Part 3 (1/2)
May 16th.
About two miles from the German frontier (_frontier_ just here as well as front) an isolated hill rises out of the Lorraine meadows.
East of it, a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbon is the boundary between Empire and Republic. On such a clear day as this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From its gra.s.sy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching the east for the danger speck; and the circ.u.mference of the hill is furrowed by a deep trench--a ”bowel,” rather--winding invisibly from one subterranean observation post to another. In each of these earthly warrens (ingeniously wattled, roofed and iron-sheeted) stand two or three artillery officers with keen quiet faces, directing by telephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods four or five miles away. Interesting as the place was, the men who lived there interested me far more. They obviously belonged to different cla.s.ses, and had received a different social education; but their mental and moral fraternity was complete. They were all fairly young, and their faces had the look that war has given to French faces: a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will and sobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so bent on the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to the vanis.h.i.+ng point of the great perspective.
From this vigilant height--one of the intentest eyes open on the frontier--we went a short distance down the hillside to a village out of range of the guns, where the commanding officer gave us tea in a charming old house with a terraced garden full of flowers and puppies. Below the terrace, lost Lorraine stretched away to her blue heights, a vision of summer peace: and just above us the unsleeping hill kept watch, its signal-wires trembling night and day. It was one of the intervals of rest and sweetness when the whole horrible black business seems to press most intolerably on the nerves.
Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed a dark blur in our bird's-eye view of the plain. We pa.s.sed into the forest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts. On all sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branched and sodded and leafy that they seemed like some transition form between tree and house. We were in one of the so-called ”villages negres” of the second-line trenches, the jolly little settlements to which the troops retire after doing their s.h.i.+ft under fire. This particular colony has been developed to an extreme degree of comfort and safety. The houses are partly underground, connected by deep winding ”bowels” over which light rustic bridges have been thrown, and so profoundly roofed with sods that as much of them as shows above ground is sh.e.l.l-proof. Yet they are real houses, with real doors and windows under their gra.s.s-eaves, real furniture inside, and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors. In the Colonel's bungalow a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on the table, and everywhere we saw the same neatness and order, the same amused pride in the look of things. The men were dining at long trestle-tables under the trees; tired, unshaven men in shabby uniforms of all cuts and almost every colour. They were off duty, relaxed, in a good humour; but every face had the look of the faces watching on the hill-top. Wherever I go among these men of the front I have the same impression: the impression that the absorbing undivided thought of the Defense of France lives in the heart and brain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain of their chief.
We walked a dozen yards down the road and came to the edge of the forest. A wattled palisade bounded it, and through a gap in the palisade we looked out across a field to the roofs of a quiet village a mile away. I went out a few steps into the field and was abruptly pulled back. ”Take care--those are the trenches!” What looked like a ridge thrown up by a plough was the enemy's line; and in the quiet village French cannon watched. Suddenly, as we stood there, they woke, and at the same moment we heard the unmistakable Gr-r-r of an aeroplane and saw a Bird of Evil high up against the blue. Snap, snap, snap barked the mitrailleuse on the hill, the soldiers jumped from their wine and strained their eyes through the trees, and the Taube, finding itself the centre of so much attention, turned grey tail and swished away to the concealing clouds.
May 17th.
Today we started with an intenser sense of adventure. Hitherto we had always been told beforehand where we were going and how much we were to be allowed to see; but now we were being launched into the unknown. Beyond a certain point all was conjecture--we knew only that what happened after that would depend on the good-will of a Colonel of Cha.s.seurs-a-pied whom we were to go a long way to find, up into the folds of the mountains on our southeast horizon.
We picked up a staff-officer at Head-quarters and flew on to a battered town on the edge of the hills. From there we wound up through a narrowing valley, under wooded cliffs, to a little settlement where the Colonel of the Brigade was to be found. There was a short conference between the Colonel and our staff-officer, and then we annexed a Captain of Cha.s.seurs and spun away again. Our road lay through a town so exposed that our companion from Head-quarters suggested the advisability of avoiding it; but our guide hadn't the heart to inflict such a disappointment on his new acquaintances. ”Oh, we won't stop the motor--we'll just dash through,” he said indulgently; and in the excess of his indulgence he even permitted us to dash slowly.
Oh, that poor town--when we reached it, along a road ploughed with fresh obus-holes, I didn't want to stop the motor; I wanted to hurry on and blot the picture from my memory! It was doubly sad to look at because of the fact that it wasn't _quite dead;_ faint spasms of life still quivered through it. A few children played in the ravaged streets; a few pale mothers watched them from cellar doorways. ”They oughtn't to be here,” our guide explained; ”but about a hundred and fifty begged so hard to stay that the General gave them leave. The officer in command has an eye on them, and whenever he gives the signal they dive down into their burrows. He says they are perfectly obedient. It was he who asked that they might stay...”
Up and up into the hills. The vision of human pain and ruin was lost in beauty. We were among the firs, and the air was full of balm. The mossy banks gave out a scent of rain, and little water-falls from the heights set the branches trembling over secret pools. At each turn of the road, forest, and always more forest, climbing with us as we climbed, and dropped away from us to narrow valleys that converged on slate-blue distances. At one of these turns we overtook a company of soldiers, spade on shoulder and bags of tools across their backs--”trench-workers” swinging up to the heights to which we were bound. Life must be a better thing in this crystal air than in the mud-welter of the Argonne and the fogs of the North; and these men's faces were fresh with wind and weather.
Higher still ... and presently a halt on a ridge, in another ”black village,” this time almost a town! The soldiers gathered round us as the motor stopped--throngs of cha.s.seurs-a-pied in faded, trench-stained uniforms--for few visitors climb to this point, and their pleasure at the sight of new faces was presently expressed in a large ”_Vive l'Amerique!_” scrawled on the door of the car. _L'Amerique_ was glad and proud to be there, and instantly conscious of breathing an air saturated with courage and the dogged determination to endure. The men were all reservists: that is to say, mostly married, and all beyond the first fighting age. For many months there has not been much active work along this front, no great adventure to rouse the blood and wing the imagination: it has just been month after month of monotonous watching and holding on.
And the soldiers' faces showed it: there was no light of heady enterprise in their eyes, but the look of men who knew their job, had thought it over, and were there to hold their bit of France till the day of victory or extermination.
Meanwhile, they had made the best of the situation and turned their quarters into a forest colony that would enchant any normal boy.
Their village architecture was more elaborate than any we had yet seen. In the Colonel's ”dugout” a long table decked with lilacs and tulips was spread for tea. In other cheery catacombs we found neat rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires.
Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture and household decoration. Farther down the road a path between fir-boughs led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of underground compactness. While we chatted with the surgeon a soldier came in from the trenches: an elderly, bearded man, with a good average civilian face--the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any French crowd. He had a scalp-wound which had just been dressed, and was very pale. The Colonel stopped to ask a few questions, and then, turning to him, said: ”Feeling rather better now?”
”Yes, sir.”
”Good. In a day or two you'll be thinking about going back to the trenches, eh?”
”_I'm going now, sir._” It was said quite simply, and received in the same way. ”Oh, all right,” the Colonel merely rejoined; but he laid his hand on the man's shoulder as we went out.
Our next visit was to a sod-thatched hut, ”At the sign of the Ambulant Artisans,” where two or three soldiers were modelling and chiselling all kinds of trinkets from the aluminum of enemy sh.e.l.ls.
One of the ambulant artisans was just finis.h.i.+ng a ring with beautifully modelled fauns' heads, another offered me a ”Pickelhaube” small enough for Mustard-seed's wear, but complete in every detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an Imperial pfennig. There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at the front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a proof of the sureness of French taste; but the two we visited happened to be Paris jewellers, for whom ”artisan” was really too modest a pseudonym. Officers and men were evidently proud of their work, and as they stood hammering away in their cramped smithy, a red gleam lighting up the intentness of their faces, they seemed to be beating out the cheerful rhythm of ”I too will something make, and joy in the making.”...
Up the hillside, in deeper shadow, was another little structure; a wooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles and flowers. Here ma.s.s is said by one of the conscript priests of the regiment, while his congregation kneel between the fir-trunks, giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral-forest. Near by was the grave-yard, where day by day these quiet elderly men lay their comrades, the _peres de famille_ who don't go back. The care of this woodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the graves. Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover them, and when some favourite comrade goes, the men scorning ephemeral tributes, club together to buy a monstrous indestructible wreath with emblazoned streamers. It was near the end of the afternoon, and many soldiers were strolling along the paths between the graves.
”It's their favourite walk at this hour,” the Colonel said. He stopped to look down on a grave smothered in beady tokens, the grave of the last pal to fall. ”He was mentioned in the Order of the Day,”
the Colonel explained; and the group of soldiers standing near looked at us proudly, as if sharing their comrade's honour, and wanting to be sure that we understood the reason of their pride...
”And now,” said our Captain of Cha.s.seurs, ”that you've seen the second-line trenches, what do you say to taking a look at the first?”
We followed him to a point higher up the hill, where we plunged into a deep ditch of red earth--the ”bowel” leading to the first lines.
It climbed still higher, under the wet firs, and then, turning, dipped over the edge and began to wind in sharp loops down the other side of the ridge. Down we scrambled, single file, our chins on a level with the top of the pa.s.sage, the close green covert above us.