Golden Lads Part 13

LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE

The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the b.l.o.o.d.y business worth while?

I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one afternoon on the boards of an improvised stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last thin strip of the shattered kingdom English and French and Belgians were grimly ma.s.sed. He was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his comrades. With shining black hair and volatile face, he played many parts that day. He recited sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on amazing twenty-minute dialogues with himself, mimicking the voice of girl and woman, bully and dandy. His audience had come in stale from the everlasting spading and marching. They brightened visibly under his gaiety. If he cared to make that effort in the saddened place, they were ready to respond. When he dismissed them, the last flash of him was of a smiling, rollicking improvisator, bowing himself over to the applause till his black hair was level with our eyes.

And then next day as I sat in my ambulance, waiting orders, he trudged by in his blue, "the color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights under the rain. His head of hair, which the glossy black wig had covered, was gray-white. The sparkling, pantomimic face had dropped into wrinkles. He was patient and old and tired. Perhaps he, too, would have been glad of some one to cheer him up. He was just one more territorial--trench-digger and sentry and filler-in. He became for me the type of all those faithful, plodding soldiers whose first strength is spent. In him was gathered up all that fatigue and sadness of men for whom no glamour remains.

They went past me every day, hundreds of them, padding down the Nieuport road, their feet tired from service and their boots road-worn--crowds of men beyond numbering, as far as one could see into the dry, volleying dust and beyond the dust; men coming toward me, a nation of them. They came at a long, uneven jog, a cluttered walk. Every figure was sprinkled and encircled by dust--dust on their gray temples, and on their wet, streaming faces, dust coming up in puffs from their shuffling feet, too tired to lift clear of the heavy roadbed. There was a hot, pitiless sun, and every man of them was shrouded in the long, heavy winter coat, as soggy as a horse blanket, and with thick leather gaiters, loose, flapping, swathing their legs as if with bandages. On the man's back was a pack, with the huge swell of the blanket rising up beyond the neck and generating heat-waves; a loaf of tough black bread fastened upon the knapsack or tied inside a faded red handkerchief; and a dingy, scarred tin Billy-can. At his shapeless, rolling waist his belt hung heavy with a bayonet in its casing. On the shoulder rested a dirt-caked spade, with a clanking of metal where the bayonet and the Billy-can struck the handle of the spade. Under a peaked cap showed the bearded face and the white of strained eyes gleaming through dust and sweat. The man was too tired to smile and talk. The weight of the pack, the weight of the clothes, the dust, the smiting sun--all weighted down the man, leaving every line in his body sagging and drooping with weariness.

These are the men that spade the trenches, drive the food-transports and ammunition-wagons, and carry through the detail duties of small honor that the army may prosper. When has it happened before that the older generation holds up the hands of the young? At the western front they stand fast that the youth may go forward. They fill in the sh.e.l.l-holes to make a straight path for less-tired feet. They drive up food to give good heart to boys.

War is easy for the young. The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the b.l.o.o.d.y business worth while?

Is there any far-off divine event which his death will hasten? The wines of France are good wines, and his home in fertile Normandy was pleasant.

As we stood in the street in the sun one hot afternoon, four men came carrying a wounded man. The stretcher was growing red under its burden.

The man's face was greenish white, with a stubble of beard. The flesh of his body was as white as snow from loss of blood. It was torn at the chest and sides. They carried him to the dressing-station, and half an hour later lifted him into our car. We carried him in for two miles.

Four flies fed on the red rim of his closed left eye. He lay silent, motionless. Only a slight flutter of the coverlet, made by his breathing, gave a sign of life. At the Red Cross post we stopped. The coverlet still slightly rose and fell. The doctor, brown-bearded, in white linen, stepped into the car, tapped the man's wrist, tested his pulse, put a hand over his heart. Then the doctor muttered, drew the coverlet over the greenish-white face, and ordered the marines to remove him. In the moment of arrival the wounded man had died.

In the courtyard next our post two men were carrying in long strips of wood. This wood was for coffins, and one of them would be his.

A funeral pa.s.ses our car, one every day, sometimes two: a wooden cross in front, carried by a soldier; the white-robed chaplain chanting; the box of light wood, on a frame of black; the coffin draped in the tricolor, a squad of twenty soldiers following the dead. That is the funeral of the middle-aged man. There is no time wasted on him in the brisk business of war; but his comrades bury him. One in particular faithful at funerals I had learned to know--M. Le Doze. War itself is so little the respecter of persons that this man had found himself of value in paying the last small honor to the obscure dead as they were carried from his Red Cross post to the burial-ground. One hopes that he will receive no hasty trench burial when his own time comes.

I cannot write of the middle-aged man of the Belgians because he has been killed. That first mixed army, which in thin line opposed its body to an immense machine, was crushed by weight and momentum. Little is left but a memory. But I shall not forget the veteran officer of the first army, near Lokeren, who kept his men under cover while he ran out into the middle of the road to see if the Uhlans were coming. The only Belgian army today is an army of boys. Recently we had a letter from Andre Simont, of the "Obusiers Lourdes, Beiges," and he wrote:

If you promise me you will come back for next summer, I won't get pinked. If I ever do, it doesn't matter. I have had twenty years of very happy life.

If he were forty-five, he would say, as a French officer at c.o.xyde said to me:

"Four months, and I haven't heard from my wife and children. We had a pleasant home. I was well to do. I miss the good wines of my cellar.

This beer is sour. We have done our best, we French, our utmost, and it isn't quite enough. We have made a supreme effort, but it hasn't cleared the enemy from our country. _La guerre--c'est triste._"

He, too, fights on, but that overflow of vitality does not visit him, as it comes to the youngsters of the first line. It is easy for the boys of Brittany to die, those sailors with a rifle, the stanch Fusiliers Marins, who, outnumbered, held fast at Melle and Dixmude, and for twelve months made Nieuport, the extreme end of the western battle-line, a great rock. It is easy, because there is a glory in the eyes of boys.

But the older man lives with second thoughts, with a subdued philosophy, a love of security. He is married, with a child or two; his garden is warm in the afternoon sun. He turns wistfully to the young, who are so sure, to cheer him. With him it is bloodshed, the moaning of sh.e.l.l-fire, and harsh command.

One afternoon at c.o.xyde, in the camp of the middle-aged--the territorials--an open-air entertainment was given. Ma.s.sed up the side of a sand-dune, row on row, were the bearded men, two thousand of them.

There were flashes of youth, of course--marines in dark blue, with jaunty round hat with fluffy red centerpiece; Zouaves with dusky Algerian skin, yellow-sorrel jacket, and baggy harem trousers; Belgians in fresh khaki uniform; and Red Cross British Quakers. But the ma.s.s of the men were middle-aged--territorials, with the light-blue long-coat, good for all weathers and the sharp night, and the peaked cap. Over the top of the dune where the soldiers sat an observation balloon was suspended in a cloudless blue sky, like a huge yellow caterpillar.

Beyond the pasteboard stage, high on a western dune, two sentries stood with their bayonets touched by sunlight. To the south rose a monument to the territorial dead. To the north an aeroplane flashed along the line, full speed, while gun after gun threw shrapnel at it.

As I looked on the people, suddenly I thought of the Sermon on the Mount, with the mult.i.tude spread about, tier on tier, hungry for more than bread. It was a scene of summer beauty, with the glory of the sky thrown in, and every now and then the music of the heart. Half the songs of the afternoon were gay, and half were sad with long enduring, and the memory of the dear ones distant and of the many dead. Not in lightness or ignorance were these men making war. When I saw the mult.i.tude and how they hungered, I wished that Bernhardt could come to them in the dunes and express in power what is only hinted at by humble voices. I thought how everywhere we wait for some supreme one to gather up the hope of the nations and the anguish of the individual, and make a music that will send us forward to the Rhine.

But a better thing than that took place. One of their own came and shaped their suffering into song. And together, he and they, they made a song that is close to the great experience of war. A Belgian, one of the boy soldiers, came forward to sing to the bearded men. And the song that he sang was "_La valse des obus_"--"The Dance of the Sh.e.l.ls."

"Dear friends, I'm going to sing you some rhymes on the war at the Yser."

The men to whom he was singing had been holding the Yser for ten months.

"I want you to know that life in the trenches, night by night, isn't gay."

Two thousand men, unshaved and tousled, with pain in their joints from those trench nights, were listening.

"As soon as you get there, you must set to work. It doesn't matter whether it's a black night or a full moon; without making a sound, close to the enemy, you must fill the sand-bags for the fortifications."

Every man on the hill had been doing just that thing for a year.

Then came his chorus:

"Every time we are in the trenches, _Crack!_ There breaks the sh.e.l.l."

But his French has a verve that no literal translation will give. Let us take it as he sang it:

"_Crack!_ Il tombe des obus," sang the slight young Belgian, leaning out toward the two thousand men of many colors, many nations; and soon the sky in the north was spotted with white clouds of shrapnel-smoke.

"There we are, all of us, crouching with bent back--_Crack!_ Once more an obus. The shrapnel, which try to stop us at our job, drive us out; but the things that bore us still more--_Crack!_--are just those obus."

With each "_Crack!_ Il tombe des obus," the big ba.s.s-drum boomed like the sh.e.l.l he sang of. His voice was as tense and metallic as a taut string, and he snapped out the lilting line in swift staccato as if he were flaying his audience with a whip. Man after man on the hillside took up the irresistible rhythm in an undertone, and "Cracked" with the singer. In front of me was being created a folk-song. The bitterness and glory of their life were being told to them, and they were hearing the singer gladly. Their leader was lifting the dreary trench night and death itself into a surmounting and joyous thing.

"When you've made your entrenchment, then you must go and guard it without preliminaries. All right; go ahead. But just as you're moving, you have to squat down for a day and a night--yes, for a full twenty-four hours--because things are hot. Somebody gives you half a drop of coffee. Thirst torments you. The powder-fumes choke you."

Here and there in the crowd, listening intently, men were stirring. The lad was speaking to the exact intimate detail of their experience. This was the life they knew. What would he make of it?

"Despite our sufferings, we cherish the hope some day of returning and finding our parents, our wives, and our little ones. Yes, that is my hope, my joyous hope. But to come to that day, so like a dream, we must be of good cheer. It is only by enduring patience, full of confidence, that we shall force back our oppressors. To chase away those cursed Prussians--_Crack_! We need the obus. My captain calling, '_Crack_!

More, still more of those obus!' Giving them the bayonet in the bowels, we shall chase them clean beyond the Rhine. And our victory will be won to the waltz of the obus."

It was a song out of the heart of an unconquerable boy. It climbed the hillock to the top. The response was the answer of men moved. His song told them why they fought on. There is a Belgium, not under an alien rule, which the sh.e.l.ls have not shattered, and that dear kingdom is still uninvaded. The mother would rather lose her husband and her son than lose the France that made them. Their earthly presence is less precious than the spirit that pa.s.sed into them out of France. That is why these weary men continue their fight. The issue will rest in something more than a matter of mathematics. It is the last stand of the human spirit.

What is this idea of country, so pa.s.sionately held, that the women walk to the city gates with son and husband and send them out to die? It is the aspect of nature shared in by folk of one blood, an arrangement of hill and pasture which grew dear from early years, sounds and echoes of sound that come from remembered places. It is the look of a land that is your land, the light that flickers in an English lane, the bells that used to ring in Bruges.

+----------------------------------------------------------------+ |Transcribers note: In the original and html version this poem is| |centered, in this text is is rendered flat to the margin. | +----------------------------------------------------------------+

LA VALSE DES OBUS

I

Chers amis, je vais Vous chanter des couplets, Sur la guerre, A l'Yser.

Pour vous faire savoir, Que la vie, tous les soirs, Aux tranchees, N'est pas gaie.

A peine arrive, 'l Faut aller travailler.

Qu'il fa.s.se noir' ou qu'il y ait clair de lune, Et sans fair' du bruit, Nous allons pres de l'ennemi, Remplir des sacs pour fair' des abris.

Ir et IIe Refrain

Chaqu' fois que nous sommes aux tranchees, Crack! Il tombe des obus.