My Year of the War Part 14

"How do you like this kind of war?" we asked. It is the kind that irrigationists and subway excavators make.

"We've grown to be very fond of it," was the answer. "It is a cultivated taste, which becomes a pa.s.sion with experience. After you have been shot at in the open you want all the earth you can get between you and the bullets."

Now we alighted from the motor-car and went forward on foot. We pa.s.sed some eight lines of trenches before we came to the one where we were to stop. A practised military eye had gone over all that ground; a practised military hand had laid out each trench. After the work was done the civilian's eye could grasp the principle. If one trench were taken, the men knew exactly how to fall back on the next, which commanded the ground they had left. The trenches were not continuous. There were open s.p.a.ces left purposely. All that front was literally locked, and double and triple locked, with trenches. Break through one barred door and there is another and another confronting you. Considering the millions of burrowing and digging and watching soldiers, it occurred to one that if a marmite (saucepan) came along and buried our little party, our loss would not be as much noticed as if a piece of coping from a high building had fallen and extinguished us on Broadway, which would be a relatively novel way of dying. Being killed in war had long ceased to be a novelty on the continent of Europe.

We seemed in a dead world, except for the leisurely, hoa.r.s.e, m.u.f.fled reports of a French gun in the woods on either side of the open s.p.a.ce where we stood. Through our gla.s.ses we could see quite clearly the line of the German front trench, which was in the outskirts of a village on higher ground than the French. Not a human being was visible.

Both sides were watching for any move of the other, meanwhile lying tight under cover. By day they were marooned. All supplies and all reliefs of men who are to take their turn in front go out by night.

There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would man it in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had only to cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as in a winter resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might receive a call--which meant death for many. But they were used to that, and their card games went on none the less merrily.

"No farther?" we asked our major.

"No farther!" he said. "This is risk enough for you. It looks very peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some marmites if it pleased him." Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from the officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given not to do so--which adds another reason for military suspicion of the Press. The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected with the front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade headquarters, to apprehend two men of such-and-such description.

They were taken as easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a wooden leg and red hair would be in trying to get out of police headquarters when the doormen had his Bertillon photograph and measurements to go by.

That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up its slow firing at intervals. It was "bothering" one of the German trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a sh.e.l.l, swing a breech-lock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not respond because they could not locate the French battery. They may have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a four-leafed clover on the lawn below.

Our little group remained, not standing in the trench but back of it, in full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to play for realism by sending us a marmite. Probably they had seen us through the telescope at the start and concluded we weren't worth a shot. In the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst of sh.e.l.ls, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else. Then ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition.

The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer campaign. There must be fifteen dollars' worth of target in sight, say, for the smallest sh.e.l.l costs that; and the shorter you are of sh.e.l.ls the more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had become as commonplace a function to both French and German gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.

We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of them later. We are going direct to Gerbeviller which was--emphasis on the past tense--a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road, and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.

"I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!" I exclaimed.

"There was no such fighting in Belgium," was the answer.

Of course not, except in the south-western corner, where the armies still face each other.

"Not all the damage was done by the Germans," the major explained.

"Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a house, our guns let drive at that house," he went on. "The owners of the houses that were hit by our sh.e.l.ls are rather proud--proud of our marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to swallow."

For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbeviller. They tore it to pieces before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here, unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss cheese from sh.e.l.l-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured sh.e.l.ls into it. But the brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians knew that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian will not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.

"However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins does not prove that a brewery is better than a church. It only proves which is the Lord's side in this war," said Sister Julie. But I get ahead of my story.

In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction, with doors and windows intact facing gaps where doors and windows had been. We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had spared these buildings.

"Sister Julie!" the major called.

A short, st.u.r.dy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and appeared in the dark hall. She led us into the sitting-room, where she spryly placed chairs for our little party. She was smiling; her eyes were sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt, on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets some celebrated person for the first time--curiosity no less keen than if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.

Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day or night, with sh.e.l.ls screaming overhead and crashing into houses; through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and her four sister a.s.sociates remained in Gerbeviller. When the town was fired they moved from one building to another. They nursed both wounded French and Germans; also wounded townspeople who could not flee with the others.

"You were not frightened? You did not think of going away?" she was asked.

"Frightened?" she answered. "I had not time to think of that. Go away? How could I when the Lord's work had come to me?"

President Poincare went in person to give her the Legion of Honour, the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the kitchen at the time, cooking the meal for the sick for whom the sisters are still caring. So Sister Julie took the President of France into the kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me. A human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to burn. After the complexity of French politics, President Poincare was anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.

"He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be President," she said. "I thought that the President of France would be a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise.

Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel, who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du- du--yes, that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in Paris. They were very agreeable, too."

"And your Legion of Honour?"

"Oh, my medal that M. le President gave me! I keep that in a drawer.

I do not wear it every day when I am in my working-clothes."

"Have you ever been to Paris?"

"No, monsieur."

"They will make a great ado over you when you go."

"I must stay in Gerbeviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbeviller is my home. There is much to do here and there will be more to do when the people who were driven away return."

These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot; they saw their townspeople killed by sh.e.l.ls. The cornucopia of war's horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town, who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the stoicism to witness.

What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie's mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.

Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal.

Though her hair is white, youth's optimism and confidence in the future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present.

The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the streets again; there was a lot of the Lord's work to do yet.

In every word and thought she is French--French in her liveliness of spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town, she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved France fought and why she was happy to have remained in Gerbeviller to welcome them back.

In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded walk and a fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here they had been laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.

Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the edge of a woods. German aeroplanes had seen the French ma.s.sing for a charge under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes could not see what was in the woods. Rifles and machine-guns poured a spray of lead across the crest when the French appeared.

But the French, who were righting for Sister Julie's town, would not stop their rush at first. They kept on, as Pickett's men did when the Federal guns riddled their ranks with grapeshot. This accounts for many of the mounds being well beyond the crest. The Germans made a mistake in firing too soon. They would have made a heavier killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther. After the French fell back, for two days and nights their wounded lay out on that field without water or food, between the two forces, and if their comrades approached to give succour the machine-guns blazed more death, because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench on the crest. After two days the French forced the Germans out of the woods by hitting them from another point.

We went over the field of another charge half a mile away. There a French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back--which requires some nerve--and charged a German trench on rising ground. They took it. Then they tried to take the woods beyond.

Before they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty fell. But they did not give up the ground they had won. They burrowed into the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put the Germans out of the woods.

The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows--men of the type we stopped to chat with in the village--hastening to the front when the war began. Their officers were mostly reserves, too, who left civil occupations at the call to arms. One of the eight survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly looking the hero or the soldier. I expressed my admiration, and he answered quietly: "It was for France!" How often I have heard that as a reason for courage or sacrifice! The enemies of France have learned to respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French army before the war began.

"That railroad bridge yonder the Germans left intact when they occupied it because they were certain that they would need it to supply their troops when they took the Gap of Mirecourt and surrounded the French army," I was told. "However, they had to go in such a hurry that they failed to mine it. They must have fired five hundred sh.e.l.ls afterwards to destroy it, in vain."

It was dusk when we entered the city of Luneville for the second time.

Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where sh.e.l.ls had crashed into walls. It is hard to estimate just how much damage sh.e.l.l- fire has done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have struck on the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the block. But Luneville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only we did not hear about it. Grim, sad Louvain, with its German sentries among the ruins! Happy, triumphant Luneville, with its poilus instead of German sentries!

"We are going to meet the mayor," said the major.

First we went to his office. But that was a mistake. We were invited to his house, which was a fine, old, eighteenth-century building. If you could transport it to New York some arms-and-ammunition millionaire would give half a million dollars for it. The hallway was smoke- blackened and a burnt spot showed where the enemy had tried to set it on fire before evacuating the town. Ascending a handsome old staircase, we were in rooms with gilded mirrors and carved mantels, where we were introduced to His Honour, a lively man of some forty years.

"I have been in Amerique two months. So much English do I speak.

No more!" said the mayor merrily, and introduced us in turn to his wife, who spoke not even "so much" English, but French as fast and as piquantly as none but a Frenchwoman can. Her only son, who was seventeen, was going up with the 1916 cla.s.s of recruits very soon.

He was a st.u.r.dy youngster; a type of Young France who will make the France of the future.