A VOLUNTEER POILU

by Henry Sheahan

To Professor Charles Townsend Copeland of Harvard University

Dear Copey, At Verdun I thought of you, and the friendly hearth of Hollis 15 seemedvery far away from the deserted, snow-swept streets of the tragic city. Then suddenly I remembered how you had encouraged me and many others togo over and help in any way that we could; I remembered your keenunderstanding of the Epic, and the deep sympathy with human beings whichyou taught those whose privilege it was to be your pupils. And so youdid not seem so far away after all, but closer to the heart of the warthan any other friend I had. 

I dedicate this book to you with grateful affection after many years offriendship. 

Henry

Topsfield, September, 1916

Preface

I have ventured to call this book A Volunteer Poilu principally becausewe were known to the soldiers of the Bois-le-Prêtre as "les PoilusAméricains. " Then, too, it was my ambition to do for my comrades, theFrench private soldiers, what other books have done for the soldiers ofother armies. The title chosen, however, was more than complimentary; itwas but just. In recognition of the work of the Section during thesummer, it was, in October, 1915, formally adopted into the French army;a French officer became its administrative head, and the drivers weregiven the same papers, pay, and discipline as their French comrades. 

I wish to thank many of my old friends of Section II, who have aided mein the writing of this book. 

HENRY SHEAHAN

Contents

I. THE ROCHAMBEAU S'EN VA-T-EN GUERRE

I A war-time voyage--The Rochambeau--Loading ammunition and foodsupplies--Personalities on board--The dyestuffs agent--The machinelathes man--The Swede from Minnesota who was on his way to the ForeignLegion--His subsequent history--The talk aboard--The French officer--Hisphilosophy of war--Ernest Psichari--Arrival at Bordeaux--The Arabs atthe docks--The convalescent soldiers-- Across La Beauce--The Frenchcountryside in war-time. 

II. AN UNKNOWN PARIS IN THE NIGHT AND RAIN. 

Paris, rain, and darkness--The Gardens of the Tuileries--Thedormitory--The hospital at night--Beginning of the Champagneoffensive--The Gare de la Chapelle at two in the morning--Thewounded--The Zouave stretcher-bearers--The Arabs in the abandonedschool--Suburban Paris at dawn--The home of the deaconesses. 

III. THE GREAT SWATHE OF THE LINES

Nancy--The porter's story--Getting to the front--What the phrase "thefront" really means--The sense of the front--The shell zone--The zone ofquiet--My quarters in the shelled house--The fire shells--Bombarded atnight--Death of the soldier fireman. 

IV. LA FORET DE BOIS-LE-PRETRE

Le Bois-le-Prêtre--Description--History--Les Glycines, "WisteriaVilla"--The Road to the trenches--At the trenches--The painter's idea of"le sinistre dans l'art"--The sign post--The zone of violence--TheQuart-en-Réserve--The village caught in the torment of the lines--Thedead on the barbed wire--"The Road to Metz. "

V. THE TRENCHES IN THE "WOOD OF DEATH. "

The Trenches--Organization--Nature of the war--Food, shelters, clothing, ammunition, etc. --A typical day in the trenches--Trench shells or"crapouilots"--In the abri--The tunnel--The doctrinaire lieutenant ofengineers. 

VI. THE GERMANS ATTACK

The piano at Montauville--An interrupted concert--At the Quart--Thebattle for the ridge of the Wood--Fall of the Germanaeroplane--Psychology of the men in the trenches--Religion in thetrenches--

VII. THE TOWN IN THE TRENCHES

Poor old "Pont"--Description of the town--A civilian's story--The houseof the Captain of the Papal Zouaves--Church of St. Laurent--The Cemeteryand its guardian. 

VIII. MESSIEURS LES POILUS DE LA GRANDE GUERRE

En repos--A village of troops--Manners and morals--The concert--journalof the Bois-le-Prêtre--Various poilus. 

IX. PREPARING THE DEFENSE OF VERDUN

En permission--State of France--The France of 1905 and the France of1915--The class of 1917--Bar-le-Duc--The air raid--Called to Verdun. 

X. THE GREAT DAYS OF VERDUN

Verdun in 1912--Verdun on the night of the first great attack--Thehospital--The shelled cross road--The air shell--The pastry cook'sstory--The cultivateur of the Valois and the crater at Douaumont--Thepompiers of Verdun--"Do you want to see an odd sight?"--Verdun in stormand desolation. 

A Volunteer Poilu

Chapter I

The Rochambeau S'en Va-t-en Guerre

Moored alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the land, thecargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie Générale wasbeing loaded with American supplies for the France of the Great War. Ahot August sun struck spots and ripples of glancing radiance from theviscous, oily surface of the foul basin in which she lay inert; the airwas full of sounds, the wheezing of engines, the rattling of cog-checks, and the rumble of wheels and hoofs which swept, in sultry puffs of noiseand odor, from the pavements on the land. Falling from the exhausts, around, silvery-white cascade poured into the dark lane between the wharfand the deck, and sounded a monotonous, roaring underchord to theintermingled dins. At the sun-bathed bow, a derrick gang lowered bags offlour into the open well of the hold; there were commands in French, achugging, and a hissing of steam, and a giant's clutch of dusty, hundred-kilo flour-bags from Duluth would swing from the wharf to theRochambeau, sink, and disappear. In some way the unfamiliar language, and the sight of the thickset, French sailor-men, so evidently all ofone race, made the Rochambeau, moored in the shadow of the sky-scrapers, seem mysteriously alien. But among the workers in the hold, who could beseen when they stood on the floor of the open hatchway, was a young, red-headed, American longshoreman clad in the trousers part of a suit ofbrown-check overalls; sweat and grime had befouled his rather foolish, freckled face, and every time that a bunch of flour-bags tumbled to thefloor of the well, he would cry to an invisible somebody--"Moredynamite, Joe, more dynamite!"

Walking side by side, like ushers in a wedding procession, two of theship's officers made interminable rounds of the deck. Now and then theystopped and looked over the rail at the loading operations, and once inlow tones they discussed the day's communiqué. "Pas grand' chose"(nothing of importance), said he whom I took to be the elder, a bearded, seafaring kind of man. "We have occupied a crater in the Argonne, anddriven back a German patrol (une patrouille Boche) in the region ofNomény. " The younger, blond, pale, with a wispy yellow mustache, listened casually, his eyes fixed on the turbulence below. The derrickgang were now stowing away clusters of great wooden boxes marked theSomething Arms Company. "My brother says that American bullets arefilled with powder of a very good quality" (d'une très bonne qualité), remarked the latter. "By the way, how is your brother?" asked thebearded man. "Very much better, " answered the other; "the last fragment(éclat) was taken out of his thigh just before we left Bordeaux. " Theycontinued their walk, and three little French boys wearing Englishsailor hats took their places at the rail. 

As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a level withthe upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for farewells; andlittle groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes. There was a gooddeal of worrying about submarines; one heard fragments ofconversations--"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"--"Absolutelysafe, je t'assure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice, "Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund, snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for"the success of his business. " Two young Americans with the sameidentical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little blackFrenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth, paraded lonelily. A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back tothe thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, wept at the going ofa younger woman, and ruined an elaborate make-up with grotesquetraceries of tears. "Give him my love, " she sobbed; "tell him that thebusiness is doing splendidly and that he is not to buy any of Lafitte'slaces next time he goes to Paris en permission. " A little later, theRochambeau, with slow majesty, backed into the channel, and turned herbow to the east. 

The chief interest of the great majority of her passengers wascommercial; there were American drummers keen to line their pockets withEuropean profits; there were French commis voyageurs who had beenselling articles of French manufacture which had formerly been made bythe Germans; there were half-official persons who had been on missionsto American ammunition works; and there was a diplomat or two. From thesample trunks on board you could have taken anything from a pair ofboots to a time fuse. Altogether, an interesting lot. Palandeau, amiddle-aged Frenchman with a domed, bald forehead like Socrates orVerlaine, had been in America selling eau-de-cologne. 

"Then you are getting out something new?" I asked. 

"Yes, and no, " he answered. "Our product is the old-fashionedeau-de-cologne water with the name 'Farina' on it. "

"But in America we associate eau-de-cologne with the Germans, " said I. "Doesn't the bottle say 'Johann Maria Farina'? Surely the form of thename is German. "

"But that was not his name, monsieur; he was a Frenchman, and calledhimself 'Jean Marie. ' Yes, really, the Germans stole the manufacturefrom the French. Consider the name of the article, 'eau-de-cologne, ' isnot that French?"

"Yes, " I admitted. 

"Alors, " said Palandeau; "the blocus has simply given us the power toreclaim trade opportunities justly ours. Therefore we have printed a newlabel telling the truth about Farina, and the Boche 'Johann Maria' is'kapout. '"

"Do you sell much of it?"

"Quantities! Our product is superior to the Boche article, and has theglamour of an importation. I await the contest without uneasiness. "

"What contest?"

"When Jean Marie meets Johann Maria--après la guerre, " said Palandeauwith a twinkle in his eye. 

In the deck chair next to mine sat a dark, powerfully built young Iowanwith the intensely masculine head of a mediaeval soldier. There was abit of curl to the dark-brown hair which swept his broad, low forehead, his brown eyes were devoid of fear or imagination, his jaw was set, andthe big, aggressive head rested on a short, muscular neck. He had been asalesman of machine tools till the "selling end" came to a standstill. 

"But didn't the munitions traffic boom the machine-tool industry?" Iasked. 

"Sure it did. You ought to have seen what people will do to get a lathe. You know about all that you need to make shells is a machine lathe. Youcan't get a lathe in America for love or money--for anything"--he made aswift, complete gesture--"all making shells. There isn't a junk factoryin America that hasn't been pawed over by guys looking for lathes--andmy God! what prices! Knew a bird named Taylor who used to make waterpipes in Utica, New York--had a stinking little lathe he paid twohundred dollars for, and sold it last year for two thousand. My firm hadso many orders for months ahead that it didn't pay them to havesalesmen--so they offered us jobs inside; but, God, I can't stand indoorwork, so I thought I'd come over here and get into the war. I used to bein the State Cavalry. You ought to have seen how sore all those IowaGermans were on me for going, " he laughed. "Had a hell of row with a guynamed Schultz. "

Limping slightly, an enormous, grizzled man approached us and sat downby the side of the ex-machinist. Possibly a yellow-gray suit, cut in thebathrobe American style, made him look larger than he was, and thoughheavily built and stout, there was something about him which suggestedill health. One might have thought him a prosperous American businessman on his way to Baden-Baden. He had a big nose, big mouth, a hard eye, and big, freckled hands which he nervously opened and closed. 

"See that feller over there?" He pointed to a spectacled individual whoseemed lost in melancholy speculation at the rail--"Says he's a Belgianlieutenant. Been over here trying to get cloth. Says he can't get it, the firms over here haven't got the colors. Just think of it, thereisn't a pound of Bernheim's blue in the whole country!"

"I thought we were beginning to make dyes of our own, " said the Iowan. 

"Oh, yes, but we haven't got the hang of it yet. The product is prettypoor. Most of the people who need dyes are afraid to use the Americancolors, but they've got to take what they can get. Friend of mine, LonSeeger, of Seeger, Seeger & Hall, the carpet people in Hackensack, hadtwenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats spoiled on him last week byusing home dyes. "

The Belgian lieutenant, still standing by the rail, was talking withanother passenger, and some fragments of the conversation drifted to ourears. I caught the words--"My sister--quite unexpected--barelyescaped--no doubt of it--I myself saw near Malines--perfectlydreadful--tout-à-fait terrible. "

"Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats all spoiled, colors ran, didn't set, no good. This war is raising the devil with the UnitedStates textiles. Maybe the Germans won't get a glad hand when they comeback. We hear that they're going to flood the market with good, low-priced dyes so as to bust up the new American plants. Haven't youheard them hollerin' for tariff protection? I'm going over to look up anew green dye the French are getting out. We hear it's pretty goodstuff. What are you boys doing, looking for contracts?"

The Iowan replied that he hoped to get into an English cavalry regiment, and I mentioned the corps I had joined. 

"Well, don't get killed, " exclaimed the dye-stuffs agent paternally, andsettled down in his chair for a nap. 

It was the third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color ofthe American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising andfalling under the August sun. From the rail I saw coming toward us overthe edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer marked with two whiteblotches which, as the vessel neared, resolved themselves into paintedreproductions of the Swedish flag. Thus passed the Thorvald, carrying amark of the war across the lonely seas. 

"That's a Swedish boat, " said a voice at my elbow. 

"Yes, " I replied. 

A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a downyface, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me. There wassomething psychologically wrong with his face; it had that look in itwhich makes you want to see if you still have your purse. 

"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota, " he continued. 

"What's your name?" I asked. 

"Oscar Petersen, " he answered. 

"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded. 

"You bet, " he replied--and an instant later--"Are you?"

I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the samekind of experience he later became communicative. He had run away fromhome at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reformschool, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago. Ican't imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed. Atlength he "got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war, " as heexpressed it, and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, butreceived no answer. "My father was a Bible cuss, " he remarkedcheerfully, --"never got over my swiping the minister's watch. "

A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his going toenlist in the Foreign Legion--"popular young man very well known inthe--th ward, " said the article. He showed me, too, an extraordinaryletter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil onthe cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing fivedollars. "I hope you will try to avenge the Lusitania, " it said amongother things. The letter was signed by a woman. 

"Do you speak French?" I asked. 

"Not a word, " he replied. "I want to be put with the Americans or theSwedes. I speak good Swedish. "

Months later, on furlough, I saw in a hospital at Lyons a collegeclassmate who had served in the Foreign Legion. "Did you know a fellownamed Petersen?" I asked. 

"Yes, I knew him, " answered my friend; "he lifted a fifty-franc notefrom me and got killed before I could get it back. "

"How did it happen?"

"Went through my pockets, I imagine. "

"Oh, no, I meant how did he get killed?" "Stray shell sailed in as wewere going through a village, and caught him and two of the other boys. "

"You must not make your friend talk too much, " mumbled an old Sister ofCharity rather crossly. 

The two young men with the same identical oddity of gait were salesmenof artificial legs, each one a wearer and demonstrator of his wares. Thefirst, from Ohio, had lost his leg in a railroad accident two yearsbefore, and the second, a Virginian with a strong accent, had been donefor in a motor-car smashup. One morning the man from Ohio gave us a kindof danse macabre on the deck; rolling his trouser leg high above hisartificial shin, he walked, leaped, danced, and ran. "Can you beatthat?" he asked with pardonable pride. "Think what these will mean tothe soldiers. " Meanwhile, with slow care, the Virginian explained theingenious mechanism. 

Strange tatters of conversation rose from the deck. "Poor child, shelost her husband at the beginning of the war"--"Third shipment ofhosses"--"I was talking with a feller from the Atlas SteelCompany"--"Edouard is somewhere near Arras"; there were disputes aboutthe outcome of the war, and arguments over profits. A voluble Frenchwoman, whose husband was a pastry cook in a New York hotel before hejoined the forces, told me how she had wandered from one war movie toanother hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband, and had finally seen"some one who resembled him strongly" on the screen in Harlem. She had apicture of him, a thin, moody fellow with great, saber whiskers likeRostand's and a high, narrow forehead curving in on the sides betweenthe eyebrows and the hair. "He is a Chasseur alpin, " she said with agood deal of pride, "and they are holding his place for him at thehotel. He was wounded last month in the shoulder. I am going to thehospital at Lyons to see him. " The day's sunset was at its end, and agreat mass of black clouds surged over the eastern horizon, turning theseas ahead to a leaden somberness that lowered in menacing contrast tothe golden streaks of dying day. The air freshened, salvos of rain fellhissing into the dark waters, and violet cords of lightning leapedbetween sea and sky. Echoing thunder rolled long through unseen abysses. In the deserted salon I found the young Frenchman with the star-shapedscar reading an old copy of "La Revue. " He had been an officer in theChasseurs-à-pied until a fearful wound had incapacitated him for furtherservice, and had then joined the staff of a great, conservative Parisianweekly. The man was a disciple of Ernest Psichari, the soldier mysticwho died so superbly at Charleroi in the dreadful days before the Marne. From him I learned something of the French conception of the idea ofwar. It was not uninteresting to compare the French point of view withthe German, and we talked late into the night while the ship wasplunging through the storm. An article in the review, "La Psychologiedes Barbares, " was the starting-point of our conversation. 

"You must remember that the word 'barbarian' which we apply to theGermans, is understood by the French intellectually, " said he. "Not onlydo German atrocities seem barbarous, but their thought also. Considerthe respective national conceptions of the idea of war. To the Germans, war is an end in itself, and in itself and in all its effects perfectand good. To the French mind, this conception of war is barbaric, forwar is not good in itself and may be fatal to both victor andvanquished. " (He spoke a beautiful, lucid French with a sort of militarypreciseness. )

"It was Ernest Psichari who revealed to us the raison d'être of arms inmodern life, and taught us the meaning of war. To him, war was no savageruée, but the discipline of history for which every nation must beprepared, a terrible discipline neither to be sought, nor rejected whenproffered. Thus the Boches, once their illusion of the glory of war issmashed, have nothing to fall back on, but the French point of view isstable and makes for a good morale. Psichari was the intellectual leaderof that movement for the regeneration of the army which has savedFrance. When the doctrines of pacificism began to be preached in France, and cries of 'A bas l'armée' were heard in the streets, Psichari showedthat the army was the only institution left in our industrialized worldwith the old ideals and the power to teach them. Quand on a tout dit, the military ideals of honor, duty, and sacrifice of one's all for thecommon good are the fundamentals of. Character. Psichari turned thisgeneration from a generation of dreamers to a generation of soldiers, knowing why they were soldiers, glad to be soldiers. The army saved themorale of France when the Church had lost its hold, and the publicschools had been delivered to the creatures of sentimental doctrinairegovernment. Was it not a pity that Psichari should have died so young?"

"Did you know him?" I asked. 

"Yes; I saw something of him in Africa. The mystery of the East hadprofoundly stirred him. He was a dark, serious fellow with something ofthe profile of his grandfather, Ernest Renan. At Charleroi, after anheroic stand, he and every man of his squad died beside the guns theyserved. "

Long after, at the Bois-le-Prêtre, I went to the trenches to get a youngsergeant. His friends had with clumsy kindness gathered together hislittle belongings and put them in the ambulance. "As tu trouvé monlivre?" (Have you found my book?) he asked anxiously, and they tossedbeside the stretcher a trench-mired copy of Psichari's "L'Appel desArmes. "

One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and anchoredat the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde. A spindly lighthousewas flashing, seeming more to reflect the sunlight from outside than tobe burning within, and a current the color of coffee and cream with adash of vermilion in it, went by us mottled with patches of floatingmud. From the deck one had an extraordinary view, a ten-mile sweep ofthe strangely colored water, the hemisphere of the heavens all of onegreenish-blue tint, and a narrow strip of nondescript, sandy coastsuspended somehow between the strange sea and unlovely sky. At noon, theRochambeau began at a good speed her journey up the river, passingtile-roofed villages and towns built of pumice-gray stone, and greatflat islands covered with acres upon acres of leafy, bunchy vines. Therewas a scurry to the rail; some one cried, "Voilà des Boches, " and I sawworking in a vineyard half a dozen men in gray-green German regimentals. A poilu in a red cap was standing nonchalantly beside them. As theRochambeau, following the channel, drew incredibly close to the bank, the Germans leaned on their hoes and watched us pass, all save one, whocontinued to hoe industriously round the roots of the vines, ignoring uswith a Roman's disdain. "Comme ils sont laids" (How ugly they are), saida voice. There was no surprise in the tone, which expressed the expectedconfirmation of a past judgment. It was the pastry cook's voluble wifewho had spoken. The land through which we were passing, up to that timesimply the pleasant countryside of the Bordelais, turned in an instantto the France of the Great War. 

Late in the afternoon, the river, slowly narrowing, turned a great bend, and the spires of Bordeaux, violet-gray in the smoky rose of earlytwilight, were seen just ahead. A broad, paved, dirty avenue, with theriver on one side and a row of shabby houses on the other, led from thedocks to the city, and down this street, marching with Oriental dignity, came a troop of Arabs. There was a picture of a fat sous-officierleading, of brown-white rags and mantles waving in the breeze blowingfrom the harbor, of lean, muscular, black-brown legs, and dark, impassive faces. "Algerian recruits, " said an officer of the boat. Itwas a first glimpse at the universality of the war; it held one's mindto realize that while some were quitting their Devon crofts, others wereleaving behind them the ancestral well at the edges of the ancientdesert. A faint squeaking of strange pipes floated on the twilight air. 

There came an official examination of our papers, done in a businesslikeway, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were free to land inFrance. That evening a friend and I had dinner in a great café openingon the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried to analyze the differencebetween the Bordeaux of the past and the Bordeaux of the war. The ornaterestaurant, done in a kind of Paris Exhibition style, and decorated withceiling frescoes of rosy, naked Olympians floating in golden mists andsapphire skies, was full of movement and light, crowds passed by on thesidewalks, there were sounds--laughter. 

"Looks just the same to me, " said my friend, an American journalist whohad been there in 1912. "Of course there are more soldiers. Outside ofthat, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the town has not changed. "

But there was a difference, and a great difference. There was a terribleabsence of youth. Not that youth was entirely absent from the tables andthe trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and unhealthy-looking, afraidto meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the pitiable jeunesse that couldnot pass the physical examination of the army. Most of the other youngmen who bent over the tables talking, or leaned back on a divan to smokecigarettes, were strangers, and I saw many who were unquestionablyRoumanians or Greeks. A little apart, at a corner table, a father andmother were dining with a boy in a uniform much too large for him;--Ifancied from the cut of his clothes that he belonged to a young squadstill under instruction in the garrisons, and that he was enjoying anight off with his family. Screened from the rest by a clothes rack, alarky young lieutenant was discreetly conversing with a "daughter ofjoy, " and an elderly English officer, severely proper and correct, wasreading "Punch" and sipping red wine in Britannic isolation. Across thestreet an immense poster announced, "Conference in aid of the BelgianRed Cross--the German Outrages in Louvain, Malines, andLiège--illustrated. "

We finished our dinner, which was good and not costly, and started towalk to our hotel. Hardly had we turned the corner of the Place, whenthe life of Bordeaux went out like a torch extinguished by the wind. Itwas still early in the evening, there was a sound of an orchestrasomewhere behind, yet ahead of us, lonely and still, with its shopsclosed and its sidewalks deserted, was one of the greater streets ofBordeaux. Through the drawn curtains of second stories over littlegroceries and baker-shops shone the yellow light of lamps. What hadhappened to the Jean, Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the warbegan? What tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these silentwindows not conceal? And every French city is much the same; one noticesin them all the subtle lack of youth, and the animation of the greatsquares in contrast to the somber loneliness of streets and quarterswhich once were alive and gay. At the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, thewhirlpool of Parisian life is still turning, but the great streetsleading away from the Place de l'Étoile are quiet. Young and old, laborer and shopkeeper, boulevardier and apache are far away holding thetragic lines. 

The next morning at the station, I had my first glimpse of that mightyorganization which surrounds the militaire. There was a special entrancefor soldiers and a special exit for soldiers, and at both of these along file of blue-clad poilus waited for the countersigning of theirfurlough slips and military tickets. The mud of the trenches stillstained the bottom edges of their overcoats, and their steel helmetswere dented and dull. There was something fine about the facescollectively; there was a certain look of tried endurance and perilsbravely borne. I heard those on furlough telling the names of their homevillages to the officer in charge, --pleasant old names, Saint-Pierre auxVignes, La Tour du Roi. 

A big, obese, middle-aged civilian dressed in a hideous greenish suit, and wearing a pancake cap, sat opposite me in the compartment I hadchosen. There was a hard, unfriendly look in his large, fat-encircledeyes, a big mustache curved straight out over his lips, and the shortfinger nails of his square, puffy fingers were deeply rimmed with dirt. He caught sight of me reading a copy of an English weekly, and afterstaring at me with an interest not entirely free from a certainhostility, retreated behind the pages of the "Matin, " and began pickinghis teeth. Possibly he belonged to that provincial and prejudicedhandful to whom England will always be "Perfidious Albion, " or else hetook me for an English civilian dodging military service. The Frenchpress was following the English recruiting campaign very closely, andthe system of volunteer service was not without its critics. "Conscription being considered in England" (On discute la conscriptionen Angleterre), announced the "Matin" discreetly. 

It was high noon; the train had arrived at Angoulême, and was takingaboard a crowd of convalescents. On the station platform, their facesrelentlessly illumined by the brilliant light, stood about thirtysoldiers; a few were leaning on canes, one was without a right arm, somehad still the pallor of the sick, others seemed able-bodied and hearty. Every man wore on the bosom of his coat about half a dozen littlealuminum medals dangling from bows of tricolor ribbon. "Pour lesblessés, s'il vous plaît, " cried a tall young woman in the costume andblue cape of a Red-Cross nurse as she walked along the platform shakinga tin collection box under the windows of the train. 

To our compartment came three of the convalescents. One was a sturdy, farmhand sort of fellow, with yellow hair and a yellow mustache--thekind of man who might have been a Norman; he wore khaki puttees, browncorduroy trousers, and a jacket which fitted his heavy, vigorous figurerather snugly. Another was a little soul dressed in the "blue horizon"from head to foot, a homely little soul with an egg-shaped head, brown-green eyes, a retreating chin, and irregular teeth. The last, wearing the old tenue, black jacket and red trousers, was a good-lookingfellow with rather handsome brown eyes. Comfortably stretched in acorner, the Norman was deftly cutting slices of bread and meat which heoffered to his companions. Catching sight of my English paper, all threestared at me with an interest and friendliness that was in psychologicalcontrast to the attitude of the obese civilian. 

"Anglais?" asked the Norman. 

The civilian watched for my answer. 

"Non--Américain, " I replied. 

"Tiens, " they said politely. 

"Do you speak English?" asked the homely one. 

"Yes, " I answered. 

The Norman fished a creased dirty letter and a slip of paper from hiswallet and handed them to me for inspection. 

"I found them in a trench we shared with the English, " he explained. "These puttees are English; a soldier gave them to me. " He exhibited hislegs with a good deal of satisfaction. 

I examined the papers that had been given me. The first was a medicalprescription for an anti-lice ointment and the second an illiterateletter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about somebody whom thewriter was having trouble to manage, "now that you aren't here. " Itranslated as well as I could for an attentive audience. "Toujours lestotos, " they cried merrily when I explained the prescription. A spiritof good-fellowship pervaded the compartment, till even the suspiciouscivilian unbent, and handed round post-card photographs of his two sonswho were somewhere en Champagne. Not a one of the three soldiers couldhave been much over twenty-one, but they were not boys, but men, seriousmen, tried and disciplined by war. The homely one gave me one of hismany medals which he wore "to please the good Sisters"; on one side inan oval of seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and on the other, thedetermined features of General Joffre. 

Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce. Distantvillages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black againstthe burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the sweepinggolden plain. We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and shuttered, thoughthe harvests had been gathered and stacked. There was something verytragic in those deserted, outlying farms. The train began to rattlethrough the suburbs of Paris. By the window stood the Norman looking outon the winking red and violet lights of the railroad yard. "This Paris?"he asked. "I never expected to see Paris. How the war sets one totraveling!"

Chapter 2

An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain

It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I wasstrolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun wasdrying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods andathletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn, so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of themighty vista of the Champs Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown andvaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane wasmaneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white andsilver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy showthe laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts oftreble shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel, " squeaked a voice. Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was aprostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored witha stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted itspuzzled, wooden head to the laughing children. Beneath a little Prussianhelmet was the head of William of Germany, caricatured with Parisianskill into a scowling, green fellow with a monster black mustache turnedup to his eyes. "Lie down!" cried the Zouave doll imperiously. "Here isa love pat for thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche. " And he struckhim down again with his staff. 

Soldiers walked in the garden, --permissionnaires (men on furlough) outfor an airing with their rejoicing families, smart young Englishsubalterns, and rosy-fleshed, golden-haired Flemings of the type thatRubens drew. But neither their presence nor the sight of an occasionalmutilé (soldier who has lost a limb), pathetically clumsy on his newcrutches, quite sent home the presence of the war. The normal life ofthe city was powerful enough to engulf the disturbance, the theaterswere open, there were the same crowds on the boulevards, and the samegossipy spectators in the sidewalk cafés. After a year of war theParisians were accustomed to soldiers, cripples, and people in mourning. The strongest effect of the war was more subtle of definition, it was achange in the temper of the city. Since the outbreak of the war, thesham Paris that was "Gay Paree" had disappeared, and the real Paris, theParis of tragic memories and great men, had taken its place. An oldParisian explained the change to me in saying, "Paris has become moreFrench. " Deprived of the foreigner, the city adapted itself to a tastemore Gallic; faced with the realities of war, it exchanged itsartificiality for that sober reasonableness which is the normal attitudeof the nation. 

At noon I left the garden and strolled down the Champs Élysées to thePorte Maillot. The great salesrooms of the German motor-car dealers hadbeen given by the Government to a number of military charities who hadcovered the trade signs with swathes and rosettes of their nationalcolors. Under the banner of the Belgians, in the quondam hop of theMercedes, was an exhibition of leather knickknacks, baskets, and dollsmade by the blind and mutilated soldiers. The articles--children's toysfor the most part, dwarfs that rolled over and over on a set of parallelbars, Alsatian lasses with flaxen hair, and gay tops--were exposed on arow of tables a few feet back from the window. By the Porte Maillot, some of the iron saw-horses with sharpened points, which had formed partof the barricade built there in the days of the Great Retreat, lay, avillainous, rusty heap, in a grassy ditch of the city wall; a few stumpsof the trees that had been then cut down were still visible, and from arailroad tie embedded in the sidewalk hung six links of a massive chain. Through this forgotten flotsam on the great shore of the war, the quietcrowds went in and out of the Maillot entrance to the Bois de Boulogne. There was a sense of order and security in the air. I took a seat on theterrace of a little restaurant. The garçon was a small man in thefifties, inclined to corpulence, with a large head, large, blue-grayeyes, purplish lips, and blue-black hair cut pompadour. As we watchedthe orderly, Sunday crowds going to the great park, we fell intoconversation about the calmness of Paris. "Yes, it is calm, " he said;"we are all waiting (nous attendons). We know that the victory will beours at the finish. But all we can do is to wait. I have two sons at thefront. " He had struck the keynote. Paris is calmly waiting--waiting forthe end of the war, for victory, for the return of her children. 

Yet in this great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty blues, and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was another Paris, a terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early in the afternoona dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest. It began to rain. 

In a great garret of the hospital, under a high French roof, was thedormitory of the volunteers attached to the Paris Ambulance Section. Atnight, this great space was lit by only one light, a battered electricreading-lamp standing on a kind of laboratory table in the center of thefloor, and window curtains of dark-blue cambric, waving mysteriously inthe night wind, were supposed to hide even this glimmer from the eyes ofraiding Zeppelins. Looking down, early in the evening, into the greatquadrangle of the institution, one saw the windows of the opposite wingveiled with this mysterious blue, and heard all the feverish unrest of ahospital, the steps on the tiled corridors, the running of water in thebathroom taps, the hard clatter of surgical vessels, and sometimes thecry of a patient having a painful wound dressed. But late at night theconfused murmur of the battle between life and death had subsided, thelights in the wards were extinguished, and only the candle of the nightnurse, seen behind a screen, and the stertorous breathing of the manysleepers, brought back the consciousness of human life. I have oftenlooked into the wards as I returned from night calls to the stationwhere we received the wounded, and been conscious, as I peered silentlyinto that flickering obscurity, of the vague unrest of sleepers, of thevarious attitudes assumed, the arms outstretched, the upturned throats, and felt, too, in the still room, the mystic presence of the Angel ofPain. 

It was late at night, and I stood looking out of my window over theroofs of Neuilly to the great, darkened city just beyond. From somewherealong the tracks of the "Little Belt" railway came a series of piercingshrieks from a locomotive whistle. It was raining hard, drumming on theslate roof of the dormitory, and somewhere below a gutter gurgledfoolishly. Far away in the corridor a gleam of yellow light shone fromthe open door of an isolation room where a nurse was watching by apatient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been to the movies atthe Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilantwhispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them said, "That warfilm was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?""Yuh, damn good, " answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. Itwas a strange crew that inhabited these quarters; there were idealists, dreamers, men out of work, simple rascals and adventurers of all kinds. To my right slept a big, young Westerner, from some totally unknowncollege in Idaho, who was a humanitarian enthusiast to the point ofimbecility, and to the left a middle-aged rogue who indulged in secretdebauches of alcohol and water he cajoled from the hospital orderlies. Yet this obscure and motley community was America's contribution toFrance. I fell asleep. 

"Up, birds!"

The lieutenant of the Paris Section, a mining engineer with apicturesque vocabulary of Nevadan profanity, was standing in his pajamatrousers at the head of the room, holding a lantern in his hand. "Up, birds!" he called again. "Call's come in for Lah Chapelle. " There wereuneasy movements under the blankets, inmates of adjoining beds began totalk to each other, and some lit their bedside candles. The chief wentdown both sides of the dormitory, flashing his lantern before each bed, ragging the sleepy. "Get up, So-and-So. Well, I must say, Pete, you havea hell of a nerve. " There were glimpses of candle flames, bare bodiesshivering in the damp cold, and men sitting on beds, winding on theirputtees. "Gee! listen to it rain, " said somebody. "What time is it?""Twenty minutes past two. " Soon the humming and drumming of the motorsin the yard sounded through the roaring of the downpour. 

Down in the yard I found Oiler, my orderly, and our little Fordambulance, number fifty-three. One electric light, of that sickly yellowcolor universal in France, was burning over the principal entrance tothe hospital, just giving us light enough to see our way out of thegates. Down the narrow, dark Boulevard Inkerman we turned, and then outon to a great street which led into the "outer" boulevard of DeBatignolles and Clichy. To that darkness with which the city, in fear ofraiding aircraft, has hidden itself, was added the continuous, pouringrain. In the light of our lamps, the wet, golden trees of the black, silent boulevards shone strangely, and the illuminated advertisingkiosks which we passed, one after the other at the corners of greatstreets, stood lonely and drenched, in the swift, white touch of ourradiance. Black and shiny, the asphalt roadway appeared to go on in astraight line forever and forever. 

Neither in residential, suburban Neuilly nor in deserted Montmartre wasthere a light to be seen, but when we drew into the working quarter ofLa Chapelle, lights appeared in the windows, as if some toiler of thenight was expected home or starting for his labor, and vague forms, battling with the rain or in refuge under the awning of a café, were nowand then visible. From the end of the great, mean rue de La Chapelle thesounds of the unrest of the railroad yards began to be heard, for thisstreet leads to the freight-houses near the fortifications. Ourobjective was a great freight station which the Government, some monthsbefore, had turned into a receiving-post for the wounded; it lay on theedge of the yard, some distance in from the street, behind a huddle ofsmaller sheds and outbuildings. To our surprise the rue de La Chapellewas strewn with ambulances rushing from the station, and along two sidesof the great yard, where the merchandise trucks had formerly turned in, six or seven hundred more ambulances were waiting. We turned out of thedark, rain-swept city into this hurly-burly of shouts, snorting ofengines, clashing of gears, and whining of brakes, illuminated with athousand intermeshing beams of headlights across whose brilliance therain fell in sloping, liquid rods. "Quick, a small car this way!" criedsome one in an authoritative tone, and number fifty-three ran up aninclined plane into the enormous shed which had been reserved for theloading of the wounded into the ambulances. 

We entered a great, high, white-washed, warehouse kind of place, aboutfour hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, built of woodevidently years before. In the middle of this shed was an open space, and along the walls were rows of ambulances. Brancardiers(stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were loading woundedinto these cars, and as soon as one car was filled, it would go out ofthe hall and another would take its place. There was an infernal din;the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was full of blue gasolinefumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was increasing every minute, were carried the wounded, often nothing but human bundles of dirty bluecloth and fouled bandages. Every one of these wounded soldiers wassaturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly to theirovercoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with itspowder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in apuddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinistermixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a woundedsoldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our humanrelation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of thetrenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds, thesoldier comes from the train a sight for which only the great heart ofFrancis of Assisi could have adequate pity. 

Oiler and I went through an opening in a canvas partition into that partof the great shed where the wounded were being unloaded from the trains. In width, this part measured four hundred feet, but in length it ran toeight hundred. In two rows of six each, separated by an aisle abouteight feet wide, were twelve little houses, about forty feet square, built of stucco, each one painted a different color. The woodwork of theexterior was displayed through the plaster in the Elizabethan fashion, and the little sheds were clean, solidly built, and solidly roofed. Inone of these constructions was the bureau of the staff which assignedthe wounded to the hospitals, in another was a fully equippedoperating-room, and in the others, rows of stretcher-horses, twenty-fiveto a side, on which the wounded were laid until a hospital number hadbeen assigned them. A slip, with these hospital numbers on it, the namesof the patients, and the color of the little house in which they were tobe found, was then given to the chauffeur of an ambulance, who, withthis slip in hand and followed by a number of stretcher-bearers, immediately gathered his patients. A specimen slip might run thus--"ToHospital 32, avenue de Iéna, Paul Chaubard, red barraque, Jules Adamy, green barraque, and Alphonse Fort, ochre barraque. "

To give a French touch to the scene, this great space, rapidly fillingwith human beings in an appalling state of misery, as the aftermath ofthe offensive broke on us, was decorated with evergreen trees and shrubsso that the effect was that of an indoor fair or exhibition; you felt asif you might get samples of something at each barraque, as the Frenchtermed the little houses. To the side of these there was a platform, anda sunken track running along the wall, and behind, a great open spaceset with benches for those of the wounded able to walk. Some fiftygreat, cylindrical braziers, which added a strange bit of rosy, fierycolor to the scene, warmed this space. When the wounded had begun toarrive at about midnight, a regiment of Zouaves was at hand to help theregular stretcher-bearers; these Zouaves were all young, "husky" mendressed in the baggy red trousers and short blue jacket of their classicuniform, and their strength was in as much of a contrast to the weaknessof those whom they handled as their gay uniform was in contrast to themiry, horizon blue of the combatants. There was something grotesque inseeing two of these powerful fellows carrying to the wagons a dirty bluebundle of a human being. 

With a piercing shriek, that cut like a gash through the uproar of theambulance engines, a sanitary train, the seventh since midnight, cameinto the station, and so smoothly did it run by, its floors on a levelwith the main floor, that it seemed an illusion, like a stage train. Onthe platform stood some Zouaves waiting to unload the passengers, whileothers cleared the barraques and helped the feeble to the ambulances. There was a steady line of stretchers going out, yet the station was sofull that hardly a bit of the vast floor space was unoccupied. Onewalked down a narrow path between a sea of bandaged bodies. Shoulderingwhat baggage they had, those able to walk plodded in a strange, slowtempo to the waiting automobiles. All by themselves were about a hundredpoor, ragged Germans, wounded prisoners, brothers of the French in thisterrible fraternity of pain. 

About four or five hundred assis (those able to sit up) were waiting onbenches at the end of the hall. Huddled round the rosy, flickeringbraziers, they sat profoundly silent in the storm and din that movedabout them, rarely conversing with each other. I imagine that thestupefaction, which is the physiological reaction of an intenseemotional and muscular effort, had not yet worn away. There were fineheads here and there. Forgetful of his shattered arm, an old fellow, with the face of Henri Quatre, eagle nose, beard, and all, sat with hishead sunken on his chest in mournful contemplation, and a fine-looking, black-haired, dragoon kind of youth with the wildest of eyes clung likegrim death to a German helmet. The same expression of resigned fatalismwas common to all. 

Sometimes the chauffeurs who were waiting for their clients got a chanceto talk to one of the soldiers. Eager for news, they clustered round thewounded man, bombarding him with questions. 

"Are the Boches retreating?"

"When did it begin?"

"Just where is the attack located?"

"Are things going well for us?"

The soldier, a big young fellow with a tanned face, somewhat pale fromthe shock of a ripped-up forearm, answered the questions good-naturedly, though the struggle had been on so great a scale that he could only tellabout his own hundred feet of trench. Indeed the substance of hisinformation was that there had been a terrible bombardment of the Germanlines, and then an attack by the French which was still in progress. 

"Are we going to break clear through the lines?"

The soldier shrugged his shoulders. "They hope to, " he replied. 

Just beyond us, in one of the thousand stretchers on the floor, a smallbearded man had died. With his left leg and groin swathed in bandages, he lay flat on his back, his mouth open, muddy, dirty, and dead. Fromtime to time the living on each side stole curious, timid glances athim. Then, suddenly, some one noticed the body, and twostretcher-bearers carried it away, and two more brought a living manthere in its place. 

The turmoil continued to increase. At least a thousand motor-ambulances, mobilized from all over the region of Paris, were now on hand to carryaway the human wreckage of the great offensive. Ignorant of the ghastlyarmy at its doors, Paris slept. The rain continued to fall heavily. 

"Eh la, comrade. "

A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed mefrom his stretcher. 

"You speak French?"

I nodded. 

"I am going to ask you to do me a favor--write to my wife who is here inParis, and tell her that I am safe and shall let her know at once whathospital I am sent to. I shall be very grateful. "

He let his shoulders sink to the stretcher again and I saw him now andthen looking for me in the crowd. Catching my eye, he smiled. 

A train full of Algerian troops came puffing into the station, theuproar hardly rising above the general hubbub. The passengers who wereable to walk got out first, some limping, some walking firmly with asplendid Eastern dignity. These men were Arabs and Moors from Algeriaand Tunisia, who had enlisted in the colonial armies. There was a greatdiversity of size and racial type among them, some being splendid, bigmen of the type one imagines Othello to have been, some chunkier andmore bullet-headed, and others tall and lean with interesting aquilinefeatures. I fancy that the shorter, rounder-skulled ones were those witha dash of black blood. The uniform, of khaki-colored woolen, consistedof a simple, short-waisted jacket, big baggy trousers, puttees, and ared fez or a steel helmet with the lunar crescent and "R. F. " for itsdevice. We heard rumors about their having attacked a village. Advancingin the same curious tempo as the French, they passed to the braziers andthe wooden benches. Last of all from the train, holding his bandaged armagainst his chest, a native corporal with the features of a deserttribesman advanced with superb, unconscious stateliness. As theAlgerians sat round the braziers, their uniforms and brown skinspresented a contrast to the pallor of the French in their bedraggledblue, but there was a marked similarity of facial expression. A certainracial odor rose from the Orientals. 

My first assignment, two Algerians and two Frenchmen, took me to anancient Catholic high school which had just been improvised into ahospital for the Oriental troops. It lay, dirty, lonely, and grim, justto one side of a great street on the edge of Paris, and had not beenoccupied since its seizure by the State. Turning in through an enormousdoor, lit by a gas globe flaring and flickering in the torrents of rain, we found ourselves in an enormous, dark courtyard, where a half-dozenambulances were already waiting to discharge their clients. Along onewall there was a flight of steps, and from somewhere beyond the door atthe end of this stair shone the faintest glow of yellow light. 

It came from the door of a long-disused schoolroom, now turned into thereceiving-hall of this strange hospital. The big, high room was lit byone light only, a kerosene hand lamp standing on the teacher's desk, andso smoked was the chimney that the wick gave hardly more light than acandle. There was just enough illumination to see about thirty Algerianssitting at the school desks, their big bodies crammed into the littleseats, and to distinguish others lying in stretchers here and there uponthe floor. At the teacher's table a little French adjutant with a trim, black mustache and a soldier interpreter were trying to discover theidentity of their visitors. 

"Number 2215, " (numéro deux mille deux cent quinze), the officer cried;and the interpreter, leaning over the adjutant's shoulder to read thename, shouted, "Méhémet Ali. "

There was no answer, and the Algerians looked round at each other, forall the world like children in a school. It was very curious to seethese dark, heavy, wild faces bent over these disused desks. 

"Number 2168" (numéro deux mille cent soixante huit), cried theadjutant. 

"Abdullah Taleb, " cried the interpreter. 

"Moi, " answered a voice from a stretcher in the shadows of the floor. 

"Take him to room six, " said the adjutant, indicating the speaker to apair of stretcher-bearers. In the quieter pauses the rain was heardbeating on the panes. 

There are certain streets in Paris, equally unknown to tourist andParisian--obscure, narrow, cobble-stoned lanes, lined by wallsconcealing little orchards and gardens. So provincial is theiratmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to believeone's self on the fringe of an old town, just where little bourgeoisvillas begin to overlook the fields; but to consider one's self justbeyond the heart of Paris is almost incredible. Down such a street, in agreat garden, lay the institution to which our two Frenchmen wereassigned. We had a hard time finding it in the night and rain, but atlength, discovering the concierge's bell, we sent a vigorous pealclanging through the darkness. Oiler lifted the canvas flap of theambulance to see about our patients. 

"All right in there, boys?"

"Yes, " answered a voice. 

"Not cold?"

"Non. Are we at the hospital?"

"Yes; we are trying to wake up the concierge. "

There was a sound of a key in a lock, and a small, dark woman opened thedoor. She was somewhat spinstery in type, her thin, black hair wasneatly parted in the middle, and her face was shrewd, but not unkindly. 

"Deux blessés (two wounded), madame, " said I. 

The woman pulled a wire loop inside the door, and a far-off belltinkled. 

"Come in, " she said. "The porter will be here immediately. "

We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and acarbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall. 

"Are they seriously wounded?" she asked. 

"I cannot say. "

A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a small, beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber boots, and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room. 

"Two wounded have arrived, " said the lady. "You are to help thesemessieurs get out the stretchers. "

The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance, glowing red behind its curtain of rain. 

"Mon Dieu, what a deluge!" he exclaimed, and followed us forth. With an"Easy there, " and "Lift now, " we soon had both of our clients out of theambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, littleroom, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy, stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small, nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes. Themud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed, beside theVictorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A middle-agedservant--a big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature, probably theporter's wife--entered, followed by two other women, the last twowearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and the same patternof white wristlets and collar. We then carried the two soldiers upstairsto a back room, where the old servant had filled a kind of enameldishpan with soapy water. Very gently and deftly the beefy old porterand his wife took off the fouled, blood-stained uniforms of the twofighting men, and washed their bodies, while she who had opened the doorstood by and superintended all. The feverish, bright-eyed fellow seemedto be getting weaker, but the big peasant conversed with the old womanin a low, steady tone, and told her that there had been a big action. 

When Oiler and I came downstairs, two little glasses of sherry and aplate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us. There was somethingdistinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in the demeanor ofthe two prim ladies who stood by. It roused my curiosity. Finally one ofthem said:--

"Are you English, gentlemen?"

"No, " we replied; "Americans. "

"I thought you might be English, " she replied in that language, whichshe spoke very clearly and fluently. "Both of us have been many years inEngland. We are French Protestant deaconesses, and this is our home. Itis not a hospital. But when the call for more accommodations for thewounded came in, we got ready our two best rooms. The soldiers upstairsare our first visitors. "

The old porter came uneasily down the stair. "Mademoiselle Pierre saysthat the doctor must come at once, " he murmured, "the little fellow (lepetit) is not doing well. "

We thanked the ladies gratefully for the refreshment, for we were coldand soaked to the skin. Then we went out again to the ambulance and therain. A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning. Later in the morning, Isaw a copy of the "Matin" attached to a kiosk; it said something about"Grande Victoire. "

Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris, bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle. Forthree days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance squadsdrove continuously. It was a terrible phase of the conflict to see, buthe who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the soul of thewar. Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that werespiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in itsessence, profoundly animal. 

Chapter III

The Great Swathe of the Lines

The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region whence camethe wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself, share the life ofthe French soldier. Late one evening in October, I arrived in Nancy andwent to a hotel I had known well before the war. An old porter, a man ofsixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair, and a florid face almostdevoid of expression, carried up my luggage, and as I looked at him, standing in the doorway, a simple figure in his striped black and yellowvest and white apron, I wondered just what effect the war had had onhim. Through the open window of the room, seen over the dark silhouetteof the roofs of Nancy, shone the glowing red sky and rolling smoke ofthe vast munition works at Pompey and Frouard. 

"You were not here when I came to the hotel two years ago, " said I. 

"No, " he answered; "I have been here only since November, 1914. "

"You are a Frenchman? There was a Swiss here, then. "

"Yes, indeed, I am Français, monsieur. The Swiss is now a waiter in acafé of the Place Stanislas. It is something new to me to be a hotelporter. "

"Tiens. What did you do?"

"I drove a coal team, monsieur. "

"How, then, did you happen to come here?"

"I used to deliver coal to the hotel. One day I heard that the Swiss hadgone to the café to take the place of a garçon whose class had just beencalled out. I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks of coal, andbeing always out of doors, so I applied for the porter's job. "

"You are satisfied with the change. "

"Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur. "

"I suppose you have kinsmen at the front. "

"Only my sister's son, monsieur. "

"In the active forces?"

"No, he is a reservist. He is a man thirty-five years of age. He waswounded by a shrapnel ball in the groin early in the spring, but is nowat the front again. "

"What does he do en civil?"

"He is a furniture-maker, monsieur. "

He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off down thegreen velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator. In the streetbelow a crowd was coming out of the silky white radiance of the lobby ofa cinema into the violet rays thrown upon the sidewalk from theilluminated sign over the theater door. There are certain French citiesto which the war has brought a real prosperity, and Nancy was then oneof them. The thousands of refugees from the frontier villages and theworld of military officials and soldier workmen mobilized in theammunition factories had added to the population till it was actuallygreater than it had been before the war, and with this new populationhad come a development of the city's commercial life. The middle classwas making money, the rich were getting richer, and Nancy, hardly morethan eighteen or nineteen miles from the trenches, forgot its dangertill, on the first day of January, 1916, the Germans fired severalshells from a giant mortar or a marine piece into the town, one of whichscattered the fragments of a big five-story apartment house all overNancy. And on that afternoon thirty thousand people left the city. 

The day on which I was to go across the great swathe of the front to thefirst-line trenches dawned cool and sunny. I use the word "swathe"purposely, for only by that image can the real meaning of the phrase"the front" be understood. The thick, black line which figures on thewar-maps is a great swathe of country running, with a thousand littleturns and twists that do not interfere with its general regularity, fromthe summits of the Vosges to the yellow dunes of the North Sea. Therelation of the border of this swathe to the world beyond is therelation of sea to land along an irregular and indented coast. Here anisolated, strategic point, fiercely defended by the Germans, hasextended the border of the swathe beyond the usual limits, and villagesthirteen and fourteen miles from the actual lines have been pounded topieces by long-range artillery in the hope of destroying the enemy'scommunications; there the trenches cross an obscure, level moor uponwhose possession nothing particular depends, and the swathe narrows tothe villages close by the lines. This swathe, which begins with theFrench communications, passes the French trenches, leaps "No Man'sLand, " and continues beyond the German trenches to the Germancommunications, averages about twenty-two miles in width. The territorywithin this swathe is inhabited by soldiers, ruled by soldiers, workedby soldiers, and organized for war. 

Sometimes the transition between civilian life and the life of theswathe is abrupt, as, for instance, at Verdun, where the villages beyondthe lines have been emptied of civilian inhabitants to make room for thesoldiery; but at other times the change is gradual and the peasantscontinue to work fields almost in the shadow of the trenches. Since theline of trenches was organized by the Germans only after a series ofengagements along the front, during which the battle-line oscillatedover a wide territory, the approach to the swathe is often through aregion of desolated villages sometimes far removed from the presenttrenches. Such is the state of affairs in the region of the Marne, theArgonne, and on the southern bank of the Moselle. Moss-overgrown andsilent, these villages often stand deserted in the fields at theentrance to the swathe, fit heralds of the desolation that lies beyond. 

Imagine, then, the French half of the swathe extending from the edge ofthe civilian world to the barbed-wire entanglements of No Man's Land. Within this territory, in the trenches, in the artillery positions, inthe villages where troops are quartered (and they are quartered in everyvillage of the swathe), and along all the principal turns and corners ofthe roads, a certain number of shells fall every twenty-four hours, thenumber of shells per locality increasing as one advances toward thefirst lines. There are certain disputed regions, that of Verdun inparticular, where literally the whole great swathe has been pounded topieces, till hardly one stone of a village remains on another, andduring the recent offensive in the Somme the British are said to havesystematically wiped out every village, hamlet, and road behind theGerman trenches to a depth of eighteen miles. Yet, protected from riflebullets and the majority of shells by a great wooded hill, theinhabitants of M------, one mile from the lines of the Bois-le-Prêtre, did a thriving business selling fruit to the soldiers, and I once saw anold peasant woman, who was digging potatoes in her garden when a smallshell burst about two hundred feet from her, shake her fist toward theGerman lines, mutter something, and plod angrily home to her cellar. There are rarely any children close to the trenches, but in villagesthat are only occasionally shelled, the school is open, and the classhurries to the cellar at the first alarm. 

The lieutenant of the American Section, à young Frenchman who spokeEnglish not only fluently, but also with distinction, came to Nancy totake me to the front. It was a clear, sunny morning, and the rumble ofthe commercial life of Nancy, somewhat later in starting than our own, was just beginning to be heard. Across the street from thebreakfast-room of the hotel, a young woman wearing a little black capeover her shoulders rolled up the corrugated iron shutter of aconfectioner's shop and began to set the window with the popularpatriotic candy boxes, aluminum models of a "seventy-five" shell tiedround with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a whiteapron and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his head;and from the nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant dressed ina black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the morning Iwas contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; thatnight I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire shells. 

"Please give me all your military papers, " said my officer. I handedover all the cards, permits, and licenses that had been given me, and heexamined them closely. 

"Allons, let us go, " he said to his chauffeur, a young soldier wearingthe insignia of the motor-transportation corps. 

"How long does it take us to get to the lines, mon lieutenant?"

"About an hour. Our headquarters are thirty kilomètres distant. "

The big, war-gray Panhard began to move. I looked round, eager to noticeanything that marked our transition from peace to war. Beyond the Nancy, built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay theindustrial Nancy which has grown up since the development of the ironmines of French Lorraine in the eighties. Through this ugly huddle wepassed first: there were working men on the sidewalks, gamins in thegutters, --nothing to remind one of the war. 

"Halt!"

At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small, gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car. From the door of aneighboring wineshop, a hideous old woman, her uncombed, tawny yellowhair messed round her coarse, shiny face, came out to look at us. 

"Your papers, please, " said a red-faced, middle-aged sergeant wearing abrown corduroy uniform, who, walking briskly on enormous fat legs, hadfollowed the sentry out into the street. The lieutenant produced themilitary permit to travel in the army zone--the ordre de mouvement, aprinted form on a blue sheet about the size of a leaf of typewriterpaper. 

"Pass, " said the sergeant, and saluted. The sentry retired to his poston the sidewalk. At the door of the wineshop the woman continued tostare at us with an animal curiosity. Possibly our English-like uniformshad attracted her attention; the French are very curious about lesAnglais. Over the roof of an ugly row of working men's barracks, builtof mortar and trimmed with dingy brick, came the uproar of a greatindustry, the humming clang of saws, the ringing of iron on iron, andthe heart-beat thump of a great hammer that shook the earth. In a vast, detached building five great furnaces were crowned with tufts of pinkishfire, workmen were crossing the cindery yard dragging little carts andlong strips of iron, and a long line of open freight cars was beingemptied of coal. 

"They are making shells, " said the lieutenant in the tone that he mighthave said, "They are making candy. "

Another sentry held us up at the bridge where the road crosses theMoselle as it issues from the highlands to the southwest. 

Beyond the bridge, running almost directly north to Metz, lay thehistoric valley of the Moselle. Great, bare hills, varying between sevenhundred and a thousand feet in height, and often carved by erosion intostrange, high triangles and abrupt mesas, formed the valley wall. Theground color of the hills was a warm buff-brown with a good deal ofiron-red in it, and the sky above was of a light, friendly blue. Astrange, Egyptian emerald of new wheat, a certain deep cobalt of cloudshadows, and a ruddy brownness of field and moor are the colors ofLorraine. Here and there, on the meadows of the river and the steepflanks of the hills, were ancient, red-roofed villages. Across theautumnal fields the smoke and flame of squalid Pompey loomed strangely. 

There were signs of the war at Marbache, fourteen kilomètres from Nancy, slight signs, to be sure, but good ones--the presence of a militarysmithy for the repair of army wagons, several of which stood by on rustywheels, and a view of some twenty or thirty artillery caissons parkedunder the trees. But it was at B------, sixteen kilomètres from Nancy, and sixteen from the lines, that I first felt the imminence of the war. The morning train from Nancy had just stopped, to go no farther for fearof shells, and beyond the station the tracks of the once busy Nancy-Metzrailroad advanced, rusty, unused, and overgrown with grass, into thedanger zone. Far behind now lay civilian Pompey, and Marbache shared bysoldiers and civilians. B------was distinctly a village of the soldiery. The little hamlet, now the junction where the wagon-trains supplying thesoldiery meet the great artery of the railroad, was built on the banksof a canal above the river. The color of these villages in Lorraine israther lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the localbuff-yellow stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown tone that goeswell with the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown landscape. Aglorious sky of silvery white cloud masses, pierced with sunlight andislanded with soft blue, shone over the soldier village. There were nocombatants in it when we passed through, only the old poilus who drovethe wagons to the trenches and the army hostlers who looked after theanimals. There were pictures of soldier grooms leading horses down anarrow, slimy street between brown, mud-spattered walls to adrinking-trough; of horses lined up along a house wall being brisklycurry-combed by big, thick-set fellows in blousy white overalls and bluefatigue caps; and of doors of stables opening on the road showing abedding of brown straw on the earthen floor. There was a certain stench, too, the smell of horse-fouled mud that mixed with that odor I later wasable to classify as the smell of war. For the war has a smell thatclings to everything miltary, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, andcantonments, and saturates one's own clothing, a smell compounded ofhorse, chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human beings. At the guardedexit of the village to the shell zone was a little military cemetery inwhich rows of wooden crosses stood with the regularity of pins in apaper. 

Two kilomètres farther on, at Dieulouard, we drew into the shell zone. Acottage had been struck the day before, and the shell, arriving by theroof, had blown part of the front wall out into the street. In thefaçade of the house, to the left of a door hanging crazily on itshinges, an irregular oval hole, large enough to drive a motor-carthrough, rose from the ground and came to a point just below theoverhang of the roof. The edges of the broken stone were clean and newin contrast to the time-soiled outer wall of the dwelling. 

A pile of this clean stone lay on the ground at the outer opening of theorifice, mixed with fragments of red tiles. 

"They killed two there yesterday, " said the lieutenant, pointing out thedébris. 

The village, a farming hamlet transformed by the vicinity of a greatfoundry into something neither a village nor a town, was full ofsoldiers; there were soldiers in the streets, soldiers standing indoorways, soldiers cooking over wood fires, soldiers everywhere. Andlooking at the muddy village-town full of men in uniforms of blue, olduniforms of blue, muddy uniforms of blue, in blue that was blue-gray andblue-green from wear and exposure to the weather, I realized that theold days of beautiful, half-barbaric uniforms were gone forever, andthat, in place of the old romantic war of cavalry charges and greatbattles in the open, a new, more terrible war had been created, a warthat had not the chivalric externals of the old. 

After Dieulouard began the swathe of stillness. 

Following the western bank of the canal of the Moselle the road made agreat curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and thenmounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur the road wentthrough lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses surrounded byacres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in their weedyprofusion. Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great burlapscreens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect of acontinuous line when seen from a certain angle. 

"What are those for?"

"To hide the road from the Germans. Do you see that little village downthere on the crest? The Boches have an observatory there, and shell theroad whenever they see anything worth shelling. "

A strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death anddecay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued toshine on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the worldwas quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed. A villagelay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells and half deserted. Beyondthe still, shell-spattered houses, a great wood rose, about a mile and ahalf away, on a ridge that stood boldly against the sky. Running fromthe edge of the trees down across an open slope to the river was abrownish line that stood in a little contrast to the yellower grass. Suddenly, there slowly rose from this line a great puff of grayish-blacksmoke which melted away in the clear, autumnal air. 

"See, " said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he wouldhave shown at a bonfire--"those are the German trenches. We have justfired a shell into them. "

Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of Pont-à-Mousson. The road was now everywhere screened carefully with lengths oflight-brown burlap, and there was not a single house that did not bearwitness to the power of a shell. The sense of "the front" began topossess me, never to go, the sense of being in the vicinity of atremendous power. A ruined village, or a deserted town actually on thefront does not bring to mind any impression of decay, for the intellecttends rather to consider t\& means by which the destruction has beenaccomplished. One sees villages of the swathes so completely blown topieces that they are literally nothing but earthy mounds of rubbish, andseeing them thus, in a plain still fiercely disputed night and daybetween one's own side and the invisible enemy, the mind feels itself inthe presence of force, titanic, secret, and hostile. 

Beyond Pont-à-Mousson the road led directly to the trenches of theBois-le-Prêtre, less than half a mile away. But the disputed trencheswere hidden behind the trees, and I could not see them. Through thesilence of the deserted town sounded the muffled boom of shells andtrench engines bursting in the wood beyond, and every now and thenclouds of gray-black smoke from the explosion would rise above the brownleaves of the ash trees. The smoke of these explosions rose straightupwards in a foggy column, such as a locomotive might make if, halted onits tracks somewhere in the wood, it had put coal on its fires. 

With the next day I began my service at the trenches, but the war beganfor me that very night. 

A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted apartmenthouse had been assigned me. It was nine o'clock, and I was getting readyto roll up in my blankets and go to sleep. Beneath the starlit heavensthe street below was black as pitch save when a trench light, floatingserenely down the sky, illuminated with its green-white glow the curvingroad and the line of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous villas. There was nota sound to be heard outside of an occasional rifle shot in the trenches, sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet balls. I wentround to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen windows tothe lines. A little action, some quarrel of sentries, perhaps, was goingon behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river. Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad trackrunning across the un-harvested fields. Gleaming palely through theFrench window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed thedeserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnishedwater-tap above the stone sink. The hard, wooden crash of grenades brokeupon my ears. 

My own room was lit by the yellow flame of a solitary candle, rising, untroubled by the slightest breath of wind, straight into the air. Alarge rug of old-rose covered the floor, an old-rose velvet canopydraped a long table, hanging down at the corners in straight, heavycreases, and the wallpaper was a golden yellow with faint stripes ofsilvery-gray glaze. By the side of the wooden bed stood a high cabinetholding about fifty terra-cotta and porcelain figurines, shinyshepherdesses with shiny pink cheeks, Louis XV peasants with rakes ontheir shoulders, and three little dogs made of a material the color ofcocoa. The gem of the collection was an eighteenth-century porcelain ofa youth and a maid sitting on opposite sides of a curved bench overwhose center rose a blossoming bush. The youth, dressed in black, andwearing yellow stockings, looked with an amorous smile at the girl inher gorgeous dress of flowering brocade. 

A marbly-white fireplace stood in the corner, overhung by a great LouisXV mirror with a gilt frame of rich, voluptuous curves. On the mantellay a scarf of old-rose velvet smelling decidedly musty. Alone, apart, upon this mantel, as an altar, stood a colored plaster bust of Jeanned'Arc, showing her in the beauty of her winsome youth. The pale, girlishface dominated the shadowy room with its dreamy, innocent loveliness. 

There came a knock at the door, and so still was the town and the housethat the knock had the effect of something dramatic and portentous. Abig man, with bulging, pink cheeks, a large, chestnut mustache, andbrown eyes full of philosophic curiosity, stood in the doorway. Theuniform that he was wearing was unusually neat and clean. 

"So you are the American I am to have as neighbor, " said he. 

"Yes, " I replied. 

"I am the caporal in charge of the dépôt of the engineers in thecellar, " continued my visitor, "and I thought I'd come in and see howyou were. "

I invited him to enter. 

"Do you find yourself comfortable here, son?"

"Yes. I consider myself privileged to have the use of the room. Have acigarette?"

"Are these American cigarettes?"

"Yes. "

"Your American tobacco is fine, son. But in America everybody is amillionaire and has the best of everything--isn't that so? I should liketo go to America. "

"A Frenchman is never happy out of France. "

Comfortably seated in a big, ugly chair, he puffed his cigarette andmeditated. 

"Perhaps you are right, " he admitted. "We Frenchmen love the goodthings, and think we can get them in France better than anywhere else. The solid satisfactions of life--good wine--good cheese. " He paused. "You see, son, all that (tout ça) is an affair of mine--in civilian life(dans le civil) I am a grocer at Macon in Bourgogne. "

For a little while we talked of Burgundy, which I had often visited inmy student days at Lyons. There came another pause, and the Burgundiansaid:--

"Well, what do you think of this big racket (ce grand fracas)?"

"I have not seen enough of it to say. "

"Well, I think you are going to get a taste of it to-night. I heard ourartillery men (nos artiflots) early this morning firing their long-rangecannon, and every time they do that the Boches throw shells intoPont-à-Mousson. I have been expecting an answer all day. If they startin to-night, get up and come down cellar, son. This house was struck bya shell two weeks ago. "

The shadowy, candlelit room and the dark city became at his words moremysterious and hostile. The atmosphere seemed pervaded by some obscure, endless, dreadful threat. It was getting toward ten o'clock. 

"Is this the only room you have? I have never been in this suite. "

"No, there is another room. Would you like to see it?"

He followed me into a small chamber from which everything had beenstripped except a bedside table, a chair, and a crayon portrait of awoman. The picture, slightly tinted with flesh color, was that of abourgeoise on the threshold of the fifties, and the still candle-flamebrought out in distinct relief the heavy, obese countenance, the haircurled in artificial ringlets, and the gold crucifix which she wore onher large bosom. The Burgundian's attention centered on this picture, which he examined with the air of a connoisseur of female beauty. 

"Lord, how ugly she is!" he exclaimed. "She might well have stayed. Suchan old dragon would have no reason to fear the Boches. " And he laughedheartily from his rich lips and pulled his mustache. 

"Don't forget to hurry to the cellar, son, " he called as he went away. 

At his departure the lonely night closed in on me again. Far, far awaysounded the booming of cannon. 

I am a light sleeper, and the arrival of the first shell awakened me. Kicking off my blankets, I sat up in bed just in time to catch the swiftebb of a heavy concussion. A piece of glass, dislodged from a brokenpane by the tremor, fell in a treble tinkle to the floor. For a minuteor two there was a full, heavy silence, and then several objects rolleddown the roof and fell over the gutters into the street. It sounded asif some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto the house-roof from theheight of the clouds. Another silence followed. Suddenly it was brokenby a swift, complete sound, a heavy boom-roar, and on the heels of thisnoise came a throbbing, whistling sigh that, at first faint as the soundof ocean on a distant beach, increased with incredible speed to awhistling swish, ending in a HISH of tremendous volume and a roaring, grinding burst. The sound of a great shell is never a pure bang; onehears, rather, the end of the arriving HISH, the explosion, and thetearing disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one grindinghammer-blow of terrific violence. On the heels of this second shell camevoices in the dark street, and the rosy glow of fire from somewherebehind. More lumps, fragments of shell that had been shot into the airby the explosion, rained down upon the roof. I got up and went to thekitchen window. A house on one of the silent streets between the cityand the lines was on fire, great volumes of smoke were rolling off intothe starlit night, and voices were heard all about murmuring in theshadows. I hurried on my clothes and went down to the cellar. 

The light of two candles hanging from a shelf in loops of wire revealeda clean, high cellar; a mess of straw was strewn along one wall, and astack of shovels and picks, some of them wrapped in paper, was bankedagainst the other. In the straw lay three oldish men, fully clad in thedark-blue uniform which in old times had signaled the Engineer Corps;one dozed with his head on his arm, the other two were stretched outflat in the mysterious grossness of sleep. A door from the cellar to asunken garden was open, and through this opening streamed the intenseradiance of the rising fire. At the opening stood three men, my visitorof the evening, a little, wrinkled man with Napoleon III whiskers andimperial, and an old, dwarfish fellow with a short neck, a bullet head, and close-clipped hair. Catching sight of me, the Burgundian said:--

"Well, son, you see it is hammering away (ça tape) ce soir. "

Hearing another shell, he slammed the door, and stepped to the rightbehind the stone wall of the cellar. 

"Very bad, " croaked the dwarf. "The Boches are throwing fire shells. "

"And they will fire shrapnel at the poor bougres who have to put out thefires, " said the little man with the imperial. 

"So they will, those knaves, " croaked the dwarf in a voice entirely freefrom any emotion. "That fire must be down on the Boulevard Ney, " saidthe bearded man. 

"There is another beginning just to the right, " said the Burgundian inthe tone of one retailing interesting but hardly useful information. 

"There will be others, " croaked the dwarf, who, leaning against thecellar wall, was trying to roll a cigarette with big, square, fumblingfingers. And looking at a big, gray-haired man in the hay, who hadturned over and was beginning to snore, he added: "Look at the new man. He sleeps well, that fellow" (ce type là). 

"He looks like a Breton, " said the man with the imperial. 

"An Auvergnat--an Auvergnat, " replied the dwarf in a tone that was meantto be final. 

The soldier, who had just been sent down from Paris to take the place ofanother recently invalided home, snored on, unconscious of our scrutiny. The light from the fires outside cast a rosy glow on his weather-wornfeatures and sparse, silvery hair. His own curiosity stirred, thecorporal looked at his list. 

"He came from Lyons, " he announced. "His name is Alphonse Reboulet. "

"I am glad he is not an Auvergnat, " growled the dwarf. "We should haveall had fleas. "

A shell burst very near, and a bitter odor of explosives came swirlingthrough the doorway. A fragment of the shell casing struck a windowabove us, and a large piece of glass fell by the doorway and broke intosplinters. The first fire was dying down, but two others were burningbriskly. The soldiers waited for the end of the bombardment, as theymight have waited for the end of a thunderstorm. 

"Tiens--here comes the shrapnel, " exclaimed the Burgundian. And heslammed the door swiftly. 

A high, clear whistle cleaved the flame-lit sky, and about thirty smallshrapnel shells burst beyond us. 

"They try to prevent any one putting out the fires, " said the Burgundianconfidentially. "They get the range from the light of the flames. "

Another dreadful rafale (volley) of shrapnel, at the rate of ten orfifteen a minute, came speeding from the German lines. 

"They are firing on the other house, now. "

"Who puts out the fires?"

"The territorials who police and clean up the town. Some of them livetwo doors below. "

The Burgundian pointed down the garden to a door opening, like our own, on to an area below the level of the street. Suddenly, a gate opening ona back lane swung back, and two soldiers entered, one carrying the feetand the other the shoulders of a third. The body hung clumsily betweenthem like a piece of old sacking. 

"Tiens--someone is wounded, " said the Burgundian. "Go, thou, Badel, andsee who it is. "

The dwarf plodded off obediently. 

"It is Palester, " he announced on his return, "the type that had theswollen jaw last month. "

"What's the matter with him?"

"He's been killed. "

Chapter IV

La Forêt De Bois-Le-Pretre

Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare, desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to theriver in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to thenorthward-flowing stream. The town of Pont-à-Mousson lies an apron ofmeadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelleand the ridge of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The latter is the highest of allthe spurs of the valley. Rising from the river about half a mile to thenorth of the city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, andwas seen from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking thesky-line to the northwest. The hamlet of Maidières, in which ourheadquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at apoint where the amphitheater of Pont-à-Mousson, crowding between the tworidges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the west. 

The Bois-le-Prêtre dominated at once the landscape and our minds. Itsexistence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty thousandFrenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled Americans; it had dominatedand ended the lives of the dead; it would dominate the imagination ofthe future. Yet, looking across the brown walls and claret roofs of thehamlet of Maidières, there was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope, open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by afire shell, and a wood. The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees, seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost alllights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate. Such was theforest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any otherpoint along the line. The wood had been contested trench by trench, literally foot by foot. It was at once the key to the Saint-Mihielsalient and the city of Metz. 

The Saint-Mihiel salient--"the hernia, " as the French call it--begins atthe Bois-le-Prêtre. Pivoting on The Wood, the lines turn sharply inland, cross the desolate plateau of La Woevre, attain the Meuse atSaint-Mihiel, turn again, and ascend the river to the Verdunois. Thesalient, as dangerous for the Germans as it is troublesome for theFrench, represents the limit of a German offensive directed against Toulin October, 1914. That the French retreated was due to the fact that theplateau was insufficiently protected, many of the regiments having beenrushed north to the great battle then raging on the Aisne. 

Only one railroad center lies in the territory of the salient, Thiaucourt in Woevre. This pleasant little moorland town, locally famousfor its wine, is connected with Metz by two single-track railroad lines, one coming via Conflans, and the other by Arnaville on the Moselle. AtVilcey-sur-Mad, these lines unite, and follow to Thiaucourt the onlypracticable railroad route, the valley of the Rupt (brook) de Mad. 

Thus the domination of Thiaucourt, or the valley of the Rupt de Mad, byFrench artillery would break the railroad communications between thetroops keeping the salient and their base of supplies, Metz. And thefate of Metz itself hangs on the control of the Bois-le-Prêtre. 

Metz is the heart of the German organization on the western front: therailroad center, the supply station, the troop dépôt. A blow at Metzwould affect the security of every German soldier between Alsace and theBelgian frontier. But if the French can drive the Germans out of theBois-le-Prêtre and establish big howitzers on the crest the Germans arestill holding, there will soon be no more Metz. The French guns willdestroy the city as the German cannon destroyed Verdun. 

When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the battlesof September and October, 1914, they took to the ground on the heightsof the Bois-le-Prêtre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt and Metzto preserve these centers from the danger of being shelled. On the crestof the highest ridge along the valley, admirably ambushed in a thickforest, they waited for the coming of the French. And the French came. 

They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster, richyoung noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld byone vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from behind theGerman lines to the town of Thiaucourt. In the trenches behind the slatytrunks of the great ash trees, Bavarian peasants, Saxons, andround-headed Wurttem-burgers, the olive-green, jack-booted Boches, awaited their coming, determined to hold the wood, the salient, and thecity. 

A year later the Bois-le-Prêtre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume ofecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in an oldchurch, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of Death). 

The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer residenceof a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the beginning of the war. If there is an architectural style of German origin known as the"Neo-Classic, " which affects large, windowless spaces framed inpilasters of tile, and decorations and insets of omelet-yellow andbottle-green glazed brick, "Wisteria Villa" is of that school. It stoodbehind a high wall of iron spikes on the road leading from Maidières tothe trenches, a high, Germano-Pompeian country house, topped by a roofrich in angles, absurd windows, and unexpected gables. There are huge, square, French-roofed houses in New England villages built by localrichessîmes of Grant's time, and still called by neighbors "the Jinksplace" or the "Levi Oates place"; Wisteria Villa had something of thesame social relation to the commune of Maidières. Grotesque and ugly, itwas not to be despised; it had character in its way. 

Our social center was the dining-room of the villa. Exclusive of thekitchen range, it boasted the only stove in the house, a queerly shaped"Salamandre, " a kind of Franklin stove with mica doors. The walls werepapered an ugly chocolate brown with a good deal of red in it, and theborders, doors, and fireplace frame were stained a color tremblingbetween mission green and oak brown. The room was rectangular and toohigh for its width. There were pictures. On each side of the fireplace, profiles toward the chimney, hung concave plaques of Dutch girls. To theleft of the door was a yellowed etching of the tower of the château ofHeidelberg, and to the right a very small oil painting, in an ornategilt frame three inches deep, of a beach by moonlight. About two orthree hundred books, bound in boards and red leather, stood behind thecracked glass of a bookcase in the corner; they were very "jeune fille, "and only the romances of Georges Ohnet appeared to have been read. Thethousand cupboards of the house were full of dusty knickknacks, oldumbrellas, hats, account-books, and huge boxes holding the débris ofsets of checkers, dominoes, and ivory chessmen. An enlarged photographof the family hung on the walls of a bedroom; it had been taken atsomebody's marriage, and showed the group standing on the front steps, the same steps that were later to be blown to pieces by a shell. One sawthe bride, the groom, and about twenty relatives, including a boy inshort trousers, a wide, white collar, and an old-fashioned, fluffy bowtie. Anxious to be included in the picture, the driver of the bridalbarouche has craned his neck forward. On the evidence of the costumes, the picture had been taken about 1902. 

Our bureau in the cellar of Wisteria Villa was connected directly withthe trenches. When a man had been wounded, he was carried to the postede secours in the rear lines, and it was our duty to go to this trenchpost and carry the patient to the hospital at the nearest rail-head. Thebureau of the Section was in charge of two Frenchmen who shared thelabor of attending to the telephone and keeping the books. 

A hundred yards beyond Wisteria Villa, at a certain corner, theprincipal road to the trenches divided into three branches, and in orderto interfere as much as possible with communications, the Germans dailyshelled this strategic point. A comrade and I had the curiosity to keepan exact record of a week's shelling. It must be remembered that thecorner was screened from the Germans, who fired casually in the hope ofhitting something and annoying the French. The cannons shelling thecorner were usually "seventy-sevens, " the German quick-firing piecesthat correspond to the French "seventy-fives. "

Monday, ten shells at 6. 30, two at 7. 10, five at 11. 28, twenty atintervals between 2. 15 and 2. 45, a swift rafale of some sixteen at 4. 12, another rafale of twenty at 8, and occasional shells between 9 andmidnight. 

Tuesday, two big shells at mid-day. 

Wednesday, rafales at 9. 14, 11, 2. 18, 4. 30, and 6. 20. 

Thursday--no shells. 

Friday, twelve at intervals between 10. 16 and 12. 20. Solitary big shellat 1. 05. Another big shell at 3. Some fifteen stray shells between 5 andmidnight. 

Saturday--no shells. 

Sunday--About five shells an hour between 4 in the afternoon andmidnight. 

I give the number of shells falling at this corner as a concreteinstance of what was happening at a dozen other points along the road. The fire of the German batteries was as capricious as the play of asearch-light; one week, the corner and three or four other points wouldcatch it, the next week the corner and another set of localities. Andthere were periods, sometimes ten days to two weeks long, when hardly ashell was fired at any road. Then, after a certain sense of security hadbegun to take form, a rafale would come screaming over, blow a horse andwagon to pieces, and leave one or two blue figures huddled in the mud. But the French replied to each shell and every rafale, in addition tofiring at random all the day and a good deal of the night. There washardly a night that Wisteria Villa did not rock to the sound of Frenchguns fired at 2 and 3 in the morning. But the average day atPont-à-Mousson was a day of random silences. The war had all thecapricious-ness of the sea--of uncertain weather. There were hours ofcalm in the day, during which the desolate silence of the front floodedswiftly over the landscape; there were interruptions of great violence, sometimes desultory, sometimes beginning, in obedience to a human will, at a certain hour. The outbreak would commence with the orderliness of aclock striking, and continue the greater part of the day, rocking thedeserted town with its clamor. Hearing it, the soldiers en repos wouldsay, talking of The Wood, "It sings (ça chante), " or, "It knocks (çatape) up there to-day. " The smoke of the bursting shells hung over TheWood in a darkish, gray-blue fog. But since The Wood had a personalityfor us, many would say simply, "Listen to The Wood. "

The shell expresses one idea--energy. The cylinder of iron, piercing theair at a terrific speed, sings a song of swift, appalling energy, ofwhich the final explosion is the only fitting culmination. One gets, too, an idea of an unbending volition in the thing. After a certain timeat the front the ear learns to distinguish the sound of a big shell froma small shell, and to know roughly whether or not one is in the dangerzone. It was a grim jest with us that it took ten days to qualify as ashell expert, and at the end of two weeks all those who qualifiedattended the funeral of those who had failed. Life at The Wood had aninteresting uncertainty. 

A quarter of a mile beyond the corner, on the slope of Puvenelleopposite The Wood, stood Montauville, the last habitable village of theregion. To the south of it rose the wooded slopes of Puvenelle; to thenorth, seen across a marshy meadow, were the slope and the ridge of theBois-le-Prêtre. The dirty, mud-spattered village was caught between theleathery sweeps of two wooded ridges. Three winding roads, tramped intoa pie of mire, crossed the grassy slope of The Wood, and disappearedinto the trees at the top. Though less than a mile from the first Germanline, the village, because of its protection from shells by a spur ofthe Bois-le-Prêtre, was in remarkably good condition; the only buildingto show conspicuous damage being the church, whose steeple had beentwice struck. It was curious to see pigeons flying in and out of thebelfry through the shell rents in the roof. Here and there, among theuncultivated fields of those who had fled, were the green fields of someone who had stayed. A woman of seventy still kept open her grocery shop;it was extraordinarily dirty, full of buzzing flies, and smelled ofspilled wine. 

"Why did you stay?" I asked her. 

"Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course my daughterwanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I, who have been toNancy only once! A fine figure I should make in Dijon in my sabots!"

"And you are not afraid of the shells?"

"Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But Inever leave my shop. "

And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front, Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate. ButMontauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a mankilled. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow oftwenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full ofweariness. He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartilythat the whole affaire--meaning the war in general--was finished. He wasvery anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going towin. Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the Bochesseemed to be in his mind. I assured him that American opinion wasoptimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away. Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a "seventy-seven" shell, arrivingwithout warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, Isaw the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he were a rubbereffigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly ripped theenvelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from the waist, leaned face down into the mud. I was the first to get to him. The young, discontented face was full of the gray street mud, there was mud in thehollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the fluffy mustache. A chunk ofthe shell had ripped open the left breast to the heart. Down his sleeve, as down a pipe, flowed a hasty drop, drop, drop of blood that mixed withthe mire. 

Several times a day, at stated hours, the numbers of German missilesthat had fallen into the trenches of the Bois-le-Prêtre, together withFrench answers to them, would be telephoned to headquarters. The soldierin charge of the telephone was an instructor in Latin in a Frenchprovincial university, a tall, stoop- shouldered man, with anindefinite, benevolent smile curiously framed on thin lips. Probablyvery much of a scholar by training and feeling, he had accepted hismilitary destiny, and was as much a poilu as anybody. During his leisurehours he was busy writing a "Comparison of the Campaign on the Marne andthe Aisne with Caesar's battles against the Belgian Confederacy. " He hada paper edition of the Gallic Wars which he carried round with him. Oneday he explained his thesis to me. He drew a plan with a green pencil ona piece of paper. 

"See, mon ami, " he exclaimed, "here is the Aisne, Caesar's Axona; hereis Berry-au-Bac; here was Caesar, here were the invaders, here wasGeneral French, here Foch, here Von Kluck. Curious, isn't it--twothousand years afterward?" His eyes for an instant filled with dreamyperplexity. A little while later I would hear him mechanicallytelephoning. "Poste A--five 'seventy-seven' shells, six mines, twelvetrench shells; answer--ten 'seventy-five' shells, eight mines, eighteentrench shells; Poste B--two 'seventy-seven' shells, one mine, sixgrenades; answer--fifteen 'seventy-five' shells; Poste C--one 'twohundred and ten' shell, fifty mines; answer--sixty mines; Poste D--"

At Dieulouard I had entered the shell zone; at Pont-à-Mousson, I crossedthe borders of the zone of quiet; at Montauville began the lastzone--the zone of invisibility and violence. Civilian life ended at thewestern end of the village street with the abruptness of a man broughtface to face with a high wall. Beyond the village a road was seenclimbing the grassy slope of Puvenelle, to disappear as it neared thesummit of the ridge in a brown wood. It was just an ordinary hill roadof Lorraine, but the fact that it was the direct road to the trenchesinvested this climbing, winding, silent length with extraordinarycharacter. The gate of the zone of violence, every foot of it bore somescar of the war, now trivial, now gigantic--always awesome in the powerand volition it revealed. One passed from the sight of a brown puddle, scooped in the surface of the street by an exploding shell, to a view ofa magnificent ash tree splintered by some projectile. It is a very rarething to see a sinister landscape, but this whole road was sinister. Iused to discuss this sinister quality with a distinguished French artistwho as a poilu was the infirmier, or medical service man, attached to asquad of engineers working in a quarry frequently shelled. In thisfrightful place we discussed la qualité du sinistre dans l'art (thesinister in art) as calmly as if we were two Parisian critics sitting onthe benches of the Luxembourg Gardens. As the road advanced into thewood, there was hardly a wayside tree that had not been struck by ashell. Branches hung dead from trees, twigs had been lopped off by strayfragments, great trunks were split apart as if by lightning. "Nature asNature is never sinister, " said the artist; "it is when there is adisturbance of the relations between Nature and human life that you havethe sinister. Have you ever seen the villages beyond Ravenna overwhelmedby the bogs? There you see the sinister. Here Man is making Natureunlivable for Man. " He stroked his fine silky beard meditatively--"Thiswill all end when the peasants plant again. " As we talked, a shell, intended for the batteries behind, burst high above us. 

Skirting the ravine, now wooded, between Puvenelle and theBois-le-Prêtre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon thehigh plateau of La Woevre; the last kilomètre being in full view of theGermans entrenched on the ridge across the rapidly narrowing, risingravine. Along this visible space the trees and bushes by the roadsidewere matted by shell fire into an inextricable confusion of destruction, and through the wisps and splinters of this ruin was seen the ridge ofthe Bois-le-Prêtre rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At lengththe forest of Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Prêtre endedtogether in a rolling sweep of furzy fields cut off to the west andnorth by a vast billow of the moor which, like the rim of a saucer, closed the wide horizon. Continuing straight ahead, the Puvenelle roadmounted this rise, dipped and disappeared. Halfway between the edge ofthe forest of Puvenelle and this crest stood an abandoned inn, acommonplace building made of buff-brown moorland stone trimmed with redbrick. Close by this inn, at right angles to the Puvenelle road, anotherroad turned to the north and likewise disappeared over the lift in themoor. At the corner stood a government signpost of iron slightly bentback, bearing in gray-white letters on its clay-blue plaque thelegend--Thiaucourt, 12 kilomètres Metz, 25 kilomètres. 

There was not a soul anywhere in sight; I was surrounded with evidencesof terrific violence--the shattered trees, the shell holes in the road, the brown-lipped craters in the earth of the fields, the battered inn;but there was not a sign of the creators of this devastation. Anorthwest wind blew in great salvos across the mournful, lonely plateau, rippling the furze, and brought to my ears the pounding of shells frombehind the rise. When I got to this rim a soldier, a big, blond fellowof the true Gaulois type with drooping yellow mustaches, climbed slowlyout of a hole in the ground. The effect was startling. I had arrived atthe line where the earth of France completely swallows up the army. Thisdisappearance of life in a decor of intense action is one of the moststriking things of the war. All about in the surface of the earth werelittle, square, sooty holes that served as chimneys, and here and thererectangular, grave-like openings in the soil showing three or four bigsteps descending to a subterranean hut. Fifty feet away not a sign ofhuman life could be distinguished. Six feet under the ground, framed inthe doorway of a hut, a young, black-haired fellow in a dark-brownjersey stood smiling pleasantly up at us; it was he who was to be myguide to the various postes and trenches that I had need to know. Hecame up to greet me. 

"Better bring him down here, " growled a voice from somewhere in theearth. "There have been bullets crossing the road all afternoon. "

"I am going to show him the Quart-en-Réserve first. "

The Quart-en-Réserve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of theBois-le-Prêtre which, because of its situation on the crest of the greatridge, had been the most fiercely contested. We crept up on the edge ofthe ridge and looked over. An open, level field some three hundred yardswide swept from the Thiaucourt road to the edges of the Bois-le-Prêtre;across this field ran in the most confused manner a strange pattern ofbrown lines that disappeared among the stumps and poles of the haggardwood to the east. To the northwest of this plateau, on the road ahead ofus, stood a ruined village caught in the torment of the lines. Here andthere, in some twenty or thirty places scattered over the scarredplateau, the smoke of trench shells rose in little curling puffs ofgray-black that quickly dissolved in the wind. 

"The Quart is never quiet, " said my guide. "It is now half ours, halftheirs. "

Close to the ground, a blot of light flashed swifter than a stroke oflightning, and a heavier, thicker smoke rolled away. 

"That is one of ours. We are answering their trench shells with anoccasional 'one hundred and twenty. "

"How on earth is it that everybody is not killed?"

"Because the regiment has occupied the Quart so long that we know everyfoot, every turn, every shelter of it. When we see a trench shellcoming, we know just where to go. It is only the newcomers who getkilled. Two months past, when a new regiment occupied the Quart duringour absence en repos, it lost twenty-five men in one day. "

The first trench that I entered was a simple trench about seven feetdeep, with no trimmings whatsoever, just such a trench as might havebeen dug for the accommodation of a large water conduit. We walked on anarrow board walk very slippery with cheesy, red-brown mire. From timeto time the hammer crash of a shell sounded uncomfortably near, and bitsof dirt and pebbles, dislodged by the concussion, fell from the wall ofthe passage. The only vista was the curving wall of the longcommunication trench and the soft sky of Lorraine, lit with the pleasantsunlight of middle afternoon, and islanded with great golden-white cloudmasses. My guide and I might have been the last persons left in a worldof strange and terrible noises. The boyau (communication trench) beganto turn and wind about in the most perplexing manner, and we entered averitable labyrinth. This extraordinary, baffling complexity is dueprimarily to the fact that the trenches advance and retreat, rise andfall, in order to take advantage of the opportunities for defenseafforded by every change in the topography of the region. I remember onearea along the front consisting of two round, grassy hills divided by asmall, grassy valley whose floor rose gently to a low ridge connectingthe two heights. In this terrain the defensive line began on the firsthill as a semicircle edging the grassy slopes presented to the enemy, then retreated, sinking some forty feet, to take advantage of theconnecting link of upland at the head of the ravine, and tooksemicircular form again on the flat, broad summit of the second hill. Inthe meadows at the base of these hills a brook flowing from the ravinehad created a great swamp, somewhat in the shape of a wedge pointingoutward from the mouth of the valley. The lines of the enemy, edgingthis tract of mire, were consequently in the shape of an open V. Thusthe military situation at this particular point may be pictoriallyrepresented by a salient semicircle, a dash, and another salientsemicircle faced by a wide, open V. Imagine such a situation complicatedby offensive and counter-offensive, during which the French have seizedpart of the hills and the German part of the plain, till the wholeregion is a madman's maze of barbed wire, earthy lines, trenches, --someof them untenable by either side and still full of the dead who fell inthe last combat, --shell holes, and fortified craters. Such was somethingof the situation in that wind-swept plain at the edge of theBois-le-Prêtre. I leave for other chapters the account of an average dayin the trenches and the story of the great German attack, preferring totell here of the general impressions made by the appearance of thetrenches themselves. Two pictures stand out, particularly, the dead onthe barbed wire, and the village called "Fey au Rats" at night. 

"The next line is the first line. Speak in whispers now, for if theBoches hear us we shall get a shower of hand-grenades. "

I turned into a deep, wide trench whose floor had been trodden into aslop of cheesy, brown mire which clung to the big hobnailed boots of thesoldiers. Every foot or so along the parapet there was a rifle slit, made by the insertion of a wedge-shaped wooden box into the wall ofbrownish sandbags, and the sentries stood about six feet apart. Thetrench had the hushed quiet of a sickroom. 

"Do you want to see the Boches? Here; come, put your eye to this rifleslit. "

A horizontal tangle of barbed wire lay before me, the shapeless gully ofan empty trench, and, thirty-five feet away, another blue-gray tangle ofbarbed wire and a low ripple of the brownish earth. As I looked, one ofthe random silences of the front stole swiftly into the air. Frenchtrench and German trench were perfectly silent; you could have heard theticking of a watch. 

"You never see them?"

"Only when we attack them or they attack us. "

An old poilu, with a friendly smile revealing a jagged reef of yellowteeth, whispered to me amiably:--

"See them? Good Lord, it's bad enough to smell them. You ought to thankthe good God, young man, that the wind is carrying it over our heads. "

"Any wounded to-day?"

"Yes; a corporal had his leg ripped up about half an hour ago. "

At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of arifle box. No Man's Land had widened to some three hundred feet ofwaving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind passed as over thesurface of the sea. About fifty feet from the German trenches was aswathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five stout, wooden posts. Sothickly was the wire strung that the eye failed to distinguish theindividual filaments and saw only the rows of brown-black posts filledwith a steely purple mist. Upon this mist hung masses of weather-beatenblue rags whose edges waved in the wind. 

"Des camarades" (comrades), said my guide very quietly. 

A month later I saw the ruined village of Fey-en-Haye by the light ofthe full golden shield of the Hunters' Moon. The village had been takenfrom the Germans in the spring, and was now in the French lines, whichcrossed the village street and continued right on through the houses. "The first village on the road to Metz" had tumbled, in piles and moundsof rubbish, out on a street grown high with grass. Moonlight poured intothe roofless cottages, escaping by shattered walls and jagged rents, andthe mounds of débris took on fantastic outlines and cast strangeshadows. In the middle of the village street stood two wooden crossesmarking the graves of soldiers. It was the Biblical "Abomination ofDesolation. "

Looking at Fey from the end of the village street, I slowly realizedthat it was not without inhabitants. Wandering through the grass, scurrying over the rubbish heaps, running in and out of the crumblingthresholds were thousands and thousands of rats. 

Across the bright sky came a whirring hum, the sound of the motors ofaeroplanes on the way to bombard the railroad station at Metz. I lookedup, but there was nothing to be seen. The humming died away. The bentsignpost at the corner of the deserted moorland road, with its arrow andits directions, somehow seemed a strange, shadowy symbol of theimpossibility of the attainment of many human aspirations. 

Chapter V

The Trenches In The "Wood Of Death"

So great has been the interest in the purely military side of thestruggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as thesupreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlesslytested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war moreinteresting, when considered as the supreme achievement of theindustrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thanas a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife. There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the continuousand multitudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a thousandchannels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of the zone ofviolence. 

By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being, admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties, organizations, and inventions--trench warfare. The principal element ofthis modern warfare is lack of mobility. 

The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since theestablishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of eithercombatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities. Thefierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions, averaging a mile each way behind No Man's Land. This stationarycharacter has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all itsancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun, and hasturned it into the national business. I dislike to use the word"business, " with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I intendrather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds--the idea of agreat intricate organization with a corporate volition. The war ofto-day is a business, the people are the stockholders, and the object ofthe organization is the wisest application of violence to the enemy. 

To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, specialnarrow-gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the railroadstation at the edge of the shell zone to the artillery positions. Tothis end the trenches have been gathered into a special telephone systemso that General Joffre at Chantilly can talk to any officers or soldiersanywhere along the great swathe. The food, supplies, clothing, andammunition are delivered every day at the gate of the swathe, and calmlyredistributed to the trenches by a sort of military express system. 

Only one thing ever disturbs the vast, orderly system. The bony fingersof Death will persist in getting into the cogs of the machine. 

The front is divided, according to military exigencies, into a number ofroughly equal lengths called secteurs. Each secteur is an administrativeunit with its own government and its own system adapted to the localsituation. The heart of this unit is the railroad station at which thesupplies arrive for the shell zone; in a normal secteur, one militarytrain arrives every day bringing the needed supplies, and one hospitaltrain departs, carrying the sick and wounded to the hospitals. Thestation at the front is always a scene of considerable activity, especially when the train arrives; there are pictures of old poilus inred trousers pitching out yellow hay for the horses, commissary officersgetting their rations, and artilleurs stacking shells. 

The train not being able to continue into the shell zone, the suppliesare carried to the distributing station at the trenches in a convoy ofwagons, called the ravitaillement. Every single night, somewhere alongthe road, each side tries to smash up the other's ravitaillement. Toavoid this, the ravitaillement wagons start at different hours afterdark, now at dusk, now at midnight. Sometimes, close by the trenches ona clear, still night, the plashing and creaking of the enemy's wagonscan be heard through the massacred trees. I remember being shelled alongone bleak stretch of moorland road just after a drenching December rain. The trench lights rising over The Wood, three miles away, made the wetroad glow with a tarnished glimmer, and burnished the muddy pools intomirrors of pale light. The ravitaillement creaked along in the darkness. Suddenly a shell fell about a hundred yards away, and the wagons broughtup jerkily, the harnesses rattling. For ten minutes the Germans shelledthe length of road just ahead of us, but no shell came closer to us thanthe first one. About thirty "seventy-seven" shells burst, some on theroad, some on the edges of the fields; we saw them as flashes ofreddish-violet light close to the ground. In the middle of the mêlée atrench light rose, showing the line of halted gray wagons, themotionless horses, and the helmeted drivers. The whole affair passed insilence. When it was judged that the last shell had fallen, whipscracked like pistol shots, and the line lumbered on again. 

The food came to us fresh every day in a freight car fitted up like abutcher's shop, in charge of a poilu who was a butcher in civilian life. "So many men--so many grammes, " and he would cut you off a slice. Therewas a daily potato ration, and a daily extra, this last from a list tenarticles long which began again every ten days, and included beans, macaroni, lentils, rice, and cheese. The French army is very well andplenteously fed. Coffee, sugar, wine, and even tea are ungrudginglyfurnished. These foods are taken directly to the rear of the trencheswhere the regimental cooks have their traveling kitchens. Once the foodis prepared, the cooks--the beloved cuistots--take it to the trenches ingreat, steaming kettles and distribute it to the men individually. Asfor clothing, every regiment has a regimental tailor shop and supply ofuniforms in the village where they go to repos. I have often seen thesoldier tailor of one of the regiments, a little Alsatian Jew, sewing upthe shell rents in a comrade's greatcoat. He had his shop in a pleasantkitchen, and used to sit beside the fire sewing as calmly as an oldwoman. 

The sanitary arrangements of the trenches are the usual army latrines, and very severe punishments are inflicted for any fouling. 

If a man is wounded, the medical service man of his squad (infirmier), or one of the stretcher-bearers (brancardiers), takes him as quickly aspossible to the regimental medical post in the rear lines. If the trenchis getting heavily shelled, and the wound is slight, the attendant takesthe man to a shelter and applies first aid until a time comes when heand his patient can proceed to the rear with reasonable safety. At thisrear post the regimental surgeon cleans the wound, stops the bleeding, and sends for the ambulance, which, at the Bois-le-Prêtre, came rightinto the heart of the trenches by sunken roads that were in realitybroad trenches. The man is then taken to the hospital that his conditionrequires, the slightly wounded to one hospital, and those requiring anoperation to another. The French surgical hospitals all along the frontare marvels of cleanliness and order. The heart of each hospital is thepower plant, which sterilizes the water, runs the electric lights, andworks the X-ray generator. Mounted on an automobile body, it is alwaysready to decamp in case the locality gets too dangerous. You find thesegreat, lumbering affairs, half steamroller, half donkey-engine, in thecourtyards of old castles, schools, and great private houses close bythe front. 

The first-line trenches, in a position at all contested, are very aptstill to preserve the hurried arrangement of their first plan, which issometimes hardly any plan at all. It must be admitted that the Germanshave the advantage in the great majority of places, for theirs was thefirst choice, and they entrenched themselves, as far as possible, alongthe crests of the eastern hills of France, in a line long prepared forjust such an exigency. It has been the frightfully difficult task of theAllies, these two years, not only to hold the positions at the foot ofthese hills, in which they were at a tactical disadvantage, all theirmovements being visible to the Boches on the crests above them, but alsoto attack an enemy entrenched in a strong position of his own choosing. To-day at one point along the line, the French and Germans may share thedominating crest of a position, at another point, they may be equallymatched, and at another, such as Les Eparges, the French, after fearfullosses, have carried the coveted eminence. One phase of the business ofviolence is the work of the military undertaker attached to eachsecteur, who writes down in his little red book the names of the day'sdead, and arranges for the wooden cross at the head of each fresh grave. Every day along the front is a battle in which thousands of men die. 

The eastern hills of France, those pleasant rolling heights aboveRheims, Verdun, and old, provincial Pont-à-Mousson, have been literallygorged with blood. It being out of the question to strengthen or rectifyvery much the front-line trenches close to the enemy, the effort hastaken place in the rear lines. Wherever there is a certain security, therear lines of all the important strategic points have been convertedinto veritable subterranean fortresses. The floor plan of these trenchesis an adaptation of the military theory of fortification--with itsangles, salients, and bastions--to the topography of the region. Thegigantic concrete walls of the bomb-proof shelters, the little forts toshelter the machine guns, and the concrete passages in the rear-linetrenches will appear as heavy and massive to future generations as Romanmasonry appears to us. There are, of course, many unimportant littlelinks of the trench system, upon whose holding nothing depends and forwhose domination neither side cares to spend the life of a singlesoldier, that have only an apology for a second position. The war needsthe money for the preparation of important places. At vital points theremay be the tremendously powerful second line, a third line, and even afourth line. The region between Verdun and the lines, for instance, isthe most fearful snarl of barbed wire, pits, and buried explosives thatcould be imagined. The distance would have to be contested inch by inch. 

The trench theory is built about the soldier. It must preserve him asfar as possible from artillery and from an infantry attack. The defensesbegin with barbed wire; then come the rifles and the machine guns; andbehind them the light artillery, the "seventy-fives, " and the heavyartillery, the "one hundred and twenties, " "two hundred and twenties, "and, now, an immense howitzer whose real caliber has been carefullyconcealed. To take a trench position means the crossing of theentanglements of No Man's Land under fire from artillery, rifles, andmachine guns, an almost impossible proceeding. An advance is possibleonly after the opposing trenches have been made untenable by theconcentration of artillery fire. The great offensives begin by blowingthe first lines absolutely to pieces; this accomplished, the attackinginfantry advances to the vacated trenches under the rifle fire of thosefew whom the terrible deluge of shells has not killed or crazed, workstoward the strong second position under a concentrated artillery fire ofthe retreating enemy as terrible as its own, fights its way heroicallyinto the second position, and stops there. The great line has been bent, has been dented, but never broken. An offensive must cover at leasttwenty miles of front, for if the break is too narrow the attackingtroops will be massacred by the enemy artillery at both ends of thebroken first lines. If the front lines are one mile deep, the artillerymust put twenty-five square miles of trenches hors de combat, a taskthat takes millions of shells. By the time that the first line has beendestroyed and the troops have reached the second line, the shells andthe men are pretty well used up. A great successful offensive on thewestern front is theoretically possible, given millions of men, butpractically impossible. Outside of important local gains, the greatwestern offensives have been failures. Champagne was a failure, theCalais drive was a failure, Verdun was a failure, and the drive on theSomme has only bent the lines. The Germans may shorten their linesbecause of a lack of men, but I firmly believe that neither their linenor the Allies' line will ever be broken. What will be the end if theAllies cannot wrest from Germany, Belgium and that part of northernFrance she is holding for ransom--to obtain good terms at the peacecongress? Is Germany slowly, very slowly going under, or are we going towitness complete European exhaustion? Whatever happens, poor, mourning, desolated France will hold to the end. 

In localities where no great offensive is contemplated, and the businessof violence has become a routine, the object of the commander is to keepthe enemy on the qui-vive, demoralize him by killing and wounding hissoldiers, and prevent him from strengthening his first lines. Relationstake on the character of an exchange; one day the French throw athousand mines (high-explosive trench shells) into the German lines, andthe next day the Germans throw a thousand back. The French smash up avillage where German troops are en repos; while it is being done, theGermans begin to blow a French village to pieces. In the trenches theindividual soldiers throw grenades at each other, and wish that thewhole tiresome business was done with. They have two weeks in thetrenches and two weeks out of them in a cantonment behind the lines. Theperiod in the trenches is divided between the first lines and the rearlines of the first position. Often on my way to the trenches at night Iwould pass a regiment coming to repos. Silent, vaguely seen, in brokenstep the regiment passed. Sometimes a shell would come whistling in. 

There was one part of the Bois-le-Prêtre region upon which nothingdepended, and the war had there settled into the casual exchange ofpowder and old iron that obtains upon two thirds of the front. At theentrance to this position, in the shadow of a beautiful clump of ashtrees, stood the rustic shelters of the regimental cooks. From behindthe wall of trees came a terrifying crash. The war-gray, iron fieldkitchen, which the army slang calls a contre-torpilleur (torpedo-boatdestroyer), stood in a little clearing of the wood; there was nothingbeautiful to the machine, which was simply an iron box, two feet highand four feet square, mounted on big wheels, and fitted with a high ovalchimney. A halo of kitcheny smell floated about it, and the open door ofits fire-box, in which brands were burning furiously, and a jet of vaporfrom somewhere, gave it quite the appearance of an odd steam engine. Beside the contre-torpilleur stood the two cooks, both unusually smallin stature. One was about thirty-two or three years old, chunky, andgifted with short, strong, hairy arms; the other was much slighter, younger, and so juvenile of face that his downy mustache was almostinvisible. I knew these men very well; one, the older, was a farmhand ina village of Touraine, and the other, an errand boy in a bookbindingworks at Saint-Denis. The war had turned them into regimental cooks, though it was the older man who did most of the cooking, while the boyoccupied himself with gathering wood and distributing the food. Thelatter once confessed to me that when he heard that Americans werecoming to the Bois-le-Prêtre, he had expected to see Indians, and thathe and his comrades had joked, half in jest, half in earnest, about theBoches going to lose their scalps. The other was famous for an episodeof the July attacks: cornered in the trench by a Boche, he had emptiedhis kettle of hot soup over the man's head and finished him off with aknife. They waved friendlily at me. The farmhand, in particular, was oneof the pleasantest fellows who ever breathed; and still fond, like atrue good man of Touraine, of a Rabelaisian jest. 

The road now entered the wood, and continued straight ahead down apleasant vista of young ash trees. Suddenly a trench, bearing its namein little black, dauby letters on a piece of yellow board the size of ashingle, began by the side of the forest road, and I went down into itas I might have gone down cellar. The Boyau Poincaré--such was itstitle--began to curve and twist in the manner of trenches, and I cameupon a corner in the first line known as "Three Dead Men, " because afterthe capture of the wood, three dead Germans were found there inmysterious, lifelike attitudes. The names of trenches on the Frenchfront often reflect that deep, native instinct to poetry possessed bysimple peoples--the instinct that created the English ballads and theexquisite mediaeval French legends of the saints. Other trench nameswere symbolic, or patriotic, or political; we had the "Trench of theGreat Revenge, " the "Trench of France, " the "Trench of Aristide"(meaning Briand), and the "Boulevard Joffre. "

Beyond "Les Trois Morts, " began the real lines of the position, and as Iwound my way through them to the first lines, the pleasant forest ofautumnal branches thinned to a wood of trees bare as telegraph poles. Ithad taken me half an hour to get from the cook's shelters to the firstlines, and during that time I had not heard one single explosion. In thefirst trench the men stood casually by their posts at the parapet, theirbluish coats in an interesting contrast to the brown wall of the trench. Behind the sentries, who peered through the rifle slits every once in awhile, flowed the usual populace of the first-line trench, passing ascasually as if they were on a Parisian sidewalk, officers as miry astheir men, poilus of the Engineer Corps with an eye to the state of therifle boxes, and an old, unshaven soldier in light-brown corduroytrousers and blue jacket, who volunteered the information that theBoches had thrown a grenade at him as he turned the corner "downthere"--"It didn't go off. " So calm an atmosphere pervaded the cold, sunny, autumnal afternoon that the idea "the trenches" took on theproportions of a gigantic hoax; we might have been masqueraders in thetrenches after the war was over. And the Germans were only seventy-fivefeet away, across those bare poles, stumps, and matted dead brownleaves!

"Attention!"

The atmosphere of the trench changed in a second. Every head in sightlooked up searchingly at the sky. Just over the trees, distinctly seen, was a little, black, cylindrical package somersaulting through the air. In another second everybody had calculated the spot in which it wasabout to land, and those whom it threatened had swiftly found shelter, either by continuing down the trench to a sharp turn, running into thedoor of an abri (shelter), or simply snuggling into a hole dug in theside of the trench. There was a moment of full, complete silence betweenthe time when everybody had taken refuge and the explosion of the trenchshell. The missile burst with that loud hammer pound made by athick-walled iron shell, and lay smoking in the withered leaves. 

"It begins--it begins, " said an old poilu, tossing his head. "Now weshall have those pellets all afternoon. "

An instant after the burst the trench relaxed; some of the sentrieslooked back to see where the shell had fallen, others paid no attentionto it whatsoever. Once again the quiet was disturbed by a muffled boomsomewhere ahead of us, and everybody calculated and took refuge exactlyas before. The shells began to come, one on the heels of the other withalarming frequency; hardly had one burst when another was discovered inthe air. The poilus, who had taken the first shells as a matter ofcourse, good-naturedly even, began to get as cross as peevishschoolboys. It was decidedly too much of a good thing. Finally the orderwas given for every one except the sentinels, who were standing underthe occasional shelters of beams and earth bridged across the trench, toretire to the abris. I saw one of the exposed sentinels as I withdrew, abig, heavily built, young fellow with a face as placid as that of a farmanimal; his rifle leaned against the earth of the trench, and the shadowof the shelter fell on his expressionless features. The next sentinelwas a man in the late thirties, a tall, nervous soldier with a fierce, aggressive face. 

The abri to which we retired was about twenty-five feet long and eightfeet wide, and had a door at either end. The hut had been dug right inthe crude, calcareous rock of Lorraine, and the beams of the roof weredeeply set into these natural walls. Along the front wall ran a corridorabout a foot wide, and between this corridor and the rear wall was araised platform about seven feet wide piled with hay. Sprawled in thishay, in various attitudes, were about fifteen men, the squad that hadjust completed its sentry service. Two candles hung from the massiveroof and flickered in the draughts between the two doors, revealing, inrare periods of radiance, a shelf along the wall over the sleepers'heads piled with canteens, knapsacks, and helmets. In the middle of therock wall by the corridor a semicircular funnel had been carved out toserve as a fireplace, and at its base a flameless fire of beautiful, crumbling red brands was glowing. This hearth cut in the living rock wasvery wonderful and beautiful. Suddenly a trench shell landed right onthe roof of the abri, shaking little fragments of stone down into thefire on the hearth. The soldiers, who sat hunched up on the edge of theplatform, their feet in the corridor, gave vent to a burst of anger thathad its source in exasperation. 

"This is going too far. "--"Why don't they answer?"--"Are those dirtycows (the classic sales vaches) going to keep this up all afternoon?"

"Really, now, this is getting to be a real nuisance. " Suddenly two formsloomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom I havespoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier. Voices murmured in theobscurity, "Who is wounded?"--"Somebody wounded?" And dreamy-eyed onessat up in the straw. The stolid one--he could not have been much overtwenty-one or two--sat down on the edge of the straw near the fireplace, his face showing no emotion, only a pallor. He had a painful but notserious wound; a small fragment of iron, from a shell that had fallendirectly into the trench, had lodged in the bones of his foot. He tookoff his big, ugly shoe and rested the blood-stained sock on the straw. Voices like echoes traveled the length of the shelter--"Is it thou, Jarnac?"--"Art thou wounded, Jarnac?" "Yes, " answered the big fellow ina bass whisper. He was a peasant of the Woevre, one of a stolid, laborious race. 

"The lieutenant has gone to the telephone shelter to ring up thebatteries, " said the infirmier. "Good, " said a vibrant, masculine voicesomewhere in the straw. 

A shell coming toward you from the enemy makes a good deal of noise, butit is not to be compared to the noise made by one's own shells rushingon a slant just over one's head to break in the enemy's trenchesseventy-five feet away. A swift rafale of some fifty "seventy-five"shells passed whistling like the great wind of the Apocalypse, which isto blow when the firmament collapses. Looking through the rifle slit, after the rafale was over, I could see puffs of smoke apparently risingout of the carpet of dead leaves. The nervous man, the other sentry, held up his finger for us not to make the slightest noise andwhispered, --

"I heard somebody yell. "

"Where?"

"Over there by that stump. "

We strained our ears to catch a sound, but heard nothing. 

"I heard the yell plainly, " replied the sentry. 

The news seemed to give some satisfaction. At any rate, the Germansstopped their trench shells. The quiet hush of late afternoon was athand. Soon the cook came down the trench with kettles of hot soup. 

Five months have passed since I last saw the inhabitants of this abri, the tenants of the "Ritz-Marmite. " How many are still alive? What hashappened to this fine, brave crowd of Frenchmen, gentlemen all, bonscamarades? I have seen them on guard in a heavy winter snowstorm, whenthe enemy was throwing grenades which, exploding, blew purplish-blacksmudges on the snow; I have seen them so bemired in mud and slop thatthey looked like effigies of brownish earth; I have watched them wadingthrough communication trenches that were veritable canals. And this isthe third year of the war. 

The most interesting of the lot mentally was a young Socialist namedHippolyte. He was a sous-lieutenant of the Engineers, and had quartersof his own in the rear of the trenches, where one was always sure tofind books on social questions lying round in the hay. When the warbegan he was just finishing his law course at the University ofMontpellier. A true son of the South, he was dark, short, but wellproportioned, with small hands and feet. The distinguishing features ofhis countenance were his eyes and mouth--the eyes, eloquent, alert, almost Italian; the mouth, full, firm, and dogmatic. The great oratorsof the Midi must have resembled him in their youth. He was a Socialistand a pacifist à outrance, continuing his dream of universal fraternityin the midst of war. His work lay in building a tunnel under theGermans, by which he hoped to blow part of the German trenches, Teutonsand all, sky-high. 

The tunneï (sape) began in the third line, at a door hi the wall of thetrench strongly framed in wooden beams the size of railroad ties. Atoccasional intervals along the passage the roof was reinforced by aframe of these beams, so that the sape had the businesslike, professional look of a gallery in a coal mine. Descending steeply to apoint twelve feet beyond the entrance, it then went at a gentle inclineunder No Man's Land, and ended beneath the German trenches. It was theoriginal intention to blow up part of the German first line, but itbeing one day discovered that the Germans were building a tunnelparallel to the French one, it was decided to blow up the French safe sothat the explosion would spend its force underground, and cause thewalls of the German tunnel to cave in on its makers. I happened to seethe tunnel the morning of the day it was blown up. The French hadstopped working for fear of being overheard by the Germans. It was aticklish situation. Were the Germans aware of the French tunnel? If so, they would blow up their own at once. Were they still continuing theirlabor? The earth of the French might burst apart anyminute and rain downagain in a dreadful shower of clods, stones, and mangled bodies. 

Alone, quiet, at the end of the passage under the German lines sat anold poilu, the sentinel of the tunnel. He was an old coal miner of theNorth. The light of a candle showed his quiet, bearded face, grave asthe countenance of some sculptured saint on the portico of a Gothicchurch, and revealed the wrinkles and lines of many years of labor. Thesentinel held a microphone to his ears; the poles of it disappearinginto the wall of damp earth separating us from the Boches. 

Hippolyte whispered, "You hear them?"

The old man nodded his head, and gave the microphone to his officer. Isaw Hippolyte listen. Then, without a word, he handed it to me. All thatI could hear was a faint tapping. 

"The Boches, " whispered Hippolyte. 

The French blew up the sape early in the afternoon, at a time when theyfelt sure the Germans were at work in their tunnel. I saw the result thenext day. A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five feet in diameter, and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No Man's Land. Even thestumps of two trees had sunk and tilted. 

It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity. I once talked thematter over with him. He became at once intense, Latin, doctrinaire. 

"How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have todo?"

"I do not have to reconcile my theories to my office; I am furthering mytheories. "

"How so?"

"By combating the Boches. Without them we might have realized our ideaof universal peace and fraternity. Voilà l'ennemi! The race is apoisonous race, serpents, massacreurs! I wish I could smother as many ofthem every day as I did yesterday. "

During my service I did not meet another soldier whose hatred of theGermans was comparable to that of this advocate of universal love. 

I left the trenches just at dusk. Above the dreadful depression in NoMan's Land shone a bronzy sky against which the trees raised theirhaggard silhouettes. There was hardly a sound in the whole length of TheWood. A mist came up making haloes round the rising winter stars. 

Chapter VI

The Germans Attack

The schoolmaster (instituteur) and the schoolmistress (institutrice) ofMontauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on thesecond story of the schoolhouse. The kitchen of this fiat had beenstruck by a shell, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, andglass, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of acopper saucepan still hanging on the wall. In one of the rooms, elsequite bare of furniture, was an upright piano. Sometimes while stationedat Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the trenches inplaying this instrument. 

It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and thus far not a single callhad come in. The sun was shining very brightly in a sky washed clear bya night of rain, the morning mists were rising from the wood, and up anddown the very muddy street walked little groups of soldiers. I drew upthe rickety stool and began to play the waltz from "The Count ofLuxembourg. " In a short time I heard the sound of tramping on the stairsvoices. In came three poilus--a pale boy with a weary, gentle expressionin his rather faded blue eyes; a dark, heavy fellow of twenty-five orsix, with big wrists, big, muscular hands, and a rather unpleasant, lowering face; and a little, middle-aged man with straightforward, friendly hazel eyes and a pointed beard. The pale, boyish one carried aviolin made from a cigar box under his arm, just such a violin as thedarkies make down South. This violin was very beautifully made, anddecorated with a rustic design. I stopped playing. 

"Don't, don't, " cried the dark, big fellow; "we haven't heard any musicfor a long time. Please keep on. Jacques, here, will accompany you. "

"I never heard the waltz, " said the violinist; "but if you play it overfor me once or twice, I'll try to get the air--if you would like to haveme to, " he added with a shy, gentle courtesy. 

So I played the rather banal waltz again, till the lad caught the tune. He hit it amazingly well, and his ear was unusually true. The dark onehad been in Canada and was hungry for American rag-time. "'The Good OldSummer Time'--you know that? 'Harrigan'--you know that?" he said inEnglish. The rag-time of "Harrigan" floated out on the street ofMontauville. But I did not care to play things which could have noviolin obligato, so I began to play what I remembered of waltzes dear toevery Frenchman's heart--the tunes of the "Merry Widow. " "Sylvia" wentoff with quite a dash. The concert was getting popular. Somebody wantedto send for a certain Alphonse who had an occarina. Two other poilus, men in the forties, came up, their dark-brown, horseshoe beards makingthem look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on thesunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, whoturned out to be a Norman, played a solo--some music-hall fantasy, Iimagine. The next number was the ever popular "Tipperaree, " which everysingle poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind ofEnglish. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than the"Merry Widow. " I thanked Heaven that I was not called on to translateit, a feat frequently demanded of the American drivers. The song issilly enough in the King's English, but in lucid, exact French, it sinksto positive imbecility. 

"You play, don't you?" said the violinist to the small bearded man. 

"A little, " he replied modestly. 

"Please play. "

The little man sat down at the piano, meditated a minute, and began toplay the rich chords of Rachmaninof's "Prelude. " He got about halfthrough, when Zip-bang! a small shell burst down the street. The darkfellow threw open the French window. The poilus were scurrying toshelter. The pianist continued with the "Prelude. "

Zip-bang! Zip-bang! Zshh--Bang--Bang. Bang-Bang!

The piano stopped. Everybody listened. The village was still as death. Suddenly down the street came the rattle of a volley of rifle shots. Over this sound rose the choked, metallic notes of a bugle-call. Therifle shots continued. The ominous popping of machine guns resounded. The village, recovering from its silence, filled with murmurs. Bang!Bang! Bang I Bang! went some more shells. The same knowledge tookdefinite shape in our minds. 

"An attack!"

The violinist, clutching his instrument, hurried down the stairsfollowed by all the others, leaving the chords of the uncompleted"Prelude" to hang in the startled air. Shells were poppingeverywhere--crashes of smoke and violence--in the roads, in the fields, and overhead. The Germans were trying to isolate the few detachments enrepos in the village, and prevent reinforcements coming from Dieulouardor any other place. To this end all the roads between Pont-à-Mousson andthe trenches, and the roads leading directly to the trenches, were beingshelled. 

"Go at once to Poste C!"

The winding road lay straight ahead, and just at the end of the villagestreet, the Germans had established a tir de barrage. This meant that ashell was falling at that particular point about once every fiftyseconds. I heard two rafales break there as I was grinding up themachine. Up the slope of the Montauville hill came several of the otherdrivers. Tyler, of New York, a comrade who united remarkable bravery tothe kindest of hearts, followed close behind me, also evidently boundfor Poste C. German bullets, fired wildly from the ridge of The Woodover the French trenches, sang across the Montauville valley, lodging inthe trees of Puvenelle behind us with a vicious tspt; shells broke hereand there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Réserve, throwing thesmall rocks of the road surfacing wildly in every direction. The Frenchbatteries to our left were firing at the Germans, the German batterieswere firing at the French trenches and the roads, and the machine gunsrattled ceaselessly. I saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of theslope of the Bois-le-Prêtre--vague masses of moving blue on the brownways. A storm of shells was breaking round certain points in the roadand particularly at the entrance to The Wood. I wondered what had becomeof the audience at the concert. Various sounds, transit of shells, bursting of shells, crashing of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! ofmitrailleuses played the treble to a roar formed of echoes andcadences--the roar of battle. The Wood of Death (Le Bois de la Mort) wassinging again. 

That day's attack was an attempt by the Germans to take back from theFrench the eastern third of the Quart-en-Réserve and the rest of theadjoining ridge half hidden in the shattered trees. At the top of theplateau, by the rise in the moorland I described in the precedingchapter, I had an instant's view of the near-by battle, for the focuswas hardly more than four hundred yards away. There was a glimpse ofhuman beings in the Quart--soldiers in green, soldiers in blue--the veryfact that anybody was to be seen there was profoundly stirring. Theywere fighting in No Man's Land. Tyler and I watched for a second, wondering what scenes of agony, of heroism, of despair were beingenacted in that dreadful field by the ruined wood. 

We hurried our wounded to the hospital, passing on our way detachmentsof soldiers rushing toward The Wood from the villages of the region. Three or four big shells had just fallen in Dieulouard, and the villagewas deserted and horribly still. The wind carried the roar of the attackto our ears. In three quarters of an hour, I was back again at the samemoorland poste, to which an order of our commander had attached me. Montauville was full of wounded. I had three on stretchers inside, onebeside me on the seat, and two others on the front mudguards. And TheWood continued to sing. From Montauville I could hear the savage yellsand cries which accompanied the fighting. 

Half an hour after the beginning of the attack, the war invaded the sky, with the coming of the German reconnoitering aeroplanes. One went towatch the roads leading to The Wood along the plateau, one went to watchthe Dieulouard road, and the other hovered over the scene of the combat. The sky was soon dotted with the puffs of smoke left by the explodingshells of the special anti-aircraft "seventy- fives. " These puffsblossomed from a pin-point of light to a vaporous, gray-white puff-ballabout the size of the full moon, and then dissolved in the air or blewabout in streaks and wisps. These cloudlets, fired at an aviator flyingalong a certain line, often were gathered by the eye into arrangementsresembling constellations. The three machines were very high, and had alikeness to little brown and silver insects. 

The Boche watching the conflict appeared to hang almost immobile overthe Quart. With a striking suddenness, another machine appeared behindhim and above him. So unexpected was the approach of this secondaeroplane that its appearance had a touch of the miraculous. It mighthave been created at that very moment in the sky. The Frenchman--for itwas an aviator from the parc at Toul, since killed at Verdun, poorfellow--swooped beneath his antagonist and fired his machine gun at him. The German answered with two shots of a carbine. The Frenchman firedagain. Suddenly the German machine flopped to the right and swoopeddown; it then flopped to the left, the tail of the machine flew up, andthe apparatus fell, not so swiftly as one might expect, down a thousandfeet into The Wood. When I saw the wreckage, a few days afterwards, itlooked like the spilt contents of â waste-paper basket, and theaviators, a pilot and an observer, had had to be collected from all overthe landscape. The French buried them with full military honors. 

Thanks to the use of a flame machine, the Germans succeeded in regainingthe part of the ridge they had lost, but the French made it so hot forthem that they abandoned it, and the contested trenches now lie in NoMan's Land. All that night the whole Wood was illuminated, trench lightafter trench light rising over the dark branches. There would be arocket like the trail of bronze-red powder sparks hanging for an instantin the sky, then a loud Plop! and the French light would spread out itsparachute and sail slowly down the sky toward the river. The Germanlights (fusées éclairantes), cartridges of magnesium fired from a gunresembling a shotgun, burned only during their dazzling trajectory. Atmidnight the sky darkened with low, black rain clouds, upon whosesurface the constant cannon fire flashed in pools of violet-white light. Coming down from the plateau at two in the morning, I could see sharpjabs of cannon fire for thirty miles along the front on the other sideof the Moselle. 

Just after this attack a doctor of the army service was walking throughthe trenches in which the French had made their stand. He noticedsomething oddly skewered to a tree. He knocked it down with a stone, anda human heart fell at his feet. 

The most interesting question of the whole business is, "How do thesoldiers stand it?" At the beginning of my own service, I thoughtPont-à-Mousson, with its ruins, its danger, and its darkness, the mostawful place on the face of the earth. After a little while, I grewaccustomed to the décor, and when the time came for me to leave it, Iwent with as much regret as if I were leaving the friendliest, mostpeaceful of towns. First the décor, growing familiar, lost the keeneredges of its horror, and then the life of the front--the violence, thedestruction, the dying and the dead--all became casual, part of theday's work. A human being is profoundly affected by those about him;thus, when a new soldier finds himself for the first time in a trench, he is sustained by the attitude of the veterans. Violence becomes thecommonplace; shells, gases, and flames are the things that life is madeof. The war is another lesson in the power of the species to adaptitself to circumstances. When this power of adaptability has beenreinforced by a tenacious national will "to see the thing through, " menwill stand hell itself. The slow, dogged determination of the Britishcannot be more powerful than the resolution of the French. Theirdecision to continue at all costs has been reached by a purelyintellectual process, and to enforce it, they have called upon thoseancient foundations of the French character, the sober reasonablenessand unbending will they inherit from Rome. 

And a new religion has risen in the trenches, a faith much more akin toMahomet than to Christ. It is a fatalism of action. The soldier findshis salvation in the belief that nothing will happen to him until hishour comes, and the logical corollary of this belief, that it does nogood to worry, is his rock of ages. It is a curious thing to seepoilus--peasants, artisans, scholars--completely in the grip of thisphilosophy. There has been a certain return to the Church of Rome, forwhich several reasons exist, the greatest being that the war has mademen turn to spiritual things. Only an animal could be confronted withthe pageant of heroism, the glory of sacrifice, and the presence ofDeath, and not be moved to a contemplation of the fountain-head of thesesublime mysteries. But it is the upper class which in particular hasreturned to the Church. Before the war, rationalist and genial skeptic, the educated Frenchman went to church because it was the thing to do, and because non-attendance would weaken an institution which the worldwas by no means ready to lay aside. This same educated Frenchman, brought face to face with the mystery of human existence, has felt areal need of spiritual support, and consequently returned to the Churchof his fathers. 

The religious revival is a return of upper-class prodigals to the fold, and a rekindling of the chilled brands of the faith of the amiablyskeptical. The great mass of the nation has felt this spiritual force, but because the mass of the nation was always Catholic, nothing much haschanged. I failed to find any trace of conversions among the stillhostile working men of the towns, and the bred-in-the-bone Socialists. The rallying of the conservative classes about the Cross is also due tothe fact that the war has exposed the mediocrity and sterile windinessof the old socialistic governments; this misgovernment the upper classeshave determined to end once they return from the trenches, andremembering that the Church of Rome was the enemy of the pastadministrations, cannot help regarding her with a certain friendliness. But this issue of past misgovernment will be fought out on purelysecular grounds, and the Church will be only a sympathizer behind thefray. The manner in which the French priests have fought and died isworthy of the admiration of the world. Never in the history of anycountry has the national religion been so closely enmeshed in thenational life. The older clergy, as a rule, have been attached to themedical services of the front, serving as hospital orderlies andstretcher-bearers, but the younger priests have been put right into thearmy and are fighting to-day as common soldiers. There are hundreds ofofficer-priests--captains and lieutenants of the regular army. 

But the real religion of the front is the philosophy of Mahomet. Lifewill end only when Death has been decreed by Fate, and the Boches arethe unbelievers. After all, Islam in its great days was a virile faith, the faith of a race of soldiers. 

Chapter VII

The Town In The Trenches

At the beginning of the war the German plan of campaign was to takeFrance on the flank by marching through Belgium, and once the success ofthis northern venture assured, strike at the Verdun-Belfort line whichhad baffled them in the first instance. Had they not lost the battle ofthe Marne, this second venture might have proved successful, for thebody of the French army was fighting in the north, and the remainingtroops would have been discouraged by the capture of Paris. On the eveof the battle of the Marne the campaign seeming to be well in hand inthe north, a German invasion of Lorraine began, one army striking at thedefenses of the great plateau which slopes from the Vosges to theMoselle, and the other attempting to ascend the valley of the river. Itwas this second army which entered Pont-à-Mousson. 

Immediately following the declaration of hostilities the troops who hadbeen quartered in the town were withdrawn, and the town was left open tothe enemy who, going very cautiously, was on his way from Metz. Forseveral weeks in August, this city, almost directly on the frontier, sawno soldiers, French or German. It was a time of dramatic suspense. Thebest recital of it I ever heard came from the lips of the housekeeper ofWisteria Villa, a splendid, brave French woman who had never left herpost. She was short, of a clear, tanned complexion, and always had herhair tightly rolled up in a little classic pug. She was as fearless ofshells as a soldier in the trenches, and once went to a desertedorchard, practically in the trenches, to get some apples for Messieursles Américains. When asked why she did not get them at a safer place, she replied that she did not have to pay for these apples as the landbelonged to her father! Her ear for shells was the most accurate of theneighborhood, and when a deafening crash would shake the kettles on thestove and rattle the teacups, she could tell you exactly from whatdirection it had come and the probable caliber. I remember one morningseeing her wash dishes while the Germans were shelling the corner I havealready described. The window over the sink opened directly on thedangerous area, and she might have been killed any minute by a flyingeclat. Standing with her hands in the soapy water, or wiping dry thehideous blue-and-white dinner service of Wisteria Villa, she never evenbothered to look up to see where the shells were landing. Two"seventy-sevens" went off with a horrid pop; "Those are only'seventy-sevens, '" she murmured as if to herself. A fearful swish wasnext heard and the house rocked to the din of an explosion. "That's a'two hundred and ten'--the rogues--oh, the rogues!" she exclaimed in thetone she might have used in scolding a depraved boy. 

At night, when the kitchen was cleared up, she sat down to write herdaily letter to her soldier son, and once this duty finished, likednothing better than a friendly chat. She knew the history ofPont-à-Mousson and Montauville and the inhabitants thereof by heart; shehad tales to tell of the shrewdness of the peasants and divertinganecdotes of their manners and morals. These stories she told very welland picturesquely. 

"The first thing we saw was the President's poster saying not to bealarmed, that the measures of military preparation were required bycircumstances (les événements) and did not mean war. Then over this billthe maire posted a notice that in case of a real mobilization (unemobilisation sérieuse) they would ring the tocsin. At eleven o'clock thetocsin rang, oh, la la, monsieur, what a fracas! All the bells in thetown, Saint-Martin, Saint-Laurent, the hôtel de ville. Immediately allour troops went away. We did not want to see them go. 'We shall be backagain, ' they said. They liked Pont-à-Mousson. Such good young fellows!The butcher's wife has heard that only fifty-five of the six hundred whowere here are alive. They were of the active forces (de l'active). Agreat many people followed the soldiers. So for two weeks we were leftall alone, wondering what was to become of us. And all the time we heardfrightful stories about the villages beyond Nancy. On the nth of Augustwe heard cannon for the first time, and on the 12th and the 14th we werebombarded. On the 4th of September, at five o'clock in the evening, thebells began to ring again. Everybody ran out to find the reason. LesAllemands--they were not then called Boches--were coming. Baoum! wentthe bridge over the Moselle. Everybody went into their houses, so thatthe Germans came down streets absolutely deserted. I peeked from mywindow blind. The Boches came down the road from Norroy, les Uhlans, theinfantry--how big and ugly they all were. And their officers were sostiff (raide). They were not like our bons petits soldats Français. Inthe morning I went out to get some bread. 

"'Eh là, good woman' (bonne femme), said a grand Boche to me. 

"'What do you want?' said I. 

"'Are there any soldats français in the town?' said the Boche. 

"'How should I know?' I answered. 

"'You do not want to tell, good woman. '

"'I do not know. '

"'Are there any francs-tireurs (civilian snipers) in this town?'

"'Don't bother me; I'm going for some bread. '

"During the night all the clocks had been changed to German time. Manyof the Boches spoke French. There were Alsatians and Lorrains who didnot like the fracas at all. Yes, the Boches behaved themselves all rightat Pont-à-Mousson--there were some vulgarities (grossièretés). One ofthe soldiers, a big blond, went down the street wearing an ostrichfeather hat and a woman's union suit and chemise. It was a scandale. Butuncle laughed to kill himself; he was peeping out through the blinds. Right in front of my door were ten cannon, and all the street was fullof artillery. Well we had four days of this, hearing never a word fromthe French side. 

"On the night of the 9th I heard a good deal of noise, and somebody wokeup the Boches sous-officiers who were quartered in a house across thestreet. I saw lights and heard shouts. I was peeping out of my windowall the time. The dark street filled with soldiers. I saw their officerslashing them to make them hurry. They harnessed the artillery horses tothe guns, and at four o'clock in the morning there was not a singleBoche in Pont-à-Mousson. They had all gone away in the night, takingwith them the German flag on the city hall. You know, monsieur, on thenight of the 9th they received news of the battle of the Marne. 

"For five days more we saw neither Français nor Boches. Finally someFrench dragoons came down the road from Dieulouard, and little by littleother soldiers came too. But, hélas, monsieur, the Boches were waitingfor them in the Bois-le-Prêtre. "

Such was the way that Pont-à-Mousson did not become Mussenbruck. Theepisode is an agreeable interlude of decency in the history of Germanoccupations, for that atrocities were perpetrated in Nomény, just acrossthe river, is beyond question. I have talked with survivors. AtPont-à-Mousson everything was orderly; six miles to the east, houseswere burned over the heads of the inhabitants, and women and childrenbrutally massacred. 

I best remember the little city as it was one afternoon in earlyDecember. The population of 17, 000 had then shrunk to about 900, andonly a little furtive life lingered in the town. My promenade began atthe river-bank by the wooden footbridge crossing from the shore to theremaining arches of the graceful eighteenth-century stone bridge blownup in September, 1914. There is always something melancholy about aruined bridge, perhaps because the structure symbolizes a patient humanvictory over the material world. There was something intensely tragic inthe view of the wrecked quarter of Saint-Martin, seen across the deep, greenish, wintry river, and in the great curve of the broad floodsullenly hurrying to Metz. At the end of the bridge, ancient and gray, rose the two round towers of the fifteenth-century parish church, withthat blind, solemn look to them the towers of Notre Dame possess, andbeyond this edifice, a tile-roofed town and the great triangular hillcalled the Mousson. It was dangerous to cross the bridge, because Germansnipers occasionally fired at it, so I contented myself with lookingdown the river. Beyond the Bois-le-Prêtre, the next ridge to rise fromthe river was a grassy spur bearing the village of Norroy on its back. You could see the hill, only four kilomètres away, the brown walls ofthe village, the red roofs, and sometimes the glint of sunlight on awindow; but for us the village might have been on another planet. Allsocial and economic relations with Norroy had ceased since September, 1914, and reflecting on this fact, the invisible wall of the trenchesbecame more than a mere military wall, became a barrier to every humanrelation and peaceful tie. 

A sentry stood by the ruined bridge, a small, well-knit man withbeautiful silver-gray hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks; his uniform wasexceptionally clean, and he appeared to be some decent burgher torn fromhis customary life. I fell into conversation with him. He recollectedthat his father, a veteran of 1870, had prophesied the present war. 

"'We shall see them again, the spiked helmets (les casques à pointe), 'said my father--'we shall see them again. '

"'Why?' I asked him. 

"'Because they have eaten of us, and will be hungry once more. '"

The principal street of the town led from this bridge to a great square, and continued straight on toward Maidières and Montauville. Thesidewalks around this square were in arcades under the houses, for thesecond story of every building projected for seven or eight feet overthe first and rested on a line of arches at the edge of the street. Toavoid damage from shells bursting in the open space, every one of thesearcades, and there were perhaps a hundred all told, had been pluggedwith sandbags, so that the square had an odd, blind look. A little lifeflickered in the damp, dark alleys behind these obstructions. There wasa tobacco shop, kept by two pretty young women whom the younger soldierswere always jollying, a wineshop, a tailorshop, and a bookstore, alwayswell supplied with the great Parisian weeklies, which one found later inodd corners of shelters in the trenches. Occasionally a soldier bought aserious book when it was to be found in the dusty files of the"Collection Nelson"; I remember seeing a young lieutenant of artillerybuying Ségur's "Histoire de la Grande Armée en 1812, " and another takingFlaubert's "Un cœur simple. " But the military life, roughly lived, andshared with simple people, appears to make even the wisest boyish, andafter a while at the front the intellect will not read anythingintellectual. It simply won't, perhaps because it can't. The soldiermind delights in rough, genial, and simple jokes. A sergeant, whom Iknew to be a distinguished young scholar in civilian life, was alwaysthrowing messages wrapped round a stone into the German trenches; themessages were killingly funny, amiably indecent, and very jejune. Invariably they provoked a storm of grenades, and sometimes epistles inthe same vein from the Boches. In spite of the vicious pang of thegrenades, there was an absurd "Boys-will-be-boys" air to the wholeperformance. Conversation, however, did not sink to this boyish level, and the rag-tag and bob-tail of one's cultivation found its outlet inspeech. 

At the end of this street was the railroad crossing, the passage àniveau, and the station in a jungle of dead grass and brambles. Like thebridge, its rustiness and weediness was a dreadful symbol of thecessation of human activity, and the blue enamel signpost lettered inwhite with the legend, "Metz--32 kilomètres, " was another reminder ofthe town to which the French aspired with all the fierce intensity ofcrusaders longing for Jerusalem. It was impossible to get away from theomnipresence of the name of the fated city--it stared at you fromobscure street corners, and was to be found on the covers of printedbooks and post-cards. I saw the city once from the top of the hill ofthe Mousson; its cathedral towers pierced the blue mists of the brownmoorlands, and it appeared phantasmal and tremendously distant. Yet forthose towers countless men had died, were dying, would die. A Frenchsoldier who had made the ascent with me pointed out Metz the muchdesired. 

"Are you going to get it?" I asked. "Perhaps so, " he replied gravely. "After so many sacrifices. " (Après tant de sacrifices. ) He made nogesture, but I know that his vision included the soldiers' cemetery atthe foot of the Mousson hill. It lay, a rust-colored field, on the steephillside just at the border of the town, and was new, raw, and dreadful. The guardian of the cemetery, an old veteran of 1870, once took methrough the place. He was a very lean, hooped-over old man with a big, aquiline nose, blue-gray eyes framed in red lids, and a huge, yellowish-white mustache. First he showed me the hideous picture of thecivilian cemetery, in which giant shells had torn open the tombs, hurledgreat sarcophagi a distance of fifty feet, and dug craters in the rowsof graves. Though the civilian authorities had done what they could toput the place in order, there were still memories of the disturbed deadto whom the war had denied rest. Coming to the military cemetery, theguardian whispered, pointing to the new mounds with his rustic cane, "Ihave two colonels, three commandants, and a captain. Yes, two colonels"(deux colonels). Following his staff, my eye looked at the graves as ifit expected to see the living men or their effigies. Somewhat apart layanother grave. "Voilà un colonel boche, " said the sexton; "and alieutenant boche--and fifty soldats boches. "

The destroyed quarter of Pont-à-Mousson lay between the main street andthe flank of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The quarter was almost totallydeserted, probably not more than ten houses being inhabited out ofseveral thousand. The streets that led into it had grass growing high inthe gutters, and a velvety moss wearing a winter rustiness grew packedbetween the paving-stones. Beyond the main street, la rue Fabvrier wentstraight down this loneliness, and halted or turned at a clump ofwrecked houses a quarter of a mile away. Over this clump, slately-purpleand cold, appeared the Bois-le-Prêtre, and every once in a while a puffycloud of greenish-brown or gray-black would float solemnly over thecrests of the trees. This stretch of la rue Fabvrier was one of the mostmelancholy pictures it was possible to see. Hardly a house had beenspared by the German shells; there were pock-marks and pits of shellfragments in the plaster, window glass outside, and holes in walls androofs. I wandered down the street, passing the famous miraculous statueof the Virgin of Pont-à-Mousson. The image, only a foot or two high andquite devoid of facial expression, managed somehow to express emotion inthe outstretched arms, drooping in a gesture at once of invitation andacceptance. A shell had maculated the wall on each side and above thestatue, but the little niche and canopy were quite untouched. The heavysound of my soldier boots went dump! clump! down the silence. 

At the end of the road, in the fields on the slope, a beautifuleighteenth-century house stood behind a mossy green wall. It was justsuch a French house as is the analogue of our brick mansions of Georgiandays; it was two stories high and had a great front room on each side ofan entry on both floors, each room being lighted with twowell-proportioned French windows. The outer walls were a golden brown, and the roof, which curved in gently from the four sides to centralridge, a very beautiful rich red. The house had the atmosphere of theera of the French Revolution; one's fancy could people it with soberlydressed provincial grandees. A pare of larches and hemlocks lay aboutit, concealing in their silent obscurity an artificial lake heavilycoated with a pea-soup scum. 

Beyond the house lay the deserted rose-garden, rank and grown to weeds. On some of the bushes were cankered, frozen buds. In the center of thegarden, at the meeting-point of several paths, a mossy fountain wasflowing into a greenish basin shaped like a seashell, and in this basina poilu was washing his clothes. He was a man of thirty-eight or nine, big, muscular, out-of-doors looking; whistling, he washed his grayunderclothes with the soap the army furnishes, wrung them, and tossedthem over the rose-bushes to dry. 

"Does anybody live in this house?"

"Yes, a squad of travailleurs. "

A regiment of travailleurs is attached to every secteur of trenches. These soldiers, depending, I believe, on the Engineer Corps, arequartered just behind the lines, and go to them every day to put them inorder, repair the roads, and do all the manual labor. Humble folk these, peasants, ditch-diggers, road-menders, and village carpenters. Those atPont-à-Mousson were nearly all fathers of families, and it was one ofthe sights of the war most charged with true pathos to see thesegray-haired men marching to the trenches with their shovels on theirshoulders. 

"Are you comfortable?"

"Oh, yes. We live very quietly. I, being a stonemason and a carpenter, stay behind and keep the house in repair. In summer we have our littlevegetable gardens down behind those trees where the Boches can't seeus. "

"Can I see the house?"

"Surely; just wait till I have finished sousing these clothes. "

The room on the ground floor to the left of the hallway was imposing ina stately Old-World way. The rooms in Wisteria Villa were rooms forpersonages from Zola; this room was inhabited by ghosts from the pagesof Balzac. It was large, high, and square; the walls were hung with agolden scroll design printed on ancient yellow silk; the furniture wasof some rich brown finish with streaks and lusters of bronzy yellow, anda glass chandelier, all spangles and teardrops of crystal, hung from around golden panel in the ceiling. Over a severe Louis XVI mantel was alarge oil portrait of Pius IX, and on the opposite wall a portrait headof a very beautiful young girl. Chestnut hair, parted in the fashion ofthe late sixties, formed a silky frame round an oval face, and thefeatures were small and well proportioned. The most remarkable part ofthe countenance were the curiously level eyes. The calm, apart-from-the-world character of the expression in the eyes was ininteresting contrast to the good-natured and somewhat childish look inthe eyes of the old Pope. 

"Who lived here?"

"An old man (un vieux). He was a captain of the Papal Zouaves in hisyouth. See here, read the inscription on the portrait--'Presented by HisHoliness to a champion (défenseur) of the Church. '"

"Is he still alive?"

"He died three months ago in Paris. I should hate to die before I seehow the war is going to end. I imagine he would have been willing tolast a bit longer. "

"And this picture on the right, the jeune fille?"

"That was his daughter, an only child. She became a nun, and died whenshe was still young. The old man's gardener comes round from time totime to see if the place is all right. It is a pity he is not here; hecould tell you all about them. "

"You are very fortunate not to have been blown to pieces. Surely you arevery near the trenches. "

"Near enough--yes, indeed. A communication trench comes right into thecellar. But it is quiet in this part of The Wood. There is a regiment ofold Boches in the trenches opposite our territorials, fathers offamilies (pères de familles), just as they are. We fire rifles at eachother from time to time just to remember it is war (c'est la guerre). Weshare the crest together here; nothing depends on it. What good shouldwe do in killing each other? Besides it would be a waste of shells. "

"How do you know that the Boches opposite you are old?"

"We see them from time to time. They are great hands at a parley. Thefirst thing they tell you is the number of children they have. I met anold Boche not long ago down by the river. He held up two fingers to showthat he had two children, put his hand out just above his knee to showthe height of his first child, and raised it just above his waist toshow the height of the second. So I held up five fingers to show him Ihad five children, when the Lord knows I have only one. But I did notwant to be beaten by a Boche. "

A sound of voices was heard beneath us, and the clang of the shovelsbeing placed against the stone walls of the cellar. 

"Those are the travailleurs. The sergeant will be coming in and I mustreport to him. Good-bye, American friend, and come again. "

A melancholy dusk was beginning as I turned home from the romantichouse, and the deserted streets were filling with purplish shadows. Theconcussion of exploding shells had blown almost all the glass out of thewindows of the Church of St. Laurent, and the few brilliant red andyellow fragments that still clung to the twisted leaden frames remindedme of the autumn leaves that sometimes cling to winter-stricken trees. The interior of the church was swept and garnished, and about twentycandles with golden flames, slowly waving in the drafts from the ruinedwindows, shone beneath a statue of the Virgin. There was not anothersoul in the church. A terrible silence fell with the gathering darkness. In a little wicker basket at the foot of the benignant mother were abouttwenty photographs of soldiers, some in little brassy frames with spotsof verdigris on them, some the old-fashioned "cabinet" kind, some onsimple post-cards. There was a young, dark Zouave who stood with hishand on an ugly little table, a sergeant of the Engineer Corps with avacant, uninteresting face, and two young infantry men, brothers, on thesame shabby finger-marked post-card. Pious hands had left them thus inthe care of the unhappy mother, "Marie, consolatrice des malheureux. "

The darkness of midnight was beginning at Pont-à-Mousson, for the townwas always as black as a pit. On my way home I saw a furtive knife edgeof yellow light here and there under a door. The sentry stood by hisshuttered lantern. Suddenly the first of the trench lights flowered inthe sky over the long dark ridge of the Bois-le-Prétre. 

Chapter VIII

Messieurs Les Poilus De La Grande Guerre

The word "poilu, " now applied to a French soldier, means literally "ahairy one, " but the term is understood metaphorically. Since timeimmemorial the possession of plenty of bodily hair has served toindicate a certain sturdy, male bearishness, and thus the French, longbefore the war, called any good, powerful fellow--"un véritable poilu. "The term has been found applied to soldiers of the Napoleonic wars. TheFrench soldier of to-day, coming from the trenches looking like awell-digger, but contented, hearty, and strong, is the poilu parexcellence. 

The origin of the term "Boche, " meaning a German, has been treated in athousand articles, and controversy has raged over it. The probableorigin of the term, however, lies in the Parisian slang word "caboche, "meaning an ugly head. This became shortened to "Boche, " and was appliedto foreigners of Germanic origin, in exactly the way that theAmerican-born laborer applies the contemptuous term "square-head" to hiscompetitors from northern Europe. The word "Boche" cannot be translatedby anything except "Boche, " any more than our word "Wop, " meaning anItalian, can be turned into French. The same attitude, half banter, halfrace contempt, lies at the heart of both terms. 

When the poilus have faced the Boches for two weeks in the trenches, they march down late at night to a village behind the lines, far enoughaway from the batteries to be out of danger of everything exceptoccasional big shells, and near enough to be rushed up to the front incase of an attack. There they are quartered in houses, barns, sheds, andcellars, in everything that can decently house and shelter a man. Thesetwo weeks of repos are the poilus' elysium, for they mean rest fromstrain, safety, and comparative comfort. The English have behind theirlines model villages with macadam roads, concrete sidewalks, a watersystem, a sewer system, and all kinds of schemes to make the soldiershappy; the French have to be contented with an ordinary Lorrainevillage, kept in good order by the Medical Corps, but quite destitute ofanything as chic as the British possess. 

The village of cantonnement is pretty sure to be the usual brown-walled, red-roofed village of Lorraine clumped round its parish church ormouldering castle. In such a French village there is always a hall, usually over the largest wineshop, called the "Salle de Fêtes, " and thishall serves for the concert each regiment gives while en repos. TheGovernment provides for, indeed insists upon, a weekly bath, and thebathhouse, usually some converted factory or large shed, receives itsdaily consignments of companies, marching up to the douches as solemnlyas if they were going to church. Round the army continues the often busylife of the village, for to many such a hamlet the presence of amultitude of soldiers is a great economic boon. Grocery-shops, inparticular, do a rushing business, for any soldier who has a sou is gladto vary the government menu with such delicacies as pâtés de foie gras, little sugar biscuits, and the well- beloved tablet of chocolate. 

While the grocery-man (l'épicier) is fighting somewhere in the north orin the Argonne, madame l'épicière stays at home and serves thecustomers. At her side is her own father, an old fellow wearing bigyellow sabots, and perhaps the grocer's son and heir, a boy about twelveyears old. Madame is dressed entirely in black, not because she is inmourning, but because it is the rural fashion; she wears a knittedshoulder cape, a high black collar, and moves in a brisk, businesslikeway; the two men wear the blue-check overalls persons of their callingaffect, in company with very clean white collars and rather dirty, frayed bow ties of unlovely patterns. Along the counter stand thepoilus, young, old, small, and large, all wearing various fadings of thehorizon blue, and helmets often dented. "Some pâté de foie gras, madame, s'il vous plaît. " "Oui, monsieur. " "How much is this cheese, maman?"cries the boy in a shrill treble. In the barrel-haunted darkness at therear of the shop, the old man fumbles round for some tins of jelly. Thepoilu is very fond of sweets. Sometimes swish bang! a big shell comes inunexpectedly, and shopkeepers and clients hurry, at a decent tempo, tothe cellar. There, in the earthy obscurity, one sits down on emptyherring-boxes and vegetable cases to wait calmly for the exasperatingBoches to finish their nonsense. There is a smell of kerosene oil andonions in the air. A lantern, always on hand for just such an emergency, burns in a corner. "Have you had a bad time in the trenches this week, Monsieur Levrault?" says the épicière to a big, stolid soldier who is aregular customer. 

"No, quite passable, Madame Champaubert. "

"And Monsieur Petticollot, how is he?"

"Very well, thank you, madame. His captain was killed by a rifle grenadelast week. "

"Oh, the poor man. "

Crash goes a shell. Everybody wonders where it has fallen. In a fewseconds the éclats rain down into the street. 

"Dirty animals, " says the voice of the old man in the darkest of all thecorners. 

Madame Champaubert begins the story of how a cousin of hers who keeps agrocery-shop at Mailly, near the frontier, was cheated by a Bochetinware salesman. The cellar listens sympathetically. The boy saysnothing, but keeps his eyes fixed on the soldiers. In about twentyminutes the bombardment ends, and the bolder ones go out to ascertainthe damage. The soldier's purchases are lying on the counter. These hestuffs into his musette, the cloth wallet beloved of the poilu, anddeparts. The colonel's cook comes in; he has got hold of a good ham andwants to deck it out with herbs and capers. Has madame any capers? Whileshe is getting them, the colonel's cook retails the cream of all theregimental gossip. 

These people of Lorraine who have stayed behind, "Lorrains, " the Frenchterm them, are thoroughly French, though there is some German blood intheir veins. This Teuton addition is of very ancient date, being due tothe constant invasions which have swept up the valley of the Moselle. This intermingling of the races, however, continued right up to 1870, but since then the union of French and German stock has been rare. Itwas most frequent, perhaps, during the years between 1804 and 1850, whenNapoleon's domination of the principalities and states along the Rhineled to a French social and commercial invasion of Rhenish Germany, aninvasion which ended only with the growth of German nationalism. Themiddle classes in particular intermarried because they were more apt tobe engaged in commerce. But since 1870, two barriers, one geographic--annexed Lorraine, and one intellectual--hatred, have kept theneighbors apart. The Lorrain of to-day, no matter what his ancestorswere, is a thorough Frenchman. These Lorrains are between medium heightand tall, strongly built, with light, tawny hair, good color, and abrownish complexion. 

The poilus who come to the village en repos are from every part ofFrance, and are of all ages between nineteen and forty-five. I rememberseeing a boy aged only fourteen who had enlisted, and was a regularmember of an artillery regiment. The average regiment includes men ofevery class and caste, for every Frenchman who can shoulder a gun is inthe war. Thus the dusty little soldier who is standing by Poste A, maybe So-and-So the sculptor, the next man to him is simple Jacques who hasa little farm near Bourges, and the man beyond, Emile, the notary'sclerk. It is this amazing fraternity that makes the French army thegreatest army in the world. The officers of a regiment of the activeforces (by l'armée active you are to understand the army actually in thegarrisons and under arms from year to year) are army officers byprofession; the officers of the reserve regiments are either retiredofficers of the regular army or men who have voluntarily followed thesevere courses in the officers' training-school. Thus the colonel andthree of the commandants of a certain regiment were ex-officers of theregular army, while all the other officers, captains, lieutenants, andso forth, were citizens who followed civilian pursuits. Captain X was afamous lawyer, Captain B a small merchant in a little known provincialtown, Captain C a photographer. Any Frenchman who has the requisiteeducation can become an officer if he is willing to devote more of histime, than is by law required, to military service. Thus the French armyis the soul of democracy, and the officer understands, and is understoodby, his men. The spirit of the French army is remarkably fraternal, andthis fraternity is at once social and mystical. It has a social origin, for the poilus realize that the army rests on class justice and equalopportunity; it has a mystical strength, because war has taught the menthat it is only the human being that counts, and that comradeship isbetter than insistence on the rights and virtues of pomps and prides. After having been face to face with death for two years, a man learnssomething about the true values of human life. 

The men who tramp into the village at one and two o'clock in the morningare men who have for two weeks been under a strain that two years ofexperience has robbed of its tensity. But strain it is, nevertheless, asthe occasional carrying of a maniac reveals. They know very well whythey are fighting; even the most ignorant French laborer has some ideaas to what the affair is all about. The Boches attacked France who waspeacefully minding her own business; it was the duty of all Frenchmen todefend France, so everybody went to the war. And since the war has goneon for so long, it must be seen through to the very end. Not a singlepoilu wants peace or is ready for peace. And the French, unlike theEnglish, have continually under their eyes the spectacle of theirdevastated land. Yet I heard no ferocious talk about the Germans, notales of French cruelty toward German prisoners. 

Nevertheless, a German prisoner who had been taken in the Bois-le-Prêtreconfessed to me a horror of the French breaking through into Germany. Looking round to see if any one was listening, he said in English, forhe was an educated man--"Just remember the French Revolution. Justremember the French Revolution. God! what cruelties. You rememberCarrier at Nantes, don't you, my dear sir? All the things we are said tohave done in Belgium--" But here the troop of prisoners was hurried toone side, and I never saw the man again. An army will always have allkinds of people in it, the good, the bad, the degenerate, the depraved, the brutal; and these types will act according to their natures. But Ican't imagine several regiments of French poilus doing in little Germantowns what the Germans did at Nomeny. The backbone of the French army, as he is the backbone of France, is the French peasant. In spite of DeMaupassant's ugly tales of the Norman country people, and Zola's studiesof the sordid, almost bestial, life of certain unhappy, peasantfamilies, the French peasant (cultivateur) is a very fine fellow. He hasthree very good qualities, endurance, patience, and willingness to work. Apart from these characteristics, he is an excellent fellow by himself;not jovial, to be sure, but solid, self-respecting, and glad to makefriends when there is a chance that the friendship will be a real one. He does not care very much for the working men of the towns, theouvriers, with their fantastic theories of universal brotherhood andpeace, and he hates the deputé whom the working man elects as he hates avine fungus. A needless timidity, some fear of showing himself off as asimpleton, has kept him from having his just influence in Frenchpolitics; but the war is freeing him from these shackles, and when peacecomes, he will make himself known: that is, if there are any peasantsleft to vote. 

Another thing about the peasantry is that trench warfare does not wearythem, the constant contact with the earth having nothing unusual in it. A friend of mine, the younger son of a great landed family of theprovince of Anjou, was captain of a company almost exclusively composedof peasants of his native region; he loved them as if they were hischildren, and they would follow him anywhere. The little company, almostto a man, was wiped out in the battles round Verdun. In a letter Ireceived from this officer, a few days before his death, he related thisanecdote. His company was waiting, in a new trench in a new region, forthe Germans to attack. Suddenly the tension was relieved by a fiercelittle discussion carried on entirely in whispers. His soldiers appearedto be studying the earth of the trench. "What's the trouble about?" heasked. Came the answer, "They are quarreling as to whether the earth ofthis trench would best support cabbages or turnips. "

It is rare to find a French workman (ouvrier) in the trenches. They haveall been taken out and sent home to make shells. 

The little group to which I was most attached, and for whose hospitalityand friendly greeting I shall always be a debtor, consisted of Belin, arailroad clerk; Bonnefon, a student at the École des Beaux-Arts; Magne, a village schoolmaster in the Dauphiné; and Grétry, proprietor of abutcher's shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Belin and Magne hadviolins which they left in the care of a café-keeper in the village, andused to play on them just before dinner. The dinner was served in thehouse of the village woman who prepared the food of these four, forsous-officiers are entitled to eat by themselves if they can find anyone kind enough to look after the cooking. If they can't, then they haveto rely entirely on the substantial but hardly delicious cuisine oftheir regimental cuistot. However, at this village, Madame Brun, thewidow of the local carpenter, had offered to take the popotte, as theFrench term an officer's mess. We ate in a room half parlor, halfbedchamber, decorated exclusively with holy pictures. This was a goodspecimen menu--bread, vermicelli soup, apple fritters, potato salad, boiled beef, red wine, and coffee. Of this dinner, the Governmentfurnished the potatoes, the bread, the meat, the coffee, the wine, andthe condiments; private purses paid for the fritters, the vermicelli, and the bits of onion in the salad. Standing round their barns theprivate soldiers were having a tasty stew of meat and potatoes cooked bythe field kitchen, bread, and a cupful of boiled lentils (known in thearmy as "edible bedbugs"), all washed down with the army pinard, or redwine. 

This village in which the troops were lodged revealed in an interestingway the course of French history. Across the river on a rise was a crosscommemorating the victory of the Emperor Jo vin over the invadingGermans in 371, and sunken in the bed of the Moselle were still seenlengths of Roman dikes. The heart of the village, however, was thecorpse of a fourteenth-century castle which Richelieu had dismantled in1630. Its destiny had been a curious one. Dismantled by Richelieu, sacked in the French Revolution, it had finally become a kind ofgigantic mediaeval apartment house for the peasants of the region. Thesalle d'honneur was cut up into little rooms, the room of the seigneurbecame a haymow, and the cellars of the towers were used to storepotatoes in. About twenty little chimneys rose over the old, dilapidatedbattlements. A haymow in this castle was the most picturesque thing Iever saw in a cantonment. It was the wreck of a lofty and noblefifteenth-century room, the ceiling, still a rich red brown, wassupported on beautiful square beams, and a cross-barred window of theRenaissance, of which only the stonework remained, commanded a fine viewover the river. The walls of the room were of stone, whitewashed yearsbefore, and the floor was an ordinary barn floor made of common planksand covered with a foot of new, clean hay. In the center of the southernwall was a Gothic fireplace, still black and ashy within. On the cornersof this mantel hung clusters of canteens, guns were stacked by it, and ablue overcoat was rolled up at its base. An old man, the proprietor ofthe loft, followed us up, made signs that he was completely deaf, andtraced in the dust on the floor the date, 1470. 

The concerts were held in the "Salle de Fêtes, " a hall in which, duringpeace time, the village celebrates its little festivals. It was an ugly, bare shed with a sloping roof resting on iron girders painted claywhite, but the poilus had beautified it with a home-made stage andrustic greenery. The proscenium arch, painted by Bonnefon, waspearl-gray in color and decorated with panels of gilt stripes; and ashield showing the lictor's rods, a red liberty cap and the letters "R. F. " served as a headpiece. The scenery, also the work of Bonnefon, represented a Versailles kind of garden full of statues and very wateryfountains. There was no curtain. Just below the stage a semicircle ofchairs had been arranged for the officers of the regiment, and behindthese were wooden benches and a large space for standing room. By thetime the concert was supposed to begin, every bench was filled, andstanding room was at a premium. Suddenly there were cries of "LeColonel, " and everybody stood up as the fine-looking old colonel and hisstaff took their places. The orchestra, composed of a pianist, a fewviolinists, and a flute-player, began to play the "Marseillaise. " Whenthe music was over, and everybody decently quiet, the concert began. 

"Le Camarade Tollot, of the Théâtre des Variétés de Paris will recite'Le Dernier Drapeau, '" shouted the announcer. Le Camarade Tollot walkedon the stage and bowed, a big, important young man with a lion's mane ofdark hair. Then, striking an attitude, he recited in the best French, ranting style, a rhymed tale of a battle in which many regiments chargedtogether, flags flying. One by one the flags fell to the ground as thebearers were cut down by the withering fire of the enemy; all save onewho struggled on. It was a fine, old-fashioned, dramatic"will-he-get-there-yes-he-will-he-falls" sort of thing. "Il tombe, " saidle Camarade Tollot, in what used to be called the "oratoricalorotund"--"il tombe. " There was a full pause. He was wounded. He rosestaggering to his feet. All the other flags were down. He advanced--thelast flag (le dernier drapeau) reached the enemy--and died just as hiscomrades, heartened by his courage, had rallied and were charging tovictory. A tremendous storm of applause greeted the speaker, who favoredus with the recital of a short, sentimental poem as an encore. 

The next number was thus announced: "Le Camarade Millet will sound, first, all the French bugle-calls and then the Boche ones. " Le CamaradeMillet, a big man with a fine horseshoe beard, stood at the edge of thestage, said, "la Charge français" and blew it on the bugle; then "laCharge boche, " and blew that. "La Retraite français--La Retraite boche, "etc. Another salvo of applause was given to le Camarade Millet. 

"Le Camarade Roland. "

Le Camarade Roland was about twenty-one or two years old, but his eyeswere old and wise, and he had evidently seen life. He was dark-hairedand a little below medium height. The red scar of a wound appeared justbelow his left ear. After marking time with his feet, he began a kind ofpatter song about having a telephone, every verse of which ended, "Oh, la la, j'ai le téléphone chez moi" (I've a telephone in my house). "Iknow who is unfaithful now--who have horns upon their brow, " the singertold of surprising secrets and unsuspected affaires de cœur. The silly, music-hall song may seem banal now, but it amused us hugely then. "LeCamarade Duclos. "

"Oh, if you could have seen your son, My mother, my mother, Oh, if youcould have seen your son, With the regiment"--sang Camarade Duclos, another old-eyed youngster. There was amiable adventure with an amiable"blonde" (oh, if you could have seen your son); another with a "joliebrune" (oh, ma mère, ma mère); and still another leçon d'amour. Therefrain had a catchy lilt to it, and the poilus began humming it. 

"Le Camarade Salvatore. "

The newcomer was a big, obese Corsican mountaineer, with a pleasant, round face and brown eyes. He advanced quietly to the side of the stageholding a ten-sou tin flute in his hand, and when he began to play, foran instant I forgot all about the Bois-le-Prêtre, the trenches, andeverything else. The man was a born musician. I never heard anythingmore tender and sweet than the little melody he played. The poiluslistened in profound silence, and when he had finished, a kind of sighexhaled from the hearts of the audience. 

There followed another singer, a violinist, and a clown whose song of asoldier on furlough finished with these appreciated couplets:--

"The Government says it is the thing To have a baby every spring; Sowhen your son Is twenty-one, He'll come to the trenches and take papa'splace. So do your duty by the race. "

In the uproar of cheers of "That's right, " and so on, the concert ended. 

The day after the concert was Sunday, and at about ten o'clock thatmorning a young soldier with a fluffy, yellow chin beard came down themuddy street shouting, "le Mouchoir, le Mouchoir. " About two or threehundred paper sheets were clutched tightly in his left hand, and he wasselling them for a sou apiece. Little groups of poilus gathered roundthe soldier newsboy; I saw some of them laughing as they went away. Thepaper was the trench paper of the Bois-le-Prêtre, named the "Mouchoir"(the handkerchief) from a famous position thus called in the Bois. Thejokes in it were like the jokes in a local minstrel show, puns on localnames, jests about the Boches, and good-humored satire. The spirit ofthe "Mouchoir" was whole-heartedly amateur. Thus the issue whichfollowed a heavy snowfall contained this genuine wish:--

"Oh, snow, Please go, Leave the trench Of the French; Cross the band OfNo Man's Land To where the Boche lies. Freeze him, Squeeze him, Soakhim, Choke him, Cover him, Smother him, Till the beggar dies. "

This is far from an exact translation, but the idea and the spirit havebeen faithfully preserved. The "Mouchoir" was always a bit moresqueamish than the average, rollicking trench journal, for it was issuedby a group of medical service men who were almost all priests. Indeed, there were some issues that combined satire, puns, and piety in aterrifying manner. Its editors printed it in the cellar of the church, using a simple sheet of gelatine for their press. 

I wandered in to see the church. The usual number of civilians were tobe seen, and a generous sprinkling of soldiers. Through the open door ofthe edifice the sounds of a mine-throwing competition at the Boisoccasionally drifted. The abbé, a big, dark man of thirty-four or five, with a deep, resonant voice and positive gestures, had come to thesermon. 

"Brethren, " said he, "in place of a sermon this morning, I shall readthe annual exposition of our Christian faith" (exposition de la foichrétienne). He began reading from a little book a historical account ofthe creation and the temptation, and so concise was the language and socertain his voice that I had the sensation of listening to a series ofevents that had actually taken place. He might have been reading thecommuniqué. "Le premier homme was called Adam, and la première femme, Eve. Certain angels began a revolt against God; they are called the badangels or the demons. " (Certains anges se sont mis en revolte contreDieu; il sont appelles les mauvais anges ou les démons. ) "And from thisoriginal sin arrives all the troubles, Death to which the human race issubjected. " Such was the discourse I heard in the church by the trenchesto the accompaniment of the distant chanting of The Wood. 

Going by again late in the afternoon, I saw the end of an officer'sfuneral. The body, in a wooden box covered with the tricolor, was beingcarried out between two files of muddy soldiers, who stood at attention, bayonets fixed. A peasant's cart, a tumbril, was waiting to take thebody to the cemetery; the driver was having a hard time con-trolling afoolish and restive horse. The colonel, a fine-looking man in thesixties, came last from the church, and stood on the steps surrounded byhis officers. The dusk was falling. 

"Officiers, sous-officiers, soldats. 

"Lieutenant de Blanchet, whose death we deplore, was a gallant officer, a true comrade, and a loyal Frenchman. In order that France might live, he was willing to close his eyes on her forever. "

The officer advanced to the tumbril and holding his hand high said:--

"Farewell--de Blanchet, we say unto thee the eternal adieu. "

The door of the church was wide open. The sacristan put out the candles, and the smoke from them rose like incense into the air. The tumbrilrattled away in the dusk. My mind returned again to the phrases of thesermon, --original sin, death, life, of a sudden, seemed strangelygrotesque. 

It would be hard to find any one more courteous and kind than the Frenchofficer. A good deal of the success of the American Ambulance FieldSections in France is due to the hospitality and bon acceuil of theFrench, and to the work of the French officers attached to the Sections. In Lieutenant Kuhlman, who commanded at Pont-à-Mousson, every Americanhad a good friend and tactful, hard-working officer; in Lieutenant Maas, who commanded at Verdun, the qualities of administrative ability andperfect courtesy were most happily joined. 

The principal characteristic of the French soldier is hisreasonableness. 

Chapter IX

Preparing The Defense Of Verdun

Every three months, if the military situation will allow of it and everyother man in his group has likewise been away, the French soldier gets asix days' furlough. The slips of paper which are then given out arecalled feuilles de permission, and the lucky soldier is called apermissionnaire. When the combats that gave the Bois-le-Prêtre itssinister nickname began to peter out, the poilus who had done thefighting were accorded these little vacations, and almost everyafternoon the straggling groups of joyous permissionnaires were seen onthe road between the trenches and the station. The expression on thefaces was never that of having been rescued from a living hell; itexpressed joy and prospect of a good time rather than deliverance. 

When I got my permission, a comrade took me to the station at a certainrail-head where a special train started for Paris, and by paying extra Iwas allowed to travel second class. I shall not dwell on the journeybecause I did not meet a single human being worth recording during thetrip. At eight at night I arrived in Paris. So varied had been myexperiences at the front that had I stepped out into a dark and desertedcity I should not have been surprised. The poilu, when he sees the citylights again, almost feels like saying, "Why, it is still here!" Many ofthem look frankly at the women, not in the spirit of gallant adventure, but out of pure curiosity. In spite of the French reputation for roguishlicentiousness, the sex question never seems to intrude very much alongthe battle-line, perhaps because there is so little to suggest it. Certainly conversation at the front ignores sex altogether, and speechthere is remarkably decent and clean. Of course, when music-hall songsare sung at the concerts, the other sex is sometimes more than casuallymentioned. It is the comic papers which are responsible for the myththat the period of furlough is spent in a Roman orgy; this is, ofcourse, true of some few, but for the great majority the reverse rules, and une permission is spent in a typically French way, paying formalcalls to the oldest friends of the family, being with the family as muchas possible, and attending to such homely affairs as the purchase ofsocks and underclothes. In the evening brave Jacques or Georges orFrançois is visited by all his old cronies, who gather round the heroand ask him questions, and he is solemnly kissed by all his relatives. One evening is sure to be consecrated to a grand family reunion at arestaurant. 

I determined to observe, during my permission, the new France which hascome into being since the outbreak of the war, and the attitude of theFrench toward their allies. I knew the old France pretty well. Puttingany ridiculous ideas of French decadence aside, the France of the lastten years did not have the international standing of an older France. The Delcassé incident had revealed a France evidently untaught by thelesson of 1870, and if the Moroccan question ended in a French victory, it was frankly won by getting behind the petticoats of England. Thenation was unprepared for war, torn by political strife, and in aposition to be ruthlessly trampled on by the Germans. The France of1900-13 is not a very pleasant France to remember. 

For one thing, the bitter strife aroused by the breaking of theConcordat and the seizure of the property of the Church was slowlycrystallizing into an icy hatred, the worst in the world, the hatred ofa man who has been robbed. The Church Separation Law may have been rightin theory, and with the liberal tendencies of the reformers one may haveevery sympathy, but the fact remains that the sale and dispersion of theecclesiastical property passed in a storm of corruption and graft. Properties worth many thousands of dollars were juggled among politicalhenchmen, sold for a song, and sold again at a great profit. Even as theSoutherners complain of the Reconstruction rather than of the Civil War, so do the French Catholics complain, not of the law, but of itsaftermath. The Socialist- Labor Party exultant, the Catholic Partywronged and revengeful, and all the other thousand parties of the FrenchGovernment at one another's throats, there seemed little hope for thereal France. The tragedy of the thing lay in the fact that this disunionand strife was caused by the excess of a good quality; in other words, that the remarkable ability of every Frenchman to think for himself wasdestroying the national unity. 

Meanwhile, what was the state of the army and navy?

The Minister of War of the radicals who had triumphed was General André, a narrow, bigoted doctrinaire. The force behind the evil work of thisman can be hardly realized by those who are unfamiliar with the passionwith which the French invest the idea. There are times when the French, the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to lack mentalbrakes--when the idea so obsesses them, that they become fanatics, --notthe emotional, English type of fanatic, but a cold, hard-headed, intellectual Latin type. The radical Frenchman says, "Are the Gospelstrue?" "Presumably no, according to modern science and historicalresearch. " "Then away with everything founded on the Gospels, " hereplies; and begins a cold-blooded, highly intellectual campaign ofdestruction. Thus it is that the average French church or publicbuilding of any antiquity, whether it be in Paris or in an obscurevillage, has been so often mutilated that it is only a shadow of itself. France is strewn with wrecks of buildings embodying disputed ideas. Andworst of all, these buildings were rarely sacked by a mob; therevolutionary commune, in many cases, paying laborers to smash windowsand destroy sculpture at so much a day. 

André believed it his mission to extirpate all conservatism, whetherCatholic or not, from the army. In a few short months, by a campaign ofdelation and espionage, he had completely disorganized the army, theonly really national institution left in France. Officers of standing, suspected of any reactionary political tendency, were discharged by thethousand; and officers against whom no charge could be brought wererefused ammunition, even though they were stationed at a ticklish pointon the frontier. At the same time a like disorganization was takingplace in the navy, the evil genius of the Marine being the MinisterCamille Pelletan. 

Those who saw, in 1912, the ceremonies attendant on the deposition ofthe bones of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Pantheon were sick at heart. Never had the Government of France sunk so low. The Royalists shouted, the extreme radicals hooted, and when the carriage of Fallières passed, it was seen that humorists had somehow succeeded in writing jocoseinscriptions on the presidential carriage. The head of the Frenchnation, a short, pudgy man, the incarnation of pontifying mediocrity, went by with an expression on his face like that of a terrified, elderly, pink rabbit. The bescrawled carriage and its humiliatedoccupant passed by to an accompaniment of jeering. Everybody--partiesand populace--was jeering. The scene was disgusting. 

The election of Poincaré, a man of genuine distinction, was a sign ofbetter times. Millerand became Minister of War, and began thereorganization of the army, thus making possible the victory of theMarne. But a petty intrigue led by a group of radicals caused theresignation of this minister at a time when the First Balkan Warthreatened to engulf Europe. The maneuver was inexcusable. Messimy, anattaché of the group who had led the attack, took Millerand's place. When the war broke out, Messimy was invited to make himself scarce, andMillerand returned to his post. Thanks to him, the army was as ready asan army in a democratic country can be. 

The France of 1915-16 is a new France. The nation has learned that if itis to live it must cease tearing itself to pieces, and all parties areunited in a "Holy Union" (l'Union Sacrée). Truce in the face of a commondanger or a real union? Will it last? Alarmists whisper that when thewar is over, the army will settle its score with the politicians. Otherspredict a great victory for the radicals, because the industrial classesare safe at home making shells while the conservative peasants are beingkilled off in the trenches. Everybody in France is saying, "What willhappen when the army comes home?" There is to-day only one man in Francecompletely trusted by all classes--General Joffre, and if by any chancethere should be political troubles after the war, the army and thenation will look to him. 

The French fully realize what the English alliance has meant to them, and are grateful for Engish aid. As the titanic character of England'smighty effort becomes clearer, the sympathy with England will increase. Of course one cannot expect the French to understand the state of mindwhich insists upon a volunteer system in the face of the deadliest andmost terrible foe. The attitude of the English to sport has ratherperplexed them, and they did not like the action of some Englishofficers in bringing a pack of hounds to the Flanders front. It wasthought that officers should be soldiers first and sportsmen afterward, and the knowledge that dilettante English officers were riding to houndswhile the English nation was resisting conscription and Jean, Jacques, and Pierre were doing the fighting and dying in the trenches, provoked asecret and bitter disdain. 

But since the British have got into the war as a nation, this secretdisdain has been forgotten, and the poilu has taken "le Tommie" to hisheart. 

I heard only the friendliest criticism of the Russians. 

It is a rather delicate task to say what the French think of theAmericans, for the real truth is that they think of us but rarely. Ourquarrel with Germany over the submarines interested them somewhat, butthis interest rapidly died away when it became evident that we were notgoing to do anything about it. They see our flag over countless charitydépôts, hospitals, and benevolent institutions, and are grateful. Thepoilu would be glad to see us in the fray simply because of the aid weshould bring, but he is reasonable enough to know that the United Statescan keep out of the mêlée without losing any moral prestige. The onlyhostile criticism of America that I heard came from doctrinaires who sawthe war as a conflict between autocracy and democracy, and if you grantthat this point of view is the right one, these thinkers have a right todespise us. But the Frenchman knows that the Allies represent somethingmore than "virtue-on-a-rampage. "

In Lyons I saw a sight at once ludicrous and pathetic. Two littledragoons of the class of 1917, stripling boys of eighteen or nineteen atthe most, walked across the public square; their uniforms were too largefor them, the skirts of their great blue mantles barely hung above thedust of the street, and their enormous warlike helmets and flowinghorse-tails were ill-suited to their boyish heads. As I looked at them, I thought of the blue bundles I had seen drying upon the barbed wire, and felt sick at the brutality of the whole awful business. The sun wasshining over the bluish mists of Lyons, and the bell of old Saint-Jeanwas ringing. Two Zouaves, stone blind, went by guided by a little, fatinfirmier. At the frontier, the General Staff was preparing the defenseof Verdun. 

One great nation, for the sake of a city valueless from a military pointof view, was preparing to kill several hundred thousand of its citizens, and another great nation, anxious to retain the city, was preparingcalmly for a parallel hecatomb. There is something awful and dreadfulabout the orderliness of a great offensive, for while one's imaginationis grasped by the grandeur and the organization of the thing, all one'sfaculties of intellect are revolted by the stark brutality of death enmasse. 

Early in February we were called to Bar-le-Duc, a pleasant old city somedistance behind Verdun. Several hundred thousand men were soon going tobe killed and wounded, and the city was in a feverish haste ofpreparation. So many thousand cans of ether, so many thousand pounds oflint, so many million shells, so many ambulances, so many hundredthousand litres of gasoline. Nobody knew when the Germans were going tostrike. 

During the winter great activity in the German trenches near Verdun hadled the French to expect an attack, but it was not till the end ofJanuary that aeroplane reconnoitering made certain the imminence of anoffensive. As a first step in countering it, the French authoritiesprepared in the villages surrounding Bar-le-Duc a number of dépôts fortroops, army supplies, and ammunition. Of this organization, Bar-le-Ducwas the key. The preparations for the counter-attack were therecentralized. Day after day convoys of motor-lorries carrying troopsground into town and disappeared to the eastward; big mortars mounted ontrucks came rattling over the pavements to go no one knew where; andkhaki-clad troops, troupes d'attaque, tanned Marocains and chunky, bull-necked Zouaves, crossed the bridge over the Ornain and marchedaway. At the turn in the road a new transparency had been erected, withVERDUN printed on it in huge letters. Now and then a soldier, catchingsight of it, would nudge his comrade. 

On the 18th we were told to be in readiness to go at any minute andpermissions to leave the barrack yard were recalled. 

The attack began with an air raid on Bar-le-Duc. I was working on myengine in the sunlit barrack yard when I heard a muffled Pom! somewhereto the right. Two French drivers who were putting a tire on their carjumped up with a "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" We stood together lookinground. Beyond a wall on the other side of the river great volumes ofbrownish smoke were rolling up, and high in the air, brown and silvery, like great locusts, were two German aeroplanes. 

"Nom d'un chien, il y'en a plusieurs, " said one of the Frenchmen, pointing out four, five, seven, nine aeroplanes. One seemed to hangimmobile over the barrack yard. I fancy we all had visions of what wouldhappen if a bomb hit the near-by gasoline reserve. Men ran across theyard to the shelter of the dormitories; some, caught as we were in theopen, preferred to take a chance on dropping flat under a car. Awhistling scream, a kind of shrill, increasing shriek, sounded in theair and ended in a crash. Smoke rolled up heavily in another direction. Another whistle, another crash, another and another and another. Thelast building struck shot up great tongues of flame. "C'est la gare, "said somebody. Across the yard a comrade's arm beckoned me, "Come on, we've got to help put out the fires!"

The streets were quite deserted; horses and wagons abandoned to theirfate were, however, quietly holding their places. Faces, emotionallydivided between fear and strong interest, peered at us as we ran by, disappearing at the first whistle of a bomb, for all the world likehermit-crabs into their shells. A whistle sent us both scurrying into apassageway; the shell fell with a wicked hiss, and, scattering thepaving-stones to the four winds, blew a shallow crater in the roadway. Abig cart horse, hit in the neck and forelegs by fragments of the shell, screamed hideously. Right at the bridge, the sentry, an old territorial, was watching the whole scene from his flimsy box with every appearanceof unconcern. 

Not the station itself, but a kind of baggage-shed was on fire. A hosefed by an old-fashioned seesaw pump was being played on the flames. Officials of the railroad company ran to and fro shouting unintelligibleorders. For five minutes more the German aeroplanes hovered overhead, then slowly melted away into the sky to the south-east. The raid hadlasted, I imagine, just about twenty minutes. 

That night, fearing another raid, all lights were extinguished in thetown and at the barracks. Before rolling up in my blankets, I went outinto the yard to get a few breaths of fresh air. Through the night air, rising and falling with the wind, I heard in one of the random silencesof the night a low, distant drumming of artillery. 

Chapter X

The Great Days of Verdun

The Verdun I saw in April, 1913, was an out-of-the-way provincial cityof little importance outside of its situation as the nucleus of a greatfortress. There were two cities--an old one, la ville des évêques, on akind of acropolis rising from the left bank of the Meuse, and a newerone built on the meadows of the river. Round the acropolis Vauban hadbuilt a citadel whose steep, green-black walls struck root in the meanstreets and narrow lanes on the slopes. Sunless by-ways, ill-paved andsour with the odor of surface drainage, led to it. Always picturesque, the old town now and then took on a real beauty. There were fine, shield-bearing doorways of the Renaissance to be seen, Gothic windows ingreasy walls, and here and there at a street corner a huddle ofhalf-timbered houses in a high contrast of invading sunlight andretreating shade. From the cathedral parapet, there was a view of thedistant forts, and a horizontal sweep of the unharvested, buff-brownmoorlands. 

"Un peu morte, " say the French who knew Verdun before the war. The newtown was without distinction. It was out of date. It had none of theglories that the province copies from Paris, no boulevards, no grandesaertères. Such life as there was, was military. Rue Mazel was brightwith the gold braid and scarlet of the fournisseurs militaires, and inthe late afternoon chic young officers enlivened the provincialdinginess with a brave show of handsome uniforms. All day long squads ofsoldiers went flick! flack! up and down the street and bugle-callssounded piercingly from the citadel. The soldiery submerged the civilpopulation. 

With no industries of any importance, and becoming less and less of aneconomic center as the depopulation of the Woevre continued, Verdunlived for its garrison. A fortress since Roman days, the city could notescape its historic destiny. Remembering the citadel, the buttressedcathedral, the soldiery, and the military tradition, the visitor felthimself to be in a soldier's country strong with the memory of manywars. 

The next day, at noon, we were ordered to go to M------, and at 12. 15 wewere in convoy formation in the road by the barracks wall. The greatroute nationale from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun runs through a rolling, buff-brown moorland, poor in villages and arid and desolate in aspect. Now it sinks through moorland valleys, now it cuts bowl-shapeddepressions in which the spring rains have bred green quagmires, andnow, rising, leaps the crest of a hill commanding a landscape ofocean-like immensity. 

Gray segments of the road disappear ahead behind fuzzy monticules; acloud of wood-smoke hangs low over some invisible village in a fold ofthe moor, and patches of woodland lie like mantles on the barren slopes. Great swathes of barbed wire, a quarter of a mile in width, advancingand retreating, rising and falling with the geographical nature of thedefensive position, disappear on both sides to the horizon. And so thickis this wire spread, that after a certain distance the eye fails todistinguish the individual threads and sees only rows of stout blackposts filled with a steely, purple mist. 

We went though several villages, being greeted in every one with theinevitable error, Anglais! We dodged interminable motor-convoys carryingtroops, the poilus sitting unconcernedly along the benches at the side, their rifles tight between their knees. At midnight we arrived atB------, four miles and a half west of Verdun. The night was clear andbitter cold; the ice-blue winter stars were westering. Refugees trampedpast in the darkness. By the sputtering light of a match, I saw a womango by with a cat in a canary cage; the animal moved uneasily, its eyesshone with fear. A middle-aged soldier went by accompanying an old womanand a young girl. Many pushed baby carriages ahead of them full ofknick-knacks and packages. 

The crossroad where the ambulances turned off was a maze of beams oflight from the autos. There was shouting of orders which nobody couldcarry out. Wounded, able to walk, passed through the beams of the lamps, the red of their bloodstains, detached against the white of thebandages, presenting the sharpest of contrasts in the silvery glare. Atthe station, men who had died in the ambulances were dumped hurriedly ina plot of grass by the side of the roadway and covered with a blanket. Never was there seen such a bedlam! But on the main road the greatconvoys moved smoothly on as if held together by an invisible chain. Asmouldering in the sky told of fires in Verdun. 

From a high hill between B------and Verdun I got my first good look atthe bombardment. From the edge of earth and sky, far across themoorlands, ray after ray of violet-white fire made a swift stab at thestars. Mingled with the rays, now seen here, now there, thereddish-violet semicircle of the great mortars flared for the briefestinstant above the horizon. From the direction of this inferno came aloud roaring, a rumbling and roaring, increasing in volume--the sound ofa great river tossing huge rocks through subterranean abysses. Everylittle while a great shell, falling in the city, would blow a great holeof white in the night, and so thundering was the crash of arrival thatwe almost expected to see the city sink into the earth. 

Terrible in the desolation of the night, on fire, haunted by specters ofwounded men who crept along the narrow lanes by the city walls, Verdunwas once more undergoing the destinies of war. The shells were fallingalong rue Mazel and on the citadel. A group of old houses by the Meusehad burnt to rafters of flickering flame, and as I passed them, onecollapsed into the flooded river in a cloud of hissing steam. 

In order to escape shells, the wounded were taking the obscure by-waysof the town. Our wounded had started to walk to the ambulance stationwith the others, but, being weak and exhausted, had collapsed on theway. They were waiting for us at a little house just beyond the walls. Said one to the other, "As-tu-vu Maurice?" and the other answeredwithout any emotion, "II est mort. "

The 24th was the most dreadful day. The wind and snow swept the heightsof the desolate moor, seriously interfering with the running of theautomobiles. Here and there, on a slope, a lorry was stuck in the slush, though the soldier passengers were out of it and doing their best topush it along. The cannonade was still so intense that, in intervalsbetween the heavier snow-flurries, I could see the stabs of fire in thebrownish sky. Wrapped in sheepskins and muffled to the ears in knittedscarves that might have come from New England, the territorials who hadcharge of the road were filling the ruts with crushed rock. Exhaustionhad begun to tell on the horses; many lay dead and snowy in the frozenfields. A detachment of khaki-clad, red-fezzed colonial troops passedby, bent to the storm. The news was of the most depressing sort. Thewounded could give you only the story of their part of the line, and youheard over and over again, "Nous avons reculés. " A detachment of cavalrywas at hand; their casques and dark-blue mantles gave them a crusadingair. And through the increasing cold and darkness of late afternoon, troops, cannons, horsemen, and motor-trucks vanished toward the edge ofthe moor where flashed with increasing brilliance the rays of theartillery. 

I saw some German prisoners for the first time at T---, below Verdun. They had been marched down from the firing-line. Young men in thetwenties for the most part, they seemed even more war-worn than theFrench. The hideous, helot-like uniform of the German private hungloosely on their shoulders, and the color of their skin was unhealthyand greenish. They were far from appearing starved; I noticed two orthree who looked particularly sound and hearty. Nevertheless, they wereby no means as sound-looking as the ruddier French. 

The poilus crowded round to see them, staring into their faces withoutthe least malevolence. At last--at last--voilà enfin des Boches! Alittle to the side stood a strange pair, two big men wearing an odd kindof grayish protector and apron over their bodies. Against a near-by wallstood a kind of flattish tank to which a long metallic hose wasattached. The French soldiers eyed them with contempt and disgust. Icaught the words, "Flame-throwers!"

I do not know what we should have done at Verdun without LieutenantRoeder, our mechanical officer. All the boys behaved splendidly, butLieutenant Roeder had the tremendously difficult task of keeping theSection going when the rolling-stock was none too good, and fearfulweather and too constant usage had reduced some of the wagons to wrecks. It was all the finer of him because he was by profession abacteriologist. Still very young, he had done distinguished work. Simplybecause there was no one else to attend to the mechanical department, hehad volunteered for this most tiresome and disagreeable task. There isnot a single driver in Section II who does not owe much to the friendlycounsel, splendid courage, and keen mind of George Roeder. 

A few miles below Verdun, on a narrow strip of meadowland between theriver and the northern bluffs, stood an eighteenth-century château andthe half-dozen houses of its dependents. The hurrying river had floodedthe low fields and then retreated, turning the meadows and pasturages tobright green, puddly marshes, malodorous with swampy exhalations. Beyondthe swirls and currents of the river and its vanishing islands ofpale-green pebbles, rose the brown, deserted hills of the Hauts deMeuse. The top of one height had been pinched into the rectangle of afortress; little forests ran along the sky-line of the heights, and anarrow road, slanting across a spur of the valley, climbed anddisappeared. 

The château itself was a huge, three-story box of gray-white stone witha slate roof, a little turret en poivrière at each corner, and agraceless classic doorway in the principal façade. A wide double gate, with a coronet in a tarnished gold medallion set in the iron arch-piece, gave entrance to this place through a kind of courtyard formed by therear of the château and the walls of two low wings devoted to thestables and the servants' quarters. Within, a high clump of dark- greenmyrtle, ringed with muddy, rut-scarred turf, marked the theoreticallimits of a driveway. Along the right-hand wall stood the rifles of thewounded, and in a corner, a great snarled pile of bayonets, belts, cartridge-boxes, gas-mask satchels, greasy tin boxes of anti-liceointment, and dented helmets. A bright winter sunlight fell on wallsdank from the river mists, and heightened the austerity of thelandscape. Beyond a bend in the river lay the smoke of the battle ofDouaumont; shells broke, pin-points of light, in the upper fringes ofthe haze. 

The château had been a hospital since the beginning of the war. A heavysmell of ether and iodoform lay about it, mixed with the smell of thewar. This effluvia of an army, mixed with the sharper reek ofanaesthetics, was the atmosphere of the hospital. The great rush ofwounded had begun. Every few minutes the ambulances slopped down a mirybyway, and turned in the gates; tired, putty-faced hospital attendantstook out the stretchers and the nouveaux clients; mussy bundles of bluerags and bloody blankets turned into human beings; an overworked, nervous médecin chef shouted contradictory orders at the brancardiers, and passed into real crises of hysterical rage. 

"Avancez!" he would scream at the bewildered chauffeurs of theambulances; and an instant later, "Reculez! Reculez!"

The wounded in the stretchers, strewn along the edges of the driveway, raised patient, tired eyes at his snarling. 

Another doctor, a little bearded man wearing a white apron and the redvelvet képi of an army physician, questioned each batch of new arrivals. Deep lines of fatigue had traced themselves under his kindly eyes; histhin face had a dreadful color. Some of the wounded had turned theireyes from the sun; others, too weak to move, lay stonily blinking. Almost expressionless, silent, they resigned themselves to theattendants as if these men were the deaf ministers of some inexorablepower. 

The surgeon went from stretcher to stretcher looking at the diagnosiscards attached at the poste de secours, stopping occasionally to ask thefatal question, "As-tu craché du sang?" (Have you spit blood?) A thinoldish man with a face full of hollows like that of an old horse, answered "Oui, " faintly. Close by, an artilleryman, whose cannon hadburst, looked with calm brown eyes out of a cooked and bluish face. Another, with a soldier's tunic thrown capewise over his naked torso, trembled in his thin blanket, and from the edges of a cotton andlint-pad dressing hastily stuffed upon a shoulder wound, an occasionaldrop of blood slid down his lean chest. 

A little to one side, the cooks of the hospital, in their greasy aprons, watched the performance with a certain calm interest. In a few minutesthe wounded were sorted and sent to the various wards. I was ordered totake three men who had been successfully operated on to the barracks forconvalescents several miles away. 

A highway and an unused railroad, both under heavy fire from German gunson the Hauts de Meuse, passed behind the château and along the foot ofthe bluffs. There were a hundred shell holes in the marshes between theroad and the river, black-lipped craters in the sedgy green; there wereugly punches in the brown earth of the bluffs, and deep scoops in thesurface of the road. The telephone wires, cut by shell fragments, fellin stiff, draping lines to the ground. Every once in a while a shellwould fall into the river, causing a silvery gray geyser to hang for aninstant above the green eddies of the Meuse. A certain village alongthis highway was the focal point of the firing. Many of the houses hadbeen blown to pieces, and fragments of red tile, bits of shiny glass, and lumps of masonry were strewn all over the deserted street. 

As I hurried along, two shells came over, one sliding into the riverwith a Hip! and the other landing in a house about two hundred yardsaway. A vast cloud of grayish-black smoke befogged the cottage, and asection of splintered timber came buzzing through the air and fell intoa puddle. From the house next to the one struck, a black cat cameslinking, paused for an indecisive second in the middle of the street, and ran back again. Through the canvas partition of the ambulance, Iheard the voices of my convalescents. "No more marmites!" I cried tothem as I swung down a road out of shell reach. I little knew what waswaiting for us beyond the next village. 

A regiment of Zouaves going up to the line was resting at the crossroad, and the regimental wagons, drawn up in waiting line, blocked the narrowroad completely. At the angle between the two highways, under the fourtrees planted by pious custom of the Meuse, stood a cross of thickplanks. From each arm of the cross, on wine-soaked straps, dangled, likea bunch of grapes, a cluster of dark-blue canteens; rifles were stackedround its base, and under the trees stood half a dozen clipped-headed, bull-necked Zouaves. A rather rough-looking adjutant, with a bullet headdisfigured by a frightful scar at the corner of his mouth, rode up anddown the line to see if all was well. Little groups were handing round ahalf loaf of army bread, and washing it down with gulps of wine. 

"Hello, sport!" they cried at me; and the favorite "All right, " and"Tommy!"

The air was heavy with the musty smell of street mud that never driesduring winter time, mixed with the odor of the tired horses, who stood, scarcely moving, backed away from their harnesses against themire-gripped wagons. Suddenly the order to go on again was given; thecarters snapped their whips, the horses pulled, the noisy, lumbering, creaky line moved on, and the men fell in behind, in any order. 

I started my car again and looked for an opening through the mêlée. 

Beyond the cross, the road narrowed and flanked one of the southeasternforts of the city. A meadow, which sloped gently upward from the road tothe abrupt hillside of the fortress, had been used as a place ofencampment and had been trodden into a surface of thick cheesy mire. Here and there were the ashes of fires. There were hundreds of suchplaces round the moorland villages between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. Thefort looked squarely down on Verdun, and over its grassy height came thedrumming of the battle, and the frequent crash of big shells fallinginto the city. 

In a corner lay the anatomical relics of some horses killed by anair-bomb the day before. And even as I noted them, I heard the muffledPom! Pom! Pom! of anti-aircraft guns. My back was to the river and Icould not see what was going on. 

"What is it?" I said to a Zouave who was plodding along beside theambulance. 

"Des Boches--crossing the river. "

The regiment plodded on as before. Now and then a soldier would stop andlook up at the aeroplanes. 

"He's coming!" I heard a voice exclaim. 

Suddenly, the adjutant whom I had seen before came galloping down theline, shouting, "Arrêtez! Arrêtez! Pas de mouvement!"

A current of tension ran down the troop with as much reality as acurrent of water runs down hill. I wondered whether the Boche had seenus. 

"Is he approaching?" I asked. 

"Yes. "

Ahead of me was a one-horse wagon, and ahead of that a wagon with twohorses carrying the medical supplies. The driver of the latter, anoldish, thick-set, wine-faced fellow, got down an instant from hiswagon, looked at the Boche, and resumed his seat. A few seconds later, there sounded the terrifying scream of an air-bomb, a roar, and I foundmyself in a bitter swirl of smoke. The shell had fallen right betweenthe horses of the two-horse wagon, blowing the animals to pieces, splintering the wagon, and killing the driver. Something sailed swiftlyover my head, and landed just behind the ambulance. It was a chunk ofthe skull of one of the horses. The horse attached to the wagon ahead ofme went into a frenzy of fear and backed his wagon into my ambulance, smashing the right lamp. In the twinkling of an eye, the soldiersdispersed. Some ran into the fields. Others crouched in the waysideditch. A cart upset. Another bomb dropped screaming in a field andburst; a cloud of smoke rolled away down the meadow. 

When the excitement had subsided, it was found that a soldier had beenwounded. The bodies of the horses were rolled over into the ditch, thewreck of the wagon was dragged to the miry field, and the regiment wenton. In a very short time I got to the hospital and delivered myconvalescents. 

My way home ran through the town of S------, an ugly, overgrown villageof the Verdunois, given up to the activities of the staff directing thebattle. The headquarters building was the hôtel de ville, a largeeighteenth-century edifice, in an acre of trampled mud a little distancefrom the street. Before the building flowed the great highway fromBar-le-Duc to Verdun; relays of motor lorries went by, and gendarmes, organized into a kind of traffic squad, stood every hundred feet or so. The atmosphere of S------at the height of the battle was one of calmorganization; it would not have been hard to believe that themotor-lorries and unemotional men were at the service of some greatmaster-work of engineering. There was something of the holiday in theattitude of the inhabitants of the place; they watched the motor showexactly as they might have watched a circus parade. 

"Les voilà, " said somebody. 

A little bemedaled group appeared on the steps of the hôtel de ville. Dominating it was Joffre. Above middle height, silver-haired, elderly, he has a certain paternal look which his eye belies; Joffre's eye is thehard eye of a commander-in-chief, the military eye, the eye of an OldTestament father if you will. De Castelnau was speaking, making nogestures--an old man with an ashen skin, deep-set eye and great hookednose, a long cape concealed the thick, age-settled body. Poincaré stoodlistening, with a look at once worried and brave, the ghost of a sadsmile lingering on a sensitive mouth. Last of all came Pétain, theprotégé of De Castelnau, who commanded at Verdun--a tall, square-builtman, not un-English in his appearance, with grizzled hair and the soberface of a thinker. But his mouth and jaw are those of a man of action, and the look in his gray eyes is always changing. Now it is speculativeand analytic, now steely and cold. 

In the shelter of a doorway stood a group of territorials, getting theirfirst real news of the battle from a Paris newspaper. I heard "Nousavons reculé--huit kilomètres--le général Pétain--" A motor-lorrydrowned out the rest. 

That night we were given orders to be ready to evacuate the château incase the Boches advanced. The drivers slept in the ambulances, rising atintervals through the night to warm their engines. The buzz of themotors sounded through the tall pines of the château park, drowning outthe rumbling of the bombardment and the monotonous roaring of the flood. Now and then a trench light, rising like a spectral star over the lineson the Hauts de Meuse, would shine reflected in the river. At intervalsattendants carried down the swampy paths to the chapel the bodies ofsoldiers who had died during the night. The cannon flashing wasterrific. Just before dawn, half a dozen batteries of "seventy-fives"came in a swift trot down the shelled road; the men leaned over on theirsteaming horses, the harnesses rattled and jingled, and the cavalcadeswept on, outlined a splendid instant against the mortar flashes and thestreaks of day. 

On my morning trip a soldier with bandaged arm was put beside me on thefront seat. He was about forty years old; a wiry black beard gave acertain fullness to his thin face, and his hands were pudgy and short offinger. When he removed his helmet, I saw that he was bald. A bad coldcaused him to speak in a curious whispering tone, giving to everythinghe said the character of a grotesque confidence. 

"What do you do en civil?" he asked. 

I told him. 

"I am a pastry cook, " he went on; "my specialty is Saint-Denis appletarts. "

A marmite intended for the road landed in the river as he spoke. 

"Have you ever had one? They are very good when made with fresh cream. "He sighed. 

"How did you get wounded?" said I. 

"Éclat d'obus, " he replied, as if that were the whole story. After apause he added, "Douaumont--yesterday. "

I thought of the shells I had seen bursting over the fort. 

"Do you put salt in chocolate?" he asked professionally. 

"Not as a rule, " I replied. 

"It improves it, " he pursued, as if he were revealing a confidentialdogma. "The Boche bread is bad, very bad, much worse than a year ago. Full of crumbles and lumps. Dégoûtant!"

The ambulance rolled up to the evacuation station, and my pastry cookalighted. 

"When the war is over, come to my shop, " he whispered benevolently, "andyou shall have some tartes aux pommes à la mode de Saint-Denis with mywife and me. "

"With fresh cream?" I asked. 

"Of course, " he replied seriously. 

I accepted gratefully, and the good old soul gave me his address. 

In the afternoon a sergeant rode with me. He was somewhere betweentwenty-eight and thirty, thick-set of body, with black hair and thetanned and ruddy complexion of outdoor folk. The high collar of adark-blue sweater rose over his great coat and circled a muscularthroat; his gray socks were pulled country-wise outside of the legs ofhis blue trousers. He had an honest, pleasant face; there was a certainsimple, wholesome quality about the man. In the piping times of peace, he was a cultivateur in the Valois, working his own little farm; he wasmarried and had two little boys. At Douaumont, a fragment of a shell hadtorn open his left hand. 

"The Boches are not going to get through up there?"

"Not now. As long as we hold the heights, Verdun is safe. " His simpleFrench, innocent of argot, had a good country twang. "But oh, the peoplekilled! Comme il y a des gens tués!" He pronounced the final s of theword gens in the manner of the Valois. 

"Ça s'accroche aux arbres, " he continued. 

The vagueness of the ça had a dreadful quality in it that made you seetrees and mangled bodies. "We had to hold the crest of Douaumont under aterrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope when the Germans triedto fortify them. Our 'seventy-fives' dropped shells into the big cratersas I would drop stones into a pond. Pauvres gens!"

The phrase had an earth-wide sympathy in it, a feeling that thetranslation "poor folks" does not render. He had taken part in a strangeincident. There had been a terrible corps-à-corps in one of the craterswhich had culminated in a victory for the French; but the lieutenant ofhis company had left a kinsman behind with the dead and wounded. Twonights later, the officer and the sergeant crawled down the dreadfulslope to the crater where the combat had taken place, in the hope offinding the wounded man. They could hear faint cries and moans from thecrater before they got to it. The light of a pocket flash-lamp showedthem a mass of dead and wounded on the floor of the crater--"un tas demourants et de cadavres, " as he expressed it. 

After a short search, they found the man for whom they were looking; hewas still alive but unconscious. They were dragging him out when aGerman, hideously wounded, begged them to kill him. 

"Moi, je n'ai plus jambes, " he repeated in French; "pitié, tuez-moi. "

He managed to make the lieutenant see that if he went away and leftthem, they would all die in the agonies of thirst and open wounds. Alittle flickering life still lingered in a few; there were vague râlesin the darkness. A rafale of shells fell on the slope; the violet glaresoutlined the mouth of the crater. 

"Ferme tes yeux" (shut your eyes), said the lieutenant to the German. The Frenchmen scrambled over the edge of the crater with theirunconscious burden, and then, from a little distance, threwhand-grenades into the pit till all the moaning died away. 

Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and theorganization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I wentagain to Verdun. The snow was falling heavily, covering the piles ofdébris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned houses. Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow. Above the Meuse, above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope, rose theshell-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers of thestill, tragic town. The drumming of the bombardment had died away. Theriver was again in flood. In a deserted wine-shop on a side street wellprotected from shells by a wall of sandbags was a post of territorials. 

To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was somethingSophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin ofthe beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the wrecked housesgave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood atwo-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned seesaw fire pump. There wereold clerks and bookkeepers among the soldier firemen--retired gendarmeswho had volunteered, a country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant fromthe Lyonnais. Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and theoutbreak of fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop. Onthat day only a few explosive shells had fallen. 

"Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?" said one of the pompiersto me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a cold, desertedhouse. The snow had blown through the shell-splintered window-panes. Inthe dining-room stood a table, the cloth was laid and the silver spread;but a green feathery fungus had grown in a dish of food and brokenstraws of dust floated on the wine in the glasses. The territorial tookmy arm, his eyes showing the pleasure of my responding curiosity, andwhispered, --

"There were officers quartered here who were called very suddenly. I sawthe servant of one of them yesterday; they have all been killed. "

Outside there was not a flash from the batteries on the moor. The snowcontinued to fall, and darkness, coming on the swift wings of the storm, fell like a mantle over the desolation of the city. 

The End