My Year of the War Part 13

It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where we had left the car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of chatting soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in command, and found him and his staff around a table covered with oilcloth in the main living-room of a villager's house. He spoke of his men, of their loyalty and cheerfulness, as the other commanders had, as if this were his only boast. These French officers have little "side"; none of that toe-the-mark, strutting militarism which the Germans think necessary to efficiency. They live very simply on campaign, though if they do get to town for a few hours they enjoy a good meal.

If they did not, madame at the restaurant would feel that she was not doing her duty to France.

XII Smiles Among Ruins

Scorched piles of brick and mortar where a home has been ought to make about the same impression anywhere. When you have gone from Belgium to French Lorraine, however, you will know quite the contrary. In Belgium I suffered all the depression which a nightmare of war's misery can bring; in French Lorraine I found myself sharing something of the elation of a man who looks at a bruised knuckle with the consciousness that it broke a burglar's jaw.

A Belgian repairing the wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes.

The difference was this: The Germans were still in Belgium; they were out of French Lorraine for good.

"What matters a sh.e.l.l-hole through my walls and my torn roof!" said a Lorraine farmer. "Work will make my house whole. But nothing could ever have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans remained. I saw them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is ours!"

I had thought it a pretty good thing to see something of the Eastern French front; but a better thing was the happiness I found there.

Mon capitaine had come out from the Ministry of War in Paris; but when we set out from Nancy southward, we had a different local guide, a major belonging to the command in charge of the region which we were to visit. He was another example which upsets certain popular notions of Frenchmen as gesticulating, excitable little men.

Some six feet two in height, he had an eye that looked straight into yours, a very square chin, and a fine forehead. You had only to look at him and size him up on points to conclude that he was all there; that he knew his work.

"Well, we've got good weather for it to-day, monsieur," said a voice out of a goatskin coat, and I found we had the same chauffeur as before.

The sun was shining--a warm winter sun like that of a February thaw in our Northern States--glistening on the snowy fields and slopes among the forests and tree-clad hills of the mountainous country.

Faces ambushed in whiskers thought it was a good day for tr.i.m.m.i.n.g beards and washing clothes. The sentries along the roads had their scarfs around their necks instead of over their ears. A French soldier makes ear m.u.f.fs, chest protector, nightcap, and a blanket out of the scarf which wife or sister knits for him. If any woman who reads this knits one to send to France she may be sure that the fellow who received it will get every st.i.tch's worth out of it.

To-day, then, it was war without mittens. You did not have to sound the bugle to get soldiers out of their burrows or their houses. Our first stop was at our own request, in a village where groups of soldiers were taking a sun bath. More came out of the doors as we alighted.

They were all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve regiment. Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers, some employers, when the war began. Then they were piou-pious, in French slang; then all France prayed G.o.dspeed to its beloved piou- pious. Then you knew the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard hands; the employer by his manner of command. Now they were poilus--bearded, hard-eyed veterans; you could not tell the clerk from the labourer or the employer from the peasant.

Anyone who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan goldfield in '97-8 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had happened to these men. The puny had put on muscle; the city dweller had blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose; social differences of habit had disappeared. The gentleman used to his bath and linen sheets and the hard-living farmer or labourer--both had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they were lodged and in the dug-outs of the trenches when it was their turn to occupy them through the winter. Any "sn.o.b" had his edges trimmed by the banter of his comrades. Their beards accentuated the likeness of type. A cheery lot of faces and intelligent, these, which greeted us with curious interest.

"Perhaps President Wilson will make peace," one said.

"When?"

A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was:

"When we have Alsace-Lorraine back."

Under a shed their dejeuner was cooking. This meal at noon is the meal of the day to the average Frenchman who has only bread and coffee in the morning. They say that he objects to fighting at luncheon time. That is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work and laugh and talk and enjoy his eating. The Germans found this out and tried to take his trenches at the noon hour. Interference with his gastronomic habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and fork for the bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious counter-attack. He would teach those "Boches" to leave him to eat his dejeuner in peace.

That appetizing stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved that Frenchmen know how to cook. I didn't blame them for objecting to being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it. The average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more meat, for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier. It is a very simple problem with France's fine roads to feed that long line when it is stationary. It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance of four hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day for each man and a known number of men to feed. From the railway head trucks and motor-buses take the supplies up to the distributing points.

At one place I saw ten Paris motor-buses, their signs painted over in a steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had broken down through the war. The French take good care of their equipment and their clothes; they waste no food. As a people is so is their army, and the French are thrifty by nature.

Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Tsar. And he has a happy family. It seemed to me that life ought to have been utterly dull for this characteristic group of poilus, living crowded together all winter in a remote village. Civilians sequestered in this fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.

One of the officers in speaking of this said that early in the autumn the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a soldier. Commanders were worried. But as winter wore on the spirit changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the one thought that they were there for France. The fellowship of a cause taught them patience, brought them cheer. Another thing was the increasing sense of team play, of confidence in victory, which holds a ball team, a business enterprise, or an army together. Every day the organization of the army was improving; every day that indescribable and subtle element of satisfaction that the Germans were securely held was growing.

Every Frenchman saves something of his income; madame sees to it that he does. He knows that if he dies he will not leave wife and children penniless. His son, not yet old enough to fight, will come on to take his place. Men at home of twenty-two or three years and unmarried, men of twenty-eight or thirty years and not long married, and men of forty with some money put by, will, in turn, understand how their own cla.s.s feels.

In ten minutes you had entered into the hearts of this single company in a way that made you feel that you had got into the heart of the whole French army. When you asked them if they would like to go home they didn't say "No!" all in a chorus, as if that were what the colonel had told them to say. They obey the colonel, but their thoughts are their own. Otherwise, these ruddy, healthy men, representing the people of France and not the cafes of Paris, would not keep France a republic.

Yes, they did want to go home. They did want to go home. They wanted their wives and babies; they wanted to sit down to morning coffee at their own tables. Lumps rose in their throats at the suggestion. But they were not going until the German peril was over for ever. Why stop now, only to have another terrible war in thirty or forty years? A peace that would endure must be won. They had thought that out for themselves. They would not stick to their determination if they had not. This is the way of democracies. Thus, everyone was conscious that he was fighting not merely to win, but for future generations.

"It happened that this great struggle which we had long feared came in our day, and to us is the duty," said one. You caught the spirit of comradeship pa.s.sing the time with jests at one another's expense.

One of the men who was not a full thirty-third-degree poilu had compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his shock of hair.

"I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way for Zeppelins!" said a comrade.

"Envy! Sheer envy!" was the retort. "Look at him!" and he pointed at some scraggly bunches on chin and cheeks which resembled a young gra.s.s plat that had come up badly.

"I don't believe in air-tight beards," was the response. When I produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is with soldiers at the front. They all wanted to be in the photograph, on the chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or father looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this: "Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry 18th Company, 5th Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121." by which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector. By the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on any one of his millions, each a human being with all a human being's individual emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of the vast mult.i.tude of obedient chessmen.

"We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word," all agreed. Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means the enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy's intelligence.

"If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot here," said mon capitaine.

These were the men who had not been long married. They were not yet past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home; perhaps they had become fathers since they went to war. The younger men of the first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of youth which makes comradeship easy.

But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late thirties and early forties, have settled down in life. Their families are established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may enjoy a vacation from the wife; for you know madame, in France, with all her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this is not a proper tonic for her lord. So the old boys seem the most content in the fellowship of winter quarters. What they cannot stand are repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of rifle and pack. But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one very practical reason why they will fight well--and they have fought better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in their blood. "Allons, messieurs!" said the tall major, who wanted us to see battlefields. It required no escort to tell us where the battlefield was. We knew it when we came to it, as you know the point reached by high tide on the sands--this field where many Gettysburgs were fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in the balance--as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a decisive victory over the French army. Where destruction ended there the German invasion reached its limit.

Forests and streams and ditches and railway culverts played their part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery walls, too. In all my battlefield visits in Europe I have not seen a single cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen to the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.

We stopped at a cross-roads where charges met and wrestled back and forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of sh.e.l.ls appeared as steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his end, and near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over.

Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him out in this fighting across the fields and through the forests, in a tug- of-war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust- laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder breaking forth into h.e.l.l when the war was only a month old and pa.s.sion was at a white heat.

Hasty shelter-trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that they carry on their backs to give them a little cover. And there is the trench that stopped the Germans--the trench which they charged but could not take. It lies among sh.e.l.l-holes so thick that you can step from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German courage could not endure. Thus far and no farther the invasion came in that wheat-field which will be ever memorable.

We went up a hill once crowned by one of those cl.u.s.ters of farm- buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and granaries are close together. All around were bare fields. Those farm- buildings stood up like a mountain peak. The French had the hill and lost it and recovered it. Whichever side had it, the other was bound to bathe it in sh.e.l.ls because it commanded the country around. The value of property meant nothing. All that counted was military advantage. Because churches are often on hill-tops, because they are bound to be used for lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces.

When two men are fighting for life they don't bother about upsetting a table with a vase, or notice any "Keep off the gra.s.s" signs; no, not even if the family Bible be underfoot.

None of the roof, none of the superstructure of these farm-buildings was left; only the lower walls, which were eighteen inches thick and in places penetrated by the sh.e.l.ls. For when a Frenchman builds a farmhouse he builds it to last a few hundred years. The farm windmill was as twisted as a birdcage that has been rolled under a trolley car, but a large hayrake was unharmed. Such is the luck of war. I made up my mind that if I ever got under sh.e.l.l-fire I would make for the hayrake and avoid the windmill.

Our tall major pointed out all the fluctuating positions during the battle.

It was like hearing a chess match explained from memory by an expert. Words to him were something precious. He made each one count as he would the shots from his cannon. His narrative had the lucidity of a terse judge reviewing evidence. The battlefield was etched on his mind in every important phase of its action.

Not once did he speak in abuse of the enemy. The staff officer who directs steel ringing on steel is too busy thrusting and keeping guard to indulge in diatribes. To him the enemy is a powerful impersonal devil, who must be beaten. When I asked about the conduct of the Germans in the towns they occupied, his lip tightened and his eyes grew hard.

"I'm afraid it was pretty bad!" he said; as if he felt, besides the wrong to his own people, the shame that men who had fought so bravely should act so ill. I think his att.i.tude toward war was this: "We will die for France, but calling the Germans names will not help us to win. It only takes breath."

"Allons, messieurs!"

As our car ran up a gentle hill we noticed two soldiers driving a load of manure. This seemed a pretty prosaic, even humiliating, business, in a poetic sense, for the brave poilus, veterans of Lorraine's great battle. But Father Joffre is a true Frenchman of his time. Why should not the soldiers help the farmers whose sons are away at the front and perhaps helping farmers back of some Other point of the line?

Over the crest of the hill we came on long lines of soldiers bearing timbers and fascines for trench-building, which explained why some of the villages were empty. A fascine is something usually made of woven branches which will hold dirt in position. The woven wicker cases for sh.e.l.ls which the German artillery uses and leaves behind when it has to quit the field in a hurry, make excellent fascines, and a number that I saw were of this ready-made kind. After carrying sh.e.l.l for killing Frenchmen they were to protect the lives of Frenchmen.

Near by other soldiers were turning up a strip of fresh earth against the snow, which looked like a rip in the frosting of a chocolate cake.