A Volunteer Poilu Part 4

Beyond the bridge, running almost directly north to Metz, lay the historic valley of the Moselle. Great, bare hills, varying between seven hundred and a thousand feet in height, and often carved by erosion into strange, high triangles and abrupt mesas, formed the valley wall. The ground color of the hills was a warm buff-brown with a good deal of iron-red in it, and the sky above was of a light, friendly blue. A strange, Egyptian emerald of new wheat, a certain deep cobalt of cloud shadows, and a ruddy brownness of field and moor are the colors of Lorraine. Here and there, on the meadows of the river and the steep flanks of the hills, were ancient, red-roofed villages. Across the autumnal fields the smoke and flame of squalid Pompey loomed strangely.

There were signs of the war at Marbache, fourteen kilometres from Nancy, slight signs, to be sure, but good ones--the presence of a military smithy for the repair of army wagons, several of which stood by on rusty wheels, and a view of some twenty or thirty artillery caissons parked under the trees. But it was at B------, sixteen kilometres from Nancy, and sixteen from the lines, that I first felt the imminence of the war.

The morning train from Nancy had just stopped, to go no farther for fear of sh.e.l.ls, and beyond the station the tracks of the once busy Nancy-Metz railroad advanced, rusty, unused, and overgrown with gra.s.s, into the danger zone. Far behind now lay civilian Pompey, and Marbache shared by soldiers and civilians. B------was distinctly a village of the soldiery.

The little hamlet, now the junction where the wagon-trains supplying the soldiery meet the great artery of the railroad, was built on the banks of a ca.n.a.l above the river. The color of these villages in Lorraine is rather lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the local buff-yellow stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown tone that goes well with the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown landscape. A glorious sky of silvery white cloud ma.s.ses, pierced with sunlight and islanded with soft blue, shone over the soldier village. There were no combatants in it when we pa.s.sed through, only the old poilus who drove the wagons to the trenches and the army hostlers who looked after the animals. There were pictures of soldier grooms leading horses down a narrow, slimy street between brown, mud-spattered walls to a drinking-trough; of horses lined up along a house wall being briskly curry-combed by big, thick-set fellows in blousy white overalls and blue fatigue caps; and of doors of stables opening on the road showing a bedding of brown straw on the earthen floor. There was a certain stench, too, the smell of horse-fouled mud that mixed with that odor I later was able to cla.s.sify as the smell of war. For the war has a smell that clings to everything miltary, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, and cantonments, and saturates one's own clothing, a smell compounded of horse, chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human beings. At the guarded exit of the village to the sh.e.l.l zone was a little military cemetery in which rows of wooden crosses stood with the regularity of pins in a paper.

Two kilometres farther on, at Dieulouard, we drew into the sh.e.l.l zone. A cottage had been struck the day before, and the sh.e.l.l, arriving by the roof, had blown part of the front wall out into the street. In the facade of the house, to the left of a door hanging crazily on its hinges, an irregular oval hole, large enough to drive a motor-car through, rose from the ground and came to a point just below the overhang of the roof. The edges of the broken stone were clean and new in contrast to the time-soiled outer wall of the dwelling.

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

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

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

After Dieulouard began the swathe of stillness.

Following the western bank of the ca.n.a.l of the Moselle the road made a great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and then mounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur the road went through lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses surrounded by acres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in their weedy profusion. Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great burlap screens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect of a continuous line when seen from a certain angle.

"What are those for?"

"To hide the road from the Germans. Do you see that little village down there on the crest? The Boches have an observatory there, and sh.e.l.l the road whenever they see anything worth sh.e.l.ling."

A strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and decay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued to s.h.i.+ne on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the world was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed. A village lay ahead of us, disfigured by random sh.e.l.ls and half deserted. Beyond the still, sh.e.l.l-spattered houses, a great wood rose, about a mile and a half away, on a ridge that stood boldly against the sky. Running from the edge of the trees down across an open slope to the river was a brownish line that stood in a little contrast to the yellower gra.s.s.

Suddenly, there slowly rose from this line a great puff of grayish-black smoke which melted away in the clear, autumnal air.

"See," said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he would have shown at a bonfire--"those are the German trenches. We have just fired a sh.e.l.l into them."

Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of Pont-a-Mousson.

The road was now everywhere screened carefully with lengths of light-brown burlap, and there was not a single house that did not bear witness to the power of a sh.e.l.l. The sense of "the front" began to possess me, never to go, the sense of being in the vicinity of a tremendous power. A ruined village, or a deserted town actually on the front does not bring to mind any impression of decay, for the intellect tends rather to consider t& means by which the destruction has been accomplished. One sees villages of the swathes so completely blown to pieces that they are literally nothing but earthy mounds of rubbish, and seeing them thus, in a plain still fiercely disputed night and day between one's own side and the invisible enemy, the mind feels itself in the presence of force, t.i.tanic, secret, and hostile.

Beyond Pont-a-Mousson the road led directly to the trenches of the Bois-le-Pretre, less than half a mile away. But the disputed trenches were hidden behind the trees, and I could not see them. Through the silence of the deserted town sounded the m.u.f.fled boom of sh.e.l.ls and trench engines bursting in the wood beyond, and every now and then clouds of gray-black smoke from the explosion would rise above the brown leaves of the ash trees. The smoke of these explosions rose straight upwards in a foggy column, such as a locomotive might make if, halted on its tracks somewhere in the wood, it had put coal on its fires.

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

A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted apartment house had been a.s.signed me. It was nine o'clock, and I was getting ready to roll up in my blankets and go to sleep. Beneath the starlit heavens the street below was black as pitch save when a trench light, floating serenely down the sky, illuminated with its green-white glow the curving road and the line of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous villas. There was not a sound to be heard outside of an occasional rifle shot in the trenches, sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet b.a.l.l.s. I went round to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen windows to the lines. A little action, some quarrel of sentries, perhaps, was going on behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river.

Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad track running across the un-harvested fields. Gleaming palely through the French window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed the deserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished water-tap above the stone sink. The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke upon my ears.

My own room was lit by the yellow flame of a solitary candle, rising, untroubled by the slightest breath of wind, straight into the air. A large rug of old-rose covered the floor, an old-rose velvet canopy draped a long table, hanging down at the corners in straight, heavy creases, and the wallpaper was a golden yellow with faint stripes of silvery-gray glaze. By the side of the wooden bed stood a high cabinet holding about fifty terra-cotta and porcelain figurines, s.h.i.+ny shepherdesses with s.h.i.+ny pink cheeks, Louis XV peasants with rakes on their shoulders, and three little dogs made of a material the color of cocoa. The gem of the collection was an eighteenth-century porcelain of a youth and a maid sitting on opposite sides of a curved bench over whose center rose a blossoming bush. The youth, dressed in black, and wearing yellow stockings, looked with an amorous smile at the girl in her gorgeous dress of flowering brocade.

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

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

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

"Yes," I replied.

"I am the caporal in charge of the depot of the engineers in the cellar," continued my visitor, "and I thought I'd come in and see how you were."

I invited him to enter.

"Do you find yourself comfortable here, son?"

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

"Are these American cigarettes?"

"Yes."

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

"A Frenchman is never happy out of France."

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

"Perhaps you are right," he admitted. "We Frenchmen love the good things, and think we can get them in France better than anywhere else.

The solid satisfactions of life--good wine--good cheese." He paused.

"You see, son, all that (tout ca) is an affair of mine--in civilian life (dans le civil) I am a grocer at Macon in Bourgogne."

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

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

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

"Well, I think you are going to get a taste of it to-night. I heard our artillery men (nos artiflots) early this morning firing their long-range cannon, and every time they do that the Boches throw sh.e.l.ls into Pont-a-Mousson. I have been expecting an answer all day. If they start in to-night, get up and come down cellar, son. This house was struck by a sh.e.l.l two weeks ago."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am a light sleeper, and the arrival of the first sh.e.l.l awakened me.

Kicking off my blankets, I sat up in bed just in time to catch the swift ebb of a heavy concussion. A piece of gla.s.s, dislodged from a broken pane by the tremor, fell in a treble tinkle to the floor. For a minute or two there was a full, heavy silence, and then several objects rolled down the roof and fell over the gutters into the street. It sounded as if some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto the house-roof from the height of the clouds. Another silence followed. Suddenly it was broken by a swift, complete sound, a heavy boom-roar, and on the heels of this noise came a throbbing, whistling sigh that, at first faint as the sound of ocean on a distant beach, increased with incredible speed to a whistling swish, ending in a HISH of tremendous volume and a roaring, grinding burst. The sound of a great sh.e.l.l is never a pure bang; one hears, rather, the end of the arriving HISH, the explosion, and the tearing disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one grinding hammer-blow of terrific violence. On the heels of this second sh.e.l.l came voices in the dark street, and the rosy glow of fire from somewhere behind. More lumps, fragments of sh.e.l.l that had been shot into the air by the explosion, rained down upon the roof. I got up and went to the kitchen window. A house on one of the silent streets between the city and the lines was on fire, great volumes of smoke were rolling off into the starlit night, and voices were heard all about murmuring in the shadows. I hurried on my clothes and went down to the cellar.

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

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

Hearing another sh.e.l.l, he slammed the door, and stepped to the right behind the stone wall of the cellar.