Part 3 (1/2)
Soon they would know what the Germans had done to the homes.
What the Germans had done to one piano was evident. It stood in the yard of a house where gra.s.s and flowers had been trodden by horses and men. In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of the little drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the intoxication of a Paris gained, a France in submission. They did not know what Joffre had in pickle for them. It had all gone according to programme up to that moment. Nothing can stop us Germans!
Champagne instead of beer! Set the gla.s.s on top of the piano and sing! Haven't we waited forty years for this day?
Captured diaries of German officers, which reflect the seventh heaven of elation suddenly turned into grim depression, taken in connection with what one saw on the battlefield, reconstruct the scene around that piano. The cup to the lips; then dashed away. How those orders to retreat must have hurt!
The state of the refugees' homes all depended upon the chances of war. War's lightning might have hit your roof-tree and it might not. It plays no favourites between the honest and the dishonest; the thrifty and the s.h.i.+ftless. We pa.s.sed villages which exhibited no signs of destruction or of looting. German troops had marched through in the advance and in the retreat without being billeted. A hurrying army with another on its heels has no time for looting. Other villages had been points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight.
General Mauvaise Chance had it in for them. Sh.e.l.ls had wrecked some houses; others were burned. Where a German non-commissioned officer came to the door of a French family and said that room must be made for German soldiers in that house and if anyone dared to interfere with them he would be shot, there the exhausted human nature of a people trained to think that ”Krieg ist Krieg” and that the spoils of war are to the victor had its way.
It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is the effect of war, when men live a year in a day, that he is demonized in a month. Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken, crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled. The soldiery which could not have its Paris ”took it out” of the property of their hosts.
Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is organized destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are aroused to the kind of insane pa.s.sion which war kindles in human beings. But some indecencies one could not understand in civilized men. All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded that will embarra.s.s the enemy. A certain foully disgusting practice was too common not to have had the approval of at least some officers, whose conduct in several chateaux includes them as accomplices. Not all officers, not all soldiers. That there should be a few is enough to sicken you of belonging to the human species.
Nothing worse in Central America; nothing worse where civilized degeneracy disgraces savagery.
But do not think that destruction for destruction's sake was done in all houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the stoppers of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.
To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big, conical haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.
It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open.
Occasionally one saw the hastily-made shelter-trenches of a skirmish line; and again, the emplacements for batteries--hurried field- emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then, pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.
Swift marching and quick man?uvres of the type which gave war some of its old sport and zest; the advance all the while gathering force like the neap tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested wheatfield or a pasture after all leave few marks of pa.s.sage. A day's rain will wash away bloodstains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by his murderous wrath.
The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order.
Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the rifles and guns and sh.e.l.l-fire, were moving across the fields with spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that were war's victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and, sometimes, when the burying was unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to take Paris.
Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came running across the street at sight of him.
”Son of an old friend of mine, from my town,” said our statesman.
Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.
Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and sh.e.l.led, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a st.u.r.dy young woman who threw some flowers into the tonneau as we pa.s.sed, in her tribute to the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of victorious France--France after forty years' waiting throwing back a foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling landscape, basked in victory. Dead the spirit of anyone who could not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a Frenchman. Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages which had saved Paris and France.
The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom we pa.s.sed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead.
Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete?
Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, with firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of s.h.i.+p-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of park-like country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see against the background of the foliage which threw it into relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting sh.e.l.ls, renewed with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.
This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns, in sight; only against ma.s.ses of autumn green a diaphanous, man-made nimbus which was raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall gra.s.s. Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.
There was hard fighting; a lot of French and German were being killed in the direction of Compiegne and Noyon to-day. Another dip into another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the m.u.f.fled firing of a line of infantry were audible. Yes, we were getting up with the army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road on which we were. Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.
Ahead was the army's larder on wheels; a procession of big motor transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision of a battles.h.i.+p fleet at sea. We should have known that they belonged to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pa.s.s.
All army transports are like that. What the deuced right has anybody to pa.s.s? They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front of them. Our car in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut that an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of; which proves again how closely European armies are tied to their fine highways. We got out, and here again was our statesman putting his shoulder to the wheel. That is the way of the French in war.
Everybody tries to help. By this time the transport chauffeurs remembered that they also were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are polite even in time of war, they let us by.
A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.
”Stop here!” he called.