow and its directions, somehow seemed a strange,
shadowy symbol of the impossibility of the attainment of many human
aspirations.



Chapter V

The Trenches In The "Wood Of Death"

So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the
struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the
supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy,
physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and
relentlessly tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the
war more interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement
of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
than as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political
strife. There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the
continuous and multitudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a
thousand channels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of the
zone of violence.

By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being,
admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties,
organizations, and inventions--trench warfare. The principal element
of this modern warfare is lack of mobility.

The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since the
establishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of either
combatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities.
The fierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions,
averaging a mile each way behind No Man's Land. This stationary
character has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all its
ancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun, and has
turned it into the national business. I dislike to use the word
"business," with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I intend
rather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds--the idea of
a great intricate organization with a corporate volition. The war of to-
day is a business, the people are the stockholders, and the object of
the organization is the wisest application of violence to the enemy.

To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, special narrow-
gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the railroad station
at the edge of the shell zone to the artillery positions. To this end the
trenches have been gathered into a special telephone system so that
General Joffre at Chantilly can talk to any officers or soldiers
anywhere along the great swathe. The food, supplies, clothing, and
ammunition are delivered every day at the gate of the swathe, and
calmly redistributed to the trenches by a sort of military express
system.

Only one thing ever disturbs the vast, orderly system. The bony
fingers of Death will persist in getting into the cogs of the machine.

The front is divided, according to military exigencies, into a number of
roughly equal lengths called secteurs. Each secteur is an
administrative unit with its own government and its own system
adapted to the local situation. The heart of this unit is the railroad
station at which the supplies arrive for the shell zone; in a normal
secteur, one military train arrives every day bringing the needed
supplies, and one hospital train departs, carrying the sick and
wounded to the hospitals. The station at the front is always a scene of
considerable activity, especially when the train arrives; there are
pictures of old poilus in red trousers pitching out yellow hay for the
horses, commissary officers getting their rations, and artilleurs
stacking shells.

The train not being able to continue into the shell zone, the supplies
are carried to the distributing station at the trenches in a convoy of
wagons, called the ravitaillement. Every single night, somewhere
along the road, each side tries to smash up the other's ravitaillement.
To avoid this, the ravitaillement wagons start at different hours after
dark, now at dusk, now at midnight. Sometimes, close by the
trenches on a clear, still night, the plashing and creaking of the
enemy's wagons can be heard through the massacred trees. I
remember being shelled along one bleak stretch of moorland road
just after a drenching December rain. The trench lights rising over
The Wood, three miles away, made the wet road glow with a
tarnished glimmer, and burnished the muddy pools into mirrors of
pale light. The ravitaillement creaked along in the darkness. Suddenly
a shell fell about a hundred yards away, and the wagons brought up
jerkily, the harnesses rattling. For ten minutes the Germans shelled
the length of road just ahead of us, but no shell came closer to us
than the first one. About thirty "seventy-seven" shells burst, some on
the road, some on the edges of the fields; we saw them as flashes of
reddish-violet light close to the ground. In the middle of the mle a
trench light rose, showing the line of halted gray wagons, the
motionless horses, and the helmeted drivers. The whole affair passed
in silence. When it was judged that the last shell had fallen, whips
cracked like pistol shots, and the line lumbered on again.

The food came to us fresh every day in a freight car fitted up like a
butcher's shop, in charge of a poilu who was a butcher in civilian life.
"So many men--so many grammes," and he would cut you off a slice.
There was a daily potato ration, and a daily extra, this last from a list
ten articles long which began again every ten days, and included
beans, macaroni, lentils, rice, and cheese. The French army is very
well and plenteously fed. Coffee, sugar, wine, and even tea are
ungrudgingly furnished. These foods are taken directly to the rear of
the trenches where the regimental cooks have their traveling
kitchens. Once the food is prepared, the cooks--the beloved cuistots--
take it to the trenches in great, steaming kettles and distribute it to
the men individually. As for clothing, every regiment has a regimental
tailor shop and supply of uniforms in the village where they go to
repos. I have often seen the soldier tailor of one of the regiments, a
little Alsatian Jew, sewing up the shell rents in a comrade's greatcoat.
He had his shop in a pleasant kitchen, and used to sit beside the fire
sewing as calmly as an old woman.

The sanitary arrangements of the trenches are the usual army
latrines, and very severe punishments are inflicted for any fouling.

If a man is wounded, the medical service man of his squad (infirmier),
or one of the stretcher-bearers {brancardiers), takes him as quickly as
possible to the regimental medical post in the rear lines. If the trench
is getting heavily shelled, and the wound is slight, the attendant takes
the man to a shelter and applies first aid until a time comes when he
and his patient can proceed to the rear with reasonable safety. At this
rear post the regimental surgeon cleans the wound, stops the
bleeding, and sends for the ambulance, which, at the Bois-le-Prtre,
came right into the heart of the trenches by sunken roads that were in
reality broad trenches. The man is then taken to the hospital that his
condition requires, the slightly wounded to one hospital, and those
requiring an operation to another. The French surgical hospitals all
along the front are marvels of cleanliness and order. The heart of
each hospital is the power plant, which sterilizes the water, runs the
electric lights, and works the X-ray generator. Mounted on an
automobile body, it is always ready to decamp in case the locality
gets too dangerous. You find these great, lumbering affairs, half
steamroller, half donkey-engine, in the courtyards of old castles,
schools, and great private houses close by the front.

The first-line trenches, in a position at all contested, are very apt still
to preserve the hurried arrangement of their first plan, which is
sometimes hardly any plan at all. It must be admitted that the
Germans have the advantage in the great majority of places, for
theirs was the first choice, and they entrenched themselves, as far as
possible, along the crests of the eastern hills of France, in a line long
prepared for just such an exigency. It has been the frightfully difficult
task of the Allies, these two years, not only to hold the positions at the
foot of these hills, in which they were at a tactical disadvantage, all
their movements being visible to the Boches on the crests above
them, but also to attack an enemy entrenched in a strong position of
his own choosing. To-day at one point along the line, the French and
Germans may share the dominating crest of a position, at another
point, they may be equally matched, and at another, such as Les
Eparges, the French, after fearful losses, have carried the coveted
eminence. One phase of the business of violence is the work of the
military undertaker attached to each secteur, who writes down in his
little red book the names of the day's dead, and arranges for the
wooden cross at the head of each fresh grave. Every day along the
front is a battle in which thousands of men die.

The eastern hills of France, those pleasant rolling heights above
Rheims, Verdun, and old, provincial Pont--Mousson, have been
literally gorged with blood. It being out of the question to strengthen or
rectify very much the front-line trenches close to the enemy, the effort
has taken place in the rear lines. Wherever there is a certain security,
the rear lines of all the important strategic points have been
converted into veritable subterranean fortresses. The floor plan of
these trenches is an adaptation of the military theory of fortification--
with its angles, salients, and bastions--to the topography of the
region. The gigantic concrete walls of the bomb-proof shelters, the
little forts to shelter the machine guns, and the concrete passages in
the rear-line trenches will appear as heavy and massive to future
generations as Roman masonry appears to us. There are, of course,
many unimportant little links of the trench system, upon whose
holding nothing depends and for whose domination neither side cares
to spend the life of a single soldier, that have only an apology for a
second position. The war needs the money for the preparation of
important places. At vital points there may be the tremendously
powerful second line, a third line, and even a fourth line. The region
between Verdun and the lines, for instance, is the most fearful snarl
of barbed wire, pits, and buried explosives that could be imagined.
The distance would have to be contested inch by inch.

The trench theory is built about the soldier. It must preserve him as
far as possible from artillery and from an infantry attack. The
defenses begin with barbed wire; then come the rifles and the
machine guns; and behind them the light artillery, the "seventy-fives,"
and the heavy artillery, the "one hundred and twenties," "two hundred
and twenties," and, now, an immense howitzer whose real caliber has
been carefully concealed. To take a trench position means the
crossing of the entanglements of No Man's Land under fire from
artillery, rifles, and machine guns, an almost impossible proceeding.
An advance is possible only after the opposing trenches have been
made untenable by the concentration of artillery fire. The great
offensives begin by blowing the first lines absolutely to pieces; this
accomplished, the attacking infantry advances to the vacated
trenches under the rifle fire of those few whom the terrible deluge of
shells has not killed or crazed, works toward the strong second
position under a concentrated artillery fire of the retreating enemy as
terrible as its own, fights its way heroically into the second position,
and stops there. The great line has been bent, has been dented, but
never broken. An offensive must cover at least twenty miles of front,
for if the break is too narrow the attacking troops will be massacred
by the enemy artillery at both ends of the broken first lines. If the front
lines are one mile deep, the artillery must put twenty-five square miles
of trenches hors de combat, a task that takes millions of shells. By
the time that the first line has been destroyed and the troops have
reached the second line, the shells and the men are pretty well used
up. A great successful offensive on the western front is theoretically
possible, given millions of men, but practically impossible. Outside of
important local gains, the great western offensives have been
failures. Champagne was a failure, the Calais drive was a failure,
Verdun was a failure, and the drive on the Somme has only bent the
lines. The Germans may shorten their lines because of a lack of men,
but I firmly believe that neither their line nor the Allies' line will ever
be broken. What will be the end if the Allies cannot wrest from
Germany, Belgium and that part of northern France she is holding for
ransom--to obtain good terms at the peace congress? Is Germany
slowly, very slowly going under, or are we going to witness complete
European exhaustion? Whatever happens, poor, mourning,
desolated France will hold to the end.

In localities where no great offensive is contemplated, and the
business of violence has become a routine, the object of the
commander is to keep the enemy on the qui-vive, demoralize him by
killing and wounding his soldiers, and prevent him from strengthening
his first lines. Relations take on the character of an exchange; one
day the French throw a thousand mines (high-explosive trench shells)
into the German lines, and the next day the Germans throw a
thousand back. The French smash up a village where German troops
are en repos; while it is being done, the Germans begin to blow a
French village to pieces. In the trenches the individual soldiers throw
grenades at each other, and wish that the whole tiresome business
was done with. They have two weeks in the trenches and two weeks
out of them in a cantonment behind the lines. The period in the
trenches is divided between the first lines and the rear lines of the first
position. Often on my way to the trenches at night I would pass a
regiment coming to repos. Silent, vaguely seen, in broken step the
regiment passed. Sometimes a shell would come whistling in.

There was one part of the Bois-le-Prtre region upon which nothing
depended, and the war had there settled into the casual exchange of
powder and old iron that obtains upon two thirds of the front. At the
entrance to this position, in the shadow of a beautiful clump of ash
trees, stood the rustic shelters of the regimental cooks. From behind
the wall of trees came a terrifying crash. The war-gray, iron field
kitchen, which the army slang calls a contre-torpilleur (torpedo-boat
destroyer), stood in a little clearing of the wood; there was nothing
beautiful to the machine, which was simply an iron box, two feet high
and four feet square, mounted on big wheels, and fitted with a high
oval chimney. A halo of kitcheny smell floated about it, and the open
door of its fire-box, in which brands were burning furiously, and a jet
of vapor from somewhere, gave it quite the appearance of an odd
steam engine. Beside the contre-torpilleur stood the two cooks, both
unusually small in stature. One was about thirty-two or three years
old, chunky, and gifted with short, strong, hairy arms; the other was
much slighter, younger, and so juvenile of face that his downy
mustache was almost invisible. I knew these men very well; one, the
older, was a farmhand in a village of Touraine, and the other, an
errand boy in a bookbinding works at Saint-Denis. The war had
turned them into regimental cooks, though it was the older man who
did most of the cooking, while the boy occupied himself with gathering
wood and distributing the food. The latter once confessed to me that
when he heard that Americans were coming to the Bois-le-Prtre, he
had expected to see Indians, and that he and his comrades had
joked, half in jest, half in earnest, about the Boches going to lose their
scalps. The other was famous for an episode of the July attacks:
cornered in the trench by a Boche, he had emptied his kettle of hot
soup over the man's head and finished him off with a knife. They
waved friendlily at me. The farmhand, in particular, was one of the
pleasantest fellows who ever breathed; and still fond, like a true good
man of Touraine, of a Rabelaisian jest.

The road now entered the wood, and continued straight ahead down
a pleasant vista of young ash trees. Suddenly a trench, bearing its
name in little black, dauby letters on a piece of yellow board the size
of a shingle, began by the side of the forest road, and I went down
into it as I might have gone down cellar. The Boyau Poincar--such
was its title--began to curve and twist in the manner of trenches, and I
came upon a corner in the first line known as "Three Dead Men,"
because after the capture of the wood, three dead Germans were
found there in mysterious, lifelike attitudes. The names of trenches on
the French front often reflect that deep, native instinct to poetry
possessed by simple peoples--the instinct that created the English
ballads and the exquisite mediaeval French legends of the saints.
Other trench names were symbolic, or patriotic, or political; we had
the "Trench of the Great Revenge," the "Trench of France," the
"Trench of Aristide" (meaning Briand), and the "Boulevard Joffre."

Beyond "Les Trois Morts," began the real lines of the position, and as
I wound my way through them to the first lines, the pleasant forest of
autumnal branches thinned to a wood of trees bare as telegraph
poles. It had taken me half an hour to get from the cook's shelters to
the first lines, and during that time I had not heard one single
explosion. In the first trench the men stood casually by their posts at
the parapet, their bluish coats in an interesting contrast to the brown
wall of the trench. Behind the sentries, who peered through the rifle
slits every once in a while, flowed the usual populace of the first-line
trench, passing as casually as if they were on a Parisian sidewalk,
officers as miry as their men, poilus of the Engineer Corps with an
eye to the state of the rifle boxes, and an old, unshaven soldier in
light-brown corduroy trousers and blue jacket, who volunteered the
information that the Boches had thrown a grenade at him as he
turned the corner "down there"--"It didn't go off." So calm an
atmosphere pervaded the cold, sunny, autumnal afternoon that the
idea "the trenches" took on the proportions of a gigantic hoax; we
might have been masqueraders in the trenches after the war was
over. And the Germans were only seventy-five feet away, across
those bare poles, stumps, and matted dead brown leaves!

"Attention!"

The atmosphere of the trench changed in a second. Every head in
sight looked up searchingly at the sky. Just over the trees, distinctly
seen, was a little, black, cylindrical package somersaulting through
the air. In another second everybody had calculated the spot in which
it was about to land, and those whom it threatened had swiftly found
shelter, either by continuing down the trench to a sharp turn, running
into the door of an abri (shelter), or simply snuggling into a hole dug in
the side of the trench. There was a moment of full, complete silence
between the time when everybody had taken refuge and the
explosion of the trench shell. The missile burst with that loud hammer
pound made by a thick-walled iron shell, and lay smoking in the
withered leaves.

"It begins--it begins," said an old poilu, tossing his head. "Now we
shall have those pellets all afternoon."

An instant after the burst the trench relaxed; some of the sentries
looked back to see where the shell had fallen, others paid no
attention to it whatsoever. Once again the quiet was disturbed by a
muffled boom somewhere ahead of us, and everybody calculated
and took refuge exactly as before. The shells began to come, one on
the heels of the other with alarming frequency; hardly had one burst
when another was discovered in the air. The poilus, who had taken
the first shells as a matter of course, good-naturedly even, began to
get as cross as peevish schoolboys. It was decidedly too much of a
good thing. Finally the order was given for every one except the
sentinels, who were standing under the occasional shelters of beams
and earth bridged across the trench, to retire to the abris. I saw one
of the exposed sentinels as I withdrew, a big, heavily built, young
fellow with a face as placid as that of a farm animal; his rifle leaned
against the earth of the trench, and the shadow of the shelter fell on
his expressionless features. The next sentinel was a man in the late
thirties, a tall, nervous soldier with a fierce, aggressive face.

The abri to which we retired was about twenty-five feet long and eight
feet wide, and had a door at either end. The hut had been dug right in
the crude, calcareous rock of Lorraine, and the beams of the roof
were deeply set into these natural walls. Along the front wall ran a
corridor about a foot wide, and between this corridor and the rear wall
was a raised platform about seven feet wide piled with hay. Sprawled
in this hay, in various attitudes, were about fifteen men, the squad
that had just completed its sentry service. Two candles hung from the
massive roof and flickered in the draughts between the two doors,
revealing, in rare periods of radiance, a shelf along the wall over the
sleepers' heads piled with canteens, knapsacks, and helmets. In the
middle of the rock wall by the corridor a semicircular funnel had been
carved out to serve as a fireplace, and at its base a flameless fire of
beautiful, crumbling red brands was glowing. This hearth cut in the
living rock was very wonderful and beautiful. Suddenly a trench shell
landed right on the roof of the abri, shaking little fragments of stone
down into the fire on the hearth. The soldiers, who sat hunched up on
the edge of the platform, their feet in the corridor, gave vent to a burst
of anger that had its source in exasperation.

"This is going too far."--"Why don't they answer?"--"Are those dirty
cows (the classic sales vaches) going to keep this up all afternoon?"

"Really, now, this is getting to be a real nuisance." Suddenly two
forms loomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom
I have spoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier. Voices murmured
in the obscurity, "Who is wounded?"--"Somebody wounded?" And
dreamy-eyed ones sat up in the straw. The stolid one--he could not
have been much over twenty-one or two--sat down on the edge of
the straw near the fireplace, his face showing no emotion, only a
pallor. He had a painful but not serious wound; a small fragment of
iron, from a shell that had fallen directly into the trench, had lodged in
the bones of his foot. He took off his big, ugly shoe and rested the
blood-stained sock on the straw. Voices like echoes traveled the
length of the shelter--"Is it thou, Jarnac?"--"Art thou wounded,
Jarnac?" "Yes," answered the big fellow in a bass whisper. He was a
peasant of the Woevre, one of a stolid, laborious race.

"The lieutenant has gone to the telephone shelter to ring up the
batteries," said the infirmier. "Good," said a vibrant, masculine voice
somewhere in the straw.

A shell coming toward you from the enemy makes a good deal of
noise, but it is not to be compared to the noise made by one's own
shells rushing on a slant just over one's head to break in the enemy's
trenches seventy-five feet away. A swift rafale of some fifty "seventy-
five" shells passed whistling like the great wind of the Apocalypse,
which is to blow when the firmament collapses. Looking through the
rifle slit, after the rafale was over, I could see puffs of smoke
apparently rising out of the carpet of dead leaves. The nervous man,
the other sentry, held up his finger for us not to make the slightest
noise and whispered,--

"I heard somebody yell."

"Where?"

"Over there by that stump."

We strained our ears to catch a sound, but heard nothing.

"I heard the yell plainly," replied the sentry.

The news seemed to give some satisfaction. At any rate, the
Germans stopped their trench shells. The quiet hush of late afternoon
was at hand. Soon the cook came down the trench with kettles of hot
soup.

Five months have passed since I last saw the inhabitants of this abri,
the tenants of the "Ritz-Marmite." How many are still alive? What has
happened to this fine, brave crowd of Frenchmen, gentlemen all,
bons camarades? I have seen them on guard in a heavy winter
snowstorm, when the enemy was throwing grenades which,
exploding, blew purplish-black smudges on the snow; I have seen
them so bemired in mud and slop that they looked like effigies of
brownish earth; I have watched them wading through communication
trenches that were veritable canals. And this is the third year of the
war.

The most interesting of the lot mentally was a young Socialist named
Hippolyte. He was a sous-lieutenant of the Engineers, and had
quarters of his own in the rear of the trenches, where one was always
sure to find books on social questions lying round in the hay. When
the war began he was just finishing his law course at the University of
Montpellier. A true son of the South, he was dark, short, but well
proportioned, with small hands and feet. The distinguishing features
of his countenance were his eyes and mouth--the eyes, eloquent,
alert, almost Italian; the mouth, full, firm, and dogmatic. The great
orators of the Midi must have resembled him in their youth. He was a
Socialist and a pacifist  outrance, continuing his dream of universal
fraternity in the midst of war. His work lay in building a tunnel under
the Germans, by which he hoped to blow part of the German
trenches, Teutons and all, sky-high.

The tunne (sape) began in the third line, at a door hi the wall of the
trench strongly framed in wooden beams the size of railroad ties. At
occasional intervals along the passage the roof was reinforced by a
frame of these beams, so that the sape had the businesslike,
professional look of a gallery in a coal mine. Descending steeply to a
point twelve feet beyond the entrance, it then went at a gentle incline
under No Man's Land, and ended beneath the German trenches. It
was the original intention to blow up part of the German first line, but it
being one day discovered that the Germans were building a tunnel
parallel to the French one, it was decided to blow up the French safe
so that the explosion would spend its force underground, and cause
the walls of the German tunnel to cave in on its makers. I happened
to see the tunnel the morning of the day it was blown up. The French
had stopped working for fear of being overheard by the Germans. It
was a ticklish situation. Were the Germans aware of the French
tunnel? If so, they would blow up their own at once. Were they still
continuing their labor? The earth of the French might burst apart
anyminute and rain down again in a dreadful shower of clods, stones,
and mangled bodies.

Alone, quiet, at the end of the passage under the German lines sat
an old poilu, the sentinel of the tunnel. He was an old coal miner of
the North. The light of a candle showed his quiet, bearded face, grave
as the countenance of some sculptured saint on the portico of a
Gothic church, and revealed the wrinkles and lines of many years of
labor. The sentinel held a microphone to his ears; the poles of it
disappearing into the wall of damp earth separating us from the
Boches.

Hippolyte whispered, "You hear them?"

The old man nodded his head, and gave the microphone to his
officer. I saw Hippolyte listen. Then, without a word, he handed it to
me. All that I could hear was a faint tapping.

"The Boches," whispered Hippolyte.

The French blew up the sape early in the afternoon, at a time when
they felt sure the Germans were at work in their tunnel. I saw the
result the next day. A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five
feet in diameter, and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No
Man's Land. Even the stumps of two trees had sunk and tilted.

It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity. I once talked the
matter over with him. He became at once intense, Latin, doctrinaire.

"How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have to
do?"

"I do not have to reconcile my theories to my office; I am furthering
my theories."

"How so?"

"By combating the Boches. Without them we might have realized our
idea of universal peace and fraternity. Voil l'ennemi! The race is a
poisonous race, serpents, massacreurs! I wish I could smother as
many of them every day as I did yesterday."

During my service I did not meet another soldier whose hatred of the
Germans was comparable to that of this advocate of universal love.

I left the trenches just at dusk. Above the dreadful depression in No
Man's Land shone a bronzy sky against which the trees raised their
haggard silhouettes. There was hardly a sound in the whole length of
The Wood. A mist came up making haloes round the rising winter
stars.



Chapter VI

The Germans Attack

The schoolmaster (instituteur) and the schoolmistress (institutrice) of
Montauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on
the second story of the schoolhouse. The kitchen of this fiat had been
struck by a shell, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and
glass, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of a
copper saucepan still hanging on the wall. In one of the rooms, else
quite bare of furniture, was an upright piano. Sometimes while
stationed at Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the
trenches in playing this instrument.

It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and thus far not a single call
had come in. The sun was shining very brightly in a sky washed clear
by a night of rain, the morning mists were rising from the wood, and
up and down the very muddy street walked little groups of soldiers. I
drew up the rickety stool and began to play the waltz from "The Count
of Luxembourg." In a short time I heard the sound of tramping on the
stairs voices. In came three poilus--a pale boy with a weary, gentle
expression in his rather faded blue eyes; a dark, heavy fellow of
twenty-five or six, with big wrists, big, muscular hands, and a rather
unpleasant, lowering face; and a little, middle-aged man with
straightforward, friendly hazel eyes and a pointed beard. The pale,
boyish one carried a violin made from a cigar box under his arm, just
such a violin as the darkies make down South. This violin was very
beautifully made, and decorated with a rustic design. I stopped
playing.

"Don't, don't," cried the dark, big fellow; "we haven't heard any music
for a long time. Please keep on. Jacques, here, will accompany you."

"I never heard the waltz," said the violinist; "but if you play it over for
me once or twice, I'll try to get the air--if you would like to have me
to," he added with a shy, gentle courtesy.

So I played the rather banal waltz again, till the lad caught the tune.
He hit it amazingly well, and his ear was unusually true. The dark one
had been in Canada and was hungry for American rag-time. "'The 
Good Old Summer Time'--you know that? 'Harrigan'--you know that?"
he said in English. The rag-time of "Harrigan" floated out on the street
of Montauville. But I did not care to play things which could have no
violin obligato, so I began to play what I remembered of waltzes dear
to every Frenchman's heart--the tunes of the "Merry Widow." "Sylvia"
went off with quite a dash. The concert was getting popular.
Somebody wanted to send for a certain Alphonse who had an
occarina. Two other poilus, men in the forties, came up, their dark-
brown, horseshoe beards making them look like brothers. Side by
side against the faded paper on the sunny wall they stood, surveying
us contentedly. The violinist, who turned out to be a Norman, played
a solo--some music-hall fantasy, I imagine. The next number was the
ever popular "Tipperaree," which every single poilu in the French
army has learned to sing in a kind of English. Our piano-violin duet hit
off this piece even better than the "Merry Widow." I thanked Heaven
that I was not called on to translate it, a feat frequently demanded of
the American drivers. The song is silly enough in the King's English,
but in lucid, exact French, it sinks to positive imbecility.

"You play, don't you?" said the violinist to the small bearded man.

"A little," he replied modestly.

"Please play."

The little man sat down at the piano, meditated a minute, and began
to play the rich chords of Rachmaninof's "Prelude." He got about half
through, when Zip-bang! a small shell burst down the street. The
dark fellow threw open the French window. The poilus were scurrying
to shelter. The pianist continued with the "Prelude."

Zip-bang! Zip-bang! Zshh--Bang--Bang. Bang-Bang!

The piano stopped. Everybody listened. The village was still as death.
Suddenly down the street came the rattle of a volley of rifle shots.
Over this sound rose the choked, metallic notes of a bugle-call. The
rifle shots continued. The ominous popping of machine guns
resounded. The village, recovering from its silence, filled with
murmurs. Bang! Bang! Bang I Bang! went some more shells. The
same knowledge took definite shape in our minds.

"An attack!"

The violinist, clutching his instrument, hurried down the stairs followed
by all the others, leaving the chords of the uncompleted "Prelude" to
hang in the startled air. Shells were popping everywhere--crashes of
smoke and violence--in the roads, in the fields, and overhead. The
Germans were trying to isolate the few detachments en repos in the
village, and prevent reinforcements coming from Dieulouard or any
other place. To this end all the roads between Pont--Mousson and
the trenches, and the roads leading directly to the trenches, were
being shelled.

"Go at once to Poste C!"

The winding road lay straight ahead, and just at the end of the village
street, the Germans had established a tir de barrage. This meant that
a shell was falling at that particular point about once every fifty
seconds. I heard two rafales break there as I was grinding up the
machine. Up the slope of the Montauville hill came several of the
other drivers. Tyler, of New York, a comrade who united remarkable
bravery to the kindest of hearts, followed close behind me, also
evidently bound for Poste C. German bullets, fired wildly from the
ridge of The Wood over the French trenches, sang across the
Montauville valley, lodging in the trees of Puvenelle behind us with a
vicious tspt; shells broke here and there on the stretch leading to the
Quart-en-Rserve, throwing the small rocks of the road surfacing
wildly in every direction. The French batteries to our left were firing at
the Germans, the German batteries were firing at the French
trenches and the roads, and the machine guns rattled ceaselessly. I
saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of the slope of the Bois-
le-Prtre--vague masses of moving blue on the brown ways. A storm
of shells was breaking round certain points in the road and particularly
at the entrance to The Wood. I wondered what had become of the
audience at the concert. Various sounds, transit of shells, bursting of
shells, crashing of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! of mitrailleuses
played the treble to a roar formed of echoes and cadences--the roar
of battle. The Wood of Death (Le Bois de la Mort) was singing again.

That day's attack was an attempt by the Germans to take back from
the French the eastern third of the Quart-en-Rserve and the rest of
the adjoining ridge half hidden in the shattered trees. At the top of the
plateau, by the rise in the moorland I described in the preceding
chapter, I had an instant's view of the near-by battle, for the focus
was hardly more than four hundred yards away. There was a glimpse
of human beings in the Quart--soldiers in green, soldiers in blue--the
very fact that anybody was to be seen there was profoundly stirring.
They were fighting in No Man's Land. Tyler and I watched for a
second, wondering what scenes of agony, of heroism, of despair
were being enacted in that dreadful field by the ruined wood.

We hurried our wounded to the hospital, passing on our way
detachments of soldiers rushing toward The Wood from the villages
of the region. Three or four big shells had just fallen in Dieulouard,
and the village was deserted and horribly still. The wind carried the
roar of the attack to our ears. In three quarters of an hour, I was back
again at the same moorland poste, to which an order of our
commander had attached me. Montauville was full of wounded. I had
three on stretchers inside, one beside me on the seat, and two others
on the front mudguards. And The Wood continued to sing. From
Montauville I could hear the savage yells and cries which
accompanied the fighting.

Half an hour after the beginning of the attack, the war invaded the
sky, with the coming of the German reconnoitering aeroplanes. One
went to watch the roads leading to The Wood along the plateau, one
went to watch the Dieulouard road, and the other hovered over the
scene of the combat. The sky was soon dotted with the puffs of
smoke left by the exploding shells of the special anti-aircraft "seventy-
fives." These puffs blossomed from a pin-point of light to a vaporous,
gray-white puff-ball about the size of the full moon, and then
dissolved in the air or blew about in streaks and wisps. These
cloudlets, fired at an aviator flying along a certain line, often were
gathered by the eye into arrangements resembling constellations.
The three machines were very high, and had a likeness to little brown
and silver insects.

The Boche watching the conflict appeared to hang almost immobile
over the Quart. With a striking suddenness, another machine
appeared behind him and above him. So unexpected was the
approach of this second aeroplane that its appearance had a touch of
the miraculous. It might have been created at that very moment in the
sky. The Frenchman--for it was an aviator from the parc at Toul, since
killed at Verdun, poor fellow--swooped beneath his antagonist and
fired his machine gun at him. The German answered with two shots
of a carbine. The Frenchman fired again. Suddenly the German
machine flopped to the right and swooped down; it then flopped to the
left, the tail of the machine flew up, and the apparatus fell, not so
swiftly as one might expect, down a thousand feet into The Wood.
When I saw the wreckage, a few days afterwards, it looked like the
spilt contents of  waste-paper basket, and the aviators, a pilot and
an observer, had had to be collected from all over the landscape. The
French buried them with full military honors.

Thanks to the use of a flame machine, the Germans succeeded in
regaining the part of the ridge they had lost, but the French made it
so hot for them that they abandoned it, and the contested trenches
now lie in No Man's Land. All that night the whole Wood was
illuminated, trench light after trench light rising over the dark
branches. There would be a rocket like the trail of bronze-red powder
sparks hanging for an instant in the sky, then a loud Plop! and the
French light would spread out its parachute and sail slowly down the
sky toward the river. The German lights (fuses clairantes),
cartridges of magnesium fired from a gun resembling a shotgun,
burned only during their dazzling trajectory. At midnight the sky
darkened with low, black rain clouds, upon whose surface the
constant cannon fire flashed in pools of violet-white light. Coming
down from the plateau at two in the morning, I could see sharp jabs of
cannon fire for thirty miles along the front on the other side of the
Moselle.

Just after this attack a doctor of the army service was walking through
the trenches in which the French had made their stand. He noticed
something oddly skewered to a tree. He knocked it down with a
stone, and a human heart fell at his feet.

The most interesting question of the whole business is, "How do the
soldiers stand it?" At the beginning of my own service, I thought Pont-
-Mousson, with its ruins, its danger, and its darkness, the most awful
place on the face of the earth. After a little while, I grew accustomed
to the dcor, and when the time came for me to leave it, I went with
as much regret as if I were leaving the friendliest, most peaceful of
towns. First the dcor, growing familiar, lost the keener edges of its
horror, and then the life of the front--the violence, the destruction, the
dying and the dead--all became casual, part of the day's work. A
human being is profoundly affected by those about him; thus, when a
new soldier finds himself for the first time in a trench, he is sustained
by the attitude of the veterans. Violence becomes the commonplace;
shells, gases, and flames are the things that life is made of. The war
is another lesson in the power of the species to adapt itself to
circumstances. When this power of adaptability has been reinforced
by a tenacious national will "to see the thing through," men will stand
hell itself. The slow, dogged determination of the British cannot be
more powerful than the resolution of the French. Their decision to
continue at all costs has been reached by a purely intellectual
process, and to enforce it, they have called upon those ancient
foundations of the French character, the sober reasonableness and
unbending will they inherit from Rome.

And a new religion has risen in the trenches, a faith much more akin
to Mahomet than to Christ. It is a fatalism of action. The soldier finds
his salvation in the belief that nothing will happen to him until his hour
comes, and the logical corollary of this belief, that it does no good to
worry, is his rock of ages. It is a curious thing to see poilus--peasants,
artisans, scholars--completely in the grip of this philosophy. There has
been a certain return to the Church of Rome, for which several
reasons exist, the greatest being that the war has made men turn to
spiritual things. Only an animal could be confronted with the pageant
of heroism, the glory of sacrifice, and the presence of Death, and not
be moved to a contemplation of the fountain-head of these sublime
mysteries. But it is the upper class which in particular has returned to
the Church. Before the war, rationalist and genial skeptic, the
educated Frenchman went to church because it was the thing to do,
and because non-attendance would weaken an institution which the
world was by no means ready to lay aside. This same educated
Frenchman, brought face to face with the mystery of human
existence, has felt a real need of spiritual support, and consequently
returned to the Church of his fathers.

The religious revival is a return of upper-class prodigals to the fold,
and a rekindling of the chilled brands of the faith of the amiably
skeptical. The great mass of the nation has felt this spiritual force, but
because the mass of the nation was always Catholic, nothing much
has changed. I failed to find any trace of conversions among the still
hostile working men of the towns, and the bred-in-the-bone Socialists.
The rallying of the conservative classes about the Cross is also due
to the fact that the war has exposed the mediocrity and sterile
windiness of the old socialistic governments; this misgovernment the
upper classes have determined to end once they return from the
trenches, and remembering that the Church of Rome was the enemy
of the past administrations, cannot help regarding her with a certain
friendliness. But this issue of past misgovernment will be fought out
on purely secular grounds, and the Church will be only a sympathizer
behind the fray. The manner in which the French priests have fought
and died is worthy of the admiration of the world. Never in the history
of any country has the national religion been so closely enmeshed in
the national life. The older clergy, as a rule, have been attached to
the medical services of the front, serving as hospital orderlies and
stretcher-bearers, but the younger priests have been put right into the
army and are fighting to-day as common soldiers. There are
hundreds of officer-priests--captains and lieutenants of the regular
army.

But the real religion of the front is the philosophy of Mahomet. Life will
end only when Death has been decreed by Fate, and the Boches are
the unbelievers. After all, Islam in its great days was a virile faith, the
faith of a race of soldiers.


Chapter VII

The Town In The Trenches

At the beginning of the war the German plan of campaign was to
take France on the flank by marching through Belgium, and once the
success of this northern venture assured, strike at the Verdun-Belfort
line which had baffled them in the first instance. Had they not lost the
battle of the Marne, this second venture might have proved
successful, for the body of the French army was fighting in the north,
and the remaining troops would have been discouraged by the
capture of Paris. On the eve of the battle of the Marne the campaign
seeming to be well in hand in the north, a German invasion of
Lorraine began, one army striking at the defenses of the great
plateau which slopes from the Vosges to the Moselle, and the other
attempting to ascend the valley of the river. It was this second army
which entered Pont--Mousson.

Immediately following the declaration of hostilities the troops who had
been quartered in the town were withdrawn, and the town was left
open to the enemy who, going very cautiously, was on his way from
Metz. For several weeks in August, this city, almost directly on the
frontier, saw no soldiers, French or German. It was a time of dramatic
suspense. The best recital of it I ever heard came from the lips of the
housekeeper of Wisteria Villa, a splendid, brave French woman who
had never left her post. She was short, of a clear, tanned complexion,
and always had her hair tightly rolled up in a little classic pug. She
was as fearless of shells as a soldier in the trenches, and once went
to a deserted orchard, practically in the trenches, to get some apples
for Messieurs les Amricains. When asked why she did not get them
at a safer place, she replied that she did not have to pay for these
apples as the land belonged to her father! Her ear for shells was the
most accurate of the neighborhood, and when a deafening crash
would shake the kettles on the stove and rattle the teacups, she
could tell you exactly from what direction it had come and the
probable caliber. I remember one morning seeing her wash dishes
while the Germans were shelling the corner I have already described.
The window over the sink opened directly on the dangerous area,
and she might have been killed any minute by a flying eclat. Standing
with her hands in the soapy water, or wiping dry the hideous blue-
and-white dinner service of Wisteria Villa, she never even bothered to
look up to see where the shells were landing. Two "seventy-sevens"
went off with a horrid pop; "Those are only 'seventy-sevens,'" she
murmured as if to herself. A fearful swish was next heard and the
house rocked to the din of an explosion. "That's a 'two hundred and
ten'--the rogues--oh, the rogues!" she exclaimed in the tone she
might have used in scolding a depraved boy.

At night, when the kitchen was cleared up, she sat down to write her
daily letter to her soldier son, and once this duty finished, liked
nothing better than a friendly chat. She knew the history of Pont--
Mousson and Montauville and the inhabitants thereof by heart; she
had tales to tell of the shrewdness of the peasants and diverting
anecdotes of their manners and morals. These stories she told very
well and picturesquely.

"The first thing we saw was the President's poster saying not to be
alarmed, that the measures of military preparation were required by
circumstances (les vnements) and did not mean war. Then over
this bill the maire posted a notice that in case of a real mobilization
(une mobilisation srieuse) they would ring the tocsin. At eleven
o'clock the tocsin rang, oh, la la, monsieur, what a fracas! All the bells
in the town, Saint-Martin, Saint-Laurent, the htel de ville.
Immediately all our troops went away. We did not want to see them
go. 'We shall be back again,' they said. They liked Pont--Mousson.
Such good young fellows! The butcher's wife has heard that only fifty-
five of the six hundred who were here are alive. They were of the
active forces (de l'active). A great many people followed the soldiers.
So for two weeks we were left all alone, wondering what was to
become of us. And all the time we heard frightful stories about the
villages beyond Nancy. On the nth of August we heard cannon for the
first time, and on the 12th and the 14th we were bombarded. On the
4th of September, at five o'clock in the evening, the bells began to
ring again. Everybody ran out to find the reason. Les Allemands--they
were not then called Boches--were coming. Baoum! went the bridge
over the Moselle. Everybody went into their houses, so that the
Germans came down streets absolutely deserted. I peeked from my
window blind. The Boches came down the road from Norroy, les
Uhlans, the infantry--how big and ugly they all were. And their officers
were so stiff (raide). They were not like our bons petits soldats
Franais. In the morning I went out to get some bread.

"'Eh l, good woman' (bonne femme), said a grand Boche to me.

'"What do you want?' said I.

"'Are there any soldats franais in the town?' said the Boche.

"'How should I know?' I answered.

"'You do not want to tell, good woman.'

"'I do not know.'

"'Are there any francs-tireurs (civilian snipers) in this town?'

"'Don't bother me; I'm going for some bread.'

"During the night all the clocks had been changed to German time.
Many of the Boches spoke French. There were Alsatians and
Lorrains who did not like the fracas at all. Yes, the Boches behaved
themselves all right at Pont--Mousson--there were some vulgarities
(grossirets). One of the soldiers, a big blond, went down the street
wearing an ostrich feather hat and a woman's union suit and
chemise. It was a scandale. But uncle laughed to kill himself; he was
peeping out through the blinds. Right in front of my door were ten
cannon, and all the street was full of artillery. Well we had four days of
this, hearing never a word from the French side.

"On the night of the 9th I heard a good deal of noise, and somebody
woke up the Boches sous-officiers who were quartered in a house
across the street. I saw lights and heard shouts. I was peeping out of
my window all the time. The dark street filled with soldiers. I saw their
officers lashing them to make them hurry. They harnessed the
artillery horses to the guns, and at four o'clock in the morning there
was not a single Boche in Pont--Mousson. They had all gone away
in the night, taking with them the German flag on the city hall. You
know, monsieur, on the night of the 9th they received news of the
battle of the Marne.

"For five days more we saw neither Franais nor Boches. Finally
some French dragoons came down the road from Dieulouard, and
little by little other soldiers came too. But, hlas, monsieur, the
Boches were waiting for them in the Bois-le-Prtre."

Such was the way that Pont--Mousson did not become
Mussenbruck. The episode is an agreeable interlude of decency in
the history of German occupations, for that atrocities were
perpetrated in Nomny, just across the river, is beyond question. I
have talked with survivors. At Pont--Mousson everything was
orderly; six miles to the east, houses were burned over the heads of
the inhabitants, and women and children brutally massacred.

I best remember the little city as it was one afternoon in early
December. The population of 17,000 had then shrunk to about 900,
and only a little furtive life lingered in the town. My promenade began
at the river-bank by the wooden footbridge crossing from the shore to
the remaining arches of the graceful eighteenth-century stone bridge
blown up in September, 1914. There is always something melancholy
about a ruined bridge, perhaps because the structure symbolizes a
patient human victory over the material world. There was something
intensely tragic in the view of the wrecked quarter of Saint-Martin,
seen across the deep, greenish, wintry river, and in the great curve of
the broad flood sullenly hurrying to Metz. At the end of the bridge,
ancient and gray, rose the two round towers of the fifteenth-century
parish church, with that blind, solemn look to them the towers of Notre
Dame possess, and beyond this edifice, a tile-roofed town and the
great triangular hill called the Mousson. It was dangerous to cross the
bridge, because German snipers occasionally fired at it, so I
contented myself with looking down the river. Beyond the Bois-le-
Prtre, the next ridge to rise from the river was a grassy spur bearing
the village of Norroy on its back. You could see the hill, only four
kilomtres away, the brown walls of the village, the red roofs, and
sometimes the glint of sunlight on a window; but for us the village
might have been on another planet. All social and economic relations
with Norroy had ceased since September, 1914, and reflecting on this
fact, the invisible wall of the trenches became more than a mere
military wall, became a barrier to every human relation and peaceful
tie.

A sentry stood by the ruined bridge, a small, well-knit man with
beautiful silver-gray hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks; his uniform was
exceptionally clean, and he appeared to be some decent burgher torn
from his customary life. I fell into conversation with him. He
recollected that his father, a veteran of 1870, had prophesied the
present war.

"'We shall see them again, the spiked helmets (les casques 
pointe),' said my father--'we shall see them again.'

"'Why?' I asked him.

"'Because they have eaten of us, and will be hungry once more.'"

The principal street of the town led from this bridge to a great square,
and continued straight on toward Maidires and Montauville. The
sidewalks around this square were in arcades under the houses, for
the second story of every building projected for seven or eight feet
over the first and rested on a line of arches at the edge of the street.
To avoid damage from shells bursting in the open space, every one
of these arcades, and there were perhaps a hundred all told, had
been plugged with sandbags, so that the square had an odd, blind
look. A little life flickered in the damp, dark alleys behind these
obstructions. There was a tobacco shop, kept by two pretty young
women whom the younger soldiers were always jollying, a wineshop,
a tailorshop, and a bookstore, always well supplied with the great
Parisian weeklies, which one found later in odd corners of shelters in
the trenches. Occasionally a soldier bought a serious book when it
was to be found in the dusty files of the "Collection Nelson"; I
remember seeing a young lieutenant of artillery buying Sgur's
"Histoire de la Grande Arme en 1812," and another taking Flaubert's
"Un cur simple." But the military life, roughly lived, and shared with
simple people, appears to make even the wisest boyish, and after a
while at the front the intellect will not read anything intellectual. It
simply won't, perhaps because it can't. The soldier mind delights in
rough, genial, and simple jokes. A sergeant, whom I knew to be a
distinguished young scholar in civilian life, was always throwing
messages wrapped round a stone into the German trenches; the
messages were killingly funny, amiably indecent, and very jejune.
Invariably they provoked a storm of grenades, and sometimes
epistles in the same vein from the Boches. In spite of the vicious
pang of the grenades, there was an absurd "Boys-will-be-boys" air to
the whole performance. Conversation, however, did not sink to this
boyish level, and the rag-tag and bob-tail of one's cultivation found its
outlet in speech.

At the end of this street was the railroad crossing, the passage 
niveau, and the station in a jungle of dead grass and brambles. Like
the bridge, its rustiness and weediness was a dreadful symbol of the
cessation of human activity, and the blue enamel signpost lettered in
white with the legend, "Metz--32 kilomtres," was another reminder of
the town to which the French aspired with all the fierce intensity of
crusaders longing for Jerusalem. It was impossible to get away from
the omnipresence of the name of the fated city--it stared at you from
obscure street corners, and was to be found on the covers of printed
books and post-cards. I saw the city once from the top of the hill of
the Mousson; its cathedral towers pierced the blue mists of the brown
moorlands, and it appeared phantasmal and tremendously distant.
Yet for those towers countless men had died, were dying, would die.
A French soldier who had made the ascent with me pointed out Metz
the much desired.

"Are you going to get it?" I asked. "Perhaps so," he replied gravely.
"After so many sacrifices." (Aprs tant de sacrifices.) He made no
gesture, but I know that his vision included the soldiers' cemetery at
the foot of the Mousson hill. It lay, a rust-colored field, on the steep
hillside just at the border of the town, and was new, raw, and dreadful.
The guardian of the cemetery, an old veteran of 1870, once took me
through the place. He was a very lean, hooped-over old man with a
big, aquiline nose, blue-gray eyes framed in red lids, and a huge,
yellowish-white mustache. First he showed me the hideous picture of
the civilian cemetery, in which giant shells had torn open the tombs,
hurled great sarcophagi a distance of fifty feet, and dug craters in the
rows of graves. Though the civilian authorities had done what they
could to put the place in order, there were still memories of the
disturbed dead to whom the war had denied rest. Coming to the
military cemetery, the guardian whispered, pointing to the new
mounds with his rustic cane, "I have two colonels, three
commandants, and a captain. Yes, two colonels" (deux colonels).
Following his staff, my eye looked at the graves as if it expected to
see the living men or their effigies. Somewhat apart lay another
grave. "Voil un colonel boche," said the sexton; "and a lieutenant
boche--and fifty soldats boches."

The destroyed quarter of Pont--Mousson lay between the main
street and the flank of the Bois-le-Prtre. The quarter was almost
totally deserted, probably not more than ten houses being inhabited
out of several thousand. The streets that led into it had grass growing
high in the gutters, and a velvety moss wearing a winter rustiness
grew packed between the paving-stones. Beyond the main street, la
rue Fabvrier went straight down this loneliness, and halted or turned
at a clump of wrecked houses a quarter of a mile away. Over this
clump, slately-purple and cold, appeared the Bois-le-Prtre, and
every once in a while a puffy cloud of greenish-brown or gray-black
would float solemnly over the crests of the trees. This stretch of la rue
Fabvrier was one of the most melancholy pictures it was possible to
see. Hardly a house had been spared by the German shells; there
were pock-marks and pits of shell fragments in the plaster, window
glass outside, and holes in walls and roofs. I wandered down the
street, passing the famous miraculous statue of the Virgin of Pont--
Mousson. The image, only a foot or two high and quite devoid of
facial expression, managed somehow to express emotion in the
outstretched arms, drooping in a gesture at once of invitation and
acceptance. A shell had maculated the wall on each side and above
the statue, but the little niche and canopy were quite untouched. The
heavy sound of my soldier boots went dump! clump! down the
silence.

At the end of the road, in the fields on the slope, a beautiful
eighteenth-century house stood behind a mossy green wall. It was
just such a French house as is the analogue of our brick mansions of
Georgian days; it was two stories high and had a great front room on
each side of an entry on both floors, each room being lighted with two
well-proportioned French windows. The outer walls were a golden
brown, and the roof, which curved in gently from the four sides to
central ridge, a very beautiful rich red. The house had the
atmosphere of the era of the French Revolution; one's fancy could
people it with soberly dressed provincial grandees. A pare of larches
and hemlocks lay about it, concealing in their silent obscurity an
artificial lake heavily coated with a pea-soup scum.

Beyond the house lay the deserted rose-garden, rank and grown to
weeds. On some of the bushes were cankered, frozen buds. In the
center of the garden, at the meeting-point of several paths, a mossy
fountain was flowing into a greenish basin shaped like a seashell, and
in this basin a poilu was washing his clothes. He was a man of thirty-
eight or nine, big, muscular, out-of-doors looking; whistling, he
washed his gray underclothes with the soap the army furnishes,
wrung them, and tossed them over the rose-bushes to dry.

"Does anybody live in this house?"

"Yes, a squad of travailleurs."

A regiment of travailleurs is attached to every secteur of trenches.
These soldiers, depending, I believe, on the Engineer Corps, are
quartered just behind the lines, and go to them every day to put them
in order, repair the roads, and do all the manual labor. Humble folk
these, peasants, ditch-diggers, road-menders, and village carpenters.
Those at Pont--Mousson were nearly all fathers of families, and it
was one of the sights of the war most charged with true pathos to see
these gray-haired men marching to the trenches with their shovels on
their shoulders.

"Are you comfortable?"

"Oh, yes. We live very quietly. I, being a stonemason and a
carpenter, stay behind and keep the house in repair. In summer we
have our little vegetable gardens down behind those trees where the
Boches can't see us."

"Can I see the house?"

"Surely; just wait till I have finished sousing these clothes."

The room on the ground floor to the left of the hallway was
imposing in a stately Old-World way. The rooms in Wisteria Villa were
rooms for personages from Zola; this room was inhabited by ghosts
from the pages of Balzac. It was large, high, and square; the walls
were hung with a golden scroll design printed on ancient yellow silk;
the furniture was of some rich brown finish with streaks and lusters of
bronzy yellow, and a glass chandelier, all spangles and teardrops of
crystal, hung from a round golden panel in the ceiling. Over a severe
Louis XVI mantel was a large oil portrait of Pius IX, and on the
opposite wall a portrait head of a very beautiful young girl. Chestnut
hair, parted in the fashion of the late sixties, formed a silky frame
round an oval face, and the features were small and well
proportioned. The most remarkable part of the countenance were the
curiously level eyes. The calm, apart-from-the-world character of the
expression in the eyes was in interesting contrast to the good-natured
and somewhat childish look in the eyes of the old Pope.

"Who lived here?"

"An old man (un vieux). He was a captain of the Papal Zouaves in his
youth. See here, read the inscription on the portrait--'Presented by
His Holiness to a champion (dfenseur) of the Church.'"

"Is he still alive?"

"He died three months ago in Paris. I should hate to die before I see
how the war is going to end. I imagine he would have been willing to
last a bit longer."

"And this picture on the right, the jeune fille?"

"That was his daughter, an only child. She became a nun, and died
when she was still young. The old man's gardener comes round from
time to time to see if the place is all right. It is a pity he is not here;
he could tell you all about them."

"You are very fortunate not to have been blown to pieces. Surely you
are very near the trenches."

"Near enough--yes, indeed. A communication trench comes right into
the cellar. But it is quiet in this part of The Wood. There is a regiment
of old Boches in the trenches opposite our territorials, fathers of
families (pres de familles), just as they are. We fire rifles at each
other from time to time just to remember it is war (c'est la guerre). We
share the crest together here; nothing depends on it. What good
should we do in killing each other? Besides it would be a waste of
shells."

"How do you know that the Boches opposite you are old?"

"We see them from time to time. They are great hands at a parley.
The first thing they tell you is the number of children they have. I met
an old Boche not long ago down by the river. He held up two fingers
to show that he had two children, put his hand out just above his
knee to show the height of his first child, and raised it just above his
waist to show the height of the second. So I held up five fingers to
show him I had five children, when the Lord knows I have only one.
But I did not want to be beaten by a Boche."

A sound of voices was heard beneath us, and the clang of the
shovels being placed against the stone walls of the cellar.

"Those are the travailleurs. The sergeant will be coming in and I must
report to him. Good-bye, American friend, and come again."

A melancholy dusk was beginning as I turned home from the
romantic house, and the deserted streets were filling with purplish
shadows. The concussion of exploding shells had blown almost all
the glass out of the windows of the Church of St. Laurent, and the few
brilliant red and yellow fragments that still clung to the twisted leaden
frames reminded me of the autumn leaves that sometimes cling to
winter-stricken trees. The interior of the church was swept and
garnished, and about twenty candles with golden flames, slowly
waving in the drafts from the ruined windows, shone beneath a statue
of the Virgin. There was not another soul in the church. A terrible
silence fell with the gathering darkness. In a little wicker basket at the
foot of the benignant mother were about twenty photographs of
soldiers, some in little brassy frames with spots of verdigris on them,
some the old-fashioned "cabinet" kind, some on simple post-cards.
There was a young, dark Zouave who stood with his hand on an ugly
little table, a sergeant of the Engineer Corps with a vacant,
uninteresting face, and two young infantry men, brothers, on the
same shabby finger-marked post-card. Pious hands had left them
thus in the care of the unhappy mother, "Marie, consolatrice des
malheureux."

The darkness of midnight was beginning at Pont--Mousson, for the
town was always as black as a pit. On my way home I saw a furtive
knife edge of yellow light here and there under a door. The sentry
stood by his shuttered lantern. Suddenly the first of the trench lights
flowered in the sky over the long dark ridge of the Bois-le-Prtre.




Chapter VIII

Messieurs Les Poilus De La Grande Guerre


The word "poilu," now applied to a French soldier, means literally "a
hairy one," but the term is understood metaphorically. Since time
immemorial the possession of plenty of bodily hair has served to
indicate a certain sturdy, male bearishness, and thus the French, long
before the war, called any good, powerful fellow--"un vritable
poilu." The term has been found applied to soldiers of the Napoleonic
wars. The French soldier of to-day, coming from the trenches looking
like a well-digger, but contented, hearty, and strong, is the poilu par
excellence.

The origin of the term "Boche," meaning a German, has been treated
in a thousand articles, and controversy has raged over it. The
probable origin of the term, however, lies in the Parisian slang word
"caboche," meaning an ugly head. This became shortened to
"Boche," and was applied to foreigners of Germanic origin, in exactly
the way that the American-born laborer applies the contemptuous
term "square-head" to his competitors from northern Europe. The
word "Boche" cannot be translated by anything except "Boche," any
more than our word "Wop," meaning an Italian, can be turned into
French. The same attitude, half banter, half race contempt, lies at the
heart of both terms.

When the poilus have faced the Boches for two weeks in the
trenches, they march down late at night to a village behind the lines,
far enough away from the batteries to be out of danger of everything
except occasional big shells, and near enough to be rushed up to the
front in case of an attack. There they are quartered in houses, barns,
sheds, and cellars, in everything that can decently house and shelter
a man. These two weeks of repos are the poilus' elysium, for they
mean rest from strain, safety, and comparative comfort. The English
have behind their lines model villages with macadam roads, concrete
sidewalks, a water system, a sewer system, and all kinds of schemes
to make the soldiers happy; the French have to be contented with an
ordinary Lorraine village, kept in good order by the Medical Corps, but
quite destitute of anything as chic as the British possess.

The village of cantonnement is pretty sure to be the usual brown-
walled, red-roofed village of Lorraine clumped round its parish church
or mouldering castle. In such a French village there is always a hall,
usually over the largest wineshop, called the "Salle de Ftes," and
this hall serves for the concert each regiment gives while en repos.
The Government provides for, indeed insists upon, a weekly bath,
and the bathhouse, usually some converted factory or large shed,
receives its daily consignments of companies, marching up to the
douches as solemnly as if they were going to church. Round the
army continues the often busy life of the village, for to many such a
hamlet the presence of a multitude of soldiers is a great economic
boon. Grocery-shops, in particular, do a rushing business, for any
soldier who has a sou is glad to vary the government menu with such
delicacies as pts de foie gras, little sugar biscuits, and the well-
beloved tablet of chocolate.

While the grocery-man (l'picier) is fighting somewhere in the north or
in the Argonne, madame l'picire stays at home and serves the
customers. At her side is her own father, an old fellow wearing big
yellow sabots, and perhaps the grocer's son and heir, a boy about
twelve years old. Madame is dressed entirely in black, not because
she is in mourning, but because it is the rural fashion; she wears a
knitted shoulder cape, a high black collar, and moves in a brisk,
businesslike way; the two men wear the blue-check overalls persons
of their calling affect, in company with very clean white collars and
rather dirty, frayed bow ties of unlovely patterns. Along the counter
stand the poilus, young, old, small, and large, all wearing various
fadings of the horizon blue, and helmets often dented. "Some pt de
foie gras, madame, s'il vous plat." "Oui, monsieur." "How much is this
cheese, maman?" cries the boy in a shrill treble. In the barrel-haunted
darkness at the rear of the shop, the old man fumbles round for some
tins of jelly. The poilu is very fond of sweets. Sometimes swish bang!
a big shell comes in unexpectedly, and shopkeepers and clients
hurry, at a decent tempo, to the cellar. There, in the earthy obscurity,
one sits down on empty herring-boxes and vegetable cases to wait
calmly for the exasperating Boches to finish their nonsense. There is
a smell of kerosene oil and onions in the air. A lantern, always on
hand for just such an emergency, burns in a corner. "Have you had a
bad time in the trenches this week, Monsieur Levrault?" says the
picire to a big, stolid soldier who is a regular customer.

"No, quite passable, Madame Champaubert."

"And Monsieur Petticollot, how is he?"

"Very well, thank you, madame. His captain was killed by a rifle
grenade last week."

"Oh, the poor man."

Crash goes a shell. Everybody wonders where it has fallen. In a few
seconds the clats rain down into the street.

"Dirty animals," says the voice of the old man in the darkest of all the
corners.

Madame Champaubert begins the story of how a cousin of hers who
keeps a grocery-shop at Mailly, near the frontier, was cheated by a
Boche tinware salesman. The cellar listens sympathetically. The boy
says nothing, but keeps his eyes fixed on the soldiers. In about
twenty minutes the bombardment ends, and the bolder ones go out
to ascertain the damage. The soldier's purchases are lying on the
counter. These he stuffs into his musette, the cloth wallet beloved of
the poilu, and departs. The colonel's cook comes in; he has got hold
of a good ham and wants to deck it out with herbs and capers. Has
madame any capers? While she is getting them, the colonel's cook
retails the cream of all the regimental gossip.

These people of Lorraine who have stayed behind, "Lorrains," the
French term them, are thoroughly French, though there is some
German blood in their veins. This Teuton addition is of very ancient
date, being due to the constant invasions which have swept up the
valley of the Moselle. This intermingling of the races, however,
continued right up to 1870, but since then the union of French and
German stock has been rare. It was most frequent, perhaps, during
the years between 1804 and 1850, when Napoleon's domination of
the principalities and states along the Rhine led to a French social
and commercial invasion of Rhenish Germany, an invasion which
ended only with the growth of German nationalism. The middle
classes in particular intermarried because they were more apt to be
engaged in commerce. But since 1870, two barriers, one geographic
--annexed Lorraine, and one intellectual--hatred, have kept the
neighbors apart. The Lorrain of to-day, no matter what his ancestors
were, is a thorough Frenchman. These Lorrains are between medium
height and tall, strongly built, with light, tawny hair, good color, and a
brownish complexion.

The poilus who come to the village en repos are from every part of
France, and are of all ages between nineteen and forty-five. I
remember seeing a boy aged only fourteen who had enlisted, and
was a regular member of an artillery regiment. The average regiment
includes men of every class and caste, for every Frenchman who can
shoulder a gun is in the war. Thus the dusty little soldier who is
standing by Poste A, may be So-and-So the sculptor, the next man to
him is simple Jacques who has a little farm near Bourges, and the
man beyond, Emile, the notary's clerk. It is this amazing fraternity that
makes the French army the greatest army in the world. The officers of
a regiment of the active forces (by l'arme active you are to
understand the army actually in the garrisons and under arms from
year to year) are army officers by profession; the officers of the
reserve regiments are either retired officers of the regular army or
men who have voluntarily followed the severe courses in the officers'
training-school. Thus the colonel and three of the commandants of a
certain regiment were ex-officers of the regular army, while all the
other officers, captains, lieutenants, and so forth, were citizens who
followed civilian pursuits. Captain X was a famous lawyer, Captain B
a small merchant in a little known provincial town, Captain C a
photographer. Any Frenchman who has the requisite education can
become an officer if he is willing to devote more of his time, than is by
law required, to military service. Thus the French army is the soul of
democracy, and the officer understands, and is understood by, his
men. The spirit of the French army is remarkably fraternal, and this
fraternity is at once social and mystical. It has a social origin, for the
poilus realize that the army rests on class justice and equal
opportunity; it has a mystical strength, because war has taught the
men that it is only the human being that counts, and that
comradeship is better than insistence on the rights and virtues of
pomps and prides. After having been face to face with death for two
years, a man learns something about the true values of human life.

The men who tramp into the village at one and two o'clock in the
morning are men who have for two weeks been under a strain that 
two years of experience has robbed of its tensity. But strain it is,
nevertheless, as the occasional carrying of a maniac reveals. They
know very well why they are fighting; even the most ignorant French
laborer has some idea as to what the affair is all about. The Boches
attacked France who was peacefully minding her own business; it
was the duty of all Frenchmen to defend France, so everybody went
to the war. And since the war has gone on for so long, it must be
seen through to the very end. Not a single poilu wants peace or is
ready for peace. And the French, unlike the English, have continually
under their eyes the spectacle of their devastated land. Yet I heard no
ferocious talk about the Germans, no tales of French cruelty toward
German prisoners.

Nevertheless, a German prisoner who had been taken in the Bois-le-
Prtre confessed to me a horror of the French breaking through into
Germany. Looking round to see if any one was listening, he said in
English, for he was an educated man--"Just remember the French
Revolution. Just remember the French Revolution. God! what
cruelties. You remember Carrier at Nantes, don't you, my dear sir? All
the things we are said to have done in Belgium--" But here the troop
of prisoners was hurried to one side, and I never saw the man again.
An army will always have all kinds of people in it, the good, the bad,
the degenerate, the depraved, the brutal; and these types will act
according to their natures. But I can't imagine several regiments of
French poilus doing in little German towns what the Germans did at
Nomeny. The backbone of the French army, as he is the backbone of
France, is the French peasant. In spite of De Maupassant's ugly tales
of the Norman country people, and Zola's studies of the sordid,
almost bestial, life of certain unhappy, peasant families, the French
peasant (cultivateur) is a very fine fellow. He has three very good
qualities, endurance, patience, and willingness to work. Apart from
these characteristics, he is an excellent fellow by himself; not jovial,
to be sure, but solid, self-respecting, and glad to make friends when
there is a chance that the friendship will be a real one. He does not
care very much for the working men of the towns, the ouvriers, with
their fantastic theories of universal brotherhood and peace, and he
hates the deput whom the working man elects as he hates a vine
fungus. A needless timidity, some fear of showing himself off as a
simpleton, has kept him from having his just influence in French
politics; but the war is freeing him from these shackles, and when
peace comes, he will make himself known: that is, if there are any
peasants left to vote.

Another thing about the peasantry is that trench warfare does not
weary them, the constant contact with the earth having nothing
unusual in it. A friend of mine, the younger son of a great landed
family of the province of Anjou, was captain of a company almost
exclusively composed of peasants of his native region; he loved them
as if they were his children, and they would follow him anywhere. The
little company, almost to a man, was wiped out in the battles round
Verdun. In a letter I received from this officer, a few days before his
death, he related this anecdote. His company was waiting, in a new
trench in a new region, for the Germans to attack. Suddenly the
tension was relieved by a fierce little discussion carried on entirely in
whispers. His soldiers appeared to be studying the earth of the
trench. "What's the trouble about?" he asked. Came the answer,
"They are quarreling as to whether the earth of this trench would best
support cabbages or turnips."

It is rare to find a French workman (ouvrier) in the trenches. They
have all been taken out and sent home to make shells.

The little group to which I was most attached, and for whose
hospitality and friendly greeting I shall always be a debtor, consisted
of Belin, a railroad clerk; Bonnefon, a student at the cole des Beaux-
Arts; Magne, a village schoolmaster in the Dauphin; and Grtry,
proprietor of a butcher's shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Belin and
Magne had violins which they left in the care of a caf-keeper in the
village, and used to play on them just before dinner. The dinner was
served in the house of the village woman who prepared the food of
these four, for sous-officiers are entitled to eat by themselves if they
can find any one kind enough to look after the cooking. If they can't,
then they have to rely entirely on the substantial but hardly delicious
cuisine of their regimental cuistot. However, at this village, Madame
Brun, the widow of the local carpenter, had offered to take the
popotte, as the French term an officer's mess. We ate in a room half
parlor, half bedchamber, decorated exclusively with holy pictures.
This was a good specimen menu--bread, vermicelli soup, apple
fritters, potato salad, boiled beef, red wine, and coffee. Of this dinner,
the Government furnished the potatoes, the bread, the meat, the
coffee, the wine, and the condiments; private purses paid for the
fritters, the vermicelli, and the bits of onion in the salad. Standing
round their barns the private soldiers were having a tasty stew of
meat and potatoes cooked by the field kitchen, bread, and a cupful of
boiled lentils (known in the army as "edible bedbugs"), all washed
down with the army pinard, or red wine.

This village in which the troops were lodged revealed in an interesting
way the course of French history. Across the river on a rise was a
cross commemorating the victory of the Emperor Jo vin over the
invading Germans in 371, and sunken in the bed of the Moselle were
still seen lengths of Roman dikes. The heart of the village, however,
was the corpse of a fourteenth-century castle which Richelieu had
dismantled in 1630. Its destiny had been a curious one. Dismantled
by Richelieu, sacked in the French Revolution, it had finally become a
kind of gigantic mediaeval apartment house for the peasants of the
region. The salle d'honneur was cut up into little rooms, the room of
the seigneur became a haymow, and the cellars of the towers were
used to store potatoes in. About twenty little chimneys rose over the
old, dilapidated battlements. A haymow in this castle was the most
picturesque thing I ever saw in a cantonment. It was the wreck of a
lofty and noble fifteenth-century room, the ceiling, still a rich red
brown, was supported on beautiful square beams, and a cross-
barred window of the Renaissance, of which only the stonework
remained, commanded a fine view over the river. The walls of the
room were of stone, whitewashed years before, and the floor was an
ordinary barn floor made of common planks and covered with a foot
of new, clean hay. In the center of the southern wall was a Gothic
fireplace, still black and ashy within. On the corners of this mantel
hung clusters of canteens, guns were stacked by it, and a blue
overcoat was rolled up at its base. An old man, the proprietor of the
loft, followed us up, made signs that he was completely deaf, and
traced in the dust on the floor the date, 1470.

The concerts were held in the "Salle de Ftes," a hall in which, during
peace time, the village celebrates its little festivals. It was an ugly,
bare shed with a sloping roof resting on iron girders painted clay
white, but the poilus had beautified it with a home-made stage and
rustic greenery. The proscenium arch, painted by Bonnefon, was
pearl-gray in color and decorated with panels of gilt stripes; and a
shield showing the lictor's rods, a red liberty cap and the letters "R. F."
served as a headpiece. The scenery, also the work of Bonnefon,
represented a Versailles kind of garden full of statues and very watery
fountains. There was no curtain. Just below the stage a semicircle of
chairs had been arranged for the officers of the regiment, and behind
these were wooden benches and a large space for standing room. By
the time the concert was supposed to begin, every bench was filled,
and standing room was at a premium. Suddenly there were cries of
"Le Colonel," and everybody stood up as the fine-looking old colonel
and his staff took their places. The orchestra, composed of a pianist,
a few violinists, and a flute-player, began to play the "Marseillaise."
When the music was over, and everybody decently quiet, the concert
began.

"Le Camarade Tollot, of the Thtre des Varits de Paris will recite
'Le Dernier Drapeau,'" shouted the announcer. Le Camarade Tollot
walked on the stage and bowed, a big, important young man with a
lion's mane of dark hair. Then, striking an attitude, he recited in the
best French, ranting style, a rhymed tale of a battle in which many
regiments charged together, flags flying. One by one the flags fell to
the ground as the bearers were cut down by the withering fire of the
enemy; all save one who struggled on. It was a fine, old-fashioned,
dramatic "will-he-get-there-yes-he-will-he-falls" sort of thing. "Il
tombe," said le Camarade Tollot, in what used to be called the
"oratorical orotund"--"il tombe." There was a full pause. He was
wounded. He rose staggering to his feet. All the other flags were
down. He advanced--the last flag (le dernier drapeau) reached the
enemy--and died just as his comrades, heartened by his courage,
had rallied and were charging to victory. A tremendous storm of
applause greeted the speaker, who favored us with the recital of a
short, sentimental poem as an encore.

The next number was thus announced: "Le Camarade Millet will
sound, first, all the French bugle-calls and then the Boche ones." Le
Camarade Millet, a big man with a fine horseshoe beard, stood at the
edge of the stage, said, "la Charge franais" and blew it on the bugle;
then "la Charge boche," and blew that. "La Retraite franais--La
Retraite boche," etc. Another salvo of applause was given to le
Camarade Millet.

"Le Camarade Roland."

Le Camarade Roland was about twenty-one or two years old, but his
eyes were old and wise, and he had evidently seen life. He was dark-
haired and a little below medium height. The red scar of a wound
appeared just below his left ear. After marking time with his feet, he
began a kind of patter song about having a telephone, every verse of
which ended, "Oh, la la, j'ai le tlphone chez moi" (I've a telephone
in my house). "I know who is unfaithful now--who have horns upon
their brow," the singer told of surprising secrets and unsuspected
affaires de cur. The silly, music-hall song may seem banal now, but
it amused us hugely then. "Le Camarade Duclos."

"Oh, if you could have seen your son, My mother, my mother, Oh, if
you could have seen your son, With the regiment"--sang
Camarade Duclos, another old-eyed youngster. There was amiable
adventure with an amiable "blonde" (oh, if you could have seen your
son); another with a "jolie brune" (oh, ma mre, ma mre); and still
another leon d'amour. The refrain had a catchy lilt to it, and the
poilus began humming it.

"Le Camarade Salvatore."

The newcomer was a big, obese Corsican mountaineer, with a
pleasant, round face and brown eyes. He advanced quietly to the
side of the stage holding a ten-sou tin flute in his hand, and when he
began to play, for an instant I forgot all about the Bois-le-Prtre, the
trenches, and everything else. The man was a born musician. I never
heard anything more tender and sweet than the little melody he
played. The poilus listened in profound silence, and when he had
finished, a kind of sigh exhaled from the hearts of the audience.

There followed another singer, a violinist, and a clown whose song of
a soldier on furlough finished with these appreciated couplets:--

"The Government says it is the thing
To have a baby every spring;
So when your son
Is twenty-one,
He'll come to the trenches and take papa's place.
So do your duty by the race."

In the uproar of cheers of "That's right," and so on, the concert
ended.

The day after the concert was Sunday, and at about ten o'clock that
morning a young soldier with a fluffy, yellow chin beard came down
the muddy street shouting, "le Mouchoir, le Mouchoir." About two or
three hundred paper sheets were clutched tightly in his left hand, and
he was selling them for a sou apiece. Little groups of poilus gathered
round the soldier newsboy; I saw some of them laughing as they went
away. The paper was the trench paper of the Bois-le-Prtre, named
the "Mouchoir" (the handkerchief) from a famous position thus called
in the Bois. The jokes in it were like the jokes in a local minstrel show,
puns on local names, jests about the Boches, and good-humored
satire. The spirit of the "Mouchoir" was whole-heartedly amateur.
Thus the issue which followed a heavy snowfall contained this
genuine wish:--

"Oh, snow,
Please go,
Leave the trench
Of the French;
Cross the band
Of No Man's Land
To where the Boche lies.
Freeze him,
Squeeze him,
Soak him,
Choke him,
Cover him,
Smother him,
Till the beggar dies."

This is far from an exact translation, but the idea and the spirit have
been faithfully preserved. The "Mouchoir" was always a bit more
squeamish than the average, rollicking trench journal, for it was
issued by a group of medical service men who were almost all
priests. Indeed, there were some issues that combined satire, puns,
and piety in a terrifying manner. Its editors printed it in the cellar of
the church, using a simple sheet of gelatine for their press.

I wandered in to see the church. The usual number of civilians were
to be seen, and a generous sprinkling of soldiers. Through the open
door of the edifice the sounds of a mine-throwing competition at the
Bois occasionally drifted. The abb, a big, dark man of thirty-four or
five, with a deep, resonant voice and positive gestures, had come to
the sermon.

"Brethren," said he, "in place of a sermon this morning, I shall read
the annual exposition of our Christian faith" (exposition de la foi
chrtienne). He began reading from a little book a historical account
of the creation and the temptation, and so concise was the language
and so certain his voice that I had the sensation of listening to a
series of events that had actually taken place. He might have been
reading the communiqu. "Le premier homme was called Adam,
and la premire femme, Eve. Certain angels began a revolt against
God; they are called the bad angels or the demons." (Certains anges
se sont mis en revolte contre Dieu; il sont appelles les mauvais
anges ou les dmons.)" And from this original sin arrives all the
troubles, Death to which the human race is subjected." Such was the
discourse I heard in the church by the trenches to the
accompaniment of the distant chanting of The Wood.

Going by again late in the afternoon, I saw the end of an officer's
funeral. The body, in a wooden box covered with the tricolor, was
being carried out between two files of muddy soldiers, who stood at
attention, bayonets fixed. A peasant's cart, a tumbril, was waiting to
take the body to the cemetery; the driver was having a hard time con-
trolling a foolish and restive horse. The colonel, a fine-looking man in
the sixties, came last from the church, and stood on the steps
surrounded by his officers. The dusk was falling.

"Officiers, sous-officiers, soldats.

"Lieutenant de Blanchet, whose death we deplore, was a gallant
officer, a true comrade, and a loyal Frenchman. In order that France
might live, he was willing to close his eyes on her forever."

The officer advanced to the tumbril and holding his hand high said:--

"Farewell--de Blanchet, we say unto thee the eternal adieu."

The door of the church was wide open. The sacristan put out the
candles, and the smoke from them rose like incense into the air. The
tumbril rattled away in the dusk. My mind returned again to the
phrases of the sermon,--original sin, death, life, of a sudden, seemed
strangely grotesque.

It would be hard to find any one more courteous and kind than the
French officer. A good deal of the success of the American
Ambulance Field Sections in France is due to the hospitality and bon
acceuil of the French, and to the work of the French officers attached
to the Sections. In Lieutenant Kuhlman, who commanded at Pont--
Mousson, every American had a good friend and tactful, hard-
working officer; in Lieutenant Maas, who commanded at Verdun, the
qualities of administrative ability and perfect courtesy were most
happily joined.

The principal characteristic of the French soldier is his
reasonableness.



Chapter IX

Preparing The Defense Of Verdun


Every three months, if the military situation will allow of it and every
other man in his group has likewise been away, the French soldier
gets a six days' furlough. The slips of paper which are then given out
are called feuilles de permission, and the lucky soldier is called a
permissionnaire. When the combats that gave the Bois-le-Prtre its
sinister nickname began to peter out, the poilus who had done the
fighting were accorded these little vacations, and almost every
afternoon the straggling groups of joyous permissionnaires were
seen on the road between the trenches and the station. The
expression on the faces was never that of having been rescued from
a living hell; it expressed joy and prospect of a good time rather than
deliverance.

When I got my permission, a comrade took me to the station at a
certain rail-head where a special train started for Paris, and by paying
extra I was allowed to travel second class. I shall not dwell on the
journey because I did not meet a single human being worth recording
during the trip. At eight at night I arrived in Paris. So varied had been
my experiences at the front that had I stepped out into a dark and
deserted city I should not have been surprised. The poilu, when he
sees the city lights again, almost feels like saying, "Why, it is still
here!" Many of them look frankly at the women, not in the spirit of
gallant adventure, but out of pure curiosity. In spite of the French
reputation for roguish licentiousness, the sex question never seems
to intrude very much along the battle-line, perhaps because there is
so little to suggest it. Certainly conversation at the front ignores sex
altogether, and speech there is remarkably decent and clean. Of
course, when music-hall songs are sung at the concerts, the other
sex is sometimes more than casually mentioned. It is the comic
papers which are responsible for the myth that the period of furlough
is spent in a Roman orgy; this is, of course, true of some few, but for
the great majority the reverse rules, and une permission is spent in a
typically French way, paying formal calls to the oldest friends of the
family, being with the family as much as possible, and attending to
such homely affairs as the purchase of socks and underclothes. In
the evening brave Jacques or Georges or Franois is visited by all his
old cronies, who gather round the hero and ask him questions, and
he is solemnly kissed by all his relatives. One evening is sure to be
consecrated to a grand family reunion at a restaurant.

I determined to observe, during my permission, the new France
which has come into being since the outbreak of the war, and the
attitude of the French toward their allies. I knew the old France pretty
well. Putting any ridiculous ideas of French decadence aside, the
France of the last ten years did not have the international standing of
an older France. The Delcass incident had revealed a France
evidently untaught by the lesson of 1870, and if the Moroccan
question ended in a French victory, it was frankly won by getting
behind the petticoats of England. The nation was unprepared for war,
torn by political strife, and in a position to be ruthlessly trampled on
by the Germans. The France of 1900-13 is not a very pleasant
France to remember.

For one thing, the bitter strife aroused by the breaking of the
Concordat and the seizure of the property of the Church was slowly
crystallizing into an icy hatred, the worst in the world, the hatred of a
man who has been robbed. The Church Separation Law may have
been right in theory, and with the liberal tendencies of the reformers
one may have every sympathy, but the fact remains that the sale and
dispersion of the ecclesiastical property passed in a storm of
corruption and graft. Properties worth many thousands of dollars
were juggled among political henchmen, sold for a song, and sold
again at a great profit. Even as the Southerners complain of the
Reconstruction rather than of the Civil War, so do the French
Catholics complain, not of the law, but of its aftermath. The Socialist-
Labor Party exultant, the Catholic Party wronged and revengeful, and
all the other thousand parties of the French Government at one
another's throats, there seemed little hope for the real France. The
tragedy of the thing lay in the fact that this disunion and strife was
caused by the excess of a good quality; in other words, that the
remarkable ability of every Frenchman to think for himself was
destroying the national unity.

Meanwhile, what was the state of the army and navy?

The Minister of War of the radicals who had triumphed was General
Andr, a narrow, bigoted doctrinaire. The force behind the evil work of
this man can be hardly realized by those who are unfamiliar with the
passion with which the French invest the idea. There are times when
the French, the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to
lack mental brakes--when the idea so obsesses them, that they
become fanatics,--not the emotional, English type of fanatic, but a
cold, hard-headed, intellectual Latin type. The radical Frenchman
says, "Are the Gospels true?" "Presumably no, according to modern
science and historical research." "Then away with everything founded
on the Gospels," he replies; and begins a cold-blooded, highly
intellectual campaign of destruction. Thus it is that the average
French church or public building of any antiquity, whether it be in
Paris or in an obscure village, has been so often mutilated that it is
only a shadow of itself. France is strewn with wrecks of buildings
embodying disputed ideas. And worst of all, these buildings were
rarely sacked by a mob; the revolutionary commune, in many cases,
paying laborers to smash windows and destroy sculpture at so much
a day.

Andr believed it his mission to extirpate all conservatism, whether
Catholic or not, from the army. In a few short months, by a campaign
of delation and espionage, he had completely disorganized the army,
the only really national institution left in France. Officers of standing,
suspected of any reactionary political tendency, were discharged by
the thousand; and officers against whom no charge could be brought
were refused ammunition, even though they were stationed at a
ticklish point on the frontier. At the same time a like disorganization
was taking place in the navy, the evil genius of the Marine being the
Minister Camille Pelletan.

Those who saw, in 1912, the ceremonies attendant on the deposition
of the bones of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Pantheon were sick at
heart. Never had the Government of France sunk so low. The
Royalists shouted, the extreme radicals hooted, and when the
carriage of Fallires passed, it was seen that humorists had
somehow succeeded in writing jocose inscriptions on the presidential
carriage. The head of the French nation, a short, pudgy man, the
incarnation of pontifying mediocrity, went by with an expression on his
face like that of a terrified, elderly, pink rabbit. The bescrawled
carriage and its humiliated occupant passed by to an accompaniment
of jeering. Everybody--parties and populace--was jeering. The scene
was disgusting.

The election of Poincar, a man of genuine distinction, was a sign of
better times. Millerand became Minister of War, and began the
reorganization of the army, thus making possible the victory of the
Marne. But a petty intrigue led by a group of radicals caused the
resignation of this minister at a time when the First Balkan War
threatened to engulf Europe. The maneuver was inexcusable.
Messimy, an attach of the group who had led the attack, took
Millerand's place. When the war broke out, Messimy was invited to
make himself scarce, and Millerand returned to his post. Thanks to
him, the army was as ready as an army in a democratic country can
be.

The France of 1915-16 is a new France. The nation has learned that
if it is to live it must cease tearing itself to pieces, and all parties
are united in a "Holy Union" (l'Union Sacre). Truce in the face of a
common danger or a real union? Will it last? Alarmists whisper that
when the war is over, the army will settle its score with the politicians.
Others predict a great victory for the radicals, because the industrial
classes are safe at home making shells while the conservative
peasants are being killed off in the trenches. Everybody in France is
saying, "What will happen when the army comes home?" There is to-
day only one man in France completely trusted by all classes--
General Joffre, and if by any chance there should be political troubles
after the war, the army and the nation will look to him.

The French fully realize what the English alliance has meant to them,
and are grateful for Engish aid. As the titanic character of England's
mighty effort becomes clearer, the sympathy with England will
increase. Of course one cannot expect the French to understand the
state of mind which insists upon a volunteer system in the face of the
deadliest and most terrible foe. The attitude of the English to sport
has rather perplexed them, and they did not like the action of some
English officers in bringing a pack of hounds to the Flanders front. It
was thought that officers should be soldiers first and sportsmen
afterward, and the knowledge that dilettante English officers were
riding to hounds while the English nation was resisting conscription
and Jean, Jacques, and Pierre were doing the fighting and dying in
the trenches, provoked a secret and bitter disdain.

But since the British have got into the war as a nation, this secret
disdain has been forgotten, and the poilu has taken "le Tommie" to
his heart.

I heard only the friendliest criticism of the Russians.

It is a rather delicate task to say what the French think of the
Americans, for the real truth is that they think of us but rarely. Our
quarrel with Germany over the submarines interested them
somewhat, but this interest rapidly died away when it became evident
that we were not going to do anything about it. They see our flag over
countless charity dpts, hospitals, and benevolent institutions, and
are grateful. The poilu would be glad to see us in the fray simply
because of the aid we should bring, but he is reasonable enough to
know that the United States can keep out of the mle without losing
any moral prestige. The only hostile criticism of America that I heard
came from doctrinaires who saw the war as a conflict between
autocracy and democracy, and if you grant that this point of view is
the right one, these thinkers have a right to despise us. But the
Frenchman knows that the Allies represent something more than
"virtue-on-a-rampage."

In Lyons I saw a sight at once ludicrous and pathetic. Two little
dragoons of the class of 1917, stripling boys of eighteen or nineteen
at the most, walked across the public square; their uniforms were too
large for them, the skirts of their great blue mantles barely hung
above the dust of the street, and their enormous warlike helmets and
flowing horse-tails were ill-suited to their boyish heads. As I looked at
them, I thought of the blue bundles I had seen drying upon the
barbed wire, and felt sick at the brutality of the whole awful business.
The sun was shining over the bluish mists of Lyons, and the bell of
old Saint-Jean was ringing. Two Zouaves, stone blind, went by
guided by a little, fat infirmier. At the frontier, the General Staff was
preparing the defense of Verdun.

One great nation, for the sake of a city valueless from a military point
of view, was preparing to kill several hundred thousand of its citizens,
and another great nation, anxious to retain the city, was preparing
calmly for a parallel hecatomb. There is something awful and dreadful
about the orderliness of a great offensive, for while one's imagination
is grasped by the grandeur and the organization of the thing, all one's
faculties of intellect are revolted by the stark brutality of death en
masse.

Early in February we were called to Bar-le-Duc, a pleasant old city
some distance behind Verdun. Several hundred thousand men were
soon going to be killed and wounded, and the city was in a feverish
haste of preparation. So many thousand cans of ether, so many
thousand pounds of lint, so many million shells, so many
ambulances, so many hundred thousand litres of gasoline. Nobody
knew when the Germans were going to strike.

During the winter great activity in the German trenches near Verdun
had led the French to expect an attack, but it was not till the end of
January that aeroplane reconnoitering made certain the imminence of
an offensive. As a first step in countering it, the French authorities
prepared in the villages surrounding Bar-le-Duc a number of dpts
for troops, army supplies, and ammunition. Of this organization, Bar-
le-Duc was the key. The preparations for the counter-attack were
there centralized. Day after day convoys of motor-lorries carrying
troops ground into town and disappeared to the eastward; big
mortars mounted on trucks came rattling over the pavements to go
no one knew where; and khaki-clad troops, troupes d'attaque, tanned
Marocains and chunky, bull-necked Zouaves, crossed the bridge
over the Ornain and marched away. At the turn in the road a new
transparency had been erected, with VERDUN printed on it in huge
letters. Now and then a soldier, catching sight of it, would nudge his
comrade.

On the 18th we were told to be in readiness to go at any minute and
permissions to leave the barrack yard were recalled.

The attack began with an air raid on Bar-le-Duc. I was working on my
engine in the sunlit barrack yard when I heard a muffled Pom!
somewhere to the right. Two French drivers who were putting a tire
on their car jumped up with a "Qu'est-ce que c'est que a?" We stood
together looking round. Beyond a wall on the other side of the river
great volumes of brownish smoke were rolling up, and high in the air,
brown and silvery, like great locusts, were two German aeroplanes.

"Nom d'un chien, il y'en a plusieurs," said one of the Frenchmen,
pointing out four, five, seven, nine aeroplanes. One seemed to hang
immobile over the barrack yard. I fancy we all had visions of what
would happen if a bomb hit the near-by gasoline reserve. Men ran
across the yard to the shelter of the dormitories; some, caught as we
were in the open, preferred to take a chance on dropping flat under a
car. A whistling scream, a kind of shrill, increasing shriek, sounded in
the air and ended in a crash. Smoke rolled up heavily in another
direction. Another whistle, another crash, another and another and
another. The last building struck shot up great tongues of flame.
"C'est la gare," said somebody. Across the yard a comrade's arm
beckoned me, "Come on, we've got to help put out the fires!"

The streets were quite deserted; horses and wagons abandoned to
their fate were, however, quietly holding their places. Faces,
emotionally divided between fear and strong interest, peered at us as
we ran by, disappearing at the first whistle of a bomb, for all the world
like hermit-crabs into their shells. A whistle sent us both scurrying into
a passageway; the shell fell with a wicked hiss, and, scattering the
paving-stones to the four winds, blew a shallow crater in the roadway.
A big cart horse, hit in the neck and forelegs by fragments of the
shell, screamed hideously. Right at the bridge, the sentry, an old
territorial, was watching the whole scene from his flimsy box with
every appearance of unconcern.

Not the station itself, but a kind of baggage-shed was on fire. A hose
fed by an old-fashioned seesaw pump was being played on the
flames. Officials of the railroad company ran to and fro shouting
unintelligible orders. For five minutes more the German aeroplanes
hovered overhead, then slowly melted away into the sky to the south-
east. The raid had lasted, I imagine, just about twenty minutes.

That night, fearing another raid, all lights were extinguished in the
town and at the barracks. Before rolling up in my blankets, I went out
into the yard to get a few breaths of fresh air. Through the night air,
rising and falling with the wind, I heard in one of the random silences
of the night a low, distant drumming of artillery.




Chapter X



The Great Days of Verdun

The Verdun I saw in April, 1913, was an out-of-the-way provincial city
of little importance outside of its situation as the nucleus of a great
fortress. There were two cities--an old one, la ville des vques, on a
kind of acropolis rising from the left bank of the Meuse, and a newer
one built on the meadows of the river. Round the acropolis Vauban
had built a citadel whose steep, green-black walls struck root in the
mean streets and narrow lanes on the slopes. Sunless by-ways, ill-
paved and sour with the odor of surface drainage, led to it. Always
picturesque, the old town now and then took on a real beauty. There
were fine, shield-bearing doorways of the Renaissance to be seen,
Gothic windows in greasy walls, and here and there at a street corner
a huddle of half-timbered houses in a high contrast of invading
sunlight and retreating shade. From the cathedral parapet, there was
a view of the distant forts, and a horizontal sweep of the unharvested,
buff-brown moorlands.

"Un peu morte," say the French who knew Verdun before the war.
The new town was without distinction. It was out of date. It had none
of the glories that the province copies from Paris, no boulevards, no
grandes aertres. Such life as there was, was military. Rue Mazel
was bright with the gold braid and scarlet of the fournisseurs
militaires, and in the late afternoon chic young officers enlivened the
provincial dinginess with a brave show of handsome uniforms. All day
long squads of soldiers went flick! flack! up and down the street and
bugle-calls sounded piercingly from the citadel. The soldiery
submerged the civil population.

With no industries of any importance, and becoming less and less of
an economic center as the depopulation of the Woevre continued,
Verdun lived for its garrison. A fortress since Roman days, the city
could not escape its historic destiny. Remembering the citadel, the
buttressed cathedral, the soldiery, and the military tradition, the
visitor felt himself to be in a soldier's country strong with the memory
of many wars.

The next day, at noon, we were ordered to go to M------, and at 12.15
we were in convoy formation in the road by the barracks wall. The
great route nationale from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun runs through a
rolling, buff-brown moorland, poor in villages and arid and desolate in
aspect. Now it sinks through moorland valleys, now it cuts bowl-
shaped depressions in which the spring rains have bred green
quagmires, and now, rising, leaps the crest of a hill commanding a
landscape of ocean-like immensity.

Gray segments of the road disappear ahead behind fuzzy monticules;
a cloud of wood-smoke hangs low over some invisible village in a fold
of the moor, and patches of woodland lie like mantles on the barren
slopes. Great swathes of barbed wire, a quarter of a mile in width,
advancing and retreating, rising and falling with the geographical
nature of the defensive position, disappear on both sides to the
horizon. And so thick is this wire spread, that after a certain distance
the eye fails to distinguish the individual threads and sees only rows
of stout black posts filled with a steely, purple mist.

We went though several villages, being greeted in every one with the
inevitable error, AnglaisI We dodged interminable motor-convoys
carrying troops, the poilus sitting unconcernedly along the benches at
the side, their rifles tight between their knees. At midnight we arrived
at B------, four miles and a half west of Verdun. The night was clear
and bitter cold; the ice-blue winter stars were westering. Refugees
tramped past in the darkness. By the sputtering light of a match, I
saw a woman go by with a cat in a canary cage; the animal moved
uneasily, its eyes shone with fear. A middle-aged soldier went by
accompanying an old woman and a young girl. Many pushed baby
carriages ahead of them full of knick-knacks and packages.

The crossroad where the ambulances turned off was a maze of
beams of light from the autos. There was shouting of orders which
nobody could carry out. Wounded, able to walk, passed through the
beams of the lamps, the red of their bloodstains, detached against
the white of the bandages, presenting the sharpest of contrasts in the
silvery glare. At the station, men who had died in the ambulances
were dumped hurriedly in a plot of grass by the side of the roadway
and covered with a blanket. Never was there seen such a bedlam!
But on the main road the great convoys moved smoothly on as if held
together by an invisible chain. A smouldering in the sky told of fires in
Verdun.

From a high hill between B------and Verdun I got my first good look at
the bombardment. From the edge of earth and sky, far across the
moorlands, ray after ray of violet-white fire made a swift stab at the
stars. Mingled with the rays, now seen here, now there, the reddish-
violet semicircle of the great mortars flared for the briefest instant
above the horizon. From the direction of this inferno came a loud
roaring, a rumbling and roaring, increasing in volume--the sound of a
great river tossing huge rocks through subterranean abysses. Every
little while a great shell, falling in the city, would blow a great hole of
white in the night, and so thundering was the crash of arrival that we
almost expected to see the city sink into the earth.

Terrible in the desolation of the night, on fire, haunted by specters of
wounded men who crept along the narrow lanes by the city walls,
Verdun was once more undergoing the destinies of war. The shells
were falling along rue Mazel and on the citadel. A group of old houses
by the Meuse had burnt to rafters of flickering flame, and as I passed
them, one collapsed into the flooded river in a cloud of hissing steam.

In order to escape shells, the wounded were taking the obscure by-
ways of the town. Our wounded had started to walk to the ambulance
station with the others, but, being weak and exhausted, had collapsed
on the way. They were waiting for us at a little house just beyond the
walls. Said one to the other, "As-tu-vu Maurice?" and the other
answered without any emotion, "II est mort."

The 24th was the most dreadful day. The wind and snow swept the
heights of the desolate moor, seriously interfering with the running of
the automobiles. Here and there, on a slope, a lorry was stuck in the
slush, though the soldier passengers were out of it and doing their
best to push it along. The cannonade was still so intense that, in
intervals between the heavier snow-flurries, I could see the stabs of
fire in the brownish sky. Wrapped in sheepskins and muffled to the
ears in knitted scarves that might have come from New England, the
territorials who had charge of the road were filling the ruts with
crushed rock. Exhaustion had begun to tell on the horses; many lay
dead and snowy in the frozen fields. A detachment of khaki-clad, red-
fezzed colonial troops passed by, bent to the storm. The news was of
the most depressing sort. The wounded could give you only the story
of their part of the line, and you heard over and over again, "Nous
avons reculs." A detachment of cavalry was at hand; their casques
and dark-blue mantles gave them a crusading air. And through the
increasing cold and darkness of late afternoon, troops, cannons,
horsemen, and motor-trucks vanished toward the edge of the moor
where flashed with increasing brilliance the rays of the artillery.

I saw some German prisoners for the first time at T---, below Verdun.
They had been marched down from the firing-line. Young men in the
twenties for the most part, they seemed even more war-worn than the
French. The hideous, helot-like uniform of the German private hung
loosely on their shoulders, and the color of their skin was unhealthy
and greenish. They were far from appearing starved; I noticed two or
three who looked particularly sound and hearty. Nevertheless, they
were by no means as sound-looking as the ruddier French.

The poilus crowded round to see them, staring into their faces without
the least malevolence. At last--at last--voil enfin des Boches! A little
to the side stood a strange pair, two big men wearing an odd kind of
grayish protector and apron over their bodies. Against a near-by wall
stood a kind of flattish tank to which a long metallic hose was
attached. The French soldiers eyed them with contempt and disgust.
I caught the words, "Flame-throwers!"

I do not know what we should have done at Verdun without
Lieutenant Roeder, our mechanical officer. All the boys behaved
splendidly, but Lieutenant Roeder had the tremendously difficult task
of keeping the Section going when the rolling-stock was none too
good, and fearful weather and too constant usage had reduced some
of the wagons to wrecks. It was all the finer of him because he was by
profession a bacteriologist. Still very young, he had done
distinguished work. Simply because there was no one else to attend
to the mechanical department, he had volunteered for this most
tiresome and disagreeable task. There is not a single driver in Section
II who does not owe much to the friendly counsel, splendid courage,
and keen mind of George Roeder.

A few miles below Verdun, on a narrow strip of meadowland between
the river and the northern bluffs, stood an eighteenth-century chteau
and the half-dozen houses of its dependents. The hurrying river had
flooded the low fields and then retreated, turning the meadows and
pasturages to bright green, puddly marshes, malodorous with
swampy exhalations. Beyond the swirls and currents of the river and
its vanishing islands of pale-green pebbles, rose the brown, deserted
hills of the Hauts de Meuse. The top of one height had been pinched
into the rectangle of a fortress; little forests ran along the sky-line of
the heights, and a narrow road, slanting across a spur of the valley,
climbed and disappeared.

The chteau itself was a huge, three-story box of gray-white stone
with a slate roof, a little turret en poivrire at each corner, and a
graceless classic doorway in the principal faade. A wide double
gate, with a coronet in a tarnished gold medallion set in the iron arch-
piece, gave entrance to this place through a kind of courtyard formed
by the rear of the chteau and the walls of two low wings devoted to
the stables and the servants' quarters. Within, a high clump of dark-
green myrtle, ringed with muddy, rut-scarred turf, marked the
theoretical limits of a driveway. Along the right-hand wall stood the
rifles of the wounded, and in a corner, a great snarled pile of
bayonets, belts, cartridge-boxes, gas-mask satchels, greasy tin
boxes of anti-lice ointment, and dented helmets. A bright winter
sunlight fell on walls dank from the river mists, and heightened the
austerity of the landscape. Beyond a bend in the river lay the smoke
of the battle of Douaumont; shells broke, pin-points of light, in the
upper fringes of the haze.

The chteau had been a hospital since the beginning of the war. A
heavy smell of ether and iodoform lay about it, mixed with the smell of
the war. This effluvia of an army, mixed with the sharper reek of
anaesthetics, was the atmosphere of the hospital. The great rush of
wounded had begun. Every few minutes the ambulances slopped
down a miry byway, and turned in the gates; tired, putty-faced
hospital attendants took out the stretchers and the nouveaux clients;
mussy bundles of blue rags and bloody blankets turned into human
beings; an overworked, nervous mdecin chef shouted contradictory
orders at the brancardiers, and passed into real crises of hysterical
rage.

"Avancez!" he would scream at the bewildered chauffeurs of the
ambulances; and an instant later, "Reculez! Reculez!"

The wounded in the stretchers, strewn along the edges of the
driveway, raised patient, tired eyes at his snarling.

Another doctor, a little bearded man wearing a white apron and the
red velvet kpi of an army physician, questioned each batch of new
arrivals. Deep lines of fatigue had traced themselves under his kindly
eyes; his thin face had a dreadful color. Some of the wounded had
turned their eyes from the sun; others, too weak to move, lay stonily
blinking. Almost expressionless, silent, they resigned themselves to
the attendants as if these men were the deaf ministers of some
inexorable power.

The surgeon went from stretcher to stretcher looking at the diagnosis
cards attached at the poste de secours, stopping occasionally to ask
the fatal question, "As-tu crach du sang?" (Have you spit blood?) A
thin oldish man with a face full of hollows like that of an old horse,
answered "Oui," faintly. Close by, an artilleryman, whose cannon had
burst, looked with calm brown eyes out of a cooked and bluish face.
Another, with a soldier's tunic thrown capewise over his naked torso,
trembled in his thin blanket, and from the edges of a cotton and lint-
pad dressing hastily stuffed upon a shoulder wound, an occasional
drop of blood slid down his lean chest.

A little to one side, the cooks of the hospital, in their greasy aprons,
watched the performance with a certain calm interest. In a few
minutes the wounded were sorted and sent to the various wards. I
was ordered to take three men who had been successfully operated
on to the barracks for convalescents several miles away.

A highway and an unused railroad, both under heavy fire from
German guns on the Hauts de Meuse, passed behind the chteau
and along the foot of the bluffs. There were a hundred shell holes in
the marshes between the road and the river, black-lipped craters in
the sedgy green; there were ugly punches in the brown earth of the
bluffs, and deep scoops in the surface of the road. The telephone
wires, cut by shell fragments, fell in stiff, draping lines to the ground.
Every once in a while a shell would fall into the river, causing a silvery
gray geyser to hang for an instant above the green eddies of the
Meuse. A certain village along this highway was the focal point of the
firing. Many of the houses had been blown to pieces, and fragments
of red tile, bits of shiny glass, and lumps of masonry were strewn all
over the deserted street.

As I hurried along, two shells came over, one sliding into the river with
a Hip! and the other landing in a house about two hundred yards
away. A vast cloud of grayish-black smoke befogged the cottage, and
a section of splintered timber came buzzing through the air and fell
into a puddle. From the house next to the one struck, a black cat
came slinking, paused for an indecisive second in the middle of the
street, and ran back again. Through the canvas partition of the
ambulance, I heard the voices of my convalescents. "No more
marmites!" I cried to them as I swung down a road out of shell reach.
I little knew what was waiting for us beyond the next village.

A regiment of Zouaves going up to the line was resting at the
crossroad, and the regimental wagons, drawn up in waiting line,
blocked the narrow road completely. At the angle between the two
highways, under the four trees planted by pious custom of the Meuse,
stood a cross of thick planks. From each arm of the cross, on wine-
soaked straps, dangled, like a bunch of grapes, a cluster of dark-blue
canteens; rifles were stacked round its base, and under the trees
stood half a dozen clipped-headed, bull-necked Zouaves. A rather
rough-looking adjutant, with a bullet head disfigured by a frightful scar
at the corner of his mouth, rode up and down the line to see if all was
well. Little groups were handing round a half loaf of army bread, and
washing it down with gulps of wine.

"Hello, sport!" they cried at me; and the favorite "All right," and
"Tommy!"

The air was heavy with the musty smell of street mud that never dries
during winter time, mixed with the odor of the tired horses, who stood,
scarcely moving, backed away from their harnesses against the mire-
gripped wagons. Suddenly the order to go on again was given; the
carters snapped their whips, the horses pulled, the noisy, lumbering,
creaky line moved on, and the men fell in behind, in any order.

I started my car again and looked for an opening through the mle.

Beyond the cross, the road narrowed and flanked one of the
southeastern forts of the city. A meadow, which sloped gently upward
from the road to the abrupt hillside of the fortress, had been used as
a place of encampment and had been trodden into a surface of thick
cheesy mire. Here and there were the ashes of fires. There were
hundreds of such places round the moorland villages between
Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. The fort looked squarely down on Verdun,
and over its grassy height came the drumming of the battle, and the
frequent crash of big shells falling into the city.

In a corner lay the anatomical relics of some horses killed by an air-
bomb the day before. And even as I noted them, I heard the muffled
PomI Pom! Pom! of anti-aircraft guns. My back was to the river and I
could not see what was going on.

"What is it?" I said to a Zouave who was plodding along beside the
ambulance.

"Des Boches--crossing the river."

The regiment plodded on as before. Now and then a soldier would
stop and look up at the aeroplanes.

"He's coming!" I heard a voice exclaim.

Suddenly, the adjutant whom I had seen before came galloping down
the line, shouting, "Arrtez! Arrtez! Pas de mouvement!"

A current of tension ran down the troop with as much reality as a
current of water runs down hill. I wondered whether the Boche had
seen us.

"Is he approaching?" I asked.

"Yes."

Ahead of me was a one-horse wagon, and ahead of that a wagon
with two horses carrying the medical supplies. The driver of the latter,
an oldish, thick-set, wine-faced fellow, got down an instant from his
wagon, looked at the Boche, and resumed his seat. A few seconds
later, there sounded the terrifying scream of an air-bomb, a roar, and
I found myself in a bitter swirl of smoke. The shell had fallen right
between the horses of the two-horse wagon, blowing the animals to
pieces, splintering the wagon, and killing the driver. Something sailed
swiftly over my head, and landed just behind the ambulance. It was a
chunk of the skull of one of the horses. The horse attached to the
wagon ahead of me went into a frenzy of fear and backed his wagon
into my ambulance, smashing the right lamp. In the twinkling of an
eye, the soldiers dispersed. Some ran into the fields. Others
crouched in the wayside ditch. A cart upset. Another bomb dropped
screaming in a field and burst; a cloud of smoke rolled away down the
meadow.

When the excitement had subsided, it was found that a soldier had
been wounded. The bodies of the horses were rolled over into the
ditch, the wreck of the wagon was dragged to the miry field, and the
regiment went on. In a very short time I got to the hospital and
delivered my convalescents.

My way home ran through the town of S------, an ugly, overgrown
village of the Verdunois, given up to the activities of the staff directing
the battle. The headquarters building was the htel de ville, a large
eighteenth-century edifice, in an acre of trampled mud a little distance
from the street. Before the building flowed the great highway from
Bar-le-Duc to Verdun; relays of motor lorries went by, and 
gendarmes, organized into a kind of traffic squad, stood every
hundred feet or so. The atmosphere of S------at the height of the
battle was one of calm organization; it would not have been hard to
believe that the motor-lorries and unemotional men were at the
service of some great master-work of engineering. There was
something of the holiday in the attitude of the inhabitants of the place;
they watched the motor show exactly as they might have watched a
circus parade.

"Les voil," said somebody.

A little bemedaled group appeared on the steps of the htel de ville.
Dominating it was Joffre. Above middle height, silver-haired, elderly,
he has a certain paternal look which his eye belies; Joffre's eye is the
hard eye of a commander-in-chief, the military eye, the eye of an Old
Testament father if you will. De Castelnau was speaking, making no
gestures--an old man with an ashen skin, deep-set eye and great
hooked nose, a long cape concealed the thick, age-settled body.
Poincar stood listening, with a look at once worried and brave, the
ghost of a sad smile lingering on a sensitive mouth. Last of all came
Ptain, the protg of De Castelnau, who commanded at Verdun--a
tall, square-built man, not un-English in his appearance, with grizzled
hair and the sober face of a thinker. But his mouth and jaw are those
of a man of action, and the look in his gray eyes is always changing.
Now it is speculative and analytic, now steely and cold.

In the shelter of a doorway stood a group of territorials, getting their
first real news of the battle from a Paris newspaper. I heard "Nous
avons recul--huit kilomtres--le gnral Ptain--" A motor-lorry
drowned out the rest.

That night we were given orders to be ready to evacuate the chteau
in case the Boches advanced. The drivers slept in the ambulances,
rising at intervals through the night to warm their engines. The buzz of
the motors sounded through the tall pines of the chteau park,
drowning out the rumbling of the bombardment and the monotonous
roaring of the flood. Now and then a trench light, rising like a spectral
star over the lines on the Hauts de Meuse, would shine reflected in
the river. At intervals attendants carried down the swampy paths to
the chapel the bodies of soldiers who had died during the night. The
cannon flashing was terrific. Just before dawn, half a dozen batteries
of "seventy-fives" came in a swift trot down the shelled road; the men
leaned over on their steaming horses, the harnesses rattled and
jingled, and the cavalcade swept on, outlined a splendid instant
against the mortar flashes and the streaks of day.

On my morning trip a soldier with bandaged arm was put beside me
on the front seat. He was about forty years old; a wiry black beard
gave a certain fullness to his thin face, and his hands were pudgy and
short of finger. When he removed his helmet, I saw that he was bald.
A bad cold caused him to speak in a curious whispering tone, giving
to everything he said the character of a grotesque confidence.

"What do you do en civil? " he asked.

I told him.

"I am a pastry cook," he went on; "my specialty is Saint-Denis apple
tarts."

A marmite intended for the road landed in the river as he spoke.

"Have you ever had one? They are very good when made with fresh
cream." He sighed.

"How did you get wounded?" said I.

"clat d'obus," he replied, as if that were the whole story. After a
pause he added, "Douaumont--yesterday."

I thought of the shells I had seen bursting over the fort.

"Do you put salt in chocolate?" he asked professionally.

"Not as a rule," I replied.

"It improves it," he pursued, as if he were revealing a confidential
dogma. "The Boche bread is bad, very bad, much worse than a year
ago. Full of crumbles and lumps. Dgotant!"

The ambulance rolled up to the evacuation station, and my pastry
cook alighted.

"When the war is over, come to my shop," he whispered
benevolently, "and you shall have some tartes aux pommes  la
mode de Saint-Denis with my wife and me."

"With fresh cream?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied seriously.

I accepted gratefully, and the good old soul gave me his address.

In the afternoon a sergeant rode with me. He was somewhere
between twenty-eight and thirty, thick-set of body, with black hair and
the tanned and ruddy complexion of outdoor folk. The high collar of a
dark-blue sweater rose over his great coat and circled a muscular
throat; his gray socks were pulled country-wise outside of the legs of
his blue trousers. He had an honest, pleasant face; there was a
certain simple, wholesome quality about the man. In the piping times
of peace, he was a cultivateur in the Valois, working his own little
farm; he was married and had two little boys. At Douaumont, a
fragment of a shell had torn open his left hand.

"The Boches are not going to get through up there?"

"Not now. As long as we hold the heights, Verdun is safe." His simple
French, innocent of argot, had a good country twang. "But oh, the
people killed! Comme il y a des gens tus!" He pronounced the final s
of the word gens in the manner of the Valois.

"a s'accroche aux arbres," he continued.

The vagueness of the a had a dreadful quality in it that made you
see trees and mangled bodies. "We had to hold the crest of
Douaumont under a terrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope
when the Germans tried to fortify them. Our 'seventy-fives' dropped
shells into the big craters as I would drop stones into a pond. Pauvres
gens!"

The phrase had an earth-wide sympathy in it, a feeling that the
translation "poor folks" does not render. He had taken part in a
strange incident. There had been a terrible corps--corps in one of
the craters which had culminated in a victory for the French; but the
lieutenant of his company had left a kinsman behind with the dead
and wounded. Two nights later, the officer and the sergeant crawled
down the dreadful slope to the crater where the combat had taken
place, in the hope of finding the wounded man. They could hear faint
cries and moans from the crater before they got to it. The light of a
pocket flash-lamp showed them a mass of dead and wounded on the
floor of the crater--"un tas de mourants et de cadavres," as he
expressed it.

After a short search, they found the man for whom they were looking;
he was still alive but unconscious. They were dragging him out when
a German, hideously wounded, begged them to kill him.

"Moi, je n'ai plus jambes," he repeated in French; "piti, tuez-moi."

He managed to make the lieutenant see that if he went away and left
them, they would all die in the agonies of thirst and open wounds. A
little flickering life still lingered in a few; there were vague rles in the
darkness. A rafale of shells fell on the slope; the violet glares
outlined the mouth of the crater.

"Ferme tes yeux" (shut your eyes), said the lieutenant to the German.
The Frenchmen scrambled over the edge of the crater with their
unconscious burden, and then, from a little distance, threw hand-
grenades into the pit till all the moaning died away.

Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and
the organization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I
went again to Verdun. The snow was falling heavily, covering the
piles of dbris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned
houses. Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow. Above
the Meuse, above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope,
rose the shell-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers
of the still, tragic town. The drumming of the bombardment had died
away. The river was again in flood. In a deserted wine-shop on a side
street well protected from shells by a wall of sandbags was a post of
territorials.

To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was
something Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence
and ruin of the beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the
wrecked houses gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way,
under cover, stood a two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned
seesaw fire pump. There were old clerks and bookkeepers among
the soldier firemen--retired gendarmes who had volunteered, a
country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant from the Lyonnais.
Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and the outbreak of
fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop. On that day
only a few explosive shells had fallen.

"Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?" said one of the
pompiers to me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a
cold, deserted house. The snow had blown through the shell-
splintered window-panes. In the dining-room stood a table, the cloth
was laid and the silver spread; but a green feathery fungus had
grown in a dish of food and broken straws of dust floated on the wine
in the glasses. The territorial took my arm, his eyes showing the
pleasure of my responding curiosity, and whispered,--

"There were officers quartered here who were called very suddenly. I
saw the servant of one of them yesterday; they have all been killed."

Outside there was not a flash from the batteries on the moor. The
snow continued to fall, and darkness, coming on the swift wings of the
storm, fell like a mantle over the desolation of the city.

The End
