Part 4 (1/2)

We were in the first trench. It was, at places, from three hundred to forty yards distant from the Germans. No one spoke, or only in whispers.

The moonlight turned the men at arms into ghosts. Their silence added to their unreality. I felt like Rip Van Winkle hemmed in by the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson. From somewhere near us, above or below, to the right or left the ”seventy-fives,” as though aroused by the moon, began like terriers to bark viciously. The officer in the steel casque paused to listen, fixed their position, and named them. How he knew where they were, how he knew where he was himself, was all part of the mystery.

Rats, jet black in the moonlight, scurried across the open places, scrambled over our feet, ran boldly between them. We had scared them, perhaps, but not half so badly as they scared me.

We pushed on past sentinels, motionless, silent, fatefully awake. The moonlight had turned their blue uniforms white and flashed on their steel helmets. They were like men in armor, and so still that only when you brushed against them, cautiously as men change places in a canoe, did you feel they were alive. At times, one of them thinking something in the gardens of barb-wire had moved, would loosen his rifle, and there would be a flame and flare of red, and then again silence, the silence of the hunter stalking a wild beast, of the officer of the law, gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of the burglar to betray his presence.

The next morning I called to make my compliments to General Franchet d'Esperay. He was a splendid person--as alert as a steel lance. He demanded what I had seen.

”Nothing!” he protested. ”You have seen nothing. When you return from Serbia, come to Champagne again and I myself will show you something of interest.”

I am curious to see what he calls ”something of interest.”

”I wonder what's happening in Buffalo?”

There promised to be a story for some one to write a year after the war.

It would tell how quickly Champagne recovered from the invasion of the Germans. But one need not wait until after the war. The story can be written now.

We know that the enemy was thrown back across the Aisne.

We know that the enemy drove the French and English before him until at the Forest of Montmorency, the Hun was within ten and at Claye within fifteen miles of Paris.

But to-day, by any outward evidence, he would have a hard time to prove it. And that is not because when he advanced he was careful not to tramp on the gra.s.s or to pick the flowers. He did not obey even the warnings to automobilists: ”Attention _les enfants_!”

On the contrary, as he came, he threw before him thousands of tons of steel and iron. Like a cyclone he uprooted trees, unroofed houses; like a tidal wave he excavated roads that had been built by the Romans, swept away walls, and broke the backs of stone bridges that for hundreds of years had held their own against swollen rivers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: General Franchet d'Esperay.

”He was a splendid person, as alert as a steel lance.”]

A year ago I followed the German in his retreat from Claye through Meaux, Chateau Thierry to Soissons, where, on the east bank of the Aisne, I watched the French artillery sh.e.l.l his guns on the hills opposite. The French then were hot upon his heels. In one place they had not had time to remove even their own dead, and to avoid the bodies in the open road the car had to twist and turn.

Yesterday, coming back to Paris from the trenches that guard Rheims, I covered the same road. But it was not the same. It seemed that I must surely have lost the way. Only the iron signs at the crossroads, and the map used the year before and scarred with my own pencil marks, were evidences that again I was following mile by mile and foot by foot the route of that swift advance and riotous retreat.

A year before the signs of the retreat were the road itself, the houses facing it, and a devastated countryside. You knew then, that, of these signs, some would at once be effaced. They had to be effaced, for they were polluting the air. But until the villagers returned to their homes, or to what remained of their homes, the bloated carca.s.ses of horses blocked the road, the bodies of German soldiers, in death mercifully unlike anything human and as unreal as fallen scarecrows, sprawled in the fields.

But while you knew these signs of the German raid would be removed, other signs were scars that you thought would be long in healing. These were the stone arches and b.u.t.tresses of the bridges, dynamited and dumped into the mud of the Marne and Ourcq, chateaux and villas with the roof torn away as deftly as with one hand you could rip off the lid of a cigar-box, or with a wall blown in, or out, in either case exposing indecently the owner's bedroom, his wife's boudoir, the children's nursery.

Other signs of the German were villages with houses wrecked, the humble shops sacked, garden walls levelled, fields of beets and turnips uprooted by his sh.e.l.ls, or where he had s.n.a.t.c.hed sleep in the trampled mud, strewn with demolished haystacks, vast trees split clean in half as though by lightning, or with nothing remaining but the splintered stump.

That was the picture of the roads and countryside in the triangle of Soissons, Rheims, and Meaux, as it was a year ago.

And I expected to see the wake of that great retreat still marked by ruins and devastation.

But I had not sufficiently trusted to the indomitable spirit of the French, in their intolerance of waste, their fierce, yet ordered energy.

To-day the fields are cultivated up to the very b.u.t.ts of the French batteries. They are being put to bed, and tucked in for the long winter sleep. For miles the furrows stretch over the fields in unbroken lines.

Ploughs, not sh.e.l.ls, have drawn them.

They are gray with fertilizers, strewn with manure; the swiftly dug trenches of a year ago have given way to the peaked mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. Where there were vast stretches of mud, scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with stale, ill-smelling straw, the carca.s.ses of oxen and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a smiling landscape, with miles of growing grain, green vegetables, green turf.