Fighting France Part 5

That officer knew how to suffer whom one of my brothers met on the battle field of Lorraine. An artillery officer, his arm was shattered, a few bits of flesh barely holding it fast to his shoulder. My brother, when he saw the man painfully dragging himself along, asked him whether or not he needed help.

"I don't need help," replied the wounded man, "but my battery down there does. It is retreating."

"If it is retreating, it can't be helped and it is a waste of time for me to get it ammunition...."

"No," begged the lieutenant, "get the munitions. We Colonials fight until the last man falls...."

He offered to guide my brother, mounted beside him on the artillery caisson, and stayed there all day. For after he had supplied his own battery, it was the battery next it, and then the one next to that, which he wanted to supply.... Finally, in the evening, at nightfall, they came to take him off in the ambulance. The major looked at his shattered arm, examined his frightful wound, and muttered:

"You are in a bad way. Couldn't you have come here sooner?"

The lieutenant replied humbly:

"Pardon me, I lost a lot of time on the way."

Those men I saw for months fighting and dying to the south of Verdun, at the b.u.t.te des Eparges, knew how to suffer.

The b.u.t.te des Eparges dominates the great plain of the Woevre, and from the very beginning it has been the theater of a frightful and long drawn out battle of the kind one seldom sees in this war. The Germans have been entrenched on the left side of the b.u.t.te, the French on the right. And day and night for four years there has been an incessant battle over its summit of grenades, bombs and sh.e.l.ls; a terrible hand-to-hand fight in which neither one of the contestants yields an inch of ground. A brook of blood runs its interrupted course on each slope. On the south slope it is red with German blood; with French blood on the north.

The two slopes of the b.u.t.te have been so raked by firing that they have not a single tree, bush, or blades of gra.s.s on them; they stand out sinister and frightful in their nakedness, seeming to cry out to the men of the plain:

"See, all of you, the scourge of G.o.d has pa.s.sed over this place."

They are dented, furrowed and blown into creva.s.ses by the explosions of mines; they are sown over with the enormous funnels in which the fighters take shelter; they are covered with an incessant smoke from the projectiles that plow them up.

As for the summit, it is a no man's land, that belongs to the dead men whose bodies cover it. The summit stopped being a battle field to become a charnel house. The number of men who have fallen there will never be known. The most fantastic figures come from the lips of those who come down ... 5,000, 8,000, 10,000 ... it will never be known. But what is known is that the dead are always there. They form a parapet above which the living fight on. These dead rot in the sunshine and in the rain. In accordance with the wind's being from the east or the west, the frightful odor of all this rotten flesh strikes the Germans or the French. They lie there, an indistinguishable ma.s.s on the ground, and the men are unlucky who watch by night in the listening posts or the trenches. They think they are stumbling against a stone, and it is a skull their feet are touching; they think they are picking up the branch of a tree, and they have hold of the arm of a corpse.

However, in the shadow of this human charnel house, at the edge of this b.l.o.o.d.y sewer, some little French soldiers come and go, eat and sleep for months at a time. The dreadfulness of the sights, the stench in the air, the tragic presence of death has not gripped their souls, their courage or their nerves. They are no less confident and merry than the others and, in the evening, when the setting sun adds the purple of its shadows to the red of all the blood that has been shed on the b.u.t.te, they sing from the depths of their charnel house sweet love songs.... This is the most regally beautiful sight I have seen in this war; it is the most splendidly moving example I know of what personal sacrifice for one's country's sake can do.

One day, in a rest village in the neighborhood, I met a soldier from one of the battalions which was encamped in the charnel house. He was a boy twenty years old, who hurried along with a flower in his b.u.t.tonhole, whistling a tune.... He was so joyful that I asked him:

"You seem as happy as you can be."

"I have leave, Sir," he answered, "and in a week I shall go to the country to see my mother. But, for the present, I have to go and take the trench at Eparges...."

As he mentioned the name of the accursed b.u.t.te, I could not repress a movement. He saw it and said:

"Sir, I am glad to go there."

And he told me his name and the number of his company. Then he hurried away.

It chanced that precisely one week later I met one of his officers. I asked him about the merry fellow.

"That man? He was killed the day before yesterday at Eparges."

And my comrade added in a low voice:

"He was shot down at my side, struck with a bullet square in the chest. The death agony set in at once. As I was trying to do something for him, pa.s.sing my hand gently across his forehead, I said to him:

"Courage, my boy, courage."

He murmured the reply:

"Oh, I'm glad to die."

Glad ... the same phrase, the same words I had heard a week ago, which can be heard everywhere on the French front--and they are glad to go into all the trenches and into all the charnel houses, and it is with a happy heart that they rest in peace.

But France has not only fought with all her courage, with all her soul, with all her tenacity. She has fought with all her living strength, with her men, her women, even her children.

What can I say which has not already been said about the men? When I think of my own men, when I think of all the men floundering and fighting in this mud, I can find no other means of expression than the words that have already served the Commander in Chief of the French Army, General Petain, on the evening of his great victory at the Chemin des Dames. In receiving the American newspapermen, he said to them:

"Do not speak of us, the generals and the officers. Speak only of the men. We have done nothing; the men have done everything. Our men are wonderful; we, their leaders, can only kneel at their feet."

The women have been no less wonderful. And I want to write a few words about them.

The women who are at the front have fought like the men. Can you imagine a more beautiful deed of arms than that of a young girl, twenty years old, named Marcelle Semer, whose heroic story a French Cabinet Minister, M. Klotz, told recently at one of the Matinees Nationales at the Sorbonne.

In August, 1914, there lived at Eclusier, near Frise, a young girl with gray eyes and blonde hair named Marcelle Semer. She was twenty years old at the time and kept accounts in addition to overseeing the work of a factory. At the time of the August invasion, after the Battle of Charleroi, the French tried to halt the Germans at the Somme. Not being in sufficient force, they retreated, crossing the river and the ca.n.a.l. The enemy immediately pursued. Marcelle Semer, who was following the French troops, had the presence of mind, after the last soldier had crossed the Somme Ca.n.a.l, to open the drawbridge in order to prevent the Germans from crossing it, and to hurl the key to the bridge into the ca.n.a.l in order that they might not take it from her when they came up. An entire enemy army corps was thus detained for twenty-four hours by this young girl's presence of mind; and it was only on the following day that the enemy, having found some boats on the Somme, made a bridge of them and pa.s.sed over the ca.n.a.l. But the French soldiers were already far away.

The Germans were masters of the neighborhood for some days. They seized the inhabitants as hostages and shut them up in a cave.

Marcelle Semer secretly carried them food. She also carried sustenance to other inhabitants who had hidden in the woods or in cellars. She succored and concealed the soldiers whom wounds or fatigue had prevented from following the main body of troops. She contrived that sixteen of them, dressed as civilians, escaped. Then she was apprehended by the Germans, arrested and led into the presence of a court-martial. The judgment was summary, and after a quarter of an hour's questioning Marcelle Semer was condemned to death.

"Do you admit," asked the presiding officer, "that you helped French soldiers to escape?"

"I certainly do," she replied. "I managed it so that sixteen of them escaped, and they are beyond your reach. Now you can do what you want to me. I am an orphan. I have only one mother--France. She does not disturb me when I'm dying."

This was one time when G.o.d intervened. Marcelle did not die. Brought to the place of execution, at the very moment when they were about to shoot, the French reentered the village and, by a miracle, she escaped her executioners. Today she wears the Croix de Guerre and the medal of the Legion of Honor.

They were Frenchwomen and fighters, these women whose names and deeds are to be found in the columns of the "Journal Officiel." Read, for example, this citation concerning Madame Macherez, President of the a.s.sociation des Dames Francaises de Soissons:

She willingly a.s.sumed the responsibility and the danger of representing the city before the enemy, and defended or managed the interests of the population in the absence of the mayor and the majority of the members of the town council. In spite of an intense bombardment which partially ruined the city, she took the most effective means possible to maintain calm in the city and to protect the lives of the inhabitants.

In this department, a lay instructress, Mlle. Cheron, merited a citation which does not contain the least over-praise:

She evidenced the greatest energy in difficult circ.u.mstances. Charged with the duties of Secretary to the Mayor, and alone at the time of the arrival of the Germans, she was not disconcerted by their threats, and kept her head in the face of their demands with remarkable calm and decision. When our troops returned, she a.s.sumed responsibility for the service and feeding of the cantonment. She personally took the steps necessary for the identification and burial of the dead. Finally, she was able to prevent panic at the time of the bombardment by the force of her example and her encouragement of the populace.

Those three nuns were also Frenchwomen and fighters of whom the "Journal Officiel" in the general order spoke as follows: