A Volunteer Poilu Part 9

"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-a-Mousson--there were some vulgarities (grossieretes). 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-a-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 Francais nor Boches. Finally some French dragoons came down the road from Dieulouard, and little by little other soldiers came too. But, helas, monsieur, the Boches were waiting for them in the Bois-le-Pretre."

Such was the way that Pont-a-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 Nomeny, just across the river, is beyond question. I have talked with survivors. At Pont-a-Mousson everything was orderly; six miles to the east, houses were burned over the heads of the inhabitants, and women and children brutally ma.s.sacred.

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 sh.o.r.e 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-Pretre, the next ridge to rise from the river was a gra.s.sy spur bearing the village of Norroy on its back.

You could see the hill, only four kilometres 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 a 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 princ.i.p.al street of the town led from this bridge to a great square, and continued straight on toward Maidieres 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 sh.e.l.ls bursting in the open s.p.a.ce, 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 Segur's "Histoire de la Grande Armee en 1812," and another taking Flaubert's "Un c?ur 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 pa.s.sage a niveau, and the station in a jungle of dead gra.s.s 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 kilometres," 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." (Apres 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 sh.e.l.ls 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. "Voila un colonel boche," said the s.e.xton; "and a lieutenant boche--and fifty soldats boches."

The destroyed quarter of Pont-a-Mousson lay between the main street and the flank of the Bois-le-Pretre. 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 gra.s.s 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-Pretre, 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 sh.e.l.ls; there were pock-marks and pits of sh.e.l.l fragments in the plaster, window gla.s.s outside, and holes in walls and roofs. I wandered down the street, pa.s.sing the famous miraculous statue of the Virgin of Pont-a-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 sh.e.l.l 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 a.n.a.logue 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 sc.u.m.

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 seash.e.l.l, 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-a-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 l.u.s.ters of bronzy yellow, and a gla.s.s 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 (defenseur) 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 (peres 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 sh.e.l.ls."

"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 sh.e.l.ls had blown almost all the gla.s.s 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 bra.s.sy 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-a-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-Pretre.

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 st.u.r.dy, male bearishness, and thus the French, long before the war, called any good, powerful fellow--"un veritable 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 compet.i.tors 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 att.i.tude, half banter, half race contempt, lies at the heart of both terms.