FIGHTING FRANCE

FROM DUNKERQUE TO BELPORT

BY EDITH WHARTON

NEW YORK: MCMXV

CONTENTS

 THE LOOK OF PARIS IN ARGONNE IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES IN THE NORTH IN ALSACE THE TONE OF FRANCE

THE LOOK OF PARIS

(AUGUST, 1914--FEBUARY, 1915)

I

AUGUST

On the 30th of July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we hadlunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of afield. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a borderof woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, andthe sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is aptto evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomedeyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merelyflat and tame; at other moments the sensitive imagination sees inevery thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless vigilant attachmentof generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscapebefore us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemedfull of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeatedtasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war rumours whichhad hung on us since morning. 

All day the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the timewe reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away underthe horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that topass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of achurch in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in ahollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gatheredthemselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out ofthem great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such depths ofdarkness, and steeped in a blaze of mid-summer sun, the familiarwindows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Nowthey widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, nowglittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some werecataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic, others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, othersthe sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in thewestern wall the scattered fires of the rose-window hung like aconstellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes formthese ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, allveiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemedto symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavydistances and its little islands of illusion. All that a greatcathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all thetranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richnessof detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty, the cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour. 

It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heightsof St. Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with theblue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in thestillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were asfresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees slopeddownward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and theethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowedwith a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. Thegreat city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces, seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by thewatchful giant of the Eiffel Tower. 

The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believedthem, everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn't be war!The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feetover the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were, of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly andconvincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomaticwords. Paris went on steadily about her mid-summer business offeeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who werethe only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century. 

All the while, every one knew that other work was going on also. Thewhole fabric of the country's seemingly undisturbed routine wasthreaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the senseof them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is inthe balminess of a perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes tillthe evening papers came. 

They said little or nothing except what every one was alreadydeclaring all over the country. "We don't want war--_mais it fautque cela finisse!_" "This kind of thing has got to stop": that wasthe only phase one heard. If diplomacy could still arrest the war, so much the better: no one in France wanted it. All who spent thefirst days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement offeeling on that point. But if war had to come, the country, andevery heart in it, was ready. 

At the dressmaker's, the next morning, the tired fitters werepreparing to leave for their usual holiday. They looked pale andanxious--decidedly, there was a new weight of apprehension in theair. And in the rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de laConcorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip ofwhite paper against the wall of the Ministere de la Marine. "Generalmobilization" they read--and an armed nation knows what that means. But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers by readthe notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations: thedramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event wastoo great to be dramatized. Like a monstrous landslide it had fallenacross the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting itsroutine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, andburying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfullywrought machinery of civilization... 

That evening, in a restaurant of the rue Royale, we sat at a tablein one of the open windows, abreast with the street, and saw thestrange new crowds stream by. In an instant we were being shown whatmobilization was--a huge break in the normal flow of traffic, likethe sudden rupture of a dyke. The street was flooded by the torrentof people sweeping past us to the various railway stations. All wereon foot, and carrying their luggage; for since dawn every cab andtaxi and motor--omnibus had disappeared. The War Office had thrownout its drag-net and caught them all in. The crowd that passed ourwindow was chiefly composed of conscripts, the _mobilisables_ of thefirst day, who were on the way to the station accompanied by theirfamilies and friends; but among them were little clusters ofbewildered tourists, labouring along with bags and bundles, andwatching their luggage pushed before them on hand-carts--puzzledinarticulate waifs caught in the cross-tides racing to a maelstrom. 

In the restaurant, the befrogged and red-coated band poured outpatriotic music, and the intervals between the courses that so fewwaiters were left to serve were broken by the ever-recurringobligation to stand up for the Marseillaise, to stand up for GodSave the King, to stand up for the Russian National Anthem, to standup again for the Marseillaise. "_Et dire que ce sont des Hongroisqui jouent tout cela!"_ a humourist remarked from the pavement. 

As the evening wore on and the crowd about our window thickened, theloiterers outside began to join in the war-songs. "_Allons, debout!_"--and the loyal round begins again. "La chanson du depart" is afrequent demand; and the chorus of spectators chimes in roundly. Asort of quiet humour was the note of the street. Down the rueRoyale, toward the Madeleine, the bands of other restaurants wereattracting other throngs, and martial refrains were strung along theBoulevard like its garlands of arc-lights. It was a night of singingand acclamations, not boisterous, but gallant and determined. It wasParis _badauderie_ at its best. 

Meanwhile, beyond the fringe of idlers the steady stream ofconscripts still poured along. Wives and families trudged besidethem, carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles. Theimpression disengaging itself from all this superficial confusionwas that of a cheerful steadiness of spirit. The faces ceaselesslystreaming by were serious but not sad; nor was there any air ofbewilderment--the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and youngmen seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it. The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible; theyunderstood their stake in the job, and accepted it. 

The next day the army of midsummer travel was immobilized to let theother army move. No more wild rushes to the station, no more bribingof concierges, vain quests for invisible cabs, haggard hours ofwaiting in the queue at Cook's. No train stirred except to carrysoldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their wayinto a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first nightcould only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel andwait. Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to theresounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants, motionless lifts: to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotelssuddenly reduced to the intimacies and make-shift of a LatinQuarter _pension. _ Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradualparalysis of the city. As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans hadvanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had leftthe Seine. The canal-boats too were gone, or lay motionless: loadingand unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framedan emptiness; all the endless avenues stretched away to desertdistances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths ortrimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, theworried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out oftheir daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes. Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed tohave had _curare_ injected into all her veins. 

The next day--the 2nd of August--from the terrace of the Hotelde Crillon one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life. Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de laConcorde, carrying soldiers to the stations. Other conscripts, indetachments, tramped by on foot with bags and banners. Onedetachment stopped before the black-veiled statue of Strasbourg andlaid a garland at her feet. In ordinary times this demonstrationwould at once have attracted a crowd; but at the very moment when itmight have been expected to provoke a patriotic outburst it excitedno more attention than if one of the soldiers had turned aside togive a penny to a beggar. The people crossing the square did noteven stop to look. The meaning of this apparent indifference wasobvious. When an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busyin a definite and pressing way. It is not only the fighters thatmobilize: those who stay behind must do the same. For each Frenchhousehold, for each individual man or woman in France, war means acomplete reorganization of life. The detachment of conscripts, unnoticed, paid their tribute to the Cause and passed on... 

Looked back on from these sterner months those early days in Paris, in their setting of grave architecture and summer skies, wear thelight of the ideal and the abstract. The sudden flaming up ofnational life, the abeyance of every small and mean preoccupation, cleared the moral air as the streets had been cleared, and made thespectator feel as though he were reading a great poem on War ratherthan facing its realities. 

Something of this sense of exaltation seemed to penetrate thethrongs who streamed up and down the Boulevards till late into thenight. All wheeled traffic had ceased, except that of the raretaxi-cabs impressed to carry conscripts to the stations; and themiddle of the Boulevards was as thronged with foot-passengers as anItalian market-place on a Sunday morning. The vast tide swayed upand down at a slow pace, breaking now and then to make room for oneof the volunteer "legions" which were forming at every corner:Italian, Roumanian, South American, North American, each headed byits national flag and hailed with cheering as it passed. But eventhe cheers were sober: Paris was not to be shaken out of herself-imposed serenity. One felt something nobly conscious andvoluntary in the mood of this quiet multitude. Yet it was a mixedthrong, made up of every class, from the scum of the ExteriorBoulevards to the cream of the fashionable restaurants. Thesepeople, only two days ago, had been leading a thousand differentlives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien asenemies across a frontier: now workers and idlers, thieves, beggars, saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams, were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive communityof emotion. The "people, " luckily, predominated; the faces ofworkers look best in such a crowd, and there were thousands of them, each illuminated and singled out by its magnesium-flash of passion. 

I remember especially the steady-browed faces of the women; and alsothe small but significant fact that every one of them had rememberedto bring her dog. The biggest of these amiable companions had totake their chance of seeing what they could through the forest ofhuman legs; but every one that was portable was snugly lodged in thebend of an elbow, and from this safe perch scores and scores ofsmall serious muzzles, blunt or sharp, smooth or woolly, brown orgrey or white or black or brindled, looked out on the scene with thequiet awareness of the Paris dog. It was certainly a good sign thatthey had not been forgotten that night. 

II

WE had been shown, impressively, what it was to live through amobilization; now we were to learn that mobilization is only one ofthe concomitants of martial law, and that martial law is notcomfortable to live under--at least till one gets used to it. 

At first its main purpose, to the neutral civilian, seemed certainlyto be the wayward pleasure of complicating his life; and in thatline it excelled in the last refinements of ingenuity. Instructionsbegan to shower on us after the lull of the first days: instructionsas to what to do, and what not to do, in order to make our presencetolerable and our persons secure. In the first place, foreignerscould not remain in France without satisfying the authorities as totheir nationality and antecedents; and to do this necessitatedrepeated ineffective visits to chanceries, consulates and policestations, each too densely thronged with flustered applicants topermit the entrance of one more. Between these vain pilgrimages, thetraveller impatient to leave had to toil on foot to distant railwaystations, from which he returned baffled by vague answers anddisheartened by the declaration that tickets, when achievable, mustalso be _vises_ by the police. There was a moment when it seemedthat ones inmost thoughts had to have that unobtainable _visa_--toobtain which, more fruitless hours must be lived on grimy stairwaysbetween perspiring layers of fellow-aliens. Meanwhile one's moneywas probable running short, and one must cable or telegraph formore. Ah--but cables and telegrams must be _vises_ too--and evenwhen they were, one got no guarantee that they would be sent! Thenone could not use code addresses, and the ridiculous number of wordscontained in a New York address seemed to multiply as the francs inone's pockets diminished. And when the cable was finally dispatchedit was either lost on the way, or reached its destination only tocall forth, after anxious days, the disheartening response:"Impossible at present. Making every effort. " It is fair to addthat, tedious and even irritating as many of these transactionswere, they were greatly eased by the sudden uniform good-nature ofthe French functionary, who, for the first time, probably, in thelong tradition of his line, broke through its fundamental rule andwas kind. 

Luckily, too, these incessant comings and goings involved muchwalking of the beautiful idle summer streets, which grew idler andmore beautiful each day. Never had such blue-grey softness ofafternoon brooded over Paris, such sunsets turned the heights of theTrocadero into Dido's Carthage, never, above all, so rich a moonripened through such perfect evenings. The Seine itself had no smallshare in this mysterious increase of the city's beauty. Releasedfrom all traffic, its hurried ripples smoothed themselves into longsilken reaches in which quays and monuments at last saw theirunbroken images. At night the fire-fly lights of the boats hadvanished, and the reflections of the street lamps were lengthenedinto streamers of red and gold and purple that slept on the calmcurrent like fluted water-weeds. Then the moon rose and tookpossession of the city, purifying it of all accidents, calming andenlarging it and giving it back its ideal lines of strength andrepose. There was something strangely moving in this new Paris ofthe August evenings, so exposed yet so serene, as though her verybeauty shielded her. 

So, gradually, we fell into the habit of living under martial law. After the first days of flustered adjustment the personalinconveniences were so few that one felt almost ashamed of their notbeing more, of not being called on to contribute some greatersacrifice of comfort to the Cause. Within the first week over twothirds of the shops had closed--the greater number bearing on theirshuttered windows the notice "Pour cause de mobilisation, " whichshowed that the "patron" and staff were at the front. But enoughremained open to satisfy every ordinary want, and the closing of theothers served to prove how much one could do without. Provisionswere as cheap and plentiful as ever, though for a while it waseasier to buy food than to have it cooked. The restaurants wereclosing rapidly, and one often had to wander a long way for a meal, and wait a longer time to get it. A few hotels still carried on ahalting life, galvanized by an occasional inrush of travel fromBelgium and Germany; but most of them had closed or were beinghastily transformed into hospitals. 

The signs over these hotel doors first disturbed the dreamingharmony of Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hungwith Red Crosses. Every other building showed the red and white bandacross its front, with "Ouvroir" or "Hopital" beneath; therewas something sinister in these preparations for horrors in whichone could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yetsound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carriedhigh. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warningsigns did not deeply stir the trance of Paris. The first days of thewar were full of a kind of unrealizing confidence, not boastful orfatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacityof purpose that the experience of the next few months was todevelop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, thatthe mood of early August: the assurance, the balance, the kind ofsmiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is notimpossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the citymay have helped to produce this mood. War, the shrieking fury, hadannounced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was deserthush more complete: the silence of a street is always so much deeperthan the silence of wood or field. 

The heaviness of the August air intensified this impression ofsuspended life. The days were dumb enough; but at night the hushbecame acute. In the quarter I inhabit, always deserted in summer, the shuttered streets were mute as catacombs, and the faintestpin-prick of noise seemed to tear a rent in a black pall of silence. I could hear the tired tap of a lame hoof half a mile away, and thetread of the policeman guarding the Embassy across the street beatagainst the pavement like a series of detonations. Even thevariegated noises of the city's waking-up had ceased. If anysweepers, scavengers or rag-pickers still plied their trades theydid it as secretly as ghosts. I remember one morning being rousedout of a deep sleep by a sudden explosion of noise in my room. I satup with a start, and found I had been waked by a low-voiced exchangeof "Bonjours" in the street... 

Another fact that kept the reality of war from Paris was the curiousabsence of troops in the streets. After the first rush of conscriptshurrying to their military bases it might have been imagined thatthe reign of peace had set in. While smaller cities were swarmingwith soldiers no glitter of arms was reflected in the empty avenuesof the capital, no military music sounded through them. Parisscorned all show of war, and fed the patriotism of her children onthe mere sight of her beauty. It was enough. 

Even when the news of the first ephemeral successes in Alsace beganto come in, the Parisians did not swerve from their even gait. Thenewsboys did all the shouting--and even theirs was presentlysilenced by decree. It seemed as though it had been unanimously, instinctively decided that the Paris of 1914 should in no respectresemble the Paris of 1870, and as though this resolution had passedat birth into the blood of millions born since that fatal date, andignorant of its bitter lesson. The unanimity of self-restraint wasthe notable characteristic of this people suddenly plunged into anunsought and unexpected war. At first their steadiness of spiritmight have passed for the bewilderment of a generation born and bredin peace, which did not yet understand what war implied. But it isprecisely on such a mood that easy triumphs might have been supposedto have the most disturbing effect. It was the crowd in the streetthat shouted "A Berlin!" in 1870; now the crowd in the streetcontinued to mind its own business, in spite of showers of extrasand too-sanguine bulletins. 

I remember the morning when our butcher's boy brought the news thatthe first German flag had been hung out on the balcony of theMinistry of War. Now I thought, the Latin will boil over! And Iwanted to be there to see. I hurried down the quiet rue deMartignac, turned the corner of the Place Sainte Clotilde, and cameon an orderly crowd filling the street before the Ministry of War. The crowd was so orderly that the few pacific gestures of the policeeasily cleared a way for passing cabs, and for the military motorsperpetually dashing up. It was composed of all classes, and therewere many family groups, with little boys straddling their mothers'shoulders, or lifted up by the policemen when they were too heavyfor their mothers. It is safe to say that there was hardly a man orwoman of that crowd who had not a soldier at the front; and therebefore them hung the enemy's first flag--a splendid silk flag, whiteand black and crimson, and embroidered in gold. It was the flag ofan Alsatian regiment--a regiment of Prussianized Alsace. Itsymbolized all they most abhorred in the whole abhorrent job thatlay ahead of them; it symbolized also their finest ardour and theirnoblest hate, and the reason why, if every other reason failed, France could never lay down arms till the last of such flags waslow. And there they stood and looked at it, not dully oruncomprehendingly, but consciously, advisedly, and in silence; as ifalready foreseeing all it would cost to keep that flag and add to itothers like it; forseeing the cost and accepting it. There seemed tobe men's hearts even in the children of that crowd, and in themothers whose weak arms held them up. So they gazed and went on, andmade way for others like them, who gazed in their turn and went ontoo. All day the crowd renewed itself, and it was always the samecrowd, intent and understanding and silent, who looked steadily atthe flag, and knew what its being there meant. That, in August, wasthe look of Paris. 

III

FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY dusk on the Seine. The boats are plying again, but theystop at nightfall, and the river is inky-smooth, with the same longweed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewerand paler; bright lights are muffled everywhere. The line of thequays is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero arelost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firmtower-tops of Notre-Dame. Down the damp pavements only a few streetlamps throw their watery zigzags. The shops are shut, and thewindows above them thickly curtained. The faces of the houses areall blind. 

In the narrow streets of the Rive Gauche the darkness is evendeeper, and the few scattered lights in courts or "cites" createeffects of Piranesi-like mystery. The gleam of the chestnut-roaster'sbrazier at a street corner deepens the sense of an old adventurousItaly, and the darkness beyond seems full of cloaks and conspiracies. I turn, on my way home, into an empty street between high gardenwalls, with a single light showing far off at its farther end. Not asoul is in sight between me and that light: my steps echo endlesslyin the silence. Presently a dim figure comes around the corner aheadof me. Man or woman? Impossible to tell till I overtake it. TheFebruary fog deepens the darkness, and the faces one passes areindistinguishable. As for the numbers of the houses, no one thinksof looking for them. If you know the quarter you count doors fromthe corner, or try to puzzle out the familiar outline of a balconyor a pediment; if you are in a strange street, you must ask at thenearest tobacconist's--for, as for finding a policeman, a yard offyou couldn't tell him from your grandmother!

Such, after six months of war, are the nights of Paris; the days areless remarkable and less romantic. 

Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone; or so atleast it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival oflife. It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries, even from those involved in the war. After London, with all hertheaters open, and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired, Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh. But tothose who lived through that first sunlit silent month the streetsto-day show an almost normal activity. The vanishing of all themotorbuses, and of the huge lumbering commercial vans, leaves many aforgotten perspective open and reveals many a lost grace ofarchitecture; but the taxi-cabs and private motors are almost asabundant as in peace-time, and the peril of pedestrianism is kept atits normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of thoseunrivalled engines of destruction, the hospital and War Officemotors. Many shops have reopened, a few theatres are tentativelyproducing patriotic drama or mixed programmes seasonal withsentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventfulkilometres. 

For a while, in September and October, the streets were madepicturesque by the coming and going of English soldiery, and theaggressive flourish of British military motors. Then the fresh facesand smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to"militarism" which Paris offers to the casual sight-seer is theoccasional drilling of a handful of _piou-pious_ on the muddyreaches of the Place des Invalides. But there is another army inParis. Its first detachments came months ago, in the dark Septemberdays--lamentable rear-guard of the Allies' retreat on Paris. Sincethen its numbers have grown and grown, its dingy streams havepercolated through all the currents of Paris life, so that whereverone goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busyconfident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people, dazed and slowly moving--men and women with sordid bundles on theirbacks, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressedagainst their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees. Their facesare unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught thatstare of dumb bewilderment--or that other look of concentratedhorror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins--can shake offthe obsession of the Refugees. The look in their eyes is part of thelook of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the faceshe turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across theborders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whoseknowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of theirvillage steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causationthan the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing andsowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, whensuddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar facesand new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memoryof burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged toslavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled bydrunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying. These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside thedoors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, inreturn for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, orintelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, ameal-ticket--and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes... 

What are the Parisians doing meanwhile? For one thing--and the signis a good one--they are refilling the shops, and especially, ofcourse, the great "department stores. " In the early war days therewas no stranger sight than those deserted palaces, where one strayedbetween miles of unpurchased wares in quest of vanished salesmen. Afew clerks, of course, were left: enough, one would have thought, for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations. But the fewthere were did not care to be disturbed: they lurked behind theirwalls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed tobe discovered. And when one had coaxed them out they went throughthe necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wonderingthat any one should care to buy. I remember once, at the Louvre, seeing the whole force of a "department, " including the salesman Iwas trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze, deserttheir posts simultaneously to gather about a motor-cyclist in amuddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tales from thefront. But after six months the pressure of normal appetites hasbegun to reassert itself--and to shop is one of the normal appetitesof woman. I say "shop" instead of buy, to distinguish between thedull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiringthings one might do without. It is evident that many of thethousands now fighting their way into the great shops must beindulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants arereduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of thedepartment store? Even allowing for the immense, the perpetualbuying of supplies for hospitals and work-rooms, the incessantstoking-up of the innumerable centres of charitable production, there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departmentsexcept the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, howeversuffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the longrun, and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin toshop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself theteo-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively (and economically)to concerts--but the swinging doors of the department stores suckher irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions. 

No one, in this respect, would wish the look of Paris to be changed. It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again, even though the sight is less interesting than that of the othercrowds streaming daily--and on Sunday in immensely augmentednumbers--across the Pont Alexandre III to the great court of theInvalides where the German trophies are displayed. Here the heart ofFrance beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passesinto foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngsface to face with the long triple row of German guns. There are fewin those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt ablow; there are personal losses, lacerating memories, bound up withthe sight of all those evil engines. But personal sorrow is thesentiment least visible in the look of Paris. It is not fanciful tosay that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquireda new character. The change seems to have affected the very stuff itis moulded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor humanclay into some dense commemorative substance. I often pass in thestreet women whose faces look like memorial medals--idealized imagesof what they were in the flesh. And the masks of some of themen--those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and alittle satyr-like--look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burntand twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these facesreveals a personal preoccupation: they are looking, one and all, atFrance erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparingdifferent widths of Valenciennes at the lace-counter all havesomething of that vision in their eyes--or else one does not see theones who haven't. 

It is still true of Paris that she has not the air of a capital inarms. There are as few troops to be seen as ever, and but for thecoming and going of the orderlies attached to the War Office and theMilitary Government, and the sprinkling of uniforms about the doorsof barracks, there would be no sign of war in the streets--no sign, that is, except the presence of the wounded. It is only lately thatthey have begun to appear, for in the early months of the war theywere not sent to Paris, and the splendidly appointed hospitals ofthe capital stood almost empty, while others, all over the country, were overcrowded. The motives for the disposal of the wounded havebeen much speculated upon and variously explained: one of itsresults may have been the maintaining in Paris of the extraordinarymoral health which has given its tone to the whole country, andwhich is now sound and strong enough to face the sight of anymisery. 

And miseries enough it has to face. Day by day the limping figuresgrow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads morefrequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres andconcerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have towait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supportingarm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of theirfaces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the veryessence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave, these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in thetrenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad, however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured. It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones ofcharacter, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping thatsubstance into something so strong and finely tempered that for along time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy ofthe look on their faces. 

IN ARGONNE

I

The permission to visit a few ambulances and evacuation hospitalsbehind the lines gave me, at the end of February, my first sight ofWar. 

Paris is no longer included in the military zone, either in fact orin appearance. Though it is still manifestly under the war-cloud, its air of reviving activity produces the illusion that the menacewhich casts that cloud is far off not only in distance but in time. Paris, a few months ago so alive to the nearness of the enemy, seemsto have grown completely oblivious of that nearness; and it isstartling, not more than twenty miles from the gates, to pass fromsuch an atmosphere of workaday security to the imminent sense ofwar. 

Going eastward, one begins to feel the change just beyond Meaux. Between that quiet episcopal city and the hill-town of Montmirail, some forty miles farther east, there are no sensational evidences ofthe great conflict of September--only, here and there, in anunploughed field, or among the fresh brown furrows, a little moundwith a wooden cross and a wreath on it. Nevertheless, one begins toperceive, by certain negative signs, that one is already in anotherworld. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and tookthe road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curiousabsence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now andthen a lonely ploughman and his team stood out against the sky, or achild and an old woman looked from a doorway; but many of the fieldswere fallow and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few cartsdriven by peasants, a stray wood-cutter in a copse, a road-menderhammering at his stones; but already the "civilian motor" haddisappeared, and all the dust-coloured cars dashing past us weremarked with the Red Cross or the number of an army division. Atevery bridge and railway-crossing a sentinel, standing in the middleof the road with lifted rifle, stopped the motor and examined ourpapers. In this negative sphere there was hardly any other tangibleproof of military rule; but with the descent of the first hillbeyond Montmirail there came the positive feeling: _This is war!_

Along the white road rippling away eastward over the dimpled countrythe army motors were pouring by in endless lines, broken now andthen by the dark mass of a tramping regiment or the clatter of atrain of artillery. In the intervals between these waves of militarytraffic we had the road to ourselves, except for the flashing pastof despatch-bearers on motor-cycles and of hideously hooting littlemotors carrying goggled officers in goat-skins and woollen helmets. 

The villages along the road all seemed empty--not figuratively butliterally empty. None of them has suffered from the German invasion, save by the destruction, here and there, of a single house on whichsome random malice has wreaked itself; but since the general flightin September all have remained abandoned, or are provisionallyoccupied by troops, and the rich country between Montmirail andChalons is a desert. 

The first sight of Chame is extraordinarily exhilarating. The oldtown lying so pleasantly between canal and river is theHead-quarters of an army--not of a corps or of a division, but of awhole army--and the network of grey provincial streets about theRomanesque towers of Notre Dame rustles with the movement of war. The square before the principal hotel--the incomparably named "HauteMere-Dieu"--is as vivid a sight as any scene of modern warcan be. Rows of grey motor-lorries and omnibuses do not lendthemselves to as happy groupings as a detachment of cavalry, andspitting and spurting motor-cycles and "torpedo" racers are nosubstitute for the glitter of helmets and the curvetting ofchargers; but once the eye has adapted itself to the ugly lines andthe neutral tints of the new warfare, the scene in that crowdedclattering square becomes positively brilliant. It is a vision ofone of the central functions of a great war, in all its concentratedenergy, without the saddening suggestions of what, on the distantperiphery, that energy is daily and hourly resulting in. Yet evenhere such suggestions are never long out of sight; for one cannotpass through Chalons without meeting, on their way from the station, a long line of "eclopes"--the unwounded but battered, shattered, frost-bitten, deafened and half-paralyzed wreckage of theawful struggle. These poor wretches, in their thousands, are dailyshipped back from the front to rest and be restored; and it is agrim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare ofeyes that have seen what one dare not picture. 

If one could think away the "'eclopes" in the streets and thewounded in their hospitals, Chalons would be an invigoratingspectacle. When we drove up to the hotel even the grey motors andthe sober uniforms seemed to sparkle under the cold sky. Thecontinual coming and going of alert and busy messengers, the ridingup of officers (for some still ride!), the arrival of much-decoratedmilitary personages in luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro oforderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows ofgrey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulancesand the passing of detachments for the front, all these are sightsthat the pacific stranger could forever gape at. And in the hotel, what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur coats andhaversacks, what a grouping of bronzed energetic heads about thepacked tables in the restaurant! It is not easy for civilians to getto Chalons, and almost every table is occupied by officers andsoldiers--for, once off duty, there seems to be no rank distinctionin this happy democratic army, and the simple private, if he choosesto treat himself to the excellent fare of the Haute Mere-Dieu, hasas good a right to it as his colonel. 

The scene in the restaurant is inexhaustibly interesting. The mereattempt to puzzle out the different uniforms is absorbing. A week'sexperience near the front convinces me that no two uniforms in theFrench army are alike either in colour or in cut. Within the lasttwo years the question of colour has greatly preoccupied the Frenchmilitary authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue; andthe range of their experiments is proved by the extraordinaryvariety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyishrobin's-egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed. Theresult attained is the conviction that no blue is reallyinconspicuous, and that some of the harsh new slaty tints are noless striking than the deeper shades they have superseded. But tothis scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added: thepoppy-red of the Spahis' tunics, and various other less familiarcolours--grey, and a certain greenish khaki--the use of which is dueto the fact that the cloth supply has given out and that allavailable materials are employed. As for the differences in cut, theuniforms vary from the old tight tunic to the loose belted jacketcopied from the English, and the emblems of the various arms andranks embroidered on these diversified habits add a new element ofperplexity. The aviator's wings, the motorist's wheel, and many ofthe newer symbols, are easily recognizable--but there are all theother arms, and the doctors and the stretcher-bearers, the sappersand miners, and heaven knows how many more ramifications of thisgreat host which is really all the nation. 

The main interest of the scene, however, is that it shows almost asmany types as uniforms, and that almost all the types are so good. One begins to understand (if one has failed to before) why theFrench say of themselves: "_La France est une nation guerriere. _"War is the greatest of paradoxes: the most senseless anddisheartening of human retrogressions, and yet the stimulant ofqualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no othermeans of renewal. Everything depends, therefore, on the category ofimpulses that war excites in a people. Looking at the faces atChalons, one sees at once in which [Page 54] sense the French are"une nation guerriere. " It is not too much to say that war has givenbeauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, ahundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of allbeautiful. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables--young orold, plain or handsome, distinguished or average--have the same lookof quiet authority: it is as though all "nervosity, " fussiness, little personal oddities, meannesses and vulgarities, had been burntaway in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful exampleof the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance. More than half of these men were probably doing dull or useless orunimportant things till the first of last August; now each one ofthem, however small his job, is sharing in a great task, and knowsit, and has been made over by knowing it. 

Our road on leaving Chalons continued to run northeastward towardthe hills of the Argonne. 

We passed through more deserted villages, with soldiers lounging inthe doors where old women should have sat with their distaffs, soldiers watering their horses in the village pond, soldiers cookingover gypsy fires in the farm-yards. In the patches of woodland alongthe road we came upon more soldiers, cutting down pine saplings, chopping them into even lengths and loading them on hand-carts, withthe green boughs piled on top. We soon saw to what use they wereput, for at every cross-road or railway bridge a warm sentry-box ofmud and straw and plaited pine-branches was plastered against a bankor tucked like a swallow's nest into a sheltered corner. A littlefarther on we began to come more and more frequently on big coloniesof "Seventy-fives. " Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtainof woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and alwaysattended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giantgazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of wovenpine-boughs which stood near by might have been the huge huts oftheir herdsmen. 

The country between Marne and Meuse is one of the regions on whichGerman fury spent itself most bestially during the abominableSeptember days. Half way between Chalons and Sainte Menehould wecame on the first evidence of the invasion: the lamentable ruins ofthe village of Auve. These pleasant villages of the Aisne, withtheir one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofedgranaries with espaliered gable-ends, are all much of one pattern, and one can easily picture what Auve must have been as it lookedout, in the blue September weather, above the ripening pears of itsgardens to the crops in the valley and the large landscape beyond. Now it is a mere waste of rubble [Page 58] and cinders, not onethreshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruinedvillages after Auve, but this was the first, and perhaps for thatreason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all theseparate terrors, anguishes, uprootings and rendings apart involvedin the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. Thephotographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above thecrucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, thebundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered, all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning andcontinuity to the present--of all that accumulated warmth nothing wasleft but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!

As we ran on toward Sainte Menehould the names on our map showed usthat, just beyond the parallel range of hills six or seven miles tothe north, the two armies lay interlocked. But we heard no cannonyet, and the first visible evidence of the nearness of the strugglewas the encounter, at a bend of the road, of a long line ofgrey-coated figures tramping toward us between the bayonets of theircaptors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh "bag" from the hills, ofa fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-worn than onecould have wished. Their broad blond faces were meaningless, guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy: they seemed none too sorryfor their fate. 

Our pass from the General Head-quarters carried us to SainteMenehould on the edge of the Argonne, where we had to apply to theHead-quarters of the division for a farther extension. The Staff arelodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, whereoffices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, andwhere, sitting in a bare passage on a frayed damask sofa surmountedby theatrical posters and faced by a bed with a plum-colouredcounterpane, we listened for a while to the jingle of telephones, the rat-tat of typewriters, the steady hum of dictation and thecoming and going of hurried despatch-bearers and orderlies. Theextension to the permit was presently delivered with the courteousrequest that we should push on to Verdun as fast as possible, ascivilian motors were not wanted on the road that afternoon; and thisrequest, coupled with the evident stir of activity at Head-quarters, gave us the impression that there must be a good deal happeningbeyond the low line of hills to the north. How much there was wewere soon to know. 

We left Sainte Menehould at about eleven, and before twelve o'clockwe were nearing a large village on a ridge from which the land sweptaway to right and left in ample reaches. The first glimpse of theoutlying houses showed nothing unusual; but presently the mainstreet turned and dipped downward, and below and beyond us lay along stretch of ruins: the calcined remains of Clermont-en-Argonne, destroyed by the Germans on the 4th of September. The free and loftysituation of the little town--for it was really a good deal morethan a village--makes its present state the more lamentable. One cansee it from so far off, and through the torn traceries of its ruinedchurch the eye travels over so lovely a stretch of country! No doubtits beauty enriched the joy of wrecking it. 

At the farther end of what was once the main street another smallknot of houses has survived. Chief among them is the Hospice for oldmen, where Sister Gabrielle Rosnet, when the authorities of Clermonttook to their heels, stayed behind to defend her charges, and where, ever since, she has nursed an undiminishing stream of wounded fromthe eastern front. We found Soeur Rosnet, with her Sisters, preparing the midday meal of her patients in the little kitchen ofthe Hospice: the kitchen which is also her dining-room and privateoffice. She insisted on our finding time to share the _filet_ andfried potatoes that were just being taken off the stove, and whilewe lunched she told us the story of the invasion--of the Hospicedoors broken down "a coups de crosse" and the grey officers burstingin with revolvers, and finding her there before them, in the bigvaulted vestibule, "alone with my old men and my Sisters. " SoeurGabrielle Rosnet is a small round active woman, with a shrewd andruddy face of the type that looks out calmly from the darkbackground of certain Flemish pictures. Her blue eyes are full ofwarmth and humour, and she puts as much gaiety as wrath into hertale. She does not spare epithets in talking of "ces satanesAllemands"--these Sisters and nurses of the front have seen sightsto dry up the last drop of sentimental pity--but through all thehorror of those fierce September days, with Clermont blazing abouther and the helpless remnant of its inhabitants under the perpetualthreat of massacre, she retained her sense of the little inevitableabsurdities of life, such as her not knowing how to address theofficer in command "because he was so tall that I couldn't see up tohis shoulder-straps. "--"Et ils etaient tous comme ca, " she added, asort of reluctant admiration in her eyes. 

A subordinate "good Sister" had just cleared the table and pouredout our coffee when a woman came in to say, in a matter-of-facttone, that there was hard fighting going on across the valley. Sheadded calmly, as she dipped our plates into a tub, that an obus hadjust fallen a mile or two off, and that if we liked we could see thefighting from a garden over the way. It did not take us long toreach that garden! Soeur Gabrielle showed the way, bouncing up thestairs of a house across the street, and flying at her heels we cameout on a grassy terrace full of soldiers. 

The cannon were booming without a pause, and seemingly so near thatit was bewildering to look out across empty fields at a hillsidethat seemed like any other. But luckily somebody had a field-glass, and with its help a little corner of the battle of Vauquois wassuddenly brought close to us--the rush of French infantry up theslopes, the feathery drift of French gun-smoke lower down, and, highup, on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightnings and whitepuffs of the German artillery. Rap, rap, rap, went the answeringguns, as the troops swept up and disappeared into the fire-tonguedwood; and we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of havingstumbled on this visible episode of the great subterranean struggle. 

Though Soeur Rosnet had seen too many such sights to be much moved, she was full of a lively curiosity, and stood beside us, squarelyplanted in the mud, holding the field-glass to her eyes, or passingit laughingly about among the soldiers. But as we turned to go shesaid: "They've sent us word to be ready for another four hundredto-night"; and the twinkle died out of her good eyes. 

Her expectations were to be dreadfully surpassed; for, as we learneda fortnight later from a three column _communique, _ the scene we hadassisted at was no less than the first act of the successful assaulton the high-perched village of Vauquois, a point of the firstimportance to the Germans, since it masked their operations to thenorth of Varennes and commanded the railway by which, sinceSeptember, they have been revictualling and reinforcing their armyin the Argonne. Vauquois had been taken by them at the end ofSeptember and, thanks to its strong position on a rocky spur, hadbeen almost impregnably fortified; but the attack we looked on atfrom the garden of Clermont, on Sunday, February 28th, carried thevictorious French troops to the top of the ridge, and made themmasters of a part of the village. Driven from it again that night, they were to retake it after a five days' struggle of exceptionalviolence and prodigal heroism, and are now securely establishedthere in a position described as "of vital importance to theoperations. " "But what it cost!" Soeur Gabrielle said, when we sawher again a few days later. 

II

The time had come to remember our promise and hurry away fromClermont; but a few miles farther our attention was arrested by thesight of the Red Cross over a village house. The house was littlemore than a hovel, the village--Blercourt it was called--a merehamlet of scattered cottages and cow-stables: a place so easilyoverlooked that it seemed likely our supplies might be needed there. 

An orderly went to find the _medecin-chef_, and we waded after himthrough the mud to one after another of the cottages in which, withadmirable ingenuity, he had managed to create out of next to nothingthe indispensable requirements of a second-line ambulance:sterilizing and disinfecting appliances, a bandage-room, a pharmacy, a well-filled wood-shed, and a clean kitchen in which "tisanes" werebrewing over a cheerful fire. A detachment of cavalry was quarteredin the village, which the trampling of hoofs had turned into a greatmorass, and as we picked our way from cottage to cottage in thedoctor's wake he told us of the expedients to which he had been putto secure even the few hovels into which his patients were crowded. It was a complaint we were often to hear repeated along this line ofthe front, where troops and wounded are packed in thousands intovillages meant to house four or five hundred; and we admired theskill and devotion with which he had dealt with the difficulty, andmanaged to lodge his patients decently. 

We came back to the high-road, and he asked us if we should like tosee the church. It was about three o'clock, and in the low porch thecure was ringing the bell for vespers. We pushed open the innerdoors and went in. The church was without aisles, and down the navestood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets. In almost everyone lay a soldier--the doctor's "worst cases"--few of them wounded, the greater number stricken with fever, bronchitis, frost-bite, pleurisy, or some other form of trench-sickness too severe to permitof their being carried farther from the front. One or two headsturned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the mendid not move. 

The cure, meanwhile, passing around to the sacristy, had come outbefore the altar in his vestments, followed by a little whiteacolyte. A handful of women, probably the only "civil" inhabitantsleft, and some of the soldiers we had seen about the village, hadentered the church and stood together between the rows of cots; andthe service began. It was a sunless afternoon, and the picture wasall in monastic shades of black and white and ashen grey: the sickunder their earth-coloured blankets, their livid faces against thepillows, the black dresses of the women (they seemed all to be inmourning) and the silver haze floating out from the little acolyte'scenser. The only light in the scene--the candle-gleams on the altar, and their reflection in the embroideries of the cure's chasuble--werelike a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk. 

For a while the long Latin cadences sounded on through the church;but presently the cure took up in French the Canticle of the SacredHeart, composed during the war of 1870, and the little congregationjoined their trembling voices in the refrain:

 "_Sauvez, sauvez la France, Ne l'abandonnez pas!_"

The reiterated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in thenave: "_Sauvez, sauvez la France_, " the women wailed it near thealtar, the soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones; butthe bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more, as the dayfaded, the church looked like a quiet grave-yard in a battle-field. 

After we had left Sainte Menehould the sense of the nearness andall-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid. Every roadbranching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound:Varennes, le Four de Paris, le Bois de la Grurie, were not more thaneight or ten miles to the north. Along our own road the stream ofmotor-vans and the trains of ammunition grew longer and morefrequent. Once we passed a long line of "Seventy-fives" going singlefile up a hillside, farther on we watched a big detachment ofartillery galloping across a stretch of open country. The movementof supplies was continuous, and every village through which wepassed swarmed with soldiers busy loading or unloading the big vans, or clustered about the commissariat motors while hams and quartersof beef were handed out. As we approached Verdun the cannonade hadgrown louder again; and when we reached the walls of the town andpassed under the iron teeth of the portcullis we felt ourselves inone of the last outposts of a mighty line of defense. The desolationof Verdun is as impressive as the feverish activity of Chalons. The civil population was evacuated in September, and only a smallpercentage have returned. Nine-tenths of the shops are closed, andas the troops are nearly all in the trenches there is hardly anymovement in the streets. 

The first duty of the traveller who has successfully passed thechallenge of the sentinel at the gates is to climb the steep hill tothe citadel at the top of the town. Here the military authoritiesinspect one's papers, and deliver a "permis de sejour" which must beverified by the police before lodgings can be obtained. We found theprincipal hotel much less crowded than the Haute Mere-Dieu atChalons, though many of the officers of the garrison messthere. The whole atmosphere of the place was different: silent, concentrated, passive. To the chance observer, Verdun appears tolive only in its hospitals; and of these there are fourteen withinthe walls alone. As darkness fell, the streets became completelydeserted, and the cannonade seemed to grow nearer and moreincessant. That first night the hush was so intense that everyreverberation from the dark hills beyond the walls brought out inthe mind its separate vision of destruction; and then, just as thestrained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased. Amoment later, in a court below my windows, a pigeon began to coo;and all night long the two sounds strangely alternated... 

On entering the gates, the first sight to attract us had been acolony of roughly-built bungalows scattered over the miry slopes ofa little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by thesign: "Evacuation Hospital No. 6. " The next morning we went to visitit. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospitaluse, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon incharge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into adouble row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots, scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor; and the immenseward is warmed by a row of stoves down the central passage. In thebungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to bekept for a time before being transferred to the hospitals in thetown. In one bungalow an operating-room has been installed, inanother are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from thetrenches. Every possible device for the relief of the wounded hasbeen carefully thought out and intelligently applied by the surgeonin charge and the _infirmiere major_ who indefatigably seconds him. Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour, almost, on thedreadful August day when four thousand wounded lay on stretchersbetween the railway station and the gate of the little park acrossthe way; and it has gradually grown into the model of what such ahospital may become in skilful and devoted hands. 

Verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severelywounded who cannot be sent farther from the front. Among them St. Nicolas, in a big airy building on the Meuse, is an example of agreat French Military Hospital at its best; but I visited fewothers, for the main object of my journey was to get to some of thesecond-line ambulances beyond the town. The first we went to was ina small village to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy'slines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others. The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulancehad been installed at haphazard in such houses as the militaryauthorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms. The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms wereheated by stoves. The great need, here as everywhere, was forblankets and clean underclothing; for the wounded are brought infrom the front encrusted with frozen mud, and usually without havingwashed or changed for weeks. There are no women nurses in thesesecond-line ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemedintelligent, and anxious to do the best they could for their men inconditions of unusual hardship. The principal obstacle in their wayis the over-crowded state of the villages. Thousands of soldiers arecamped in all of them, in hygienic conditions that would be badenough for men in health; and there is also a great need for lightdiet, since the hospital commissariat of the front apparentlysupplies no invalid foods, and men burning with fever have to be fedon meat and vegetables. 

In the afternoon we started out again in a snow-storm, over adesolate rolling country to the south of Verdun. The wind blewfiercely across the whitened slopes, and no one was in sight but thesentries marching up and down the railway lines, and an occasionalcavalryman patrolling the lonely road. Nothing can exceed themournfulness of this depopulated land: we might have been wanderingover the wilds of Poland. We ran some twenty miles down thesteel-grey Meuse to a village about four miles west of Les Eparges, the spot where, for weeks past, a desperate struggle had been goingon. There must have been a lull in the fighting that day, for thecannon had ceased; but the scene at the point where we left themotor gave us the sense of being on the very edge of the conflict. The long straggling village lay on the river, and the trampling ofcavalry and the hauling of guns had turned the land about it into amud-flat. Before the primitive cottage where the doctor's office hadbeen installed were the motors of the surgeon and the medicalinspector who had accompanied us. Near by stood the usual flock ofgrey motor-vans, and all about was the coming and going of cavalryremounts, the riding up of officers, the unloading of supplies, theincessant activity of mud-splashed sergeants and men. 

The main ambulance was in a grange, of which the two stories hadbeen partitioned off into wards. Under the cobwebby rafters the menlay in rows on clean pallets, and big stoves made the rooms dry andwarm. But the great superiority of this ambulance was its nearnessto a canalboat which had been fitted up with hot douches. The boatwas spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shut off by a gay curtainof red-flowered chintz. Those curtains must do almost as much as thehot water to make over the _morale_ of the men: they were the mostcomforting sight of the day. 

Farther north, and on the other bank of the Meuse, lies anotherlarge village which has been turned into a colony of eclopes. Fifteen hundred sick or exhausted men are housed there--and thereare no hot douches or chintz curtains to cheer them! We were takenfirst to the church, a large featureless building at the head of thestreet. In the doorway our passage was obstructed by a mountain ofdamp straw which a gang of hostler-soldiers were pitch-forking outof the aisles. The interior of the church was dim and suffocating. Between the pillars hung screens of plaited straw, forming littleenclosures in each of which about a dozen sick men lay on morestraw, without mattresses or blankets. No beds, no tables, nochairs, no washing appliances--in their muddy clothes, as they comefrom the front, they are bedded down on the stone floor like cattletill they are well enough to go back to their job. It was a pitifulcontrast to the little church at Blercourt, with the altar lightstwinkling above the clean beds; and one wondered if even so near thefront, it had to be. "The African village, we call it, " one of ourcompanions said with a laugh: but the African village has blue skyover it, and a clear stream runs between its mud huts. 

We had been told at Sainte Menehould that, for military reasons, wemust follow a more southerly direction on our return toChalons; and when we left Verdun we took the road toBar-le-Duc. It runs southwest over beautiful broken country, untouched by war except for the fact that its villages, like all theothers in this region, are either deserted or occupied by troops. Aswe left Verdun behind us the sound of the cannon grew fainter anddied out, and we had the feeling that we were gradually passingbeyond the flaming boundaries into a more normal world; butsuddenly, at a cross-road, a sign-post snatched us back to war: _St. Mihiel_, 18 _Kilometres_. St. Mihiel, the danger-spot of the region, the weak joint in the armour! There it lay, up that harmless-lookingbye-road, not much more than ten miles away--a ten minutes' dashwould have brought us into the thick of the grey coats and spikedhelmets! The shadow of that sign-post followed us for miles, darkening the landscape like the shadow from a racing storm-cloud. 

Bar-le-Duc seemed unaware of the cloud. The charming old town was inits normal state of provincial apathy: few soldiers were about, andhere at last civilian life again predominated. After a few days onthe edge of the war, in that intermediate region under its solemnspell, there is something strangely lowering to the mood in thefirst sight of a busy unconscious community. One looks instinctively, in the eyes of the passers by, for a reflection of that other vision, and feels diminished by contact with people going so indifferentlyabout their business. 

A little way beyond Bar-le-Duc we came on another phase of thewar-vision, for our route lay exactly in the track of the Augustinvasion, and between Bar-le-Duc and Vitry-le-Francois the high-roadis lined with ruined towns. The first we came to was Laimont, alarge village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it; then comesRevigny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completelylevelled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacleof more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding betweenscorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop-fronts, handsome doorways, the colonnaded court of a public building. A fewmiles farther lies the most piteous of the group: the village ofHeiltz-le-Maurupt, once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, nowan ugly waste like the others, and with a little church so strippedand wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside likea human victim. 

In this part of the country, which is one of many cross-roads, webegan to have unexpected difficulty in finding our way, for thenames and distances on the milestones have all been effaced, thesign-posts thrown down and the enamelled _plaques_ on the houses atthe entrance to the villages removed. One report has it that thisprecaution was taken by the inhabitants at the approach of theinvading army, another that the Germans themselves demolished thesign-posts and plastered over the mile-stones in order to paint onthem misleading and encouraging distances. The result is extremelybewildering, for, all the villages being either in ruins oruninhabited, there is no one to question but the soldiers one meets, and their answer is almost invariably "We don't know--we don'tbelong here. " One is in luck if one comes across a sentinel whoknows the name of the village he is guarding. 

It was the strangest of sensations to find ourselves in a chartlesswilderness within sixty or seventy miles of Paris, and to wander, aswe did, for hours across a high heathery waste, with wide bluedistances to north and south, and in all the scene not a landmark bymeans of which we could make a guess at our whereabouts. One of ourhaphazard turns at last brought us into a muddy bye-road with longlines of "Seventy-fives" ranged along its banks like grey ant-eatersin some monstrous menagerie. A little farther on we came to abemired village swarming with artillery and cavalry, and foundourselves in the thick of an encampment just on the move. It seemsimprobable that we were meant to be there, for our arrival causedsuch surprise that no sentry remembered to challenge us, andobsequiously saluting _sous-officiers_ instantly cleared a way forthe motor. So, by a happy accident, we caught one more war-picture, all of vehement movement, as we passed out of the zone of war. 

We were still very distinctly in it on returning to Chalons, which, if it had seemed packed on our previous visit, was nowquivering and cracking with fresh crowds. The stir about thefountain, in the square before the Haute Mere-Dieu, was moremelodramatic than ever. Every one was in a hurry, every one bootedand mudsplashed, and spurred or sworded or despatch-bagged, orsomehow labelled as a member of the huge military beehive. Theprivilege of telephoning and telegraphing being denied to civiliansin the war-zone, it was ominous to arrive at night-fall on such acrowded scene, and we were not surprised to be told that there wasnot a room left at the Haute Mere-Dieu, and that even the sofas inthe reading-room had been let for the night. At every other inn inthe town we met with the same answer; and finally we decided to askpermission to go on as far as Epernay, about twelve miles off. AtHead-quarters we were told that our request could not be granted. Nomotors are allowed to circulate after night-fall in the zone of war, and the officer charged with the distribution of motor-permitspointed out that, even if an exception were made in our favour, weshould probably be turned back by the first sentinel we met, only tofind ourselves unable to re-enter Chalons without anotherpermit! This alternative was so alarming that we began to thinkourselves relatively lucky to be on the right side of the gates; andwe went back to the Haute Mere-Dieu to squeeze into a crowded cornerof the restaurant for dinner. The hope that some one might havesuddenly left the hotel in the interval was not realized; but afterdinner we learned from the landlady that she had certain roomspermanently reserved for the use of the Staff, and that, as theserooms had not yet been called for that evening, we might possibly beallowed to occupy them for the night. 

At Chalons the Head-quarters are in the Prefecture, a coldlyhandsome building of the eighteenth century, and there, in amajestic stone vestibule, beneath the gilded ramp of a great festalstaircase, we waited in anxious suspense, among the orderlies and_estafettes_, while our unusual request was considered. The resultof the deliberation, was an expression of regret: nothing could bedone for us, as officers might at any moment arrive from the GeneralHead-quarters and require the rooms. It was then past nine o'clock, and bitterly cold--and we began to wonder. Finally the politeofficer who had been charged to dismiss us, moved to compassion atour plight, offered to give us a _laissez-passer_ back to Paris. ButParis was about a hundred and twenty-five miles off, the night wasdark, the cold was piercing--and at every cross-road and railwaycrossing a sentinel would have to be convinced of our right to gofarther. We remembered the warning given us earlier in the evening, and, declining the offer, went out again into the cold. And justthen chance took pity on us. In the restaurant we had run across afriend attached to the Staff, and now, meeting him again in thedepth of our difficulty, we were told of lodgings to be found nearby. He could not take us there, for it was past the hour when he hada right to be out, or we either, for that matter, since curfewsounds at nine at Chalons. But he told us how to find our waythrough the maze of little unlit streets about the Cathedral;standing there beside the motor, in the icy darkness of the desertedsquare, and whispering hastily, as he turned to leave us: "You oughtnot to be out so late; but the word tonight is _Jena_. When you giveit to the chauffeur, be sure no sentinel overhears you. " With thathe was up the wide steps, the glass doors had closed on him, and Istood there in the pitch-black night, suddenly unable to believethat I was I, or Chalons Chalons, or that a young man who in Parisdrops in to dine with me and talk over new books and plays, had beenwhispering a password in my ear to carry me unchallenged to a housea few streets away! The sense of unreality produced by that one wordwas so overwhelming that for a blissful moment the whole fabric ofwhat I had been experiencing, the whole huge and oppressive andunescapable fact of the war, slipped away like a torn cobweb, andI seemed to see behind it the reassuring face of things as they usedto be. 

The next morning dispelled that vision. We woke to a noise of gunscloser and more incessant than even the first night's cannonade atVerdun; and when we went out into the streets it seemed as if, overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground. Waylaid at onecorner after another by the long tide of troops streaming outthrough the town to the northern suburbs, we saw in turn all thevarious divisions of the unfolding frieze: first the infantry andartillery, the sappers and miners, the endless trains of guns andammunition, then the long line of grey supply-waggons, and finallythe stretcher-bearers following the Red Cross ambulances. All thestory of a day's warfare was written in the spectacle of thatendless silent flow to the front: and we were to read it again, afew days later, in the terse announcement of "renewed activity"about Suippes, and of the bloody strip of ground gained betweenPerthes and Beausejour. 

IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES

NANCY, May 13th, 1915

Beside me, on my writing-table, stands a bunch of peonies, the jollyround-faced pink peonies of the village garden. They were pickedthis afternoon in the garden of a ruined house at Gerbeviller--ahouse so calcined and convulsed that, for epithets dire enough tofit it, one would have to borrow from a Hebrew prophet gloating overthe fall of a city of idolaters. 

Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets andstreets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread outin its last writhings; and before the black holes that were homes, along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we haveseen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked andwatered gardens. My pink peonies were not introduced to point thestale allegory of unconscious Nature veiling Man's havoc: they areput on my first page as a symbol of conscious human energy comingback to replant and rebuild the wilderness... 

Last March, in the Argonne, the towns we passed through seemed quitedead; but yesterday new life was budding everywhere. We werefollowing another track of the invasion, one of the hugetiger-scratches that the Beast flung over the land last September, between Vitry-le-Francois and Bar-le-Duc. Etrepy, Pargny, Sermaize-les-Bains, Andernay, are the names of this group ofvictims: Sermaize a pretty watering-place along wooded slopes, theothers large villages fringed with farms, and all now merescrofulous blotches on the soft spring scene. But in many we heardthe sound of hammers, and saw brick-layers and masons at work. Evenin the most mortally stricken there were signs of returning life:children playing among the stone heaps, and now and then a cautiousolder face peering out of a shed propped against the ruins. In oneplace an ancient tram-car had been converted into a cafe andlabelled: "Au Restaurant des Ruines"; and everywhere between thecalcined walls the carefully combed gardens aligned their radishesand lettuce-tops. 

From Bar-le-Duc we turned northeast, and as we entered the forest ofCommercy we began to hear again the Voice of the Front. It was thewarmest and stillest of May days, and in the clearing where westopped for luncheon the familiar boom broke with a magnifiedloudness on the noonday hush. In the intervals between the crashesthere was not a sound but the gnats' hum in the moist sunshine andthe dryad-call of the cuckoo from greener depths. At the end of thelane a few cavalrymen rode by in shabby blue, their horses' flanksglinting like ripe chestnuts. They stopped to chat and accept somecigarettes, and when they had trotted off again the gnat, the cuckooand the cannon took up their trio... 

The town of Commercy looked so undisturbed that the cannonaderocking it might have been some unheeded echo of the hills. Thesefrontier towns inured to the clash of war go about their businesswith what one might call stolidity if there were not finer, andtruer, names for it. In Commercy, to be sure, there is littlebusiness to go about just now save that connected with the militaryoccupation; but the peaceful look of the sunny sleepy streets madeone doubt if the fighting line was really less than five miles away... Yet the French, with an odd perversion of race-vanity, stillpersist in speaking of themselves as a "nervous and impressionable"people!

This afternoon, on the road to Gerbeviller, we were again in thetrack of the September invasion. Over all the slopes now cool withspring foliage the battle rocked backward and forward during thoseburning autumn days; and every mile of the struggle has left itsghastly traces. The fields are full of wooden crosses which theploughshare makes a circuit to avoid; many of the villages have beenpartly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks thenucleus of a fiercer struggle. But the landscape, in its first sweetleafiness, is so alive with ploughing and sowing and all the naturaltasks of spring, that the war scars seem like traces of a long-pastwoe; and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight ofGerbeviller that we breathed again the choking air of presenthorror. 

Gerbeviller, stretched out at ease on its slopes above the Meurthe, must have been a happy place to live in. The streets slanted upbetween scattered houses in gardens to the great Louis XIVchateau above the town and the church that balanced it. Somuch one can reconstruct from the first glimpse across the valley;but when one enters the town all perspective is lost in chaos. Gerbeviller has taken to herself the title of "the martyr town"; anhonour to which many sister victims might dispute her claim! But asa sensational image of havoc it seems improbable that any cansurpass her. Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited upfrom the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she hadperished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado; and itfills one with a cold despair to know that this double destructionwas no accident of nature but a piously planned and methodicallyexecuted human deed. From the opposite heights the poor littlegarden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress; then, when theGermans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at thenicely-timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which thefearless Teuton carries about for his land-_Lusitanias_ was tossedon each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders--almostapologetically for German thoroughness--that any of the human ratsescaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted onlurking bayonets. 

One old woman, hearing her son's deathcry, rashly looked out of herdoor. A bullet instantly laid her low among her phloxes and lilies;and there, in her little garden, her dead body was dishonoured. Itseemed singularly appropriate, in such a scene, to read above ablackened doorway the sign: "Monuments Funebres, " and to observethat the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle ofa lane called "La Ruelle des Orphelines. "

At one end of the main street of Gerbeviller there once stood acharming house, of the sober old Lorraine pattern, with low door, deep roof and ample gables: it was in the garden of this house thatmy pink peonies were picked for me by its owner, Mr. Liegeay, aformer Mayor of Gerbeviller, who witnessed all the horrors of theinvasion. 

Mr. Liegeay is now living in a neighbour's cellar, his own beingfully occupied by the debris of his charming house. He told us thestory of the three days of the German occupation; how he and hiswife and niece, and the niece's babies, took to their cellar whilethe Germans set the house on fire, and how, peering through a doorinto the stable-yard, they saw that the soldiers suspected they werewithin and were trying to get at them. Luckily the incendiaries hadheaped wood and straw all round the outside of the house, and theblaze was so hot that they could not reach the door. Between thearch of the doorway and the door itself was a half-moon opening; andMr. Liegeay and his family, during three days and three nights, broke up all the barrels in the cellar and threw the bits outthrough the opening to feed the fire in the yard. 

Finally, on the third day, when they began to be afraid that theruins of the house would fall in on them, they made a dash forsafety. The house was on the edge of the town, and the women andchildren managed to get away into the country; but Mr. Liegeay wassurprised in his garden by a German soldier. He made a rush for thehigh wall of the adjoining cemetery, and scrambling over it slippeddown between the wall and a big granite cross. The cross was coveredwith the hideous wire and glass wreaths dear to French mourners; andwith these opportune mementoes Mr. Liegeay roofed himself in, lyingwedged in his narrow hiding-place from three in the afternoon tillnight, and listening to the voices of the soldiers who were huntingfor him among the grave-stones. Luckily it was their last day atGerbeviller, and the German retreat saved his life. 

Even in Gerbeviller we saw no worse scene of destruction than theparticular spot in which the ex-mayor stood while he told his story. He looked about him at the heaps of blackened brick and contortediron. "This was my dining-room, " he said. "There were some good oldpaneling on the walls, and some fine prints that had been awedding-present to my grand-father. " He led us into another blackpit. "This was our sitting-room: you see what a view we had. " Hesighed, and added philosophically: "I suppose we were too well off. I even had an electric light out there on the terrace, to read mypaper by on summer evenings. Yes, we were too well off... " Thatwas all. 

Meanwhile all the town had been red with horror--flame and shot andtortures unnameable; and at the other end of the long street, awoman, a Sister of Charity, had held her own like Soeur Gabrielle atClermont-en-Argonne, gathering her flock of old men and childrenabout her and interposing her short stout figure between them andthe fury of the Germans. We found her in her Hospice, a ruddy, indomitable woman who related with a quiet indignation morethrilling than invective the hideous details of the bloody threedays; but that already belongs to the past, and at present she ismuch more concerned with the task of clothing and feedingGerbeviller. For two thirds of the population have already "comehome"--that is what they call the return to this desert! "You see, "Soeur Julie explained, "there are the crops to sow, the gardens totend. They had to come back. The government is building woodenshelters for them; and people will surely send us beds and linen. "(Of course they would, one felt as one listened!) "Heavy boots, too--boots for field-labourers. We want them for women as well asmen--like these. " Soeur Julie, smiling, turned up a hob-nailed sole. "I have directed all the work on our Hospice farm myself. All thewomen are working in the fields--we must take the place of the men. "And I seemed to see my pink peonies flowering in the very prints ofher sturdy boots!

May 14th. 

Nancy, the most beautiful town in France, has never been asbeautiful as now. Coming back to it last evening from a round ofruins one felt as if the humbler Sisters sacrificed to spare it werepleading with one not to forget them in the contemplation of itsdearly-bought perfection. 

The last time I looked out on the great architectural setting of thePlace Stanislas was on a hot July evening, the evening of theNational Fete. The square and the avenues leading to itswarmed with people, and as darkness fell the balanced lines ofarches and palaces sprang out in many coloured light. Garlands oflamps looped the arcades leading into the Place de la Carriere, peacock-coloured fires flared from the Arch of Triumph, long curvesof radiance beat like wings over the thickets of the park, thesculptures of the fountains, the brown-and-gold foliation of JeanDamour's great gates; and under this roofing of light was the murmurof a happy crowd carelessly celebrating the tradition ofhalf-forgotten victories. 

Now, at sunset, all life ceases in Nancy and veil after veil ofsilence comes down on the deserted Place and its empty perspectives. Last night by nine the few lingering lights in the streets had beenput out, every window was blind, and the moonless night lay over thecity like a canopy of velvet. Then, from some remote point, the arcof a search-light swept the sky, laid a fugitive pallor on darkenedpalace-fronts, a gleam of gold on invisible gates, trembled acrossthe black vault and vanished, leaving it still blacker. When we cameout of the darkened restaurant on the corner of the square, and theiron curtain of the entrance had been hastily dropped on us, westood in such complete night that it took a waiter's friendly handto guide us to the curbstone. Then, as we grew used to the darkness, we saw it lying still more densely under the colonnade of the Placede la Carriere and the clipped trees beyond. The ordered masses ofarchitecture became august, the spaces between them immense, and theblack sky faintly strewn with stars seemed to overarch an enchantedcity. Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath ofair drew under the arches. And suddenly, through the dumb night, thesound of the cannon began. 

May 14th. 

Luncheon with the General Staff in an old bourgeois house of alittle town as sleepy as "Cranford. " In the warm walled gardenseverything was blooming at once: laburnums, lilacs, red hawthorn, Banksia roses and all the pleasant border plants that go with boxand lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the springroll-call with such a rush! Upstairs, in the Empire bedroom whichthe General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruousto see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps, trench-plans, aeroplane photographs and all the documentation ofmodern war. Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, andone felt, close by, behind the walls of other gardens, theuntroubled continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life. 

We started early for Mousson on the Moselle, the ruinedhill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at itsfoot. Our road ran below the long range of the "Grand Couronne, " theline of hills curving southeast from Pont-a-Mousson to St. Nicolas du Port. All through this pleasant broken country the battleshook and swayed last autumn; but few signs of those days are leftexcept the wooden crosses in the fields. No troops are visible, andthe pictures of war that made the Argonne so tragic last March arereplaced by peaceful rustic scenes. On the way to Mousson the roadis overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about ahill-top. It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the Germaninvasion was finally checked and flung back; and the Muse of Historypoints out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaftinscribed: _Here, in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonichordes. _

A little way up the ascent to Mousson we left the motor behind a bitof rising ground. The road is raked by the German lines, and straypedestrians (unless in a group) are less liable than a motor to havea shell spent on them. We climbed under a driving grey sky whichswept gusts of rain across our road. In the lee of the castle westopped to look down at the valley of the Moselle, the slate roofsof Pont-a-Mousson and the broken bridge which once linkedtogether the two sides of the town. Nothing but the wreck of thebridge showed that we were on the edge of war. The wind was too highfor firing, and we saw no reason for believing that the wood justbehind the Hospice roof at our feet was seamed with German trenchesand bristling with guns, or that from every slope across the valleythe eye of the cannon sleeplessly glared. But there the Germanswere, drawing an iron ring about three sides of the watch-tower; andas one peered through an embrasure of the ancient walls onegradually found one's self re-living the sensations of the littlemediaeval burgh as it looked out on some earlier circle ofbesiegers. The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacingthe invisibility of the foe became. "_There_ they are--and_there_--and _there. _" We strained our eyes obediently, but saw onlycalm hillsides, dozing farms. It was as if the earth itself were theenemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades. Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning, like the work of huge ants who had scarred it with criss-crossridges. We were told that these were French trenches, but theylooked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp. 

Suddenly an officer, pointing to the west of the trenched hill said:"Do you see that farm?" It lay just below, near the river, and soclose that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animalsin the farm-yard, if there had been any; but the whole place seemedto be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. "_They are there_, " theofficer said; and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glasssuddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate. The loudestcannonade had not made "them" seem as real as that!... 

At this point the military lines and the old political frontiereverywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that concealthe German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon. Itwas Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples andtowers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky... 

Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to theriver and entered Pont-a-Mousson. It was by mere meteorological goodluck that we got there, for if the winds had been asleep the gunswould have been awake, and when they wake poor Pont-a-Mousson is notat home to visitors. One understood why as one stood in the riversidegarden of the great Premonstratensian Monastery which is now thehospital and the general asylum of the town. Between the clippedlimes and formal borders the German shells had scooped out threeor four "dreadful hollows, " in one of which, only last week, alittle girl found her death; and the facade of the building ispock-marked by shot and disfigured with gaping holes. Yet in thisprecarious shelter Sister Theresia, of the same indomitable breed asthe Sisters of Clermont and Gerbeviller, has gathered a miscellaneousflock of soldiers wounded in the trenches, civilians shattered by thebombardment, eclopes, old women and children: all the human wreckageof this storm-beaten point of the front. Sister Theresia seems in nowise disconcerted by the fact that the shells continually play overher roof. The building is immense and spreading, and when one wingis damaged she picks up her proteges and trots them off, bed andbaggage, to another. "_Je promene mes malades_, " she said calmly, as if boasting of the varied accommodation of an ultra-modernhospital, as she led us through vaulted and stuccoed galleries wherecaryatid-saints look down in plaster pomp on the rows ofbrown-blanketed pallets and the long tables at which haggard eclopeswere enjoying their evening soup. 

May 15th. 

I have seen the happiest being on earth: a man who has found hisjob. 

This afternoon we motored southwest of Nancy to a little placecalled Menil-sur-Belvitte. The name is not yet intimately known tohistory, but there are reasons why it deserves to be, and in oneman's mind it already is. Menil-sur-Belvitte is a village on theedge of the Vosges. It is badly battered, for awful fighting tookplace there in the first month of the war. The houses lie in ahollow, and just beyond it the ground rises and spreads into aplateau waving with wheat and backed by wooded slopes--the ideal"battleground" of the history-books. And here a real above-groundbattle of the old obsolete kind took place, and the French, drivingthe Germans back victoriously, fell by thousands in the trampledwheat. 

The church of Menil is a ruin, but the parsonage still stands--aplain little house at the end of the street; and here the curereceived us, and led us into a room which he has turned into achapel. The chapel is also a war museum, and everything in it hassomething to do with the battle that took place among thewheat-fields. The candelabra on the altar are made of "Seventy-five"shells, the Virgin's halo is composed of radiating bayonets, thewalls are intricately adorned with German trophies and Frenchrelics, and on the ceiling the cure has had painted a kind ofzodiacal chart of the whole region, in which Menil-sur-Belvitte'shandful of houses figures as the central orb of the system, andVerdun, Nancy, Metz, and Belfort as its humble satellites. But thechapel-museum is only a surplus expression of the cure's impassioneddedication to the dead. His real work has been done on thebattle-field, where row after row of graves, marked and listed assoon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetricallydisposed, planted with flowers and young firs, and marked by thenames and death-dates of the fallen. As he led us from one of theseenclosures to another his face was lit with the flame of a gratifiedvocation. This particular man was made to do this particular thing:he is a born collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper. In the hallof the "presbytere" hangs a case of carefully-mounted butterflies, the result, no doubt, of an earlier passion for collecting. His"specimens" have changed, that is all: he has passed frombutterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary Psyche. 

On the way to Menil we stopped at the village of Crevic. The Germanswere there in August, but the place is untouched--except for onehouse. That house, a large one, standing in a park at one end of thevillage, was the birth-place and home of General Lyautey, one ofFrance's best soldiers, and Germany's worst enemy in Africa. It isno exaggeration to say that last August General Lyautey, by hispromptness and audacity, saved Morocco for France. The Germans knowit, and hate him; and as soon as the first soldiers reachedCrevic--so obscure and imperceptible a spot that even Germanomniscience might have missed it--the officer in command asked forGeneral Lyautey's house, went straight to it, had all the papers, portraits, furniture and family relics piled in a bonfire in thecourt, and then burnt down the house. As we sat in the neglectedpark with the plaintive ruin before us we heard from the gardenerthis typical tale of German thoroughness and German chivalry. It iscorroborated by the fact that not another house in Crevic wasdestroyed. 

May 16th. 

About two miles from the German frontier (_frontier_ just here aswell as front) an isolated hill rises out of the Lorraine meadows. East of it, a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbonis the boundary between Empire and Republic. On such a clear day asthis the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From itsgrassy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching theeast for the danger speck; and the circumference of the hill isfurrowed by a deep trench--a "bowel, " rather--winding invisibly fromone subterranean observation post to another. In each of theseearthly warrens (ingeniously wattled, roofed and iron-sheeted) standtwo or three artillery officers with keen quiet faces, directing bytelephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods fouror five miles away. Interesting as the place was, the men who livedthere interested me far more. They obviously belonged to differentclasses, and had received a different social education; but theirmental and moral fraternity was complete. They were all fairlyyoung, and their faces had the look that war has given to Frenchfaces: a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will andsobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so benton the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to thevanishing point of the great perspective. 

From this vigilant height--one of the intentest eyes open on thefrontier--we went a short distance down the hillside to a villageout of range of the guns, where the commanding officer gave us teain a charming old house with a terraced garden full of flowers andpuppies. Below the terrace, lost Lorraine stretched away to her blueheights, a vision of summer peace: and just above us the unsleepinghill kept watch, its signal-wires trembling night and day. It wasone of the intervals of rest and sweetness when the whole horribleblack business seems to press most intolerably on the nerves. 

Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed adark blur in our bird's-eye view of the plain. We passed into theforest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts. Onall sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branchedand sodded and leafy that they seemed like some transition formbetween tree and house. We were in one of the so-called "villagesnegres" of the second-line trenches, the jolly little settlements towhich the troops retire after doing their shift under fire. Thisparticular colony has been developed to an extreme degree of comfortand safety. The houses are partly underground, connected by deepwinding "bowels" over which light rustic bridges have been thrown, and so profoundly roofed with sods that as much of them as showsabove ground is shell-proof. Yet they are real houses, with realdoors and windows under their grass-eaves, real furniture inside, and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors. In theColonel's bungalow a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on thetable, and everywhere we saw the same neatness and order, the sameamused pride in the look of things. The men were dining at longtrestle-tables under the trees; tired, unshaven men in shabbyuniforms of all cuts and almost every colour. They were off duty, relaxed, in a good humour; but every face had the look of the faceswatching on the hill-top. Wherever I go among these men of the frontI have the same impression: the impression that the absorbingundivided thought of the Defense of France lives in the heart andbrain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain oftheir chief. 

We walked a dozen yards down the road and came to the edge of theforest. A wattled palisade bounded it, and through a gap in thepalisade we looked out across a field to the roofs of a quietvillage a mile away. I went out a few steps into the field and wasabruptly pulled back. "Take care--those are the trenches!" Whatlooked like a ridge thrown up by a plough was the enemy's line; andin the quiet village French cannon watched. Suddenly, as we stoodthere, they woke, and at the same moment we heard the unmistakableGr-r-r of an aeroplane and saw a Bird of Evil high up against theblue. Snap, snap, snap barked the mitrailleuse on the hill, thesoldiers jumped from their wine and strained their eyes through thetrees, and the Taube, finding itself the centre of so muchattention, turned grey tail and swished away to the concealingclouds. 

May 17th. 

Today we started with an intenser sense of adventure. Hitherto wehad always been told beforehand where we were going and how much wewere to be allowed to see; but now we were being launched into theunknown. Beyond a certain point all was conjecture--we knew onlythat what happened after that would depend on the good-will of aColonel of Chasseurs-a-pied whom we were to go a long way tofind, up into the folds of the mountains on our southeast horizon. 

We picked up a staff-officer at Head-quarters and flew on to abattered town on the edge of the hills. From there we wound upthrough a narrowing valley, under wooded cliffs, to a littlesettlement where the Colonel of the Brigade was to be found. Therewas a short conference between the Colonel and our staff-officer, and then we annexed a Captain of Chasseurs and spun away again. Ourroad lay through a town so exposed that our companion fromHead-quarters suggested the advisability of avoiding it; but ourguide hadn't the heart to inflict such a disappointment on his newacquaintances. "Oh, we won't stop the motor--we'll just dashthrough, " he said indulgently; and in the excess of his indulgencehe even permitted us to dash slowly. 

Oh, that poor town--when we reached it, along a road ploughed withfresh obus-holes, I didn't want to stop the motor; I wanted to hurryon and blot the picture from my memory! It was doubly sad to look atbecause of the fact that it wasn't _quite dead;_ faint spasms oflife still quivered through it. A few children played in the ravagedstreets; a few pale mothers watched them from cellar doorways. "Theyoughtn't to be here, " our guide explained; "but about a hundred andfifty begged so hard to stay that the General gave them leave. Theofficer in command has an eye on them, and whenever he gives thesignal they dive down into their burrows. He says they are perfectlyobedient. It was he who asked that they might stay... "

Up and up into the hills. The vision of human pain and ruin was lostin beauty. We were among the firs, and the air was full of balm. Themossy banks gave out a scent of rain, and little water-falls fromthe heights set the branches trembling over secret pools. At eachturn of the road, forest, and always more forest, climbing with usas we climbed, and dropped away from us to narrow valleys thatconverged on slate-blue distances. At one of these turns we overtooka company of soldiers, spade on shoulder and bags of tools acrosstheir backs--"trench-workers" swinging up to the heights to which wewere bound. Life must be a better thing in this crystal air than inthe mud-welter of the Argonne and the fogs of the North; and thesemen's faces were fresh with wind and weather. 

Higher still ... And presently a halt on a ridge, in another"black village, " this time almost a town! The soldiers gatheredround us as the motor stopped--throngs of chasseurs-a-pied infaded, trench-stained uniforms--for few visitors climb to thispoint, and their pleasure at the sight of new faces was presentlyexpressed in a large "_Vive l'Amerique!_" scrawled on the door ofthe car. _L'Amerique_ was glad and proud to be there, and instantlyconscious of breathing an air saturated with courage and the doggeddetermination to endure. The men were all reservists: that is tosay, mostly married, and all beyond the first fighting age. For manymonths there has not been much active work along this front, nogreat adventure to rouse the blood and wing the imagination: it hasjust been month after month of monotonous watching and holding on. And the soldiers' faces showed it: there was no light of headyenterprise in their eyes, but the look of men who knew their job, had thought it over, and were there to hold their bit of France tillthe day of victory or extermination. 

Meanwhile, they had made the best of the situation and turned theirquarters into a forest colony that would enchant any normal boy. Their village architecture was more elaborate than any we had yetseen. In the Colonel's "dugout" a long table decked with lilacs andtulips was spread for tea. In other cheery catacombs we found neatrows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires. Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture andhousehold decoration. Farther down the road a path betweenfir-boughs led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of undergroundcompactness. While we chatted with the surgeon a soldier came infrom the trenches: an elderly, bearded man, with a good averagecivilian face--the kind that one runs against by hundreds in anyFrench crowd. He had a scalp-wound which had just been dressed, andwas very pale. The Colonel stopped to ask a few questions, and then, turning to him, said: "Feeling rather better now?"

"Yes, sir. "

"Good. In a day or two you'll be thinking about going back to thetrenches, eh?"

"_I'm going now, sir. _" It was said quite simply, and received inthe same way. "Oh, all right, " the Colonel merely rejoined; but helaid his hand on the man's shoulder as we went out. 

Our next visit was to a sod-thatched hut, "At the sign of theAmbulant Artisans, " where two or three soldiers were modelling andchiselling all kinds of trinkets from the aluminum of enemy shells. One of the ambulant artisans was just finishing a ring withbeautifully modelled fauns' heads, another offered me a"Pickelhaube" small enough for Mustard-seed's wear, but complete inevery detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an Imperialpfennig. There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at thefront, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is aproof of the sureness of French taste; but the two we visitedhappened to be Paris jewellers, for whom "artisan" was really toomodest a pseudonym. Officers and men were evidently proud of theirwork, and as they stood hammering away in their cramped smithy, ared gleam lighting up the intentness of their faces, they seemed tobe beating out the cheerful rhythm of "I too will something make, and joy in the making. "... 

Up the hillside, in deeper shadow, was another little structure; awooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles andflowers. Here mass is said by one of the conscript priests of theregiment, while his congregation kneel between the fir-trunks, giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral-forest. Near by wasthe grave-yard, where day by day these quiet elderly men lay theircomrades, the _peres de famille_ who don't go back. The care of thiswoodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they havespent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of thegraves. Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover them, and when some favourite comrade goes, the men scorning ephemeraltributes, club together to buy a monstrous indestructible wreathwith emblazoned streamers. It was near the end of the afternoon, andmany soldiers were strolling along the paths between the graves. "It's their favourite walk at this hour, " the Colonel said. Hestopped to look down on a grave smothered in beady tokens, the graveof the last pal to fall. "He was mentioned in the Order of the Day, "the Colonel explained; and the group of soldiers standing nearlooked at us proudly, as if sharing their comrade's honour, andwanting to be sure that we understood the reason of their pride... 

"And now, " said our Captain of Chasseurs, "that you've seen thesecond-line trenches, what do you say to taking a look at thefirst?"

We followed him to a point higher up the hill, where we plunged intoa deep ditch of red earth--the "bowel" leading to the first lines. It climbed still higher, under the wet firs, and then, turning, dipped over the edge and began to wind in sharp loops down the otherside of the ridge. Down we scrambled, single file, our chins on alevel with the top of the passage, the close green covert above us. The "bowel" went twisting down more and more sharply into a deepravine; and presently, at a bend, we came to a fir-thatched outlook, where a soldier stood with his back to us, his eye glued to apeep-hole in the wattled wall. Another turn, and another outlook;but here it was the iron-rimmed eye of the mitrailleuse that staredacross the ravine. By this time we were within a hundred yards or soof the German lines, hidden, like ours, on the other side of thenarrowing hollow; and as we stole down and down, the hush andsecrecy of the scene, and the sense of that imminent lurking hatredonly a few branch-lengths away, seemed to fill the silence withmysterious pulsations. Suddenly a sharp noise broke on them: the rapof a rifle-shot against a tree-trunk a few yards ahead. 

"Ah, the sharp-shooter, " said our guide. "No more talking, please--he's over there, in a tree somewhere, and whenever he hearsvoices he fires. Some day we shall spot his tree. "

We went on in silence to a point where a few soldiers were sittingon a ledge of rock in a widening of the "bowel. " They looked asquiet as if they had been waiting for their bocks before a Boulevardcafe. 

"Not beyond, please, " said the officer, holding me back; and Istopped. 

Here we were, then, actually and literally in the first lines! Theknowledge made one's heart tick a little; but, except for anothershot or two from our arboreal listener, and the motionlessintentness of the soldier's back at the peep-hole, there was nothingto show that we were not a dozen miles away. 

Perhaps the thought occurred to our Captain of Chasseurs; for justas I was turning back he said with his friendliest twinkle: "Do youwant awfully to go a little farther? Well, then, come on. "

We went past the soldiers sitting on the ledge and stole down anddown, to where the trees ended at the bottom of the ravine. Thesharp-shooter had stopped firing, and nothing disturbed the leafysilence but an intermittent drip of rain. We were at the end of theburrow, and the Captain signed to me that I might take a cautiouspeep round its corner. I looked out and saw a strip of intenselygreen meadow just under me, and a wooded cliff rising abruptly onits other side. That was all. The wooded cliff swarmed with "them, "and a few steps would have carried us across the interval; yet allabout us was silence, and the peace of the forest. Again, for aminute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power ofevil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriolof hate. Then the reaction of the unbelief set in, and I felt myselfin a harmless ordinary glen, like a million others on an untroubledearth. We turned and began to climb again, loop by loop, up the"bowel"--we passed the lolling soldiers, the silent mitrailleuse, wecame again to the watcher at his peep-hole. He heard us, let theofficer pass, and turned his head with a little sign ofunderstanding. 

"Do you want to look down?"

He moved a step away from his window. The look-out projected overthe ravine, raking its depths; and here, with one's eye to theleaf-lashed hole, one saw at last ... Saw, at the bottom of theharmless glen, half way between cliff and cliff, a grey uniformhuddled in a dead heap. "He's been there for days: they can't fetchhim away, " said the watcher, regluing his eye to the hole; and itwas almost a relief to find it was after all a tangible enemy hiddenover there across the meadow... 

The sun had set when we got back to our starting-point in theunderground village. The chasseurs-a-pied were lounging alongthe roadside and standing in gossiping groups about the motor. Itwas long since they had seen faces from the other life, the lifethey had left nearly a year earlier and had not been allowed to goback to for a day; and under all their jokes and good-humour theirfarewell had a tinge of wistfulness. But one felt that this fugitivereminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like adream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality: thebusiness of holding their bit of France. 

It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier'ssingle-mindedness is so strong in all who have had even a glimpse ofthe front; perhaps it is gathered less from what the men say thanfrom the look in their eyes. Even while they are acceptingcigarettes and exchanging trench-jokes, the look is there; and whenone comes on them unaware it is there also. In the dusk of theforest that look followed us down the mountain; and as we skirtedthe edge of the ravine between the armies, we felt that on the farside of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and onthe near side the men who had been made by it. 

IN THE NORTH

June 19th, 1915. 

On the way from Doullens to Montreuil-sur-Mer, on a shining summerafternoon. A road between dusty hedges, choked, literally strangled, by a torrent of westward-streaming troops of all arms. Every fewminutes there would come a break in the flow, and our motor wouldwriggle through, advance a few yards, and be stopped again by awidening of the torrent that jammed us into the ditch and splashed adazzle of dust into our eyes. The dust was stifling--but through it, what a sight!

Standing up in the car and looking back, we watched the river of warwind toward us. Cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers andminers, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers, they swepton as smoothly as if in holiday order. Through the dust, the sunpicked out the flash of lances and the gloss of chargers' flanks, flushed rows and rows of determined faces, found the least touch ofgold on faded uniforms, silvered the sad grey of mitrailleuses andmunition waggons. Close as the men were, they seemed allegoricallysplendid: as if, under the arch of the sunset, we had been watchingthe whole French army ride straight into glory... 

Finally we left the last detachment behind, and had the country toourselves. The disfigurement of war has not touched the fields ofArtois. The thatched farmhouses dozed in gardens full of roses andhollyhocks, and the hedges above the duck-ponds were weighed downwith layers of elder-blossom. On all sides wheat-fields skirted withwoodland went billowing away under the breezy light that seemed tocarry a breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up anddown as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such asense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beautyover the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grewmore and more fabulous and epic. 

The sun had set and the sea-twilight was rolling in when we dippeddown from the town of Montreuil to the valley below, where thetowers of an ancient abbey-church rise above terraced orchards. Thegates at the end of the avenue were thrown open, and the motor droveinto a monastery court full of box and roses. Everything was sweetand secluded in this mediaeval place; and from the shadow ofcloisters and arched passages groups of nuns fluttered out, nuns allblack or all white, gliding, peering and standing at gaze. It was asif we had plunged back into a century to which motors were unknownand our car had been some monster cast up from a Barbary shipwreck;and the startled attitudes of these holy women did credit to theirsense of the picturesque; for the Abbey of Neuville is now a greatBelgian hospital, and such monsters must frequently intrude on itsseclusion... 

Sunset, and summer dusk, and the moon. Under the monastery windows awalled garden with stone pavilions at the angles and the drip of afountain. Below it, tiers of orchard-terraces fading into a greatmoon-confused plain that might be either fields or sea... 

June 20th. 

Today our way ran northeast, through a landscape so English thatthere was no incongruity in the sprinkling of khaki along the road. Even the villages look English: the same plum-red brick of tidyself-respecting houses, neat, demure and freshly painted, thegardens all bursting with flowers, the landscape hedgerowed andwillowed and fed with water-courses, the people's faces square andpink and honest, and the signs over the shops in a language half waybetween English and German. Only the architecture of the towns isFrench, of a reserved and robust northern type, but unmistakably inthe same great tradition. 

War still seemed so far off that one had time for these digressionsas the motor flew on over the undulating miles. But presently wecame on an aviation camp spreading its sheds over a wide plateau. Here the khaki throng was thicker and the familiar military stirenlivened the landscape. A few miles farther, and we found ourselvesin what was seemingly a big English town oddly grouped about anucleus of French churches. This was St. Omer, grey, spacious, coldly clean in its Sunday emptiness. At the street crossingsEnglish sentries stood mechanically directing the absent trafficwith gestures familiar to Piccadilly; and the signs of the BritishRed Cross and St. John's Ambulance hung on club-like facades thatmight almost have claimed a home in Pall Mall. 

The Englishness of things was emphasized, as we passed out throughthe suburbs, by the look of the crowd on the canal bridges and alongthe roads. Every nation has its own way of loitering, and there isnothing so unlike the French way as the English. Even if all thesetall youths had not been in khaki, and the girls with them so pinkand countrified, one would instantly have recognized the passivenorthern way of letting a holiday soak in instead of squeezing outits juices with feverish fingers. 

When we turned westward from St. Omer, across the same pastures andwatercourses, we were faced by two hills standing up abruptly out ofthe plain; and on the top of one rose the walls and towers of acompact little mediaeval town. As we took the windings that led upto it a sense of Italy began to penetrate the persistent impressionof being somewhere near the English Channel. The town we wereapproaching might have been a queer dream-blend of Winchelsea andSan Gimignano; but when we entered the gates of Cassel we were in aplace so intensely itself that all analogies dropped out of mind. 

It was not surprising to learn from the guide-book that Cassel hasthe most extensive view of any town in Europe: one felt at once thatit differed in all sorts of marked and self-assertive ways fromevery other town, and would be almost sure to have the best thingsgoing in every line. And the line of an illimitable horizon isexactly the best to set off its own quaint compactness. 

We found our hotel in the most perfect of little market squares, with a Renaissance town-hall on one side, and on the other aminiature Spanish palace with a front of rosy brick adorned by greycarvings. The square was crowded with English army motors andbeautiful prancing chargers; and the restaurant of the inn (whichhas the luck to face the pink and grey palace) swarmed with khakitea-drinkers turning indifferent shoulders to the widest view inEurope. It is one of the most detestable things about war thateverything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result, is such a heightening of life, so visually stimulating andabsorbing. "It was gay and terrible, " is the phrase foreverrecurring in "War and Peace"; and the gaiety of war was everywherein Cassel, transforming the lifeless little town into a romanticstage-setting full of the flash of arms and the virile animation ofyoung faces. 

From the park on top of the hill we looked down on another picture. All about us was the plain, its distant rim merged in northernsea-mist; and through the mist, in the glitter of the afternoon sun, far-off towns and shadowy towers lay steeped, as it seemed, insummer quiet. For a moment, while we looked, the vision of warshrivelled up like a painted veil; then we caught the namespronounced by a group of English soldiers leaning over the parapetat our side. "That's Dunkerque"--one of them pointed it out with hispipe--"and there's Poperinghe, just under us; that's Furnes beyond, and Ypres and Dixmude, and Nieuport... " And at the mention ofthose names the scene grew dark again, and we felt the passing ofthe Angel to whom was given the Key of the Bottomless Pit. 

That night we went up once more to the rock of Cassel. The moon wasfull, and as civilians are not allowed out alone after dark astaff-officer went with us to show us the view from the roof of thedisused Casino on top of the rock. It was the queerest of sensationsto push open a glazed door and find ourselves in a spectral paintedroom with soldiers dozing in the moonlight on polished floors, theirkits stacked on the gaming tables. We passed through a big vestibuleamong more soldiers lounging in the half-light, and up a longstaircase to the roof where a watcher challenged us and then let usgo to the edge of the parapet. Directly below lay the unlit mass ofthe town. To the northwest a single sharp hill, the "Mont des Cats, "stood out against the sky; the rest of the horizon was unbroken, andfloating in misty moonlight. The outline of the ruined towns hadvanished and peace seemed to have won back the world. But as westood there a red flash started out of the mist far off to thenorthwest; then another and another flickered up at different pointsof the long curve. "Luminous bombs thrown up along the lines, " ourguide explained; and just then, at still another point a white lightopened like a tropical flower, spread to full bloom and drew itselfback into the night. "A flare, " we were told; and another whiteflower bloomed out farther down. Below us, the roofs of Cassel slepttheir provincial sleep, the moonlight picking out every leaf in thegardens; while beyond, those infernal flowers continued to open andshut along the curve of death. 

June 21st. 

On the road from Cassel to Poperinghe. Heat, dust, crowds, confusion, all the sordid shabby rear-view of war. The road runningacross the plain between white-powdered hedges was ploughed up bynumberless motor-vans, supply-waggons and Red Cross ambulances. Labouring through between them came detachments of Britishartillery, clattering gun-carriages, straight young figures onglossy horses, long Phidian lines of youths so ingenuously fair thatone wondered how they could have looked on the Medusa face of warand lived. Men and beasts, in spite of the dust, were as fresh andsleek as if they had come from a bath; and everywhere along thewayside were improvised camps, with tents made of waggon-covers, where the ceaseless indomitable work of cleaning was being carriedout in all its searching details. Shirts were drying onelder-bushes, kettles boiling over gypsy fires, men shaving, blacking their boots, cleaning their guns, rubbing down theirhorses, greasing their saddles, polishing their stirrups and bits:on all sides a general cheery struggle against the prevailing dust, discomfort and disorder. Here and there a young soldier leanedagainst a garden paling to talk to a girl among the hollyhocks, oran older soldier initiated a group of children into some mystery ofmilitary housekeeping; and everywhere were the same signs offriendly inarticulate understanding with the owners of the fieldsand gardens. 

From the thronged high-road we passed into the emptiness of desertedPoperinghe, and out again on the way to Ypres. Beyond the flats andwind-mills to our left were the invisible German lines, and thestaff-officer who was with us leaned forward to caution ourchauffeur: "No tooting between here and Ypres. " There was still agood deal of movement on the road, though it was less crowded withtroops than near Poperinghe; but as we passed through the lastvillage and approached the low line of houses ahead, the silence andemptiness widened about us. That low line was Ypres; every monumentthat marked it, that gave it an individual outline, is gone. It is atown without a profile. 

The motor slipped through a suburb of small brick houses and stoppedunder cover of some slightly taller buildings. Another militarymotor waited there, the chauffeur relic-hunting in the guttedhouses. 

We got out and walked toward the centre of the Cloth Market. We hadseen evacuated towns--Verdun, Badonviller, Raon-l'Etape--but we hadseen no emptiness like this. Not a human being was in the streets. Endless lines of houses looked down on us from vacant windows. Ourfootsteps echoed like the tramp of a crowd, our lowered voicesseemed to shout. In one street we came on three English soldiers whowere carrying a piano out of a house and lifting it onto ahand-cart. They stopped to stare at us, and we stared back. Itseemed an age since we had seen a living being! One of the soldiersscrambled into the cart and tapped out a tune on the crackedkey-board, and we all laughed with relief at the foolish noise... Then we walked on and were alone again. 

We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns ofLorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from theearth. At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii. ButYpres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its housesare still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of aliving city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse. Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, andsome house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different storiesexposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposedinteriors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owlssurprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humbletastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to theunmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glorywallpapers, plaster saints pine under glass bells, antimacassarsdroop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals onoffice walls. It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as ifthe people for whom these things had a meaning might at any momentcome back and take up their daily business. And then--crash! theguns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the Englishlines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the livesof a vanished city-full hung dangling before us in that deathlyblast. 

We had just reached the square before the Cathedral when thecannonade began, and its roar seemed to build a roof of iron overthe glorious ruins of Ypres. The singular distinction of the city isthat it is destroyed but not abased. The walls of the Cathedral, thelong bulk of the Cloth Market, still lift themselves above themarket place with a majesty that seems to silence compassion. Thesight of those facades, so proud in death, recalled a phrase usedsoon after the fall of Liege by Belgium's Foreign Minister--"_LaBelgique ne regrette rien_ "--which ought some day to serve as themotto of the renovated city. 

We were turning to go when we heard a whirr overhead, followed by avolley of mitrailleuse. High up in the blue, over the centre of thedead city, flew a German aeroplane; and all about it hundreds ofwhite shrapnel tufts burst out in the summer sky like the miraculoussnow-fall of Italian legend. Up and up they flew, on the trail ofthe Taube, and on flew the Taube, faster still, till quarry and packwere lost in mist, and the barking of the mitrailleuse died out. Sowe left Ypres to the death-silence in which we had found her. 

The afternoon carried us back to Poperinghe, where I was bound on aquest for lace-cushions of the special kind required by our Flemishrefugees. The model is unobtainable in France, and I had beentold--with few and vague indications--that I might find the cushionsin a certain convent of the city. But in which?

Poperinghe, though little injured, is almost empty. In its tidydesolation it looks like a town on which a wicked enchanter has laida spell. We roamed from quarter to quarter, hunting for some one toshow us the way to the convent I was looking for, till at last apasser-by led us to a door which seemed the right one. At our knockthe bars were drawn and a cloistered face looked out. No, there wereno cushions there; and the nun had never heard of the order wenamed. But there were the Penitents, the Benedictines--we might try. Our guide offered to show us the way and we went on. From one or twowindows, wondering heads looked out and vanished; but the streetswere lifeless. At last we came to a convent where there were no nunsleft, but where, the caretaker told us, there were cushions--a greatmany. He led us through pale blue passages, up cold stairs, throughrooms that smelt of linen and lavender. We passed a chapel withplaster saints in white niches above paper flowers. Everything wascold and bare and blank: like a mind from which memory has gone. Wecame to a class room with lines of empty benches facing ablue-mantled Virgin; and here, on the floor, lay rows and rows oflace-cushions. On each a bit of lace had been begun--and there theyhad been dropped when nuns and pupils fled. They had not been leftin disorder: the rows had been laid out evenly, a handkerchiefthrown over each cushion. And that orderly arrest of life seemedsadder than any scene of disarray. It symbolized the senselessparalysis of a whole nation's activities. Here were a houseful ofwomen and children, yesterday engaged in a useful task and nowaimlessly astray over the earth. And in hundreds of such houses, indozens, in hundreds of open towns, the hand of time had beenstopped, the heart of life had ceased to beat, all the currents ofhope and happiness and industry been choked--not that some greatmilitary end might be gained, or the length of the war curtailed, but that, wherever the shadow of Germany falls, all things shouldwither at the root. 

The same sight met us everywhere that afternoon. Over Furnes andBergues, and all the little intermediate villages, the evil shadowlay. Germany had willed that these places should die, and whereverher bombs could not reach her malediction had carried. Only Biblicallamentation can convey a vision of this life-drained land. "Yourcountry is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, asoverthrown by strangers. "

Late in the afternoon we came to Dunkerque, lying peacefully betweenits harbour and canals. The bombardment of the previous month hademptied it, and though no signs of damage were visible the samespellbound air lay over everything. As we sat alone at tea in thehall of the hotel on the Place Jean Bart, and looked out on thesilent square and its lifeless shops and cafes, some one suggestedthat the hotel would be a convenient centre for the excursions wehad planned, and we decided to return there the next evening. Thenwe motored back to Cassel. 

June 22nd. 

My first waking thought was: "How time flies! It must be theFourteenth of July!" I knew it could not be the Fourth of thatspecially commemorative month, because I was just awake enough to besure I was not in America; and the only other event to justify sucha terrific clatter was the French national anniversary. I sat up andlistened to the popping of guns till a completed sense of realitystole over me, and I realized that I was in the inn of the Wild Manat Cassel, and that it was not the fourteenth of July but thetwenty-second of June. 

Then, what--? A Taube, of course! And all the guns in the place werecracking at it! By the time this mental process was complete, I hadscrambled up and hurried downstairs and, unbolting the heavy doors, had rushed out into the square. It was about four in the morning, the heavenliest moment of a summer dawn, and in spite of the tumultCassel still apparently slept. Only a few soldiers stood in thesquare, looking up at a drift of white cloud behind which--theyaverred--a Taube had just slipped out of sight. Cassel was evidentlyused to Taubes, and I had the sense of having overdone my excitementand not being exactly in tune; so after gazing a moment at the whitecloud I slunk back into the hotel, barred the door and mounted to myroom. At a window on the stairs I paused to look out over thesloping roofs of the town, the gardens, the plain; and suddenlythere was another crash and a drift of white smoke blew up from thefruit-trees just under the window. It was a last shot at thefugitive, from a gun hidden in one of those quiet provincial gardensbetween the houses; and its secret presence there was more startlingthan all the clatter of mitrailleuses from the rock. 

Silence and sleep came down again on Cassel; but an hour or twolater the hush was broken by a roar like the last trump. This timeit was no question of mitrailleuses. The Wild Man rocked on itsbase, and every pane in my windows beat a tattoo. What was thatincredible unimagined sound? Why, it could be nothing, of course, but the voice of the big siege-gun of Dixmude! Five times, while Iwas dressing, the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filledwith a noise that may be compared--if the human imagination canstand the strain--to the simultaneous closing of all the ironshop-shutters in the world. The odd part was that, as far as theWild Man and its inhabitants were concerned, no visible effectsresulted, and dressing, packing and coffee-drinking went oncomfortably in the strange parentheses between the roars. 

We set off early for a neighbouring Head-quarters, and it was nottill we turned out of the gates of Cassel that we came on signs ofthe bombardment: the smashing of a gas-house and the converting of acabbage-field into a crater which, for some time to come, will sparephotographers the trouble of climbing Vesuvius. There was a certainconsolation in the discrepancy between the noise and the damagedone. 

At Head-quarters we learned more of the morning's incidents. Dunkerque, it appeared, had first been visited by the Taube whichafterward came to take the range of Cassel; and the big gun ofDixmude had then turned all its fury on the French sea-port. Thebombardment of Dunkuerque was still going on; and we were asked, andin fact bidden, to give up our plan of going there for the night. 

After luncheon we turned north, toward the dunes. The villages wedrove through were all evacuated, some quite lifeless, othersoccupied by troops. Presently we came to a group of military motorsdrawn up by the roadside, and a field black with wheeling troops. "Admiral Ronarc'h!" our companion from Head-quarters exclaimed; andwe understood that we had had the good luck to come on the hero ofDixmude in the act of reviewing the marine fusiliers andterritorials whose magnificent defense of last October gave thatmuch-besieged town another lease of glory. 

We stopped the motor and climbed to a ridge above the field. A highwind was blowing, bringing with it the booming of the guns along thefront. A sun half-veiled in sand-dust shone on pale meadows, sandyflats, grey wind-mills. The scene was deserted, except for thehandful of troops deploying before the officers on the edge of thefield. Admiral Ronarc'h, white-gloved and in full-dress uniform, stood a little in advance, a young naval officer at his side. He hadjust been distributing decorations to his fusiliers andterritorials, and they were marching past him, flags flying andbugles playing. Every one of those men had a record of heroism, andevery face in those ranks had looked on horrors unnameable. They hadlost Dixmude--for a while--but they had gained great glory, and theinspiration of their epic resistance had come from the quiet officerwho stood there, straight and grave, in his white gloves and galauniform. 

One must have been in the North to know something of the tie thatexists, in this region of bitter and continuous fighting, betweenofficers and soldiers. The feeling of the chiefs is almost one ofveneration for their men; that of the soldiers, a kind ofhalf-humorous tenderness for the officers who have faced such oddswith them. This mutual regard reveals itself in a hundredundefinable ways; but its fullest expression is in the tone withwhich the commanding officers speak the two words oftenest on theirlips: "My men. "

The little review over, we went on to Admiral Ronarc'h's quarters inthe dunes, and thence, after a brief visit, to another brigadeHead-quarters. We were in a region of sandy hillocks feathered bytamarisk, and interspersed with poplar groves slanting like wheat inthe wind. Between these meagre thickets the roofs of seasidebungalows showed above the dunes; and before one of these westopped, and were led into a sitting-room full of maps and aeroplanephotographs. One of the officers of the brigade telephoned to ask ifthe way was clear to Nieuport; and the answer was that we might goon. 

Our road ran through the "Bois Triangulaire, " a bit of woodlandexposed to constant shelling. Half the poor spindling trees weredown, and patches of blackened undergrowth and ragged hollows markedthe path of the shells. If the trees of a cannonaded wood are ofstrong inland growth their fallen trunks have the majesty of aruined temple; but there was something humanly pitiful in the frailtrunks of the Bois Triangulaire, lying there like slaughtered rowsof immature troops. 

A few miles more brought us to Nieuport, most lamentable of thevictim towns. It is not empty as Ypres is empty: troops arequartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor knots ofcheerful zouaves came swarming out of the ground like ants. ButYpres is majestic in death, poor Nieuport gruesomely comic. Aboutits splendid nucleus of mediaeval architecture a modern town hadgrown up; and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrastbetween the streets of flimsy houses, twisted like curl-papers, andthe ruins of the Gothic Cathedral and the Cloth Market. It is likepassing from a smashed toy to the survival of a prehistoriccataclysm. 

Modern Nieuport seems to have died in a colic. No less homely imageexpresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reachingout the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders. There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing elseon the warfront. On the left, a line of palsied houses leads up likea string of crutch-propped beggars to the mighty ruin of theTemplars' Tower; on the right the flats reach away to the almostimperceptible humps of masonry that were once the villages of St. Georges, Ramscappelle, Pervyse. And over it all the incessant crashof the guns stretches a sounding-board of steel. 

In front of the cathedral a German shell has dug a crater thirtyfeet across, overhung by splintered tree-trunks, burnt shrubs, vaguemounds of rubbish; and a few steps beyond lies the peacefullest spotin Nieuport, the grave-yard where the zouaves have buried theircomrades. The dead are laid in rows under the flank of thecathedral, and on their carefully set grave-stones have been placedcollections of pious images gathered from the ruined houses. Some ofthe most privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints andVirgins that cover the whole slab; and over the handsomest Virginsand the most gaily coloured saints the soldiers have placed theglass bells that once protected the parlour clocks and wedding-wreathsin the same houses. 

From sad Nieuport we motored on to a little seaside colony wheregaiety prevails. Here the big hotels and the adjoining villas alongthe beach are filled with troops just back from the trenches: it isone of the "rest cures" of the front. When we drove up, the regiment"au repos" was assembled in the wide sandy space between theprincipal hotels, and in the centre of the jolly crowd the band wasplaying. The Colonel and his officers stood listening to the music, and presently the soldiers broke into the wild "chanson des zouaves"of the --th zouaves. It was the strangest of sights to watch thatthrong of dusky merry faces under their red fezes against thebackground of sunless northern sea. When the music was over some onewith a kodak suggested "a group": we struck a collective attitude onone of the hotel terraces, and just as the camera was being aimed atus the Colonel turned and drew into the foreground a little grinningpock-marked soldier. "He's just been decorated--he's got to be inthe group. " A general exclamation of assent from the other officers, and a protest from the hero: "Me? Why, my ugly mug will smash theplate!" But it didn't--

Reluctantly we turned from this interval in the day's sad round, andtook the road to La Panne. Dust, dunes, deserted villages: my memorykeeps no more definite vision of the run. But at sunset we came on abig seaside colony stretched out above the longest beach I ever saw:along the sea-front, an esplanade bordered by the usual foolishvillas, and behind it a single street filled with hotels and shops. All the life of the desert region we had traversed seemed to havetaken refuge at La Panne. The long street was swarming with throngsof dark-uniformed Belgian soldiers, every shop seemed to be doing athriving trade, and the hotels looked as full as beehives. 

June 23rd LA PANNE. 

The particular hive that has taken us in is at the extreme end ofthe esplanade, where asphalt and iron railings lapse abruptly intosand and sea-grass. When I looked out of my window this morning Isaw only the endless stretch of brown sand against the grey roll ofthe Northern Ocean and, on a crest of the dunes, the figure of asolitary sentinel. But presently there was a sound of martial music, and long lines of troops came marching along the esplanade and downto the beach. The sands stretched away to east and west, a great"field of Mars" on which an army could have manoeuvred; and themorning exercises of cavalry and infantry began. Against the brownbeach the regiments in their dark uniforms looked as black assilhouettes; and the cavalry galloping by in single file suggested ablack frieze of warriors encircling the dun-coloured flanks of anEtruscan vase. For hours these long-drawn-out movements of troopswent on, to the wail of bugles, and under the eye of the lonelysentinel on the sand-crest; then the soldiers poured back into thetown, and La Panne was once more a busy common-place _bain-de-mer_. The common-placeness, however, was only on the surface; for as onewalked along the esplanade one discovered that the town had become acitadel, and that all the doll's-house villas with their sillygables and sillier names--"Seaweed, " "The Sea-gull, " "Mon Repos, "and the rest--were really a continuous line of barracks swarmingwith Belgian troops. In the main street there were hundreds ofsoldiers, pottering along in couples, chatting in groups, rompingand wrestling like a crowd of school-boys, or bargaining in theshops for shell-work souvenirs and sets of post-cards; and betweenthe dark-green and crimson uniforms was a frequent sprinkling ofkhaki, with the occasional pale blue of a French officer's tunic. 

Before luncheon we motored over to Dunkerque. The road runs alongthe canal, between grass-flats and prosperous villages. No signs ofwar were noticeable except on the road, which was crowded with motorvans, ambulances and troops. The walls and gates of Dunkerque rosebefore us as calm and undisturbed as when we entered the town theday before yesterday. But within the gates we were in a desert. Thebombardment had ceased the previous evening, but a death-hush lay onthe town, Every house was shuttered and the streets were empty. Wedrove to the Place Jean Bart, where two days ago we sat at tea inthe hall of the hotel. Now there was not a whole pane of glass inthe windows of the square, the doors of the hotel were closed, andevery now and then some one came out carrying a basketful of plasterfrom fallen ceilings. The whole surface of the square was literallypaved with bits of glass from the hundreds of broken windows, and atthe foot of David's statue of Jean Bart, just where our motor hadstood while we had tea, the siege-gun of Dixmude had scooped out ahollow as big as the crater at Nieuport. 

Though not a house on the square was touched, the scene was one ofunmitigated desolation. It was the first time we had seen the rawwounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed toaccentuate its cruelty. We wandered down the street behind the hotelto the graceful Gothic church of St. Eloi, of which one aisle hadbeen shattered; then, turning another corner, we came on a poor_bourgeois_ house that had had its whole front torn away. Thesqualid revelation of caved-in floors, smashed wardrobes, danglingbedsteads, heaped-up blankets, topsy-turvy chairs and stoves andwash-stands was far more painful than the sight of the woundedchurch. St. Eloi was draped in the dignity of martyrdom, but thepoor little house reminded one of some shy humdrum person suddenlyexposed in the glare of a great misfortune. 

A few people stood in clusters looking up at the ruins, or strayedaimlessly about the streets. Not a loud word was heard. The airseemed heavy with the suspended breath of a great city's activities:the mournful hush of Dunkerque was even more oppressive than thedeath-silence of Ypres. But when we came back to the Place Jean Bartthe unbreakable human spirit had begun to reassert itself. A handfulof children were playing in the bottom of the crater, collecting"specimens" of glass and splintered brick; and about its rim themarket-people, quietly and as a matter of course, were setting uptheir wooden stalls. In a few minutes the signs of German havocwould be hidden behind stacks of crockery and household utensils, and some of the pale women we had left in mournful contemplation ofthe ruins would be bargaining as sharply as ever for a sauce-pan ora butter-tub. Not once but a hundred times has the attitude of theaverage French civilian near the front reminded me of the gallantcry of Calanthea in _The Broken Heart:_ "Let me die smiling!" Ishould have liked to stop and spend all I had in the market ofDunkerque... 

All the afternoon we wandered about La Panne. The exercises of thetroops had begun again, and the deploying of those endless blacklines along the beach was a sight of the strangest beauty. The sunwas veiled, and heavy surges rolled in under a northerly gale. Toward evening the sea turned to cold tints of jade and pearl andtarnished silver. Far down the beach a mysterious fleet of fishingboats was drawn up on the sand, with black sails bellying in thewind; and the black riders galloping by might have landed from them, and been riding into the sunset out of some wild northern legend. Presently a knot of buglers took up their stand on the edge of thesea, facing inward, their feet in the surf, and began to play; andtheir call was like the call of Roland's horn, when he blew it downthe pass against the heathen. On the sandcrest below my window thelonely sentinel still watched... 

June 24th. 

It is like coming down from the mountains to leave the front. Inever had the feeling more strongly than when we passed out ofBelgium this afternoon. I had it most strongly as we drove by acluster of villas standing apart in a sterile region of sea-grassand sand. In one of those villas for nearly a year, two hearts atthe highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to theworld. It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe. Because of the light that comes from it, dead faiths have come tolife, weak convictions have grown strong, fiery impulses have turnedto long endurance, and long endurance has kept the fire of impulse. In the harbour of New York there is a pompous statue of a goddesswith a torch, designated as "Liberty enlightening the World. " Itseems as though the title on her pedestal might well, for the time, be transferred to the lintel of that villa in the dunes. 

On leaving St. Omer we took a short cut southward across rollingcountry. It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the mainroad, for presently, over the crest of a hill, we saw surging towardus a mighty movement of British and Indian troops. A great bath ofsilver sunlight lay on the wheat-fields, the clumps of woodland andthe hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalryrode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim turbaned Indians, with delicate proud faces like the faces of Princes in Persianminiatures. Then came a long train of artillery; splendid horses, clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping byall aglow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never-ending. Nowand then it was checked by a train of ambulances and supply-waggons, or caught and congested in the crooked streets of a village wherechildren and girls had come out with bunches of flowers, and bakerswere selling hot loaves to the sutlers; and when we had extricatedour motor from the crowd, and climbed another hill, we came onanother cavalcade surging toward us through the wheat-fields. Forover an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike theFrench division we had met on the move as we went north a few daysago; so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, andaway from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the longwall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea tothe Vosges. 

IN ALSACE

August 13th, 1915. 

My trip to the east began by a dash toward the north. Near Rheims isa little town--hardly more than a village, but in English we have nointermediate terms such as "bourg" and "petit bourg"--where one ofthe new Red Cross sanitary motor units was to be seen "in action. "The inspection over, we climbed to a vineyard above the town andlooked down at a river valley traversed by a double line of trees. The first line marked the canal, which is held by the French, whohave gun-boats on it. Behind this ran the high-road, with thefirst-line French trenches, and just above, on the opposite slope, were the German lines. The soil being chalky, the German positionswere clearly marked by two parallel white scorings across the brownhill-front; and while we watched we heard desultory firing, and saw, here and there along the ridge, the smoke-puff of an explodingshell. It was incredibly strange to stand there, among the vineshumming with summer insects, and to look out over a peaceful countryheavy with the coming vintage, knowing that the trees at our feethid a line of gun-boats that were crashing death into those twowhite scorings on the hill. 

Rheims itself brings one nearer to the war by its look of deathlikedesolation. The paralysis of the bombarded towns is one of the mosttragic results of the invasion. One's soul revolts at this senselessdisorganizing of innumerable useful activities. Compared with thetowns of the north, Rheims is relatively unharmed; but for that veryreason the arrest of life seems the more futile and cruel. TheCathedral square was deserted, all the houses around it were closed. And there, before us, rose the Cathedral--_a_ cathedral, rather, forit was not the one we had always known. It was, in fact, not likeany cathedral on earth. When the German bombardment began, the westfront of Rheims was covered with scaffolding: the shells set it onfire, and the whole church was wrapped in flames. Now thescaffolding is gone, and in the dull provincial square there standsa structure so strange and beautiful that one must search theInferno, or some tale of Eastern magic, for words to picture theluminous unearthly vision. The lower part of the front has beenwarmed to deep tints of umber and burnt siena. This rich burnishingpasses, higher up, through yellowish-pink and carmine, to a sulphurwhitening to ivory; and the recesses of the portals and the hollowsbehind the statues are lined with a black denser and more velvetythan any effect of shadow to be obtained by sculptured relief. Theinterweaving of colour over the whole blunted bruised surfacerecalls the metallic tints, the peacock-and-pigeon iridescences, theincredible mingling of red, blue, umber and yellow of the rocksalong the Gulf of AEgina. And the wonder of the impression isincreased by the sense of its evanescence; the knowledge that thisis the beauty of disease and death, that every one of thetransfigured statues must crumble under the autumn rains, that everyone of the pink or golden stones is already eaten away to the core, that the Cathedral of Rheims is glowing and dying before us like asunset... 

August 14th. 

A stone and brick chateau in a flat park with a stream runningthrough it. Pampas-grass, geraniums, rustic bridges, winding paths:how _bourgeois_ and sleepy it would all seem but for the sentinelchallenging our motor at the gate!

Before the door a collie dozing in the sun, and a group ofstaff-officers waiting for luncheon. Indoors, a room with handsometapestries, some good furniture and a table spread with the usualmilitary maps and aeroplane-photographs. At luncheon, the General, the chiefs of the staff--a dozen in all--an officer from the GeneralHead-quarters. The usual atmosphere of _camaraderie_, confidence, good-humour, and a kind of cheerful seriousness that I have come toregard as characteristic of the men immersed in the actual facts ofthe war. I set down this impression as typical of many such luncheonhours along the front... 

August 15th. 

This morning we set out for reconquered Alsace. For reasonsunexplained to the civilian this corner of old-new France hashitherto been inaccessible, even to highly placed French officials;and there was a special sense of excitement in taking the road thatled to it. 

We slipped through a valley or two, passed some placid villages withvine-covered gables, and noticed that most of the signs over theshops were German. We had crossed the old frontier unawares, andwere presently in the charming town of Massevaux. It was the Feastof the Assumption, and mass was just over when we reached the squarebefore the church. The streets were full of holiday people, well-dressed, smiling, seemingly unconscious of the war. Down thechurch-steps, guided by fond mammas, came little girls in whitedresses, with white wreaths in their hair, and carrying, in basketsslung over their shoulders, woolly lambs or blue and white Virgins. Groups of cavalry officers stood chatting with civilians in theirSunday best, and through the windows of the Golden Eagle we sawactive preparations for a crowded mid-day dinner. It was all ashappy and parochial as a "Hansi" picture, and the fine old gabledhouses and clean cobblestone streets made the traditional settingfor an Alsacian holiday. 

At the Golden Eagle we laid in a store of provisions, and startedout across the mountains in the direction of Thann. The Vosges, atthis season, are in their short midsummer beauty, rustling withstreams, dripping with showers, balmy with the smell of firs andbraken, and of purple thyme on hot banks. We reached the top of aridge, and, hiding the motor behind a skirt of trees, went out intothe open to lunch on a sunny slope. Facing us across the valley wasa tall conical hill clothed with forest. That hill wasHartmannswillerkopf, the centre of a long contest in which theFrench have lately been victorious; and all about us stood othercrests and ridges from which German guns still look down on thevalley of Thann. 

Thann itself is at the valley-head, in a neck between hills; ahandsome old town, with the air of prosperous stability so oddlycharacteristic of this tormented region. As we drove through themain street the pall of war-sadness fell on us again, darkening thelight and chilling the summer air. Thann is raked by the Germanlines, and its windows are mostly shuttered and its streetsdeserted. One or two houses in the Cathedral square have beengutted, but the somewhat over-pinnacled and statued cathedral whichis the pride of Thann is almost untouched, and when we entered itvespers were being sung, and a few people--mostly in black--knelt inthe nave. 

No greater contrast could be imagined to the happy feast-day scenewe had left, a few miles off, at Massevaux; but Thann, in spite ofits empty streets, is not a deserted city. A vigorous life beats init, ready to break forth as soon as the German guns are silenced. The French administration, working on the best of terms with thepopulation, are keeping up the civil activities of the town as theCanons of the Cathedral are continuing the rites of the Church. Manyinhabitants still remain behind their closed shutters and dive downinto their cellars when the shells begin to crash; and the schools, transferred to a neighbouring village, number over two thousandpupils. We walked through the town, visited a vast catacomb of awine-cellar fitted up partly as an ambulance and partly as a shelterfor the cellarless, and saw the lamentable remains of the industrialquarter along the river, which has been the special target of theGerman guns. Thann has been industrially ruined, all its mills arewrecked; but unlike the towns of the north it has had the goodfortune to preserve its outline, its civic personality, a face thatits children, when they come back, can recognize and take comfortin. 

After our visit to the ruins, a diversion was suggested by theamiable administrators of Thann who had guided our sight-seeing. They were just off for a military tournament which the --th dragoonswere giving that afternoon in a neighboring valley, and we wereinvited to go with them. 

The scene of the entertainment was a meadow enclosed in anamphitheatre of rocks, with grassy ledges projecting from the clifflike tiers of opera-boxes. These points of vantage were partlyoccupied by interested spectators and partly by ruminating cattle;on the lowest slope, the rank and fashion of the neighbourhood wasranged on a semi-circle of chairs, and below, in the meadow, alively steeple-chase was going on. The riding was extremely pretty, as French military riding always is. Few of the mounts werethoroughbreds--the greater number, in fact, being local cart-horsesbarely broken to the saddle--but their agility and dash did thegreater credit to their riders. The lancers, in particular, executedan effective "musical ride" about a central pennon, to the immensesatisfaction of the fashionable public in the foreground and of thegallery on the rocks. 

The audience was even more interesting than the artists. Chattingwith the ladies in the front row were the General of division andhis staff, groups of officers invited from the adjoiningHead-quarters, and most of the civil and military administrators ofthe restored "Departement du Haut Rhin. " All classes had turned outin honour of the fete, and every one was in a holiday mood. The people among whom we sat were mostly Alsatian property-owners, many of them industrials of Thann. Some had been driven from theirhomes, others had seen their mills destroyed, all had been livingfor a year on the perilous edge of war, under the menace ofreprisals too hideous to picture; yet the humour prevailing was thatof any group of merry-makers in a peaceful garrison town. I haveseen nothing, in my wanderings along the front, more indicative ofthe good-breeding of the French than the spirit of the ladies andgentlemen who sat chatting with the officers on that grassy slope ofAlsace. 

The display of _haute ecole_ was to be followed by an exhibition of"transportation throughout the ages, " headed by a Gaulish chariotdriven by a trooper with a long horsehair moustache and mistletoewreath, and ending in a motor of which the engine had been taken outand replaced by a large placid white horse. Unluckily a heavy rainbegan while this instructive "number" awaited its turn, and we hadto leave before Vercingetorix had led his warriors into the ring... 

August 16th. 

Up and up into the mountains. We started early, taking our way alonga narrow interminable valley that sloped up gradually toward theeast. The road was encumbered with a stream of hooded supply vansdrawn by mules, for we were on the way to one of the main positionsin the Vosges, and this train of provisions is kept up day andnight. Finally we reached a mountain village under fir-clad slopes, with a cold stream rushing down from the hills. On one side of theroad was a rustic inn, on the other, among the firs, a chaletoccupied by the brigade Head-quarters. Everywhere about us swarmedthe little "chasseurs Alpins" in blue Tam o'Shanters and leathergaiters. For a year we had been reading of these heroes of thehills, and here we were among them, looking into their thinweather-beaten faces and meeting the twinkle of their friendly eyes. Very friendly they all were, and yet, for Frenchmen, inarticulateand shy. All over the world, no doubt, the mountain silences breedthis kind of reserve, this shrinking from the glibness of thevalleys. Yet one had fancied that French fluency must soar as highas Mont Blanc. 

Mules were brought, and we started on a long ride up the mountain. The way led first over open ledges, with deep views into valleysblue with distance, then through miles of forest, first of beech andfir, and finally all of fir. Above the road the wooded slopes roseinterminably and here and there we came on tiers of mules, three orfour hundred together, stabled under the trees, in stalls dug out ofdifferent levels of the slope. Near by were shelters for the men, and perhaps at the next bend a village of "trappers' huts, " as theofficers call the log-cabins they build in this region. Thesecolonies are always bustling with life: men busy cleaning theirarms, hauling material for new cabins, washing or mending theirclothes, or carrying down the mountain from the camp-kitchen thetwo-handled pails full of steaming soup. The kitchen is always inthe most protected quarter of the camp, and generally at somedistance in the rear. Other soldiers, their job over, are lollingabout in groups, smoking, gossiping or writing home, the "Soldiers'Letter-pad" propped on a patched blue knee, a scarred fistlaboriously driving the fountain pen received in hospital. Some areleaning over the shoulder of a pal who has just received a Parispaper, others chuckling together at the jokes of their own Frenchjournal--the "Echo du Ravin, " the "Journal des Poilus, " or the"Diable Bleu": little papers ground out in purplish script onfoolscap, and adorned with comic-sketches and a wealth of localhumour. 

Higher up, under a fir-belt, at the edge of a meadow, the officerwho rode ahead signed to us to dismount and scramble after him. Weplunged under the trees, into what seemed a thicker thicket, andfound it to be a thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of abattery. The big guns were all about us, crouched in these sylvanlairs like wild beasts waiting to spring; and near each gun hoveredits attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as a bridegroomwith his bride. 

We climbed and climbed again, reaching at last a sun-and-wind-burntcommon which forms the top of one of the highest mountains in theregion. The forest was left below us and only a belt of dwarf firsran along the edge of the great grassy shoulder. We dismounted, themules were tethered among the trees, and our guide led us to aninsignificant looking stone in the grass. On one face of the stonewas cut the letter F. , on the other was a D. ; we stood on what, tilla year ago, was the boundary line between Republic and Empire. Sincethen, in certain places, the line has been bent back a long way; butwhere we stood we were still under German guns, and we had to creepalong in the shelter of the squat firs to reach the outlook on theedge of the plateau. From there, under a sky of racing clouds, wesaw outstretched below us the Promised Land of Alsace. On onehorizon, far off in the plain, gleamed the roofs and spires ofColmar, on the other rose the purplish heights beyond the Rhine. Near by stood a ring of bare hills, those closest to us scarred byridges of upheaved earth, as if giant moles had been zigzagging overthem; and just under us, in a little green valley, lay the roofs ofa peaceful village. The earth-ridges and the peaceful village werestill German; but the French positions went down the mountain, almost to the valley's edge; and one dark peak on the right wasalready French. 

We stopped at a gap in the firs and walked to the brink of theplateau. Just under us lay a rock-rimmed lake. More zig-zagearthworks surmounted it on all sides, and on the nearest shore wasthe branched roofing of another great mule-shelter. We were lookingdown at the spot to which the night-caravans of the Chasseurs Alpinsdescend to distribute supplies to the fighting line. 

"Who goes there? Attention! You're in sight of the lines!" a voicecalled out from the firs, and our companion signed to us to moveback. We had been rather too conspicuously facing the Germanbatteries on the opposite slope, and our presence might have drawntheir fire on an artillery observation post installed near by. Weretreated hurriedly and unpacked our luncheon-basket on the moresheltered side of the ridge. As we sat there in the grass, swept bya great mountain breeze full of the scent of thyme and myrtle, whilethe flutter of birds, the hum of insects, the still and busy life ofthe hills went on all about us in the sunshine, the pressure of theencircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not inthe mud and jokes and every-day activities of the trenches that onemost feels the damnable insanity of war; it is where it lurks like amythical monster in scenes to which the mind has always turned forrest. 

We had not yet made the whole tour of the mountain-top; and afterluncheon we rode over to a point where a long narrow yoke connectsit with a spur projecting directly above the German lines. We leftour mules in hiding and walked along the yoke, a mere knife-edge ofrock rimmed with dwarf vegetation. Suddenly we heard an explosionbehind us: one of the batteries we had passed on the way up wasgiving tongue. The German lines roared back and for twenty minutesthe exchange of invective thundered on. The firing was almostincessant; it seemed as if a great arch of steel were being built upabove us in the crystal air. And we could follow each curve of soundfrom its incipience to its final crash in the trenches. There werefour distinct phases: the sharp bang from the cannon, the longfurious howl overhead, the dispersed and spreading noise of theshell's explosion, and then the roll of its reverberation from cliffto cliff. This is what we heard as we crouched in the lee of thefirs: what we saw when we looked out between them was only anoccasional burst of white smoke and red flame from one hillside, andon the opposite one, a minute later, a brown geyser of dust. 

Presently a deluge of rain descended on us, driving us back to ourmules, and down the nearest mountain-trail through rivers of mud. Itrained all the way: rained in such floods and cataracts that thevery rocks of the mountain seemed to dissolve and turn into mud. Aswe slid down through it we met strings of Chasseurs Alpins comingup, splashed to the waist with wet red clay, and leading pack-mulesso coated with it that they looked like studio models from which thesculptor has just pulled off the dripping sheet. Lower down we cameon more "trapper" settlements, so saturated and reeking with wetthat they gave us a glimpse of what the winter months on the frontmust be. No more cheerful polishing of fire-arms, hauling offaggots, chatting and smoking in sociable groups: everybody hadcrept under the doubtful shelter of branches and tarpaulins; thewhole army was back in its burrows. 

August 17th. 

Sunshine again for our arrival at Belfort. The invincible city liesunpretentiously behind its green glacis and escutcheoned gates; butthe guardian Lion under the Citadel--well, the Lion is figurativelyas well as literally _a la hauteur. _ With the sunset flushon him, as he crouched aloft in his red lair below the fort, hemight almost have claimed kin with his mighty prototypes of theAssarbanipal frieze. One wondered a little, seeing whose work hewas; but probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize an heroictown than the abstract and elusive divinity who sheds light on theworld from New York harbour. 

From Belfort back into reconquered Alsace the road runs through agentle landscape of fields and orchards. We were bound forDannemarie, one of the towns of the plain, and a centre of the newadministration. It is the usual "gros bourg" of Alsace, withcomfortable old houses in espaliered gardens: dull, well-to-do, contented; not in the least the kind of setting demanded by thepatriotism which has to be fed on pictures of little girls singingthe Marseillaise in Alsatian head-dresses and old men with operaticwaistcoats tottering forward to kiss the flag. What we saw atDannemarie was less conspicuous to the eye but much more nourishingto the imagination. The military and civil administrators had thekindness and patience to explain their work and show us something ofits results; and the visit left one with the impression of a slowand quiet process of adaptation wisely planned and fruitfullycarried out. We _did_, in fact, hear the school-girls of Dannemariesing the Marseillaise--and the boys too--but, what was far moreinteresting, we saw them studying under the direction of theteachers who had always had them in charge, and found thateverywhere it had been the aim of the French officials to let theroutine of the village policy go on undisturbed. The German signsremain over the shop-fronts except where the shop-keepers havechosen to paint them out; as is happening more and more frequently. When a functionary has to be replaced he is chosen from the sametown or the same district, and even the _personnel_ of the civil andmilitary administration is mainly composed of officers and civiliansof Alsatian stock. The heads of both these departments, whoaccompanied us on our rounds, could talk to the children and oldpeople in German as well as in their local dialect; and, as far as apassing observer could discern, it seemed as though everything hadbeen done to reduce to a minimum the sense of strangeness andfriction which is inevitable in the transition from one rule toanother. The interesting point was that this exercise of tact andtolerance seemed to proceed not from any pressure of expediency butfrom a sympathetic understanding of the point of view of this peopleof the border. I heard in Dannemarie not a syllable of lyricalpatriotism or post-card sentimentality, but only a kindly andimpartial estimate of facts as they were and must be dealt with. 

August 18th. 

Today again we started early for the mountains. Our road ran more tothe westward, through the heart of the Vosges, and up to a fold ofthe hills near the borders of Lorraine. We stopped at aHead-quarters where a young officer of dragoons was to join us, andlearned from him that we were to be allowed to visit some of thefirst-line trenches which we had looked out on from a high-perchedobservation post on our former visit to the Vosges. Violent fightingwas going on in that particular region, and after a climb of an houror two we had to leave the motor at a sheltered angle of the roadand strike across the hills on foot. Our path lay through theforest, and every now and then we caught a glimpse of the high-roadrunning below us in full view of the German batteries. Presently wereached a point where the road was screened by a thick growth oftrees behind which an observation post had been set up. We scrambleddown and looked through the peephole. Just below us lay a valleywith a village in its centre, and to the left and right of thevillage were two hills, the one scored with French, the other withGerman trenches. The village, at first sight, looked as normal asthose through which we had been passing; but a closer inspectionshowed that its steeple was shattered and that some of its houseswere unroofed. Part of it was held by German, part by French troops. The cemetery adjoining the church, and a quarry just under it, belonged to the Germans; but a line of French trenches ran from thefarther side of the church up to the French batteries on the righthand hill. Parallel with this line, but starting from the other sideof the village, was a hollow lane leading up to a single tree. Thislane was a German trench, protected by the guns of the left handhill; and between the two lay perhaps fifty yards of ground. Allthis was close under us; and closer still was a slope of open groundleading up to the village and traversed by a rough cart-track. Alongthis track in the hot sunshine little French soldiers, the size oftin toys, were scrambling up with bags and loads of faggots, theirant-like activity as orderly and untroubled as if the two armies hadnot lain trench to trench a few yards away. It was one of thosestrange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to thebewildered looker-on the utter impossibility of picturing how thething _really happens. _

While we stood watching we heard the sudden scream of a batteryclose above us. The crest of the hill we were climbing was alivewith "Seventy-fives, " and the piercing noise seemed to burst out atour very backs. It was the most terrible war-shriek I had heard: akind of wolfish baying that called up an image of all the dogs ofwar simultaneously tugging at their leashes. There is a dreadfulmajesty in the sound of a distant cannonade; but these yelps andhisses roused only thoughts of horror. And there, on the oppositeslope, the black and brown geysers were beginning to spout up fromthe German trenches; and from the batteries above them came the puffand roar of retaliation. Below us, along the cart-track, the littleFrench soldiers continued to scramble up peacefully to thedilapidated village; and presently a group of officers of dragoons, emerging from the wood, came down to welcome us to theirHead-quarters. 

We continued to climb through the forest, the cannonade stillwhistling overhead, till we reached the most elaborate trappercolony we had yet seen. Half underground, walled with logs, anddeeply roofed by sods tufted with ferns and moss, the cabins werescattered under the trees and connected with each other by pathsbordered with white stones. Before the Colonel's cabin the soldiershad made a banked-up flower-bed sown with annuals; and farther upthe slope stood a log chapel, a mere gable with a wooden altar underit, all tapestried with ivy and holly. Near by was the chaplain'ssubterranean dwelling. It was reached by a deep cutting withivy-covered sides, and ivy and fir-boughs masked the front. Thissylvan retreat had just been completed, and the officers, thechaplain, and the soldiers loitering near by, were all equally eagerto have it seen and hear it praised. 

The commanding officer, having done the honours of the camp, led usabout a quarter of a mile down the hillside to an open cutting whichmarked the beginning of the trenches. From the cutting we passedinto a long tortuous burrow walled and roofed with carefully fittedlogs. The earth floor was covered by a sort of wooden lattice. Theonly light entering this tunnel was a faint ray from an occasionalnarrow slit screened by branches; and beside each of thesepeep-holes hung a shield-shaped metal shutter to be pushed over itin case of emergency. 

The passage wound down the hill, almost doubling on itself, in orderto give a view of all the surrounding lines. Presently the roofbecame much higher, and we saw on one side a curtained niche aboutfive feet above the floor. One of the officers pulled the curtainback, and there, on a narrow shelf, a gun between his knees, sat adragoon, his eyes on a peep-hole. The curtain was hastily drawnagain behind his motionless figure, lest the faint light at his backshould betray him. We passed by several of these helmeted watchers, and now and then we came to a deeper recess in which a mitrailleusesquatted, its black nose thrust through a net of branches. Sometimesthe roof of the tunnel was so low that we had to bend nearly double;and at intervals we came to heavy doors, made of logs and sheetedwith iron, which shut off one section from another. It is hard toguess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passagewith different levels and countless turnings; but we must havedescended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into ahalf-ruined farmhouse. This building, which had kept nothing but itsouter walls and one or two partitions between the rooms, had beentransformed into an observation post. In each of its corners aladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once thesecond story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peep-hole. Below, in the dilapidated rooms, the usual life of a camp was goingon. Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table, others mending their clothes, or writing letters or chucklingtogether (not too loud) over a comic newspaper. It might have been ascene anywhere along the second-line trenches but for the loweredvoices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a slit inthe wall through which I had incautiously peered, and the presenceof these helmeted watchers overhead. 

We plunged underground again and began to descend through anotherdarker and narrower tunnel. In the upper one there had been one ortwo roofless stretches where one could straighten one's back andbreathe; but here we were in pitch blackness, and saved frombreaking our necks only by the gleam of the pocket-light which theyoung lieutenant who led the party shed on our path. As he whiskedit up and down to warn us of sudden steps or sharp corners heremarked that at night even this faint glimmer was forbidden, andthat it was a bad job going back and forth from the last outposttill one had learned the turnings. 

The last outpost was a half-ruined farmhouse like the other. Atelephone connected it with Head-quarters and more dumb dragoons satmotionless on their lofty shelves. The house was shut off from thetunnel by an armoured door, and the orders were that in case ofattack that door should be barred from within and the access to thetunnel defended to the death by the men in the outpost. We were onthe extreme verge of the defences, on a slope just above the villageover which we had heard the artillery roaring a few hours earlier. The spot where we stood was raked on all sides by the enemy's lines, and the nearest trenches were only a few yards away. But of all thisnothing was really perceptible or comprehensible to me. As far as myown observation went, we might have been a hundred miles from thevalley we had looked down on, where the French soldiers were walkingpeacefully up the cart-track in the sunshine. I only knew that wehad come out of a black labyrinth into a gutted house amongfruit-trees, where soldiers were lounging and smoking, and peoplewhispered as they do about a death-bed. Over a break in the walls Isaw another gutted farmhouse close by in another orchard: it was anenemy outpost, and silent watchers in helmets of another shape satthere watching on the same high shelves. But all this was infinitelyless real and terrible than the cannonade above the disputedvillage. The artillery had ceased and the air was full of summermurmurs. Close by on a sheltered ledge I saw a patch of vineyardwith dewy cobwebs hanging to the vines. I could not understand wherewe were, or what it was all about, or why a shell from the enemyoutpost did not suddenly annihilate us. And then, little by little, there came over me the sense of that mute reciprocal watching fromtrench to trench: the interlocked stare of innumerable pairs ofeyes, stretching on, mile after mile, along the whole sleepless linefrom Dunkerque to Belfort. 

My last vision of the French front which I had traveled from end toend was this picture of a shelled house where a few men, who satsmoking and playing cards in the sunshine, had orders to hold out tothe death rather than let their fraction of that front be broken. 

THE TONE OF FRANCE

Nobody now asks the question that so often, at the beginning of thewar, came to me from the other side of the world: "_What is Francelike?"_ Every one knows what France has proved to be like: frombeing a difficult problem she has long since become a luminousinstance. 

Nevertheless, to those on whom that illumination has shone only fromfar off, there may still be something to learn about its componentelements; for it has come to consist of many separate rays, and theweary strain of the last year has been the spectroscope to decomposethem. From the very beginning, when one felt the effulgence as themere pale brightness before dawn, the attempt to define it wasirresistible. "There _is_ a tone--" the tingling sense of it was inthe air from the first days, the first hours--"but what does itconsist in? And just how is one aware of it?" In those days theanswer was comparatively easy. The tone of France after thedeclaration of war was the white glow of dedication: a greatnation's collective impulse (since there is no English equivalentfor that winged word, _elan_ ) to resist destruction. But at thattime no one knew what the resistance was to cost, how long it wouldhave to last, what sacrifices, material and moral, it wouldnecessitate. And for the moment baser sentiments were silenced:greed, self-interest, pusillanimity seemed to have been purged fromthe race. The great sitting of the Chamber, that almost religiouscelebration of defensive union, really expressed the opinion of thewhole people. It is fairly easy to soar to the empyrean when one iscarried on the wings of such an impulse, and when one does not knowhow long one is to be kept suspended at the breathing-limit. 

But there is a term to the flight of the most soaring _elan_. It islikely, after a while, to come back broken-winged and resign itselfto barn-yard bounds. National judgments cannot remain for long aboveindividual feelings; and you cannot get a national "tone" out ofanything less than a whole nation. The really interesting thing, therefore, was to see, as the war went on, and grew into a calamityunheard of in human annals, how the French spirit would meet it, andwhat virtues extract from it. 

The war has been a calamity unheard of; but France has never beenafraid of the unheard of. No race has ever yet so audaciouslydispensed with old precedents; as none has ever so revered theirrelics. It is a great strength to be able to walk without thesupport of analogies; and France has always shown that strength intimes of crisis. The absorbing question, as the war went on, was todiscover how far down into the people this intellectual audacitypenetrated, how instinctive it had become, and how it would endurethe strain of prolonged inaction. 

There was never much doubt about the army. When a warlike race hasan invader on its soil, the men holding back the invader can neverbe said to be inactive. But behind the army were the waitingmillions to whom that long motionless line in the trenches mightgradually have become a mere condition of thought, an acceptedlimitation to all sorts of activities and pleasures. The danger wasthat such a war--static, dogged, uneventful--might gradually crampinstead of enlarging the mood of the lookers-on. Conscription, ofcourse, was there to minimize this danger. Every one was sharingalike in the glory and the woe. But the glory was not of a kind topenetrate or dazzle. It requires more imagination to see the haloaround tenacity than around dash; and the French still cling to theview that they are, so to speak, the patentees and proprietors ofdash, and much less at home with his dull drudge of a partner. Sothere was reason to fear, in the long run, a gradual butirresistible disintegration, not of public opinion, but of somethingsubtler and more fundamental: public sentiment. It was possible thatcivilian France, while collectively seeming to remain at the sameheight, might individually deteriorate and diminish in its attitudetoward the war. 

The French would not be human, and therefore would not beinteresting, if one had not perceived in them occasional symptoms ofsuch a peril. There has not been a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman--savea few harmless and perhaps nervous theorizers--who has wavered aboutthe military policy of the country; but there have naturally beensome who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen tolive up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there havebeen such people: one would have had to postulate them if they hadnot come within one's experience. There have been some to whom itwas harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, ora certain kind of breakfast-roll; though the French, beingfundamentally temperate, are far less the slaves of the luxuriesthey have invented than are the other races who have adopted theseluxuries. 

There have been many more who found the sacrifice of personalhappiness--of all that made life livable, or one's country worthfighting for--infinitely harder than the most apprehensiveimagination could have pictured. There have been mothers and widowsfor whom a single grave, or the appearance of one name on themissing list, has turned the whole conflict into an idiot's tale. There have been many such; but there have apparently not been enoughto deflect by a hair's breadth the subtle current of publicsentiment; unless it is truer, as it is infinitely more inspiring, to suppose that, of this company of blinded baffled sufferers, almost all have had the strength to hide their despair and to say ofthe great national effort which has lost most of its meaning tothem: "Though it slay me, yet will I trust in it. " That is probablythe finest triumph of the tone of France: that its myriad fierycurrents flow from so many hearts made insensible by suffering, thatso many dead hands feed its undying lamp. 

This does not in the least imply that resignation is the prevailingnote in the tone of France. The attitude of the French people, afterfourteen months of trial, is not one of submission to unparalleledcalamity. It is one of exaltation, energy, the hot resolve todominate the disaster. In all classes the feeling is the same: everyword and every act is based on the resolute ignoring of anyalternative to victory. The French people no more think of acompromise than people would think of facing a flood or anearthquake with a white flag. 

Two questions are likely to be put to any observer of the strugglewho risks such assertions. What, one may be asked, are the proofs ofthis national tone? And what conditions and qualities seem tominister to it?

The proofs, now that "the tumult and the shouting dies, " andcivilian life has dropped back into something like its usualroutine, are naturally less definable than at the outset. One of themost evident is the spirit in which all kinds of privations areaccepted. No one who has come in contact with the work-people andsmall shop-keepers of Paris in the last year can fail to be struckby the extreme dignity and grace with which doing without things ispractised. The Frenchwoman leaning in the door of her empty_boutique_ still wears the smile with which she used to calm theimpatience of crowding shoppers. The seam-stress living on themeagre pay of a charity work-room gives her day's sewing asfaithfully as if she were working for full wages in a fashionable_atelier_, and never tries, by the least hint of privatedifficulties, to extract additional help. The habitual cheerfulnessof the Parisian workwoman rises, in moments of sorrow, to the finestfortitude. In a work-room where many women have been employed sincethe beginning of the war, a young girl of sixteen heard late oneafternoon that her only brother had been killed. She had a moment ofdesperate distress; but there was a big family to be helped by hersmall earnings, and the next morning punctually she was back atwork. In this same work-room the women have one half-holiday in theweek, without reduction of pay; yet if an order has to be rushedthrough for a hospital they give up that one afternoon as gaily asif they were doing it for their pleasure. But if any one who haslived for the last year among the workers and small tradesmen ofParis should begin to cite instances of endurance, self-denial andsecret charity, the list would have no end. The essential of it allis the spirit in which these acts are accomplished. 

The second question: What are the conditions and qualities that haveproduced such results? is less easy to answer. The door is solargely open to conjecture that every explanation must dependlargely on the answerer's personal bias. But one thing is certain. France has not achieved her present tone by the sacrifice of any ofher national traits, but rather by their extreme keying up;therefore the surest way of finding a clue to that tone is to try tosingle out whatever distinctively "French" characteristics--or thosethat appear such to the envious alien--have a direct bearing on thepresent attitude of France. Which (one must ask) of all theirmultiple gifts most help the French today to be what they are injust the way they are?

_Intelligence!_ is the first and instantaneous answer. Many Frenchpeople seem unaware of this. They are sincerely persuaded that thecurbing of their critical activity has been one of the mostimportant and useful results of the war. One is told that, in aspirit of patriotism, this fault-finding people has learned not tofind fault. Nothing could be more untrue. The French, when they havea grievance, do not air it in the _Times:_ their forum is the cafeand not the newspaper. But in the cafe they are talking as freely asever, discriminating as keenly and judging as passionately. Thedifference is that the very exercise of their intelligence on aproblem larger and more difficult than any they have hitherto facedhas freed them from the dominion of most of the prejudices, catch-words and conventions that directed opinion before the war. Then their intelligence ran in fixed channels; now it has overflowedits banks. 

This release has produced an immediate readjusting of all theelements of national life. In great trials a race is tested by itsvalues; and the war has shown the world what are the real values ofFrance. Never for an instant has this people, so expert in the greatart of living, imagined that life consisted in being alive. Enamoured of pleasure and beauty, dwelling freely and frankly in thepresent, they have yet kept their sense of larger meanings, haveunderstood life to be made up of many things past and to come, ofrenunciation as well as satisfaction, of traditions as well asexperiments, of dying as much as of living. Never have theyconsidered life as a thing to be cherished in itself, apart from itsreactions and its relations. 

Intelligence first, then, has helped France to be what she is; andnext, perhaps, one of its corollaries, _expression_. The French arethe first to laugh at themselves for running to words: they seem toregard their gift for expression as a weakness, a possible deterrentto action. The last year has not confirmed that view. It has rathershown that eloquence is a supplementary weapon. By "eloquence" Inaturally do not mean public speaking, nor yet the rhetoricalwriting too often associated with the word. Rhetoric is thedressing-up of conventional sentiment, eloquence the fearlessexpression of real emotion. And this gift of the fearless expressionof emotion--fearless, that is, of ridicule, or of indifference inthe hearer--has been an inestimable strength to France. It is a signof the high average of French intelligence that feeling well-wordedcan stir and uplift it; that "words" are not half shamefacedlyregarded as something separate from, and extraneous to, emotion, oreven as a mere vent for it, but as actually animating and formingit. Every additional faculty for exteriorizing states of feeling, giving them a face and a language, is a moral as well as an artisticasset, and Goethe was never wiser than when he wrote:

 "A god gave me the voice to speak my pain. "

It is not too much to say that the French are at this moment drawinga part of their national strength from their language. The pietywith which they have cherished and cultivated it has made it aprecious instrument in their hands. It can say so beautifully whatthey feel that they find strength and renovation in using it; andthe word once uttered is passed on, and carries the same help toothers. Countless instances of such happy expression could be citedby any one who has lived the last year in France. On the bodies ofyoung soldiers have been found letters of farewell to their parentsthat made one think of some heroic Elizabethan verse; and themothers robbed of these sons have sent them an answering cry ofcourage. 

"Thank you, " such a mourner wrote me the other day, "for havingunderstood the cruelty of our fate, and having pitied us. Thank youalso for having exalted the pride that is mingled with ourunutterable sorrow. " Simply that, and no more; but she might havebeen speaking for all the mothers of France. 

When the eloquent expression of feeling does not issue in action--orat least in a state of mind equivalent to action--it sinks to thelevel of rhetoric; but in France at this moment expression andconduct supplement and reflect each other. And this brings me to theother great attribute which goes to making up the tone of France:the quality of courage. It is not unintentionally that it comes laston my list. French courage is courage rationalized, courage thoughtout, and found necessary to some special end; it is, as much as anyother quality of the French temperament, the result of Frenchintelligence. 

No people so sensitive to beauty, so penetrated with a passionateinterest in life, so endowed with the power to express andimmortalize that interest, can ever really enjoy destruction for itsown sake. The French hate "militarism. " It is stupid, inartistic, unimaginative and enslaving; there could not be four better Frenchreasons for detesting it. Nor have the French ever enjoyed thesavage forms of sport which stimulate the blood of more apathetic ormore brutal races. Neither prize-fighting nor bull-fighting is ofthe soil in France, and Frenchmen do not settle their privatedifferences impromptu with their fists: they do it, logically andwith deliberation, on the duelling-ground. But when a nationaldanger threatens, they instantly become what they proudly and justlycall themselves--"a warlike nation"--and apply to the business inhand the ardour, the imagination, the perseverance that have madethem for centuries the great creative force of civilization. EveryFrench soldier knows why he is fighting, and why, at this moment, physical courage is the first quality demanded of him; everyFrenchwoman knows why war is being waged, and why her moral courageis needed to supplement the soldier's contempt of death. 

The women of France are supplying this moral courage in act as wellas in word. Frenchwomen, as a rule, are perhaps less instinctively"courageous, " in the elementary sense, than their Anglo-Saxonsisters. They are afraid of more things, and are less ashamed ofshowing their fear. The French mother coddles her children, the boysas well as the girls: when they tumble and bark their knees they areexpected to cry, and not taught to control themselves as English andAmerican children are. I have seen big French boys bawling over acut or a bruise that an Anglo-Saxon girl of the same age would havefelt compelled to bear without a tear. Frenchwomen are timid forthemselves as well as for their children. They are afraid of theunexpected, the unknown, the experimental. It is not part of theFrenchwoman's training to pretend to have physical courage. She hasnot the advantage of our discipline in the hypocrisies of "goodform" when she is called on to be brave, she must draw her couragefrom her brains. She must first be convinced of the necessity ofheroism; after that she is fit to go bridle to bridle with Jeanned'Arc. 

The same display of reasoned courage is visible in the hastyadaptation of the Frenchwoman to all kinds of uncongenial jobs. Almost every kind of service she has been called to render since thewar began has been fundamentally uncongenial. A French doctor onceremarked to me that Frenchwomen never make really good sick-nursesexcept when they are nursing their own people. They are toopersonal, too emotional, and too much interested in more interestingthings, to take to the fussy details of good nursing, except when itcan help some one they care for. Even then, as a rule, they are notsystematic or tidy; but they make up for these deficiencies byinexhaustible willingness and sympathy. And it has been easy forthem to become good war-nurses, because every Frenchwoman who nursesa French soldier feels that she is caring for her kin. The Frenchwar-nurse sometimes mislays an instrument or forgets to sterilize adressing; but she almost always finds the consoling word to say andthe right tone to take with her wounded soldiers. That profoundsolidarity which is one of the results of conscription flowers, inwar-time, in an exquisite and impartial devotion. 

This, then, is what "France is like. " The whole civilian part of thenation seems merged in one symbolic figure, carrying help and hopeto the fighters or passionately bent above the wounded. Thedevotion, the self-denial, seem instinctive; but they are reallybased on a reasoned knowledge of the situation and on an unflinchingestimate of values. All France knows today that real "life" consistsin the things that make it worth living, and that these things, forFrance, depend on the free expression of her national genius. IfFrance perishes as an intellectual light and as a moral force everyFrenchman perishes with her; and the only death that Frenchmen fearis not death in the trenches but death by the extinction of theirnational ideal. It is against this death that the whole nation isfighting; and it is the reasoned recognition of their peril which, at this moment, is making the most intelligent people in the worldthe most sublime. 

THE END