With the French in France and Salonika Part 3

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph by R. H. Davis._

"Of another house the roof only remained, from under it the rest of the building had been shot away."]

From the debris we picked the many little heirlooms, souvenirs, possessions that make a home. Photographs with written inscriptions, post-cards bearing good wishes, ornaments for the centre-table, ornaments for the person, images of the church, all crushed, broken, and stained. Many shop-windows were still dressed invitingly as they were when the sh.e.l.l burst, but beyond the goods exposed for sale was only a deep hole.

The pure deviltry of a sh.e.l.l no one can explain. Nor why it spares a looking-gla.s.s and wrecks a wall that has been standing since the twelfth century.

In the cathedral the stone roof weighing hundreds of tons had fallen, and directly beneath where it had been hung an enormous gla.s.s chandelier untouched. A sh.e.l.l loves a shining mark. To what is most beautiful it is most cruel. The Hotel de Ville, which was counted among the most presentable in the north of France, that once rose in seven arches in the style of the Renaissance, the sh.e.l.ls marked for their own.

And all the houses approaching it from the German side they destroyed.

Not even those who once lived in them could say where they stood. There is left only a mess of bricks, tiles, and plaster. They suggest the homes of human beings as little as does a brickyard.

We visited what had been the headquarters of General de Wignacourt.

They were in the garden of a house that opened upon one of the princ.i.p.al thoroughfares, and the floor level was twelve feet under the level of the flower-beds. To this subterranean office there are two entrances, one through the cellar of the house, the other down steps from the garden. The steps were beams the size of a railroad-tie. Had they not been whitewashed they would look like the shaft leading to a coal-pit.

A soldier who was an artist in plaster had decorated the entrance to the shaft with an ornamental facade worthy of any public building. Here, secure from the falling walls and explosive sh.e.l.ls, the general by telephone directed his attack. The place was as dry, as clean, and as compact as the admiral's quarters on a ship of war. The switchboard connected with batteries buried from sight in every part of the unburied city, and in an adjoining room a soldier cook was preparing a most appetizing luncheon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph by R. H. Davis._

The stone roof over this gla.s.s chandelier in the Arras cathedral was destroyed by sh.e.l.ls, and the chandelier not touched.]

Above us was three yards of cement, rafters, and earth, and crowning them gra.s.s and flowers. When the owner of the house returns he will find this addition to his residence an excellent refuge from burglars or creditors.

Personally we were glad to escape into the open street. Between being hit by a sh.e.l.l and buried under twelve feet of cement the choice was difficult.

We lunched in a charming house, where the table was spread in the front hall. The bed of the officer temporarily occupying the house also was spread in the hall, and we were curious to know, but too proud to ask, why he limited himself to such narrow quarters. Our captain rewarded our reticence. He threw back the heavy curtain that concealed the rest of the house, and showed us that there was no house. It had been deftly removed by a sh.e.l.l.

The owner of the house had run away, but before he fled, fearing the Germans might enter Arras and take his money, he had withdrawn it and hidden it in his garden. The money amounted to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He placed it in a lead box, soldered up the opening, and buried the box under a tree. Then he went away and carelessly forgot _which_ tree.

During a lull in the bombardment, he returned, and until two o'clock in the morning dug frantically for his buried treasure. The soldier who guarded the house told me the difference in the way the soldiers dig a trench and the way our absent host dug for his lost money was greatly marked. I found the leaden box cast aside in the dog-kennel. It was the exact size of a suitcase. As none of us knows when he may not have to bury a quarter of a million dollars hurriedly, it is a fact worth remembering. Any ordinary suitcase will do. The soldier and I examined the leaden box carefully. But the owner had not overlooked anything.

When we reached the ruins of the cathedral, we did not need darkness and falling rain to depress us further, or to make the scene more desolate. One lacking in all reverence would have been shocked. The wanton waste, the senseless brutality in such destruction would have moved a statue. Walls as thick as the ramparts of a fort had been blown into powdered chalk. There were great breaches in them through which you could drive an omnibus. In one place the stone roof and supporting arches had fallen, and upon the floor, where for two hundred years the people of Arras had knelt in prayer, was a mighty barricade of stone blocks, twisted candelabra, broken praying-chairs, torn vestments, shattered gla.s.s. Exposed to the elements, the chapels were open to the sky. The rain fell on sacred emblems of the Holy Family, the saints, and apostles. Upon the altars the dust of the crushed walls lay inches deep.

The destruction is too great for present repair. They can fill the excavations in the streets and board up the shattered show-windows, but the cathedral is too vast, the destruction of it too nearly complete.

The sacrilege must stand. Until the war is over, until Arras is free from sh.e.l.ls, the ruins must remain uncared for and uncovered. And the cathedral, by those who once came to it for help and guidance, will be deserted.

But not entirely deserted. The pigeons that built their nests under the eaves have descended to the empty chapels, and in swift, graceful circles sweep under the ruined arches. Above the dripping of the rain, and the surly booming of the cannon, their contented cooing was the only sound of comfort. It seemed to hold out a promise for the better days of peace.

CHAPTER III

THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE

PARIS, October, 1915.

In Artois we were "personally conducted." In a way, we were the guests of the war department; in any case, we tried to behave as such. It was no more proper for us to see what we were not invited to see than to bring our own wine to another man's dinner.

In Champagne it was entirely different. I was alone with a car and a chauffeur and a blue slip of paper. It permitted me to remain in a "certain place" inside the war zone for ten days. I did not believe it was true. I recalled other trips over the same roads a year before which finally led to the Cherche-Midi prison, and each time I showed the blue slip to the gendarmes I shivered. But the gendarmes seemed satisfied, and as they permitted us to pa.s.s farther and farther into the forbidden land, the chauffeur began to treat me almost as an equal. And so, with as little incident as one taxis from Madison Square to Central Park, we motored from Paris into the sound of the guns.

At the "certain place" the general was absent in the trenches, but the chief of staff asked what I most wanted to see. It was as though the fairy G.o.dmother had given you one wish. I chose Rheims, and to spend the night there. The chief of staff waved a wand in the shape of a second piece of paper, and we were in Rheims. To a colonel we presented the two slips of paper, and, in turn, he asked what was wanted. A year before I had seen the cathedral when it was being bombarded, when it still was burning. I asked if I might revisit it.

"And after that?" said the colonel.

It was much too good to be real.

I would wake and find myself again in Cherche-Midi prison.

Outside, the sounds of the guns were now very close. They seemed to be just around the corner, on the roof of the next house.

"Of course, what I really want is to visit the first trench."

It was like asking a Mason to reveal the mysteries of his order, a priest to tell the secrets of the confessional. The colonel commanded the presence of Lieutenant Blank. With alarm I awaited his coming. Did a military prison yawn, and was he to act as my escort? I had been too bold. I should have asked to see only the third trench.

At the order the colonel gave, Lieutenant Blank expressed surprise But his colonel, with a shrug, as though ridding himself of all responsibility, showed the blue slip. It was a pantomime, with which by repet.i.tion, we became familiar. In turn each officer would express surprise; the other officer would shrug, point to the blue slip, and we would pa.s.s forward.

The cathedral did not long detain us. Outside, for protection, it was boarded up, packed tightly in sand-bags; inside, it had been swept of broken gla.s.s, and the paintings, tapestries, and the carved images on the altars had been removed. A professional sacristan spoke a set speech, telling me of things I had seen with my own eyes--of burning rafters that spared the Gobelin tapestries, of the priceless gla.s.s trampled underfoot, of the dead and wounded Germans lying in the straw that had given the floor the look of a barn. Now it is as empty of decoration as the Pennsylvania railroad-station in New York. It is a beautiful sh.e.l.l waiting for the day to come when the candles will be relit, when the incense will toss before the altar, and the gray walls glow again with the colors of tapestries and paintings. The windows only will not bloom as before. The gla.s.s destroyed by the Emperor's sh.e.l.ls, all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot restore.

The professional guide, who is already so professional that he is exchanging German cartridges for tips, supplied a morbid detail of impossible bad taste. Among the German wounded there was a major (I remember describing him a year ago as looking like a college professor) who, when the fire came, was one of these the priests could not save, and who was burned alive. Marks on the gray surface of a pillar against which he reclined and grease spots on the stones of the floor are supposed to be evidences of his end, a torture brought upon him by the sh.e.l.ls of his own people. Mr. Kipling has written that there are many who "hope and pray these signs will be respected by our children's children." Mr. Kipling's hope shows an imperfect conception of the purposes of a cathedral. It is a house dedicated to G.o.d, and on earth to peace and good-will among men. It is not erected to teach generations of little children to gloat over the fact that an enemy, even a German officer, was by accident burned alive.

Personally, I feel the sooner those who introduced "frightfulness" to France, Belgium, and the coasts of England are hunted down and destroyed the better. But the stone-mason should get to work, and remove those stains from the Rheims cathedral. Instead, for our children's children, would not a tablet to Edith Cavell be better, or one to the French priest, Abbe Thinot, who carried the wounded Germans from the burning cathedral, and who later, while carrying French wounded from the field of battle, was himself hit three times, and of his wounds died?

I hinted to the lieutenant that the cathedral would remain for some time, but that the trenches would soon be ploughed into turnip-beds.

So, we moved toward the trenches. The officer commanding them lived in what he described as the deck of a battleship sunk underground. It was a happy simile. He had his conning-tower, in which, with a telescope through a slit in a steel plate, he could sweep the countryside. He had a fire-control station, executive offices, wardroom, cook's galley, his own cabin, equipped with telephones, electric lights, and running water.

There was a carpet on the floor, a gay coverlet on the four-poster bed, photographs on his dressing-table, and flowers. All of these were buried deep underground. A puzzling detail was a perfectly good bra.s.s lock and key on his door. I asked if it were to keep out sh.e.l.ls or burglars. And he explained that the door with the lock in tact had been blown off its hinges in a house of which no part was now standing. He had borrowed it, as he had borrowed everything else in the subterranean war-ship, from the near-by ruins.

He was an extremely light-hearted and courteous host, but he frowned suspiciously when he asked if I knew a correspondent named Senator Albert Beveridge. I hastily repudiated Beveridge. I knew him not, I said, as a correspondent, but as a politician who possibly had high hopes of the German vote. "He dined with us," said the colonel, "and then wrote against France." I suggested it was at their own risk if they welcomed those who already had been with the Germans, and who had been received by the German Emperor. This is no war for neutrals.

Then began a walk of over a mile through an open drain. The walls were of chalk as hard as flint. Unlike the mud trenches in Artois, there were no slides to block the miniature ca.n.a.l. It was as firm and compact as a whitewashed stone cell. From the main drain on either side ran other drains, cul-de-sacs, cellars, trap-doors, and ambushes. Overhead hung b.a.l.l.s of barbed-wire that, should the French troops withdraw, could be dropped and so block the trench behind them. If you raised your head they playfully s.n.a.t.c.hed off your cap. It was like ducking under innumerable bridges of live wires.

The drain opened at last into a wrecked town. Its ruins were complete.

It made Pompeii look like a furnished flat. The officer of the day joined us here, and to him the lieutenant resigned the post of guide. My new host wore a steel helmet, and at his belt dangled a mask against gas. He led us to the end of what had been a street, and which was now barricaded with huge timbers, steel doors, like those to a gambling house, intricate cat's cradles of wire, and solid steel plates.

To go back seemed the only way open. But the officer in the steel cap dived through a slit in the iron girders, and as he disappeared, beckoned. I followed down a well that dropped straight into the very bowels of the earth. It was very dark, and only crosspieces of wood offered a slippery footing. Into the darkness, with hands pressed against the well, and with feet groping for the log steps, we tobogganed down, down, down. We turned into a tunnel, and, by the slant of the ground, knew we were now mounting. There was a square of sunshine, and we walked out, and into a graveyard. It was like a dark change in a theatre. The last scene had been the ruins of a town, a gate like those of the Middle Ages, studded with bolts, reinforced with steel plates, guarded by men-at-arms in steel casques, and then the dark change into a graveyard, with gra.s.s and growing flowers, gravel walks, and hedges.

The graves were old, the monuments and urns above them moss-covered, but one was quite new, and the cross above it said that it was the grave of a German aviator. As they pa.s.sed it the French officers saluted. We entered a trench as straight as the letter Z. And at each twist and turn we were covered by an eye in a steel door. An attacking party advancing would have had as much room in which to dodge that eye as in a bath-tub.

One man with his magazine rifle could have halted a dozen. And when in the newspapers you read that one man has captured twenty prisoners, he probably was looking at them through the peep-hole in one of those steel doors.

We zigzagged into a cellar, and below the threshold of some one's front door. The trench led directly under it. The house into which the door had opened was destroyed; possibly those who once had entered by it also were destroyed, and it now swung in air with men crawling like rats below it, its half-doors banging and groaning; the wind, with ghostly fingers, opening them to no one, closing them on nothing. The trench wriggled through a garden, and we could see flung across the narrow strip of sky above us, the branch of an apple-tree, and with one shoulder brushed the severed roots of the same tree. Then the trench led outward, and we pa.s.sed beneath railroad tracks, the ties reposing on air, and supported by, instead of supporting, the iron rails.

We had been moving between garden walls, cellar walls; sometimes hidden by ruins, sometimes diving like moles into tunnels. We remained on no one level, or for any time continued in any one direction. It was entirely fantastic, entirely unreal. It was like visiting a new race of beings, who turn day into night; who, like bats, molochs, and wolves, hide in caves and shun the sunlight.

By the ray of an electric torch we saw where these underground people store their food. Where, against siege, are great casks of water, dungeons packed with ammunition, more dungeons, more ammunition. We saw, always by the shifting, pointing finger of the electric torch, sleeping quarters underground, dressing stations for the wounded underground. In niches at every turn were gas-extinguishers. They were as many, as much as a matter of course, as fire-extinguishers in a modern hotel. They were exactly like those machines advertised in seed catalogues for spraying fruit-trees. They are worn on the back like a knapsack. Through a short rubber hose a fluid attacks and dissipates the poison gases.

The sun set, and we proceeded in the light of a full moon. It needed only this to give to our journey the unreality of a nightmare. Long since I had lost all sense of direction. It was not only a maze and labyrinth, but it held to no level. At times, concealed by walls of chalk, we walked erect, and then, like woodchucks, dived into earthen burrows. For a long distance we crawled, bending double through a tunnel. At intervals lamps, as yet unlit, protruded from either side, and to warn us of these from the darkness a voice would call, "attention _a gauche_," "attention _a droite_." The air grew foul and the pressure on the ear-drums like that of the subway under the North River. We came out and drew deep breaths as though we had been long under water.