Part 3 (2/2)
Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard instantly and obeyed. In front of them was a line of single horse- drawn carts, with an extra horse in the rear. They could take paths that the motor trucks could not. Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as a relic of how armies were fed in other days. For the first time I was realizing what the motor truck means to war. It brings the army impedimenta close up to the army's rear; it means a reduction of road s.p.a.ce occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.
All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport broken down. And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been an army on the road. The valuable part of our experience was exactly in this: a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all the vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter- marching and attack. Order one expected afterwards, behind the siege line of trenches, when there had been time to establish a routine; organization and smooth organization you had here at the climax of a month's strain. It told the story of the character of the French army and the reasons for its success other than its courage.
The brains were not all with the German Staff.
That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours, we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our advance still continuing? For then, winter trench-fighting was unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as following up success with success. Paris, rising from gloom to optimism, hoped to see the Germans speedily put out of France. The appet.i.te for victory grew, after a week's bulletins which moved the flags forward on the map every day.
Another turn and Soissons was hidden from view by a woodland.
Here we came upon what looked like a leisurely family party of reserves. The French army, a small section of French army, along a road! And thus, if one would see the whole it must be in bits along the roads, when not on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in the genial afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to rest. Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of the last month.
The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being done by the others at the front. These were waiting near a fork which could take them to the right or the left, as the situation demanded. At the rear, their supply of small arms ammunition; in front, caissons of sh.e.l.ls for a battery speaking from the woods near by; a troop of cavalry drawn up, the men dismounted, ready; and ahead of them more reserves ready; everything ready.
This was where the general wanted the body of men and equipment to be, and here they were. There were no dragging ends in the rear, so far as I could see; n.o.body complaining that food or ammunition was not up; no aide looking for somebody who could not be found; no excited staff officer rus.h.i.+ng about shouting for somebody to look sharp for somebody had made a mistake. The thing was unwarlike; it was like a particularly well-thought-out route march. Yet at the word that company of cavalry might be in the thick of it, at the point where they were wanted; the infantry rus.h.i.+ng to the support of the firing-line; the motor transport facing around for withdrawal, if need be. It was only a little way, indeed, into the zone of death from the rear of that compact column. Thousands of such compact bodies on many roads, each seemingly a force by itself and each a part of the whole, which could be a dependable whole only when every part was ready, alert, and where it belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle- line three hundred miles long. The general must know what to depend on, mile by mile, in his plans. Millions of human units are grouped in increasingly larger units, harmonized according to set forms. The most complex of all machines is that of a vast army, which yet must be kept most simple. No unit acts without regard to the others; every one must know how to do its part. The parts of the machine are standardized. One is like the other in training, uniform, and every detail, so that one can replace another. Oldest of all trades this of war; old experts the French. What one saw was like man?uvres. It must be like manoeuvres or the army would not hold together. Man?uvres are to teach armies coherence; war tries out that coherence, which you may not have if someone does not know just what to do; if he is uncertain in his role. Haste leads to confusion; haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to hasten when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its routine with the smoothness of a well-rehea.r.s.ed play.
Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of his people and make the most of their virtues.
Thus, we had a French army's historical part reversed: a French army falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy blow. Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had organized in their ma.s.s offensive the elan which means fast marching and hard blows. So, we found the supposedly excitable French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge--ah, you can always depend on a Frenchman to charge!
Those reserves were p.a.w.ns on a chessboard. They appeared like it; one thought that they realized it. Their individual intelligence and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and h.o.m.ogeneity, rather than accepted it as the dictum of any war lord.
Difficult to think that 'each one had left a vacancy at a family board; difficult to think that all were not automatons in a process of endless routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.
Of old, one knew the wants of soldiers. One needed no hint of what was welcome at the front. Never at any front were there enough newspapers or tobacco. Men smoke twice as much as usual in the strain of waiting for action; men who do not use tobacco at all get the habit. Ask the G.A.R. men who fought in our great war if this is not true. Then, too, when your country is at war, when back at home hands stretch out for every fresh edition and you at the front know only what happens in your alley, think what a newspaper from Paris means out on the battle-line seventy miles from Paris! So I had brought a bundle of newspapers and many packets of cigarettes.
Monsieur, the sensation is beyond even the French language to express--the sensation of sitting down by the roadside with this morning's edition and the first cigarette for twenty-four hours.
”C'est epatant! C'est chic, ca! C'est magnifique! Alors, nom de Dieu!
Tiens! Helas! Voila! Merci, mille remerciments!”--it was an army of Frenchmen with ready words, quick, telling gestures, pouring out their volume of thanks as the car sped by and we tossed out our newspapers at intervals, so that all should have a look.
An Echo de Paris that fell into the road was the centre of a flag-rush, which included an officer. Most un-military--an officer scrambling at the same time as his men! In the name of the Kaiser, what discipline!
Then the car stopped long enough for me to see a private give the paper to his officer, who was plainly sensible of a loss of dignity, with a courtesy which said, ”A thousand pardons, mon capitaine!” and the capitaine began reading the newspaper aloud to his men. Scores of human touches which were French, republican, democratic!
With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned, native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing on to the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our reserve supply was not visible, and an officer's sharp command saved us from being invested by storm.
As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were kept back out of range of the German sh.e.l.ls, making the town a dead s.p.a.ce between them and the firing-line, which was beyond. When the Germans retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as it was their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the main square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German guns when the French infantry pa.s.sed through. Soissons was not a German town.
We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters of shops that had not been torn down by sh.e.l.l-fire closed. Soissons was as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which was firing methodically and slowly, its sh.e.l.ls whizzing toward the ridge back of the town.
The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and see the soixante-quinze and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction of the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom of an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the Germans. If that battery were on the other side under cover of any one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another shot-- and we were not sure that the battery was not on the opposite side of the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery fire to one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were scattered, according to the accepted practice, and from the central firing-station word to fire was being pa.s.sed first to one gun and then to another.
Beside the b.u.t.tress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town.
Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward and bullets were waiting for them. They had rolled over on their backs, their rigid hands still in the position of grasping their rifles after the manner of crouching skirmishers.
Our statesman said that we had better give up trying to locate the battery; and one of the officers called a halt to trying to go up to the firing-line on the part of a personally-conducted party, after we stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and his freedom of spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the French call elan. Whenever one asked a question of a French private you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know.
This definiteness, the result of military training as well as of Gallic lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know his part. This young man, you realized, had tasted the ”salt of life,” as Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had known the intoxication of a charge.
”Does everything go well?” M. Doumer asked. ”It is not going at all, now. It is sticking,” was the answer. ”Some Germans were busy up there in the stone quarries while the others were falling back. They have a covered trench and rapid-fire-gun positions to sweep a zone of fire which they have cleared.”
Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dug-outs as shelter from sh.e.l.ls!
There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private saying: ”Now this is what the general ought to do!” It was Napoleon's own plan revealed. ”You keep still!” he said. ”This army has too many generals.”
<script>