On the Edge of the War Zone Part 14

January 23, 1916

Well, I have really been to Paris, and it was so difficult that I ask myself why I troubled.

I had to await the pleasure of the commander of the Cinquieme Armee, as the Emba.s.sy was powerless to help me, although they did their best with great good will. I enclose you my sauf-conduit that you may see what so important a doc.u.ment is like. Then I want to tell you the funny thing--/ never had to show it once. I was very curious to know just how important it was. I went by the way of Esbly. On buying my ticket I expected to be asked for it, as there was a printed notice beside the window to the ticket-office announcing that all purchasers of tickets must be furnished with a sauf-conduit. No one cared to see mine. No one asked for it on the train. No one demanded it at the exit in Paris. Nor, when I returned, did anyone ask for it either at the ticket-office in Paris or at the entrance to the train. Considering that I had waited weeks for it, had to ask for it three times, had to explain what I was going to do in Paris, where I was going to stay, how long, etc., I had to be amused.

I was really terribly disappointed. I had longed to show it. It seemed so chic to travel with the consent of a big general.

Of course, if I had attempted to go without it, I should have risked getting caught, as, at any time, the train was liable to be boarded and all papers examined.

I learned at the Emba.s.sy, where the military attache had consulted the Ministry of War, that an arrangement was to be made later regarding foreigners, and that we were to be provided with a special book which, while it would not allow us to circulate freely, would give us the right to demand a permission--and get it if the military authorities chose. No great change that.

The visit served little purpose except to show me a sad-looking Paris and make me rejoice to get back.

Now that the days are so short, and it is dark at four o'clock, Paris is almost unrecognizable. With shop-shutters closed, tramway windows curtained, very few street-lights--none at all on short streets--no visible lights in houses, the city looks dead. You 'd have to see it to realize what it is like.

The weather was dull, damp, the cold penetrating, and the atmosphere depressing, and so was the conversation. It is better here on the hilltop, even though, now and then, we hear the guns.

Coming back from Paris there were almost no lights on the platforms at the railway stations, and all the coaches had their curtains drawn.

At the station at Esbly the same situation--a few lights, very low, on the main platform, and absolutely none on the platform where I took the narrow-gauge for Couilly. I went stumbling, in absolute blackness, across the main track, and literally felt my way along the little train to find a door to my coach. If it had not been for the one lamp on my little cart waiting in the road, I could not have seen where the exit at Couilly was. It was not gay, and it was far from gay climbing the long hill, with the feeble rays of that one lamp to light the blackness.

Luckily Ninette knows the road in the dark.

In the early days of the war it used to be amusing in the train, as everyone talked, and the talk was good. Those days are pa.s.sed.

With the now famous order pasted on every window:

Taisez-vous! Mefiez-vous.

Les oreilles ennemies vous ecoutent

no one says a word. I came back from Paris with half a dozen officers in the compartment. Each one, as he entered, brought his hand to salute, and sat down, without a word. They did not even look at one another. It is one of the most marked changes in att.i.tude that I have seen since the war. It is right. We were all getting too talkative, but it takes away the one charm there was in going to Paris. I've had no adventures since I wrote to you Christmas Day, although we did have, a few days after that, five minutes of excitement.

One day I was walking in the garden. It was a fairly bright day, and the sun was shining through the winter haze. I had been counting my tulips, which were coming up bravely, admiring my yellow crocuses, already in flower, and hoping the sap would not begin to rise in the rose bushes, and watching the Marne, once more lying like a sea rather than a river over the fields, and wondering how that awful winter freshet was going to affect the battle-front, when, suddenly, there was a terrible explosion. It nearly shook me off my feet.

The letter-carrier from Quincy was just mounting the hill on his wheel, and he promptly tumbled off it. I happened to be standing where I could see over the hedge, but before I could get out the stupid question, "What was that?" there came a second explosion, then a third and a fourth.

They sounded in the direction of Paris.

"Zeppelins," was my first thought, but that was hardly the hour for them.

I stood rooted to the spot. I could hear voices at Voisins, as if all the world had rushed into the street. Then I saw Amelie running down the hill. She said nothing as she pa.s.sed. The postman picked himself up, pa.s.sed me a letter, shrugged his shoulders, and pushed his wheel up the hill.

I patiently waited until the voices ceased in Voisins. I could see no smoke anywhere. Amelie came back at once, but she brought no explanation. She only brought a funny story.

There is an old woman in Voisins, well on to ninety, called Mere R---.

The war is too tremendous for her localized mind to grasp. Out of the confusion she picks and clings to certain isolated facts. At the first explosion, she rushed, terrorized, into the street, gazing up to the heavens, and shaking her withered old fists above her head, she cried in her shrill, quavering voice: "Now look at that! They told us the Kaiser was dying. It's a lie. It's a lie, you see, for here he comes throwing his cursed bombs down on us."

You know all this month the papers have had Guillaume dying of that ever-recurring cancer of the throat. I suppose the old woman thinks Guillaume is carrying all this war on in person. In a certain sense she is not very far wrong.

For a whole week we got no explanation of that five minutes'

excitement. Then it leaked out that the officer of the General Staff, who has been stationed at the Chateau de Conde, halfway between here and Esbly, was about to change his section. He had, in the park there, four German sh.e.l.ls from the Marne battlefield, which had not been exploded. He did not want to take them with him, and it was equally dangerous to leave them in the park, so he decided to explode them, and had not thought it necessary to warn anybody but the railroad people.

It is a proof of how simple our life is that such an event made conversation for weeks.

XXI

February 16, 1916

Well, we are beginning to get a little light--we foreigners--on our situation. On February 2, I was ordered to present myself again at the mairie. I obeyed the summons the next morning, and was told that the military authorities were to provide all foreigners inside the zone des armees, and all foreigners outside, who, for any reason, needed to enter the zone, with what is called a "carnet d'etrangere," and that, once I got that, I would have the privilege of asking for a permission to circulate, but, until that doc.u.ment was ready, I must be content not to leave my commune, nor to ask for any sort of a sauf-conduit.

I understand that this regulation applies even to the doctors and infirmieres, and ambulance drivers of all the American units at work in France. I naturally imagine that some temporary provision must be made for them in the interim.

I had to make a formal pet.i.tion for this famous carnet, and to furnish the military authorities with two photographs--front view,--size and form prescribed.

I looked at the mayor's secretary and asked him how the Old Scratch --I said frankly diable--I was to get photographed when he had forbidden me to leave my commune, and knew as well as I that there was no photographer here.

Quite seriously he wrote me a special permit to go to Couilly where there is a man who can photograph. He wrote on it that it was good for one day, and the purpose of the trip "to be photographed by the order of the mayor in order to get my carnet d'etrangere," and he solemnly presented it to me, without the faintest suspicion that it was humorous.

Between you and me, I did not even use it. I had still one of the photographs made for my pa.s.sport and other papers. Amelie carried it to Couilly and had it copied. Very few people would recognize me by it. It is the counterfeit presentment of a smiling, fat old lady, but it is absolutely reglementaire in size and form, and so will pa.s.s muster. I have seen some pretty queer portraits on civil papers.

We are promised these carnets in the course of "a few weeks," so, until then, you can think of me as, to all intents and purposes, really interned.

It may interest you to know that on the 9th,--just a week ago--a Zeppelin nearly got to Meaux. It was about half past eleven in the evening when the drums beat "lights out," along the hillside. There weren't many to put out, for everyone is in bed at that hour, and we have no street-lights, but an order is an order. The only result of the drum was to call everyone out of bed, in the hope "to see a Zeppelin."

We neither heard nor saw anything.

Amelie said with a grin next morning, "Eh, bien, only one thing is needed to complete our experiences--that a bomb should fall shy of its aim--the railroad down there--and wipe Huiry off the map, and write it in history."

I am sorry that you find holes in my letters. It is your own fault. You do not see this war from my point of view yet--alas! But you will. Make a note of that. The thing that you will not understand, living, as you do, in a world going about its daily routine, out of sight, out of hearing of all this horror, is that Germany's wilful destruction is on a preconceived plan--a racial principle. The more races she can reduce and enfeeble the more room there will be for her. Germany wants Belgium--but she wants as few Belgians as possible. So with Poland, and Servia, and northeast France. She wants them to die out as fast as possible. It is a part of the programme of a people calling themselves the elect of the world--the only race, in their opinion, which ought to survive.

She had a forty-four years' start of the rest of the world in preparing her programme. It is not in two years, or in three, that the rest of the world can overtake her. That advantage is going to carry her a long way. Some people still believe that advantage will exist to the end. I don't. Still, one of the overwhelming facts of this war is to me that: Germany held Belgium and northeast France at the end of 1914, and yet, all along the Allied fronts, with Germany fighting on invaded territory, they cried: "She is beaten!" So, indeed, her strategy was. At the end of 1915 she had two new allies, and held all of Servia, Montenegro, and Russian Poland, and still the Allies persisted: "She is licked, but she does not know it yet." It is one of the finest proofs of the world's faith in the triumph of the Right that so many believe this to be true.

You are going to come some day to the opinion I hold--that if we want universai peace we must first get rid of the race that does not want it or believe in it. Forbidden subject? I know. But when I resist temptation you find holes in my letters, and seem to imagine that I am taking no notice of things that happen. I notice fast enough, and I am so interested that I hope to see the condemnation, already pa.s.sed in England, against Kaiser, Kronprinz and Company, for "wilful murder,"

executed, even if I cannot live to see Germany invaded.

This is what you get for saying, "You make no comment on the overrunning of Servia or the murder of Edith Cavell, or the failure of the Gallipoli adventure." After all, these are only details in the great undertaking. As we say of every disaster, "They will not affect the final result." It is getting to be a catch-word, but it is true.

Germany is absolutely right in considering Great Britain her greatest enemy. She knows today that, even if she could get to Paris or Petrograd, it would not help her. She would still have Britain to settle with. I wonder if the Kaiser has yet waked up to a realization of his one very great achievement--the reawakening of Greater Britain? He dreamed of dealing his mother's country a mortal blow.

The blow landed, but it healed instead of killing.

This war is infernal, diabolical--and farcical--if we look at the deeds that are done every day. Luckily we don't and mustn't, for we all know that there are things in the world a million times worse than death, and that there are future results to be aimed at which make death gloriously worth while. Those are the things we must look at.