Part 8 (1/2)
Chapter VI
The Germans Attack
The schoolmaster (inst.i.tuteur) and the schoolmistress (inst.i.tutrice) of Montauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on the second story of the schoolhouse. The kitchen of this fiat had been struck by a sh.e.l.l, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and gla.s.s, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of a copper saucepan still hanging on the wall. In one of the rooms, else quite bare of furniture, was an upright piano. Sometimes while stationed at Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the trenches in playing this instrument.
It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and thus far not a single call had come in. The sun was s.h.i.+ning very brightly in a sky washed clear by a night of rain, the morning mists were rising from the wood, and up and down the very muddy street walked little groups of soldiers. I drew up the rickety stool and began to play the waltz from ”The Count of Luxembourg.” In a short time I heard the sound of tramping on the stairs voices. In came three poilus--a pale boy with a weary, gentle expression in his rather faded blue eyes; a dark, heavy fellow of twenty-five or six, with big wrists, big, muscular hands, and a rather unpleasant, lowering face; and a little, middle-aged man with straightforward, friendly hazel eyes and a pointed beard. The pale, boyish one carried a violin made from a cigar box under his arm, just such a violin as the darkies make down South. This violin was very beautifully made, and decorated with a rustic design. I stopped playing.
”Don't, don't,” cried the dark, big fellow; ”we haven't heard any music for a long time. Please keep on. Jacques, here, will accompany you.”
”I never heard the waltz,” said the violinist; ”but if you play it over for me once or twice, I'll try to get the air--if you would like to have me to,” he added with a shy, gentle courtesy.
So I played the rather ba.n.a.l waltz again, till the lad caught the tune.
He hit it amazingly well, and his ear was unusually true. The dark one had been in Canada and was hungry for American rag-time. ”'The Good Old Summer Time'--you know that? 'Harrigan'--you know that?” he said in English. The rag-time of ”Harrigan” floated out on the street of Montauville. But I did not care to play things which could have no violin obligato, so I began to play what I remembered of waltzes dear to every Frenchman's heart--the tunes of the ”Merry Widow.” ”Sylvia” went off with quite a dash. The concert was getting popular. Somebody wanted to send for a certain Alphonse who had an occarina. Two other poilus, men in the forties, came up, their dark-brown, horseshoe beards making them look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on the sunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, who turned out to be a Norman, played a solo--some music-hall fantasy, I imagine. The next number was the ever popular ”Tipperaree,” which every single poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind of English. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than the ”Merry Widow.” I thanked Heaven that I was not called on to translate it, a feat frequently demanded of the American drivers. The song is silly enough in the King's English, but in lucid, exact French, it sinks to positive imbecility.
”You play, don't you?” said the violinist to the small bearded man.
”A little,” he replied modestly.
”Please play.”
The little man sat down at the piano, meditated a minute, and began to play the rich chords of Rachmaninof's ”Prelude.” He got about half through, when Zip-bang! a small sh.e.l.l burst down the street. The dark fellow threw open the French window. The poilus were scurrying to shelter. The pianist continued with the ”Prelude.”
Zip-bang! Zip-bang! Zshh--Bang--Bang. Bang-Bang!
The piano stopped. Everybody listened. The village was still as death.
Suddenly down the street came the rattle of a volley of rifle shots.
Over this sound rose the choked, metallic notes of a bugle-call. The rifle shots continued. The ominous popping of machine guns resounded.
The village, recovering from its silence, filled with murmurs. Bang!
Bang! Bang I Bang! went some more sh.e.l.ls. The same knowledge took definite shape in our minds.
”An attack!”
The violinist, clutching his instrument, hurried down the stairs followed by all the others, leaving the chords of the uncompleted ”Prelude” to hang in the startled air. Sh.e.l.ls were popping everywhere--crashes of smoke and violence--in the roads, in the fields, and overhead. The Germans were trying to isolate the few detachments en repos in the village, and prevent reinforcements coming from Dieulouard or any other place. To this end all the roads between Pont-a-Mousson and the trenches, and the roads leading directly to the trenches, were being sh.e.l.led.
”Go at once to Poste C!”
The winding road lay straight ahead, and just at the end of the village street, the Germans had established a tir de barrage. This meant that a sh.e.l.l was falling at that particular point about once every fifty seconds. I heard two rafales break there as I was grinding up the machine. Up the slope of the Montauville hill came several of the other drivers. Tyler, of New York, a comrade who united remarkable bravery to the kindest of hearts, followed close behind me, also evidently bound for Poste C. German bullets, fired wildly from the ridge of The Wood over the French trenches, sang across the Montauville valley, lodging in the trees of Puvenelle behind us with a vicious tspt; sh.e.l.ls broke here and there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Reserve, throwing the small rocks of the road surfacing wildly in every direction. The French batteries to our left were firing at the Germans, the German batteries were firing at the French trenches and the roads, and the machine guns rattled ceaselessly. I saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of the slope of the Bois-le-Pretre--vague ma.s.ses of moving blue on the brown ways. A storm of sh.e.l.ls was breaking round certain points in the road and particularly at the entrance to The Wood. I wondered what had become of the audience at the concert. Various sounds, transit of sh.e.l.ls, bursting of sh.e.l.ls, cras.h.i.+ng of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! of mitrailleuses played the treble to a roar formed of echoes and cadences--the roar of battle. The Wood of Death (Le Bois de la Mort) was singing again.
That day's attack was an attempt by the Germans to take back from the French the eastern third of the Quart-en-Reserve and the rest of the adjoining ridge half hidden in the shattered trees. At the top of the plateau, by the rise in the moorland I described in the preceding chapter, I had an instant's view of the near-by battle, for the focus was hardly more than four hundred yards away. There was a glimpse of human beings in the Quart--soldiers in green, soldiers in blue--the very fact that anybody was to be seen there was profoundly stirring. They were fighting in No Man's Land. Tyler and I watched for a second, wondering what scenes of agony, of heroism, of despair were being enacted in that dreadful field by the ruined wood.
We hurried our wounded to the hospital, pa.s.sing on our way detachments of soldiers rus.h.i.+ng toward The Wood from the villages of the region.
Three or four big sh.e.l.ls had just fallen in Dieulouard, and the village was deserted and horribly still. The wind carried the roar of the attack to our ears. In three quarters of an hour, I was back again at the same moorland poste, to which an order of our commander had attached me.
Montauville was full of wounded. I had three on stretchers inside, one beside me on the seat, and two others on the front mudguards. And The Wood continued to sing. From Montauville I could hear the savage yells and cries which accompanied the fighting.
Half an hour after the beginning of the attack, the war invaded the sky, with the coming of the German reconnoitering aeroplanes. One went to watch the roads leading to The Wood along the plateau, one went to watch the Dieulouard road, and the other hovered over the scene of the combat.
The sky was soon dotted with the puffs of smoke left by the exploding sh.e.l.ls of the special anti-aircraft ”seventy- fives.” These puffs blossomed from a pin-point of light to a vaporous, gray-white puff-ball about the size of the full moon, and then dissolved in the air or blew about in streaks and wisps. These cloudlets, fired at an aviator flying along a certain line, often were gathered by the eye into arrangements resembling constellations. The three machines were very high, and had a likeness to little brown and silver insects.