A Volunteer Poilu Part 8

Chapter VI

The Germans Attack

The schoolmaster (inst.i.tuteur) and the schoolmistress (inst.i.tutrice) 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 sh.e.l.l, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and gla.s.s, 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 ba.n.a.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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. Sh.e.l.ls 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-a-Mousson and the trenches, and the roads leading directly to the trenches, were being sh.e.l.led.

"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 sh.e.l.l 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; sh.e.l.ls broke here and there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Reserve, 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-Pretre--vague ma.s.ses of moving blue on the brown ways. A storm of sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls, bursting of sh.e.l.ls, 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-Reserve 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, pa.s.sing on our way detachments of soldiers rushing toward The Wood from the villages of the region.

Three or four big sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 a 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 (fusees eclairantes), 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-a-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 decor, 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 decor, 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 att.i.tude of the veterans. Violence becomes the commonplace; sh.e.l.ls, 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 circ.u.mstances. When this power of adaptability has been reinforced by a tenacious national will "to see the thing through," men will stand h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.s 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 inst.i.tution 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-cla.s.s prodigals to the fold, and a rekindling of the chilled brands of the faith of the amiably skeptical. The great ma.s.s of the nation has felt this spiritual force, but because the ma.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sured, 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-a-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 cla.s.sic pug. She was as fearless of sh.e.l.ls as a soldier in the trenches, and once went to a deserted orchard, practically in the trenches, to get some apples for Messieurs les Americains. 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ling 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 sh.e.l.ls 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-a-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 circ.u.mstances (les evenements) and did not mean war. Then over this bill the maire posted a notice that in case of a real mobilization (une mobilisation serieuse) 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 hotel 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-a-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 pet.i.ts soldats Francais. In the morning I went out to get some bread.

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

"'What do you want?' said I.

"'Are there any soldats francais 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.'