A Volunteer Poilu Part 7

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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls.

The train not being able to continue into the sh.e.l.l 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 ma.s.sacred trees. I remember being sh.e.l.led 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 sh.e.l.l fell about a hundred yards away, and the wagons brought up jerkily, the harnesses rattling. For ten minutes the Germans sh.e.l.led the length of road just ahead of us, but no sh.e.l.l came closer to us than the first one. About thirty "seventy-seven" sh.e.l.ls 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 melee a trench light rose, showing the line of halted gray wagons, the motionless horses, and the helmeted drivers. The whole affair pa.s.sed in silence. When it was judged that the last sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.led, 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-Pretre, 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-a-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 pa.s.sages in the rear-line trenches will appear as heavy and ma.s.sive 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 ma.s.sacred 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 sh.e.l.ls. By the time that the first line has been destroyed and the troops have reached the second line, the sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls) 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 pa.s.s a regiment coming to repos. Silent, vaguely seen, in broken step the regiment pa.s.sed. Sometimes a sh.e.l.l would come whistling in.

There was one part of the Bois-le-Pretre 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-Pretre, 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 Poincare--such was its t.i.tle--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 att.i.tudes. 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, pa.s.sing 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 sh.e.l.l. The missile burst with that loud hammer pound made by a thick-walled iron sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l had fallen, others paid no attention to it whatsoever. Once again the quiet was disturbed by a m.u.f.fled boom somewhere ahead of us, and everybody calculated and took refuge exactly as before. The sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 att.i.tudes, were about fifteen men, the squad that had just completed its sentry service. Two candles hung from the ma.s.sive 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 sh.e.l.l 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 cla.s.sic 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 sh.e.l.l 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 ba.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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"

sh.e.l.ls pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.ls. The quiet hush of late afternoon was at hand. Soon the cook came down the trench with kettles of hot soup.

Five months have pa.s.sed 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 ca.n.a.ls. 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 a 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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. Voila l'ennemi! The race is a poisonous race, serpents, ma.s.sacreurs! 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.