With the French in France and Salonika Part 4

We were in the first trench. It was, at places, from three hundred to forty yards distant from the Germans. No one spoke, or only in whispers.

The moonlight turned the men at arms into ghosts. Their silence added to their unreality. I felt like Rip Van Winkle hemmed in by the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson. From somewhere near us, above or below, to the right or left the "seventy-fives," as though aroused by the moon, began like terriers to bark viciously. The officer in the steel casque paused to listen, fixed their position, and named them. How he knew where they were, how he knew where he was himself, was all part of the mystery.

Rats, jet black in the moonlight, scurried across the open places, scrambled over our feet, ran boldly between them. We had scared them, perhaps, but not half so badly as they scared me.

We pushed on past sentinels, motionless, silent, fatefully awake. The moonlight had turned their blue uniforms white and flashed on their steel helmets. They were like men in armor, and so still that only when you brushed against them, cautiously as men change places in a canoe, did you feel they were alive. At times, one of them thinking something in the gardens of barb-wire had moved, would loosen his rifle, and there would be a flame and flare of red, and then again silence, the silence of the hunter stalking a wild beast, of the officer of the law, gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of the burglar to betray his presence.

The next morning I called to make my compliments to General Franchet d'Esperay. He was a splendid person--as alert as a steel lance. He demanded what I had seen.

"Nothing!" he protested. "You have seen nothing. When you return from Serbia, come to Champagne again and I myself will show you something of interest."

I am curious to see what he calls "something of interest."

"I wonder what's happening in Buffalo?"

There promised to be a story for some one to write a year after the war.

It would tell how quickly Champagne recovered from the invasion of the Germans. But one need not wait until after the war. The story can be written now.

We know that the enemy was thrown back across the Aisne.

We know that the enemy drove the French and English before him until at the Forest of Montmorency, the Hun was within ten and at Claye within fifteen miles of Paris.

But to-day, by any outward evidence, he would have a hard time to prove it. And that is not because when he advanced he was careful not to tramp on the gra.s.s or to pick the flowers. He did not obey even the warnings to automobilists: "Attention _les enfants_!"

On the contrary, as he came, he threw before him thousands of tons of steel and iron. Like a cyclone he uprooted trees, unroofed houses; like a tidal wave he excavated roads that had been built by the Romans, swept away walls, and broke the backs of stone bridges that for hundreds of years had held their own against swollen rivers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: General Franchet d'Esperay.

"He was a splendid person, as alert as a steel lance."]

A year ago I followed the German in his retreat from Claye through Meaux, Chateau Thierry to Soissons, where, on the east bank of the Aisne, I watched the French artillery sh.e.l.l his guns on the hills opposite. The French then were hot upon his heels. In one place they had not had time to remove even their own dead, and to avoid the bodies in the open road the car had to twist and turn.

Yesterday, coming back to Paris from the trenches that guard Rheims, I covered the same road. But it was not the same. It seemed that I must surely have lost the way. Only the iron signs at the crossroads, and the map used the year before and scarred with my own pencil marks, were evidences that again I was following mile by mile and foot by foot the route of that swift advance and riotous retreat.

A year before the signs of the retreat were the road itself, the houses facing it, and a devastated countryside. You knew then, that, of these signs, some would at once be effaced. They had to be effaced, for they were polluting the air. But until the villagers returned to their homes, or to what remained of their homes, the bloated carca.s.ses of horses blocked the road, the bodies of German soldiers, in death mercifully unlike anything human and as unreal as fallen scarecrows, sprawled in the fields.

But while you knew these signs of the German raid would be removed, other signs were scars that you thought would be long in healing. These were the stone arches and b.u.t.tresses of the bridges, dynamited and dumped into the mud of the Marne and Ourcq, chateaux and villas with the roof torn away as deftly as with one hand you could rip off the lid of a cigar-box, or with a wall blown in, or out, in either case exposing indecently the owner's bedroom, his wife's boudoir, the children's nursery.

Other signs of the German were villages with houses wrecked, the humble shops sacked, garden walls levelled, fields of beets and turnips uprooted by his sh.e.l.ls, or where he had s.n.a.t.c.hed sleep in the trampled mud, strewn with demolished haystacks, vast trees split clean in half as though by lightning, or with nothing remaining but the splintered stump.

That was the picture of the roads and countryside in the triangle of Soissons, Rheims, and Meaux, as it was a year ago.

And I expected to see the wake of that great retreat still marked by ruins and devastation.

But I had not sufficiently trusted to the indomitable spirit of the French, in their intolerance of waste, their fierce, yet ordered energy.

To-day the fields are cultivated up to the very b.u.t.ts of the French batteries. They are being put to bed, and tucked in for the long winter sleep. For miles the furrows stretch over the fields in unbroken lines.

Ploughs, not sh.e.l.ls, have drawn them.

They are gray with fertilizers, strewn with manure; the swiftly dug trenches of a year ago have given way to the peaked mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. Where there were vast stretches of mud, scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with stale, ill-smelling straw, the carca.s.ses of oxen and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a smiling landscape, with miles of growing grain, green vegetables, green turf.

In Champagne the French spirit and nature, working together, have wiped out the signs of the German raid. It is as though it had never been. You begin to believe it was only a bad dream, an old wife's tale to frighten children.

The car moved slowly, but, look no matter how carefully, it was most difficult to find the landfalls I remembered.

Near Feret Milton there was a chateau with a lawn that ran to meet the Paris road. It had been used as a German emergency hospital, and previously by them as an outpost. The long windows to the terrace had been wrecked, the terrace was piled high with blood-stained uniforms, hundreds of boots had been tossed from an upper story that had been used as an operating-room, and mixed with these evidences of disaster were monuments of empty champagne-bottles.

That was the picture I remembered. Yesterday, like a mantle of moss, the lawn swept to the road, the long windows had been replaced and hung with yellow silk, and, on the terrace, where I had seen the blood-stained uniforms, a small boy, maybe the son and heir of the chateau, with hair flying and bare legs showing, was joyfully riding a tricycle.

Neufch.e.l.les I remembered as a village completely wrecked and inhabited only by a very old man, and a cat, that, as though for company, stalked behind him.

But to-day Neufch.e.l.les is a thriving, contented, commonplace town.

Splashes of plaster, less weather-stained than the plaster surrounding them, are the only signs remaining of the explosive sh.e.l.ls. The stone-mason and the plasterer have obliterated the work of the guns, the tiny shops have been refilled, the tide of life has flowed back, and in the streets the bareheaded women, their shoulders wrapped in black woollen shawls, gather to gossip, or, with knitting in hand, call to each other from the doorways.

There was the stable of a large villa in which I had seen five fine riding-horses lying on the stones, each with a bullet-hole over his temple. In the retreat they had been destroyed to prevent the French using them as remounts.

This time, as we pa.s.sed the same stable-yard, fresh horses looked over the half-doors, the lofts were stuffed with hay; in the corner, against the coming of winter, were piled many cords of wood, and rival chanticleers, with their harems, were stalking proudly around the stable-yard, pecking at the scattered grain. It was a picture of comfort and content. It continued like that all the way.

Even the giant poplars that line the road for four miles out of Meaux to the west, and that had been split and shattered, are now covered with autumn foliage, the scars are overgrown and by doctor nature the raw spots have been cauterized and have healed.

The stone bridges, that at Meaux and beyond the Chateau Thierry sprawled in the river, again have been reared in air. People have already forgotten that a year ago to reach Soissons from Meaux the broken bridges forced them to make a detour of fifty miles.

The lesson of it is that the French people have no time to waste upon post mortems. With us, fifty years after the event, there are those who still talk of Sherman's raid through Columbia, who are so old that they hum hymns of hate about it. How much wiser, how much more proud, is the village of Neufch.e.l.les!

Not fifty, but only one year has pa.s.sed since the Germans wrecked Neufch.e.l.les, and already it has been rebuilt and repopulated--not after the war has for half a century been at an end, but while war still endures, while _it is but twenty miles distant_! What better could ill.u.s.trate the spirit of France or better foretell her final victory?

CHAPTER IV

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRaeUS

ATHENS, November, 1915.

At home we talk glibly of a world war. But beyond speculating in munitions and as to how many Americans will be killed by the next submarine, and how many notes the President will write about it, we hardly appreciate that this actually is a war of the world, that all over the globe, every ship of state, even though it may be trying to steer a straight course, is being violently rocked by it. Even the individual, as he moves from country to country, is rocked by it, not violently, but continuously. It is in loss of time and money he feels it most. And as he travels, he learns, as he cannot learn from a map, how far-reaching are the ramifications of this war, in how many different ways it affects every one. He soon comes to accept whatever happens as directly due to the war--even when the deck steward tells him he cannot play shuffle-board because, owing to the war, there is no chalk.

In times of peace to get to this city from Paris did not require more than six days, but now, owing to the war, in making the distance we wasted fifteen. That is not counting the time in Paris required by the police to issue the pa.s.sport, without which no one can leave France. At the prefecture of police I found a line of people--French, Italians, Americans, English--in columns of four and winding through gloomy halls, down dark stairways, and out into the street. I took one look at the line and fled to Mr. Thackara, our consul-general, and, thanks to him, was not more than an hour in obtaining my laisser-pa.s.ser. The police a.s.sured me I might consider myself fortunate, as the time they usually spent in preparing a pa.s.sport was two days. It was still necessary to obtain a vise from the Italian consulate permitting me to enter Italy, from the Greek consulate to enter Greece, and, as my American pa.s.sport said nothing of Serbia, from Mr. Thackara two more vises, one to get out of France, and another to invade Serbia. Thanks to the war, in obtaining all these autographs two more days were wasted. In peace times one had only to go to Cook's and buy a ticket. In those days there was no more delay than in reserving a seat for the theatre.

War followed us south. The windows of the wagon-lit were plastered with warnings to be careful, to talk to no strangers; that the enemy was listening. War had invaded even Aix-les-Bains, most lovely of summer pleasure-grounds. As we pa.s.sed, it was wrapped in snow; the Cat's Tooth, that towers between Aixe and Chambery, and that lifts into the sky a great cross two hundred feet in height, was all white, the pine-trees around the lake were white, the streets were white, the Casino des Fleurs, the Cercle, the hotels. And above each of them, where once was only good music, good wines, beautiful flowers, and baccarat, now droop innumerable Red Cross flags. Against the snow-covered hills they were like little splashes of blood.

War followed us into Italy. But from the war as one finds it in England and France it differed. Perhaps we were too far west, but except for the field uniforms of green and the new scabbards of gun-metal, and, at Turin, four aeroplanes in the air at the same time, you might not have known that Italy was one of the Allies. For one thing, you saw no wounded. Again, perhaps, it was because we were too far south and west, and that the fighting in Tyrol is concentrated. But Bordeaux is farther from the battle-line of France than is Naples from the Italian front, and the mult.i.tudes of wounded in Bordeaux, the mult.i.tudes of women in black in Bordeaux, make one of the most appalling, most significant pictures of this war. In two days in Naples I did not see one wounded man. But I saw many Germans and German signs, and no one had scratched Mumm off the wine-card. A country that is one of the Allies, and yet not at war with Germany, cannot be taken very seriously. Indeed, in England the War Office staff speak of the Italian communiques as the "weather reports."

In Naples the foreigners accuse Italy of running with the hare and the hounds. They asked what is her object in keeping on friendly terms with the bitterest enemy of the Allies. Is there an understanding that after the war she and Germany will together carve slices off of Austria?

Whatever her ulterior object may be, her present war spirit does not impress the visitor. It is not the spirit of France and England. One man said to me: "Why can't you keep the Italian-Americans in America? Over there they earn money, and send millions of it to Italy. When they come here to fight, not only that money stops, but we have to feed and pay them."

It did not sound grateful. Nor as though Italy were seriously at war.

You do not find France and England, or Germany, grudging the man who returns to fight for his country his rations and pay. And Italy pays her soldiers five cents a day. Many of the reservists and volunteers from America who answered the call to arms are bitterly disappointed. It was their hope to be led at once to the firing-line. Instead, after six months, they are still in camp. The families some brought with them are in great need. They are not used to living on five cents a day. An Italian told me the heaviest drain upon the war-relief funds came from the families of these Italian-Americans, stranded in their own country.

He also told me his chief duty was to meet them on their arrival.

"But haven't they money when they arrive from America?" I asked.