A Volunteer Poilu Part 5

"Very bad," croaked the dwarf. "The Boches are throwing fire sh.e.l.ls."

"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 la).

"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 spa.r.s.e, 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 sh.e.l.l burst very near, and a bitter odor of explosives came swirling through the doorway. A fragment of the sh.e.l.l casing struck a window above us, and a large piece of gla.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 Foret 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-a-Mousson lies an ap.r.o.n of meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle and the ridge of the Bois-le-Pretre. 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 Maidieres, in which our headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a point where the amphitheater of Pont-a-Mousson, crowding between the two ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the west.

The Bois-le-Pretre 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 Maidieres, there was nothing to be seen but a gra.s.sy slope, open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a fire sh.e.l.l, 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-Pretre. 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-Pretre.

Metz is the heart of the German organization on the western front: the railroad center, the supply station, the troop depot. 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-Pretre 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-Pretre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt and Metz to preserve these centers from the danger of being sh.e.l.led. 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 n.o.ble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld by one vision, the unbroken, gra.s.sy 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-Pretre (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-Cla.s.sic," which affects large, windowless s.p.a.ces 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 Maidieres 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 richessimes 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 Maidieres. 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 chateau 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 gla.s.s 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 debris 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 princ.i.p.al road to the trenches divided into three branches, and in order to interfere as much as possible with communications, the Germans daily sh.e.l.led this strategic point. A comrade and I had the curiosity to keep an exact record of a week's sh.e.l.ling. 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 sh.e.l.ling the corner were usually "seventy-sevens," the German quick-firing pieces that correspond to the French "seventy-fives."

Monday, ten sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls between 9 and midnight.

Tuesday, two big sh.e.l.ls at mid-day.

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

Thursday--no sh.e.l.ls.

Friday, twelve at intervals between 10.16 and 12.20. Solitary big sh.e.l.l at 1.05. Another big sh.e.l.l at 3. Some fifteen stray sh.e.l.ls between 5 and midnight.

Sat.u.r.day--no sh.e.l.ls.