Part 2 (1/2)
”b.u.t.terfly” (in London), and ”Aida” (in Milan), and always the musical accompaniment to the social vagaries of these ladies who are no better than they should be, was music from old heads and old hearts. The ”other lips and other hearts whose tales of love”
should have been told ardently through fiddle and clarinet are toying with the great harp of a thousand strings that plays the dance of death. That is the music the young men are playing in Europe today. But in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the music that should be made from the soul of youth, crying into reeds and strings and bra.s.s is an echo, an echo altogether lovely but pa.s.sionless!
Finally our season of waiting ended. We came home to the Ritz at midnight from a dinner with Major Murphy, where we had been notified that we were to start for the front the next morning. We told him that the new uniforms were not yet ready and confessed to him that we had the cheap uniforms; he looked resigned. He had been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade of Red Cross commissioners from America, and he probably felt that he had seen the worst and that this was just another cross. But when we reached our rooms that midnight, Henry lifted his voice, not in pleading, but in command. For we were to start at seven the next morning, and it was orders. So each went to his bedroom and began unwrapping his bundles. In ten minutes Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolate divinity! With me there was trouble. Someone had blundered. The s.h.i.+rt went on easily; the tunic went on cosily, but the trousers--someone had shuffled those trousers on me. Even a shoe spoon and foots-case wouldn't get them to rise to their necessary height. Inspection proved that they were 36; now 36 doesn't do me much good as a waist line! There is a net deficit of eight tragic inches, and eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe. Yet there we were.
It was half past twelve. In six hours more we must be on our way to the front--to the great adventure. Uniforms were imperative.
And there was the hiatus! Whereupon Henry rose. He rang for the valet; no response. He rang for the tailor; he was in bed. He rang for the waiter; he was off duty. There was just one name left on the call card; so Henry hustled me into an overcoat and rang for the chambermaid! And she appeared as innocent of English as we were of French. It was an awful moment! But Henry slowly began making gestures and talking in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones. The gestures were the well-known gestures of his valedictory to the Republican party at the Chicago Auditorium in 1912--beautiful gestures and impressive. The maid became interested. Then he took the recalcitrant trousers, placed them gently but firmly against his friend's heart--or such a matter, showing how far from the ideal they came. Then he laid on the bed a brown woollen s.h.i.+rt, and in the tail of it marked out dramatically a ”V” slice about the shape of an old-fas.h.i.+oned slice of pumpkin pie--a segment ten or a dozen inches wide that would require two hands in feeding. Then he pointed from the s.h.i.+rt to the trousers and then to the ample bosom of his friend, indicating with emotion that the huge pie-slice was to go into the rear corsage of the breeches. It was wonderful to see intelligence dawn in the face of that chambermaid. The gestures of that Bull Moose speech had touched her heart. Suddenly she knew the truth, and it made her free, so she cried, ”Wee wee!” And oratory had again risen to its proper place in our midst! At two o'clock she returned with the pumpkin pie slice from the tail of the brown s.h.i.+rt, neatly, but hardly gaudily inserted into the rear waist line of the riding trousers, and we lay down to pleasant dreams; for we found that by standing stiffly erect, by keeping one's tunic pulled down, and by carefully avoiding a stooping posture, it was possible to conceal the facts of one's double life. So we went forth with Major Murphy the next morning as care-free as ”Eden's garden birds.”
We looked like birds, too--scarecrows!
[Ill.u.s.tration: Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe]
Our business took us to the American Ambulance men who were with the French army. Generally when they were at work they were quartered near a big base hospital; and their work took them from the large hospital to the first aid stations near the front line trenches.
Our way from Paris to these men led across the devastated area of France. As the chief activity of the French at the time of our visit was in the Verdun sector, we spent most of our first week at the front near Verdun. And one evening at twilight we walked through the ruined city. The Germans had just finished their evening strafe; two hundred big sh.e.l.ls had been thrown over from their field guns into the ruins. After the two hundredth sh.e.l.l had dropped it was as safe in Verdun as in Emporia until the next day. For the Germans are methodical in all things, and they spend just so many sh.e.l.ls on each enemy point, and no more. The German work of destruction is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains intact upon its walls; not a wall remains uncracked; not a soul lives in the town; now and then a sentinel may be met patrolling the wagon road that winds through the streets. This wagon road, by the way, is the object of the German artillery's attention. Upon this road they think the revitalment trains pa.s.s up to the front. But the sentinels come and go. The only living inhabitants we saw in the place were two black cats. It must have been a beautiful city before the war--a town of sixty thousand and more. It contained some old and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings--a cloister, a bishop's residence, a school--or what not--that, even crumbled and shattered by the sh.e.l.ls, still show in ruins grace and charm and dignity. And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellous that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping of men's hearts toward G.o.d, their most unutterable longing. And the broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops and stores--places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling wreck--where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts, pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris and left to petrify as the sh.e.l.l wrecked it--a thousand little details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town, leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron--this was the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished their evening strafe.
From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruined villages to a big base hospital. We came there in the dark before moonrise, and met our ambulance men--mostly young college boys joyously flirting with death under the German guns. They were stationed in a tent well outside the big hospital building. They gave us a dinner worth while--onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots, some sort of pasta--perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omelet soused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese and coffee--and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on five minutes' notice, an hour after the regular dinner. The ambulance men were under the direct command of a French lieutenant--a Frenchman of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully, played host graciously and told us many interesting things about the work of the army around him; and told it so simply--yet withal so sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long after we had left him. Three or four times a day we were meeting French lieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front. But this one was different. He was so gentle and so serious without being at all solemn. He had been in the war for three years, and said quite incidentally, that under the law of averages his time was long past due and he expected to go soon. It didn't seem to bother him. He pa.s.sed the rum omelet with a steady hand. But his serious mien had attracted the ambulance boys and upon the room of his office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled in chalk, ”Defense absolutement de rire!” ”It's absolutely forbidden to laugh.” Evidently American humour got on his nerves. As we dined in the tent, the boys outside sang trench songs, and college songs with trench words, and gave other demonstrations of their youth.
So we ate and listened to the singing, while the moon rose, and with it came a fog--more than a fog--a cloud of heavy mist that hid the moon. We moved our baggage from the tent to a vacant room in a vacant ward in the big hospital. We saw in the misty moonlight a great brick structure running around a compound. The compound was over 200 feet square, and in the centre of the compound was a big Red Cross made of canvas, painted red, on a background of whitewashed stones. It was 100 feet square. On each side of the compound a Red Cross blazed from the roof of the buildings, under the Geneva lights--lights which the Germans had agreed should mark our hospitals and protect them from air raids.
At midnight we left the hospital to visit those ambulance men who were stationed at the first aid posts, up near the battle line.
It was an eery sort of night ride in the ambulance, going without lights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle front of Verdun.
The white clay of the road was sloppy and the car wobbled and skidded along and we pa.s.sed scores of other vehicles going up and coming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The Red Cross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything but ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalment time. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions, food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an army going, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When we reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In the dugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandaged before starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital, and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing inside out of the misty rain.
As we had been climbing the hill in the ambulance, the roar of the big guns grew louder and louder. We believed it was French cannon.
But when we got out of the car we heard an angry whistle and a roar which told us that German sh.e.l.ls were coming in near us. As we stood before the dugout s.h.i.+vering in the mist we saw beyond us, over the hill, the glare of the French trench rockets lighting up the clouds above us weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over the white muddy road before us. On the road skirting the very door of the dugout pa.s.sed a line of motor trucks and carts--the revitalment train. The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out of the mist came a huge grey truck or a lumbering two-wheeled cart; and then, creaking heavily past the dugout door, plunged into the mist again.
Never did the procession stop. At regular intervals the German sh.e.l.ls crashed into the woods farther up the hill beyond us. But the silent procession before us--looming out of the mist, pa.s.sing us, and fading into the mist, kept constantly moving. In the ghostly light of the misty moons.h.i.+ne, the procession seemed to be spectral--like a line of pa.s.sing souls. A doctor came out of the dugout and started up the hill. He, too, was swallowed in the mist.
Ahead of us up the road were noises that told us the Germans were landing bombs there, not half a mile--perhaps not much more than a quarter of a mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that the Germans were sh.e.l.ling a cross-road. They sh.e.l.led it every night at midnight to smash the revitalment train. The sh.e.l.ls were landing right in the road whereon all these trucks and horse carts were pa.s.sing. The doctor who left us returned in a few minutes in an ambulance--wounded. Another ambulance came up with four or five wounded. A sh.e.l.l had crashed in and wiped out a truck load of men.
But the procession under the misty moon never stopped--never even hesitated. No driver spoke. No teams or trucks cluttered up the road. As fast as a bomb shattered the road out there behind the mist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers hurried up, cleared the way, removed the debris and the ceaseless procession in the ghostly moonlight moved on. Another ambulance brought in two more wounded.
After one o'clock the bombing stopped. Some other cross-road was taking its turn. Five men were buried that night in the little cemetery there by the dugout. We stood or sat about for a while!
no one had much to say. The grey mist thickened and enveloped us.
And we became as very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in the mist up the hill, near where the rocket's red glare flushed on the dim horizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from ”Thais.” It fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling together. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one another whistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the s.h.i.+p--the Gilded Youth whose many millions had made him s.h.i.+mmer. He was not s.h.i.+mmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field service man, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talked music--music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midst of death, and the spirit that was moving men in the moonlight to forget death for something more real than death. And so it came about that the crescendo of our talk ran thus:
And courage--that thing which the Germans thought was their special gift from Heaven, bred of military discipline, rising out of German kultur--we know now is the commonest heritage of men. It is the divine fire burning in the souls of us that proves the case for democracy. For at base and underneath we are all equals. In crises the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, the preacher, the teacher, the labourer, the ignorant, the wise, all go to death for something that defies death, something immortal in the human heart. Those truck-drivers, those mule whackers, those common soldiers, that doctor, these college men on the ambulances are brothers tonight in the democracy of courage. Upon that democracy is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a wider and deeper kins.h.i.+p of men.
So then we knew that under the gilding of the Gilded Youth was fine gold. He was called for a wounded man. As he cranked up his car he asked rather too casually, ”Have you seen our friend from the boat--the pretty nurse?” We started to answer; the stretcher bearer called again and in an instant he went buzzing away and we returned to the hospital.
We slept that night in a hospital bed. The week before three thousand men had pa.s.sed through that hospital--some upon the long journey, so we rose early the next morning. For some way to Henry and me there seemed a curious disquietude about those hospital beds.
In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out the dead from the hospital. The stretcher bearers moved as quickly as they could with their burden through the yard. A dozen soldiers and orderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a head toward the bearers and their burden. There were indeed, in sad deed, ”a dearth of woman's nursing and a lack of woman's tears.” No one knew who the dead man was. He wore his identification tag about him. No one cared except that it should be registered. If he was an officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outside the fence; if he was a private he went inside. It was a lonely, heart-breaking sight. And it occurred to Henry and me--we had been among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept uneasily with the ghosts in the hospital--that we should give one poor fellow a funeral. So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followed the stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to his tomb. It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows.
Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English on us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, ”Have you heard the news from the big base hospital?” We had not. Then he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the hospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs--incendiary bombs. An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives.
They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraft guns near by--the allies until those August and September German raids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided--they came again swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctors and the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out of the burning building. Then toward morning they came and dropped handbills which declared, ”If you don't want your hospitals bombed, move them back further from the front!”
The Germans were not acting in the heat of pa.s.sion. They were fighting scientifically, even if barbarously. For every mile a hospital is moved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrene in the wounded. And by checking gangrene we are saving a great majority of our wounded to return to battle.
Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many wounded were killed that night at Vlaincourt. ”And the French officer de liason between the French army and the American ambulance, what of him?” we asked.
”He slept in the hospital and was killed by a bomb,” answered the Frenchman.