Part 5 (1/2)

And still the cloudless weeks succeeded each other, days of blue warmth and nights of silver l.u.s.tre; and still, behind the impenetrable wall of the front, the Beast dumbly lowered and waited. Then one morning, toward the end of May, Troy, waking late after an unusually hard day, read: ”The new German offensive has begun. The Chemin des Dames has been retaken by the enemy. Our valiant troops are resisting heroically....”

Ah, now indeed they were on the road to Paris! In a flash of horror he saw it all. The bitter history of the war was re-enacting itself, and the battle of the Marne was to be fought again....

The misery of the succeeding days would have been intolerable if there had been time to think of it. But day and night there was no respite for Troy's service; and, being by this time a practised hand, he had to be continually on the road.

On the second day he received orders to evacuate the wounded from an American base hospital near the Marne. It was actually the old battleground he was to traverse; only, before, he had traversed it in the wake of the German retreat, and now it was the allied troops who, slowly, methodically, and selling every inch dear, were falling back across the sacred soil. Troy faced eastward with a heavy heart....

IX

The next morning at daylight they started for the front.

Troy's breast swelled with the sense of the approach to something bigger than he had yet known. The air of Paris, that day, was heavy with doom.

There was no mistaking its taste on the lips. It was the air of the Marne that he was breathing....

Here he was, once more involved in one of the great convulsions of destiny, and still almost as helpless a spectator as when, four years before, he had strayed the burning desert of Paris and cried out in his boy's heart for a share in the drama. Almost as helpless, yes--in spite of his four more years, his grown-up responsibilities, and the blessed uniform thanks to which he, even he, a poor little ambulance-driver of eighteen, ranked as a soldier of the great untried army of his country.

It was something--it was a great deal--to be even the humblest part, the most infinitesimal cog, in that mighty machinery of the future; but it was not enough, at this turning-point of history, for one who had so lived it all in advance, who was so aware of it now that it had come, who had carried so long on his lips the taste of its scarcely breathable air.

As the ambulance left the gates of Paris, and hurried eastward in the grey dawn, this sense of going toward something new and overwhelming continued to grow in Troy. It was probably the greatest hour of the war that was about to strike--and he was still too young to give himself to the cause he had so long dreamed of serving.

From the moment they left the gates the road was enc.u.mbered with huge grey motor-trucks, limousines, torpedoes, motor-cycles, long trains of artillery, army kitchens, supply wagons, all the familiar elements of the procession he had so often watched unrolling itself endlessly east and west from the Atlantic to the Alps. Nothing new in the sight--but something new in the faces! A look of having got beyond the accident of living, and accepted what lay over the edge, in the dim land of the final. He had seen that look in the days before the Marne....

Most of the faces on the way were French: as far as Epernay they met their compatriots only in isolated groups. But whenever one of the motor-trucks lumbering by bore a big U.S. on its rear panel Troy pushed his light ambulance ahead and skimmed past, just for the joy of seeing the fresh young heads rising pyramid-wise above the sides of the lorry, hearing the s.n.a.t.c.hes of familiar song--”Hail, hail, the gang's all here!” and ”We won't come back till it's over over there!”--and shouting back, in reply to a stentorian ”Hi, kid, beat it!”, ”Bet your life I will, old man!”

Hubert Jacks, the young fellow who was with him, shouted back too, as l.u.s.tily; but between times he was more occupied with the details of their own particular job--to which he was newer than Troy--and seemed not to feel so intensely the weight of impending events.

As they neared the Montmirail monument: ”Ever been over this ground before?” Troy asked carelessly, and Jacks answered: ”N--no.”

”Ah--I have. I was here just after the battle of the Marne, in September 'fourteen.”

”That so? You must have been quite a kid,” said Jacks with indifference, filling his pipe.

”Well--not _quite_,” Troy rejoined sulkily; and they said no more.

At Epernay they stopped for lunch, and found the place swarming with troops. Troy's soul was bursting within him: he wanted to talk and remember and compare. But his companion was unimaginative, and perhaps a little jealous of his greater experience. ”He doesn't want to show that he's new at the job,” Troy decided.

They lunched together in a corner of the packed restaurant, and while they were taking coffee some French officers came up and chatted with Troy. To all of them he felt the desperate need of explaining that he was driving an ambulance only because he was still too young to be among the combatants.

”But I shan't be--soon!” he always added, in the tone of one who affirms. ”It's merely a matter of a few weeks now.”

”Oh, you all look like babies--but you all fight like devils,” said a young French lieutenant seasoned by four years at the front; and another officer added gravely: ”Make haste to be old enough, _cher monsieur_. We need you all--every one of you....”

”Oh, we're coming--we're all coming!” Troy cried.

That evening, after a hard and harrowing day's work between _postes de secours_ and a base hospital, they found themselves in a darkened village, where, after a summary meal under flying sh.e.l.ls, some one suggested ending up at the Y.M.C.A. hut.

The sh.e.l.ling had ceased, and there seemed nothing better to do than to wander down the dark street to the underground shelter packed with American soldiers. Troy was sleepy and tired, and would have preferred to crawl into his bed at the inn; he felt, more keenly than ever, the humiliation (the word was stupid, but he could find no other) of being among all these young men, only a year or two his seniors, and none, he was sure, more pa.s.sionately eager than himself for the work that lay ahead, and yet so hopelessly divided from him by that stupid difference in age. But Hubert Jacks was seemingly unconscious of this, and only desirous of ending his night cheerfully. It would have looked unfriendly not to accompany him, so they pushed their way together through the cellar door surmounted by the sociable red triangle.

It was a big cellar, but brown uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it from wall to wall. In one corner the men were sitting on packing-boxes at a long table made of boards laid across barrels, the smoky light of little oil lamps reddening their cheeks and deepening the furrows in their white foreheads as they laboured over their correspondence. Others were playing checkers, or looking at the ill.u.s.trated papers, and everybody was smoking and talking--not in large groups, but quietly, by twos or threes. Young women in trig uniforms, with fresh innocent faces, moved among the barrels and boxes, distributing stamps or books, chatting with the soldiers, and being generally homelike and sisterly. The men gave them back glances as honest, and almost as innocent, and an air of simple daylight friendliness pervaded the Avernian cave.