A Volunteer Poilu Part 3

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

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

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

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

When Oiler and I came downstairs, two little gla.s.ses of sherry and a plate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us. There was something distinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in the demeanor of the two prim ladies who stood by. It roused my curiosity. Finally one of them said:--

"Are you English, gentlemen?"

"No," we replied; "Americans."

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

The old porter came uneasily down the stair. "Mademoiselle Pierre says that the doctor must come at once," he murmured, "the little fellow (le pet.i.t) is not doing well."

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

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

Chapter III

The Great Swathe of the Lines

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

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

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

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

"Yes, indeed, I am Francais, monsieur. The Swiss is now a waiter in a cafe of the Place Stanislas. It is something new to me to be a hotel porter."

"Tiens. What did you do?"

"I drove a coal team, monsieur."

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

"I used to deliver coal to the hotel. One day I heard that the Swiss had gone to the cafe to take the place of a garcon whose cla.s.s had just been called out. I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks of coal, and being always out of doors, so I applied for the porter's job."

"You are satisfied with the change."

"Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur."

"I suppose you have kinsmen at the front."

"Only my sister's son, monsieur."

"In the active forces?"

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

"What does he do en civil?"

"He is a furniture-maker, monsieur."

He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off down the green velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator. In the street below a crowd was coming out of the silky white radiance of the lobby of a cinema into the violet rays thrown upon the sidewalk from the illuminated sign over the theater door. There are certain French cities to which the war has brought a real prosperity, and Nancy was then one of them. The thousands of refugees from the frontier villages and the world of military officials and soldier workmen mobilized in the ammunition factories had added to the population till it was actually greater than it had been before the war, and with this new population had come a development of the city's commercial life. The middle cla.s.s was making money, the rich were getting richer, and Nancy, hardly more than eighteen or nineteen miles from the trenches, forgot its danger till, on the first day of January, 1916, the Germans fired several sh.e.l.ls from a giant mortar or a marine piece into the town, one of which scattered the fragments of a big five-story apartment house all over Nancy. And on that afternoon thirty thousand people left the city.

The day on which I was to go across the great swathe of the front to the first-line trenches dawned cool and sunny. I use the word "swathe"

purposely, for only by that image can the real meaning of the phrase "the front" be understood. The thick, black line which figures on the war-maps is a great swathe of country running, with a thousand little turns and twists that do not interfere with its general regularity, from the summits of the Vosges to the yellow dunes of the North Sea. The relation of the border of this swathe to the world beyond is the relation of sea to land along an irregular and indented coast. Here an isolated, strategic point, fiercely defended by the Germans, has extended the border of the swathe beyond the usual limits, and villages thirteen and fourteen miles from the actual lines have been pounded to pieces by long-range artillery in the hope of destroying the enemy's communications; there the trenches cross an obscure, level moor upon whose possession nothing particular depends, and the swathe narrows to the villages close by the lines. This swathe, which begins with the French communications, pa.s.ses the French trenches, leaps "No Man's Land," and continues beyond the German trenches to the German communications, averages about twenty-two miles in width. The territory within this swathe is inhabited by soldiers, ruled by soldiers, worked by soldiers, and organized for war.

Sometimes the transition between civilian life and the life of the swathe is abrupt, as, for instance, at Verdun, where the villages beyond the lines have been emptied of civilian inhabitants to make room for the soldiery; but at other times the change is gradual and the peasants continue to work fields almost in the shadow of the trenches. Since the line of trenches was organized by the Germans only after a series of engagements along the front, during which the battle-line oscillated over a wide territory, the approach to the swathe is often through a region of desolated villages sometimes far removed from the present trenches. Such is the state of affairs in the region of the Marne, the Argonne, and on the southern bank of the Moselle. Moss-overgrown and silent, these villages often stand deserted in the fields at the entrance to the swathe, fit heralds of the desolation that lies beyond.

Imagine, then, the French half of the swathe extending from the edge of the civilian world to the barbed-wire entanglements of No Man's Land.

Within this territory, in the trenches, in the artillery positions, in the villages where troops are quartered (and they are quartered in every village of the swathe), and along all the princ.i.p.al turns and corners of the roads, a certain number of sh.e.l.ls fall every twenty-four hours, the number of sh.e.l.ls per locality increasing as one advances toward the first lines. There are certain disputed regions, that of Verdun in particular, where literally the whole great swathe has been pounded to pieces, till hardly one stone of a village remains on another, and during the recent offensive in the Somme the British are said to have systematically wiped out every village, hamlet, and road behind the German trenches to a depth of eighteen miles. Yet, protected from rifle bullets and the majority of sh.e.l.ls by a great wooded hill, the inhabitants of M------, one mile from the lines of the Bois-le-Pretre, did a thriving business selling fruit to the soldiers, and I once saw an old peasant woman, who was digging potatoes in her garden when a small sh.e.l.l burst about two hundred feet from her, shake her fist toward the German lines, mutter something, and plod angrily home to her cellar.

There are rarely any children close to the trenches, but in villages that are only occasionally sh.e.l.led, the school is open, and the cla.s.s hurries to the cellar at the first alarm.

The lieutenant of the American Section, a young Frenchman who spoke English not only fluently, but also with distinction, came to Nancy to take me to the front. It was a clear, sunny morning, and the rumble of the commercial life of Nancy, somewhat later in starting than our own, was just beginning to be heard. Across the street from the breakfast-room of the hotel, a young woman wearing a little black cape over her shoulders rolled up the corrugated iron shutter of a confectioner's shop and began to set the window with the popular patriotic candy boxes, aluminum models of a "seventy-five" sh.e.l.l tied round with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a white ap.r.o.n and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his head; and from the nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant dressed in a black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the morning I was contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; that night I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire sh.e.l.ls.

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

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

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

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

The big, war-gray Panhard began to move. I looked round, eager to notice anything that marked our transition from peace to war. Beyond the Nancy, built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay the industrial Nancy which has grown up since the development of the iron mines of French Lorraine in the eighties. Through this ugly huddle we pa.s.sed first: there were working men on the sidewalks, gamins in the gutters,--nothing to remind one of the war.

"Halt!"

At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small, gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car. From the door of a neighboring wineshop, a hideous old woman, her uncombed, tawny yellow hair messed round her coa.r.s.e, s.h.i.+ny face, came out to look at us.

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

"Pa.s.s," said the sergeant, and saluted. The sentry retired to his post on the sidewalk. At the door of the wineshop the woman continued to stare at us with an animal curiosity. Possibly our English-like uniforms had attracted her attention; the French are very curious about les Anglais. Over the roof of an ugly row of working men's barracks, built of mortar and trimmed with dingy brick, came the uproar of a great industry, the humming clang of saws, the ringing of iron on iron, and the heart-beat thump of a great hammer that shook the earth. In a vast, detached building five great furnaces were crowned with tufts of pinkish fire, workmen were crossing the cindery yard dragging little carts and long strips of iron, and a long line of open freight cars was being emptied of coal.

"They are making sh.e.l.ls," said the lieutenant in the tone that he might have said, "They are making candy."

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