A Volunteer Poilu Part 6

Sunday--About five sh.e.l.ls an hour between 4 in the afternoon and midnight.

I give the number of sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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-a-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 (ca chante)," or, "It knocks (ca tape) up there to-day." The smoke of the bursting sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l from a small sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l 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-Pretre. 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 gra.s.sy 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 sh.e.l.ls by a spur of the Bois-le-Pretre, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls?"

"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 a.s.sured 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" sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l 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-Pretre, 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' sh.e.l.ls, six mines, twelve trench sh.e.l.ls; answer--ten 'seventy-five' sh.e.l.ls, eight mines, eighteen trench sh.e.l.ls; Poste B--two 'seventy-seven' sh.e.l.ls, one mine, six grenades; answer--fifteen 'seventy-five' sh.e.l.ls; Poste C--one 'two hundred and ten' sh.e.l.l, fifty mines; answer--sixty mines; Poste D--"

At Dieulouard I had entered the sh.e.l.l zone; at Pont-a-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 gra.s.sy 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 pa.s.sed from the sight of a brown puddle, scooped in the surface of the street by an exploding sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.led. In this frightful place we discussed la qualite 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 sh.e.l.l, intended for the batteries behind, burst high above us.

Skirting the ravine, now wooded, between Puvenelle and the Bois-le-Pretre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon the high plateau of La Woevre; the last kilometre being in full view of the Germans entrenched on the ridge across the rapidly narrowing, rising ravine. Along this visible s.p.a.ce the trees and bushes by the roadside were matted by sh.e.l.l fire into an inextricable confusion of destruction, and through the wisps and splinters of this ruin was seen the ridge of the Bois-le-Pretre rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At length the forest of Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Pretre 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 kilometres Metz, 25 kilometres.

There was not a soul anywhere in sight; I was surrounded with evidences of terrific violence--the shattered trees, the sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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-Reserve first."

The Quart-en-Reserve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of the Bois-le-Pretre 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-Pretre; 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs 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 sh.e.l.l sounded uncomfortably near, and bits of dirt and pebbles, dislodged by the concussion, fell from the wall of the pa.s.sage. 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 ma.s.ses. 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, gra.s.sy hills divided by a small, gra.s.sy 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 gra.s.sy 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,--sh.e.l.l holes, and fortified craters. Such was something of the situation in that wind-swept plain at the edge of the Bois-le-Pretre. 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.ses 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 gra.s.s. Moonlight poured into the roofless cottages, escaping by shattered walls and jagged rents, and the mounds of debris 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 gra.s.s, 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 princ.i.p.al 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 sh.e.l.l 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.