France at War: On the Frontier of Civilization | ||
FRANCE AT WAR
On the Frontier of Civilization
FRANCE[1]
BY RUDYARD KIPLING
By the light sane joy of life, the buckler of the Gaul,
Furious in luxury, merciless in toil,
Terrible with strength that draws from her tireless soil,
Strictest judge of her own worth, gentlest of men's mind,
First to follow truth and last to leave old truths behind--
France beloved of every soul that loves its fellow-kind.
Fretting in the womb of Rome to begin the fray.
Ere men knew our tongues apart, our one taste was known--
Each must mould the other's fate as he wrought his own.
To this end we stirred mankind till all earth was ours,
Till our world-end strifes began wayside thrones and powers,
Puppets that we made or broke to bar the other's path--
Necessary, outpost folk, hirelings of our wrath.
To this end we stormed the seas, tack for tack, and burst
Through the doorways of new worlds, doubtful which was first.
Hand on hilt (rememberest thou?), ready for the blow.
Spurred or baulked at ev'ry stride by the other's strength,
So we rode the ages down and every ocean's length;
Where did you refrain from us or we refrain from you?
Ask the wave that has not watched war between us two.
Others held us for a while, but with weaker charms,
These we quitted at the call for each other's arms.
Eager toward the known delight, equally we strove,
Each the other's mystery, terror, need, and love.
To each other's open court with our proofs we came,
Where could we find honour else or men to test the claim?
That extorted word of praise gasped 'twixt lunge and guard.
In each other's cup we poured mingled blood and tears,
Brutal joys, unmeasured hopes, intolerable fears,
All that soiled or salted life for a thousand years.
Proved beyond the need of proof, matched in every clime,
O companion, we have lived greatly through all time:
Yoked in knowledge and remorse now we come to rest,
Laughing at old villainies that time has turned to jest,
Pardoning old necessity no pardon can efface--
That undying sin we shared in Rouen market-place.
Fiercer lighting in their hearts than we launched of old.
Now we hear new voices rise, question, boast or gird,
As we raged (rememberest thou?) when our crowds were stirred.
Now we count new keels afloat, and new hosts on land,
Massed liked ours (rememberest thou?) when our strokes were planned.
We were schooled for dear life sake, to know each other's blade:
What can blood and iron make more than we have made?
We have learned by keenest use to know each other's mind:
What shall blood and iron loose that we cannot bind?
We who swept each other's coast, sacked each other's home,
Listen, court and close again, wheeling girth to girth,
In the strained and bloodless guard set for peace on earth.
By the light sane joy of life, the buckler of the Gaul,
Furious in luxury, merciless in toil,
Terrible with strength renewed from a tireless soil,
Strictest judge of her own worth, gentlest of men's mind,
First to follow truth and last to leave old truths behind,
France beloved of every soul that loves or serves its kind.
1. I
ON THE FRONTIER OF
CIVILIZATION
"It's a pretty park," said the French artillery officer. "We've done a lot for it since the owner left. I hope he'll appreciate it when he comes back."
The car traversed a winding drive through woods, between banks embellished with little chalets of a rustic nature. At first, the chalets stood their full height above ground, suggesting tea-gardens in England. Further on they sank into the earth till, at the top of the ascent, only their
The chateau that commanded these glories of forest and park sat boldly on a terrace. There was nothing wrong with it except, if one looked closely, a few scratches or dints on its white stone walls, or a neatly drilled hole under a flight of steps. One such hole ended in an unexploded shell. "Yes," said the officer. "They arrive here occasionally."
Something bellowed across the folds of the wooded hills; something grunted in reply. Something passed overhead, querulously but not without dignity. Two clear fresh barks joined the
"Well. Suppose we come and look at things a little," said the commanding officer.
AN OBSERVATION POST
There was a specimen tree--a tree worthy of such a park--the sort of tree visitors are always taken to admire. A ladder ran up it to a platform. What little wind there was swayed the tall top, and the ladder creaked like a ship's gangway. A telephone bell tinkled 50 foot overhead. Two invisible guns spoke fervently for half a minute, and broke off like terriers choked on a leash. We climbed till the topmost platform swayed sicklily beneath us. Here one
"The grass is yellow because they have used gas here," said an officer. "Their trenches are------. You can see for yourself."
The guns in the woods began again. They seemed to have no relation to the regularly spaced bursts of smoke along a little smear in the desert earth two thousand yards away--no connection
Thus it went: a pause--a gathering of sound like the race of an incoming wave; then the high-flung heads of breakers spouting white up the face of a groyne. Suddenly, a seventh wave broke and spread the shape of its foam like a plume overtopping all the others.
"That's one of our torpilleurs--what you call trench-sweepers," said the observer among the whispering leaves.
Some one crossed the platform to consult the map with its ranges. A blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a little beyond the large plume.
Then a new voice of tremendous volume lifted itself out of a lull that followed. Somebody laughed. Evidently the voice was known.
"That is not for us," a gunner said. "They are being waked up from------" he named a distant French position. "So and so is attending to them there. We go on with our usual work. Look! Another torpilleur."
"THE BARBARIAN"
Again a big plume rose; and again the lighter shells broke at their appointed distance beyond it. The smoke died away on that stretch of trench, as the foam of a swell dies in the angle of a harbour wall, and
"The usual work. Only the usual work," the officer explained. "Sometimes it is here. Sometimes above or below us. I have been here since May."
A little sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its chemical yellow look more foul. A detachment of men moved out on a road which ran toward the French trenches, and then vanished at the foot of a little rise. Other men appeared moving
"The same work. Always the same work!" the officer said. "And you could walk from here to the sea or to Switzerland in that ditch--and you'll find the same work going on everywhere. It isn't war."
"It's better than that," said another. "It's the eating-up of a people. They come and they fill the trenches and they die, and they die; and they send more and those die. We do the same, of course, but--look!"
He pointed to the large deliberate smoke-heads renewing themselves along that yellowed beach. "That is
SOLDIERS IN CAVES
We left that tall tree whose fruits are death ripened and distributed at the tingle of small bells. The observer returned to his maps and calculations; the telephone-boy stiffened up beside his exchange as the amateurs went out of his life. Some one called down through the branches to ask who was attending to--Belial, let us say, for I could not catch the
The troops we came down to see were at rest in a chain of caves which had begun life as quarries and had been fitted up by the army for its own uses. There were underground corridors, ante-chambers, rotundas, and ventilating shafts with a bewildering play of cross lights, so that wherever you looked you saw Goya's pictures of men-at-arms.
Every soldier has some of the old maid in him, and rejoices in all the gadgets and devices of his own invention.
Moreover, the French officers seem as mother-keen on their men as their men are brother-fond of them. Maybe the possessive form of address: "Mon general," "mon capitaine," helps the idea, which our men cloke in other and curter phrases. And those soldiers, like ours, had been welded for months in one furnace. As an officer said: "Half our orders now need not be given. Experience makes us think together." I believe, too, that if a French private has an idea--and they are full of
THE SENTINEL HOUNDS
The overwhelming impression was the brilliant health and vitality of these men and the quality of their breeding. They bore themselves with swing and rampant delight in life, while their voices as they talked in the side-caverns among the stands of arms were the controlled voices of civilization. Yet, as the lights pierced the gloom they looked like bandits dividing the spoil. One picture, though far from war, stays with me. A perfectly built, dark-skinned young giant had peeled himself out of his blue coat and had brought it down with a swish upon
When we came out into the open again there were good opportunities for this study. Voices and wings met and passed in the air, and, perhaps, one strong young tree had not been bending quite so far across the picturesque park-drive when we first went that way.
"Oh, yes," said an officer, "shells have to fall somewhere, and," he added with fine toleration, "it is, after all, against us that the Boche directs them. But come you and look at my dug-out. It's the most superior of all possible dug-outs."
"No. Come and look at our mess. It's the Ritz of these parts." And
WORK IN THE FIELDS
The voices and the wings were still busy after lunch, when the car slipped past the tea-houses in the drive, and came into a country where women and children worked among the crops. There were large raw shell holes by the wayside or in the midst of fields, and often a cottage or a villa had been smashed as a bonnet-box is smashed by an umbrella. That must be part of
We were looking for a town that lives under shell-fire. The regular road to it was reported unhealthy--not that the women and children seemed to care. We took byways of which certain exposed heights and corners were lightly blinded by wind-brakes of dried tree-tops. Here the shell holes were rather thick on the ground. But the women and the children and the old men went on with their work with the cattle and the crops; and where a house had been broken by shells the rubbish was collected in a neat pile, and where a room or two still remained usable, it was inhabited, and the tattered
A WRECKED TOWN
The stillness was as terrible as the spread of the quick busy weeds
IN THE CATHEDRAL
"Nonsense," said an officer. "Who should be singing here?" We circled the cathedral again, and saw what pavement-stones can do against their own city, when the shell jerks them upward. But there was singing after all--on the other side of a little door in the flank of the cathedral. We looked in, doubting, and saw at least a hundred folk, mostly women, who knelt before the altar
"And who are those women?" I asked.
"Some are caretakers; people who have still little shops here. (There is one quarter where you can buy things.) There are many old people, too, who will not go away. They are of the place, you see."
"And this bombardment happens often?" I said.
"It happens always. Would you like to look at the railway station?
We went through the gross nakedness of streets without people, till we reached the railway station, which was very fairly knocked about, but, as my friends said, nothing like as much as the cathedral. Then we had to cross the end of a long street down which the Boche could see clearly. As one glanced up it, one perceived how the weeds, to whom men's war is the truce of God, had come back and were well established the whole length of it, watched by the long perspective of open, empty windows.
2. II
THE NATION'S SPIRIT AND A NEW INHERITANCE
We left that stricken but undefeated town, dodged a few miles down the roads beside which the women tended their cows, and dropped into a place on a hill where a Moroccan regiment of many experiences was in billets.
They were Mohammedans bafflingly like half a dozen of our Indian frontier types, though they spoke no accessible tongue. They had, of course, turned the farm buildings where they lay into a little bit of
"And how long have you dealt with them?"
"A long time--a long time. I helped to organize the corps. I am one of those whose heart is in Africa."
The day closed--(after an amazing interlude in the chateau of a dream, which was all glassy ponds, stately trees, and vistas of white and gold saloons. The proprietor was somebody's chauffeur at the front, and we drank to his excellent health) --at a little village in a twilight full of the petrol of many cars and the wholesome flavour of healthy troops. There is no better guide to camp than one's
THE LINE THAT NEVER SLEEPS
It is difficult to keep an edge after hours of fresh air and experiences; so one does not get the most from the most interesting part of the day--the dinner with the local headquarters. Here the professionals meet--the Line, the Gunners, the Intelligence with stupefying photo-plans of the enemy's trenches; the Supply; the Staff, who collect and note all things, and are very properly chaffed; and, be sure, the Interpreter, who, by force of questioning prisoners, naturally
. . . . . . .
The ridge with the scattered pines might have hidden children at play. Certainly a horse would have been quite visible, but there was no hint of guns, except a semaphore which
"And where are the guns?" I demanded at last.
They were almost under one's hand, their ammunition in cellars and dug-outs beside them. As far as one can make out, the 75 gun has no pet name. The bayonet is Rosalie the virgin of Bayonne, but the 75, the watchful nurse of the trenches and little sister of the Line, seems to be
FAMOUS FRENCH 75's
"As a matter of fact," says a commandant, "anybody--or, rather, everybody did. The general idea is after such-and-such system, the patent of which had expired, and we improved it; the breech action, with slight modification, is somebody else's; the sighting is perhaps a little special; and so is the traversing, but, at bottom, it is
That, of course, is all that Shakespeare ever got out of the alphabet. The French Artillery make their own guns as he made his plays. It is just as simple as that.
"There is nothing going on for the moment; it's too misty," said the Commandant. (I fancy that the Boche, being, as a rule methodical, amateurs are introduced to batteries in the Boche's intervals. At least, there are hours healthy and unhealthy which vary with each position.) "But," the Commandant reflected a moment, "there is a place--and a distance. Let us say . . . " He gave a range.
The gun-servers stood back with
"They'll be bothered down below
We waited in the fragrant silence. Nothing came back from the mist that clogged the lower grounds, though no shell of this war was ever launched with more earnest prayers that it might do hurt.
Then they talked about the lives of guns; what number of rounds some will stand and others will not; how soon one can make two good guns out of three spoilt ones, and what crazy luck sometimes goes with a single shot or a blind salvo.
LESSON FROM THE "BOCHE"
A shell must fall somewhere, and by the law of averages occasionally
"What made the change?"
"The Boche. If he had been quiet for another twenty years the world must have been his--rotten, but all his. Now he is saving the world."
"How?"
"Because he has shown us what
Then we had another look at the animal in its trench--a little nearer this time than before, and quieter on account of the mist. Pick up the chain anywhere you please, you shall find the same observation-post, table, map, observer, and telephonist; the same always-hidden, always-ready guns; and same vexed foreshore of trenches, smoking and shaking from Switzerland to the sea. The handling of the war varies with the nature of the country, but the tools are unaltered. One looks upon them at last with the same weariness of wonder as the eye receives from endless repetitions of Egyptian hieroglyphics. A long, low
TRAGEDY OF RHEIMS
But there is no hieroglyphic for Rheims, no blunting of the mind at the abominations committed on the cathedral there. The thing peers upward, maimed and blinded, from
Inside--("Cover yourselves, gentlemen," said the sacristan, "this place is no longer consecrated")--everything is swept clear or burned out from end to end, except two candlesticks
IRON NERVE AND FAITH
And, in the meantime, Rheims goes about what business it may have with that iron nerve and endurance and faith which is the new inheritance of France. There is agony enough when the big shells come in; there is pain and terror among the people; and always fresh desecration
Or as a woman put it more logically, "What else can we do? Remember, we knew the Boche in '70 when you did not. We know what he has done in the last year. This is not war. It is against wild beasts that we fight. There is no arrangement
3. III
BATTLE SPECTACLE AND A REVIEW
Travelling with two chauffeurs is not the luxury it looks; since there is only one of you and there is always another of those iron men to relieve the wheel. Nor can I decide whether an ex-professor of the German tongue, or an ex-roadracer who has lived six years abroad, or a Marechal des Logis, or a Brigadier makes the most thrusting driver through three-mile stretches of military traffic repeated at half-hour intervals. Sometimes it was motor-ambulances strung all along a level; or
FARM LIFE AMIDST WAR
There was a village that had been stamped flat, till it looked older than Pompeii. There were not three roofs left, nor one whole house. In most places you saw straight into the cellars. The hops were ripe in the grave-dotted fields round about. They had been brought in and piled in the nearest outline of a dwelling. Women sat on chairs on the pavement,
The farm-girl came out leading the horse, and as the two young things passed they nodded and smiled at each other, with the delicate tangle of the hop-vines at their feet.
The guns spoke earnestly in the north. That was the Argonne, where the Crown Prince was busily getting rid of a few thousands of his father's faithful subjects in order to secure himself the reversion of his father's throne. No man likes losing his job, and when at long last the inner history of this war comes to be written, we may find that the people we mistook for principals and prime agents were only average incompetents moving all Hell to avoid dismissal.
WATCHING THE GUN-FIRE
It must have been a hot fight. A village, wrecked as is usual along this line, opened on it from a hillside that overlooked an Italian landscape of carefully drawn hills studded with small villages--a plain with a road and a river in the foreground, and an all-revealing afternoon light upon everything. The hills smoked and shook and bellowed. An observation-balloon climbed up to see; while an aeroplane which had nothing to do with the strife, but was merely training a beginner, ducked and
Still higher up, on a narrow path among the trees, stood a priest and three or four officers. They watched the battle and claimed the great bursts of smoke for one side or the other, at the same time as they kept an eye on the flickering aeroplane.
BEHIND THE GERMAN LINES
The valley held and increased the sounds till they seemed to hit our hillside like a sea.
A change of light showed a village, exquisitely pencilled atop of a hill, with reddish haze at its feet.
"What is that place?" I asked.
The priest replied in a voice as deep as an organ: "That is Saint------ It is in the Boche lines. Its condition is pitiable."
The thunders and the smokes rolled up and diminished and renewed themselves, but the small children romped up and down the old stone steps; the beginner's aeroplane unsteadily chased its own shadow over the fields; and the soldiers in billet asked the band for their favourite tunes.
Said the lieutenant of local Guards as the cars went on: "She--play--Tipperary."
And she did--to an accompaniment of heavy pieces in the hills, which followed us into a town all ringed with enormous searchlights,
. . . .
It happened about that time that Lord Kitchener with General Joffre reviewed a French Army Corps.
We came on it in a vast dip of ground under grey clouds, as one comes suddenly on water; for it lay out in misty blue lakes of men mixed with darker patches, like osiers and undergrowth, of guns, horses, and wagons. A straight road cut the landscape in two along its murmuring front.
VETERANS OF THE WAR
It was as though Cadmus had sown the dragon's teeth, not in orderly furrows but broadcast, till, horrified
"The army will move across where you are standing. Get to a flank," some one said.
AN ARMY IN MOTION
We were no more than well clear of that immobile host when it all surged forward, headed by massed bands playing a tune that sounded like the very pulse of France.
The two Generals, with their Staff, and the French Minister for War, were on foot near a patch of very green lucerne. They made about twenty figures in all. The cars were little grey blocks against the grey skyline. There was nothing else in
"What is the tune?" I asked of an officer beside me.
"My faith, I can't recall for the moment. I've marched to it often enough, though. 'Sambre-et-Meuse,' perhaps. Look! There goes my battalion! Those Chasseurs yonder."
He knew, of course; but what could a stranger identify in that earth-shaking passage of thirty thousand?
ARTILLERY AND CAVALRY
The note behind the ridge changed to something deeper.
"Ah! Our guns," said an artillery
They came twelve abreast--one hundred and fifty guns free for the moment to take the air in company, behind their teams. And next week would see them, hidden singly or in lurking confederacies, by mountain and marsh and forest, or the wrecked habitations of men--where?
The big guns followed them, with that long-nosed air of detachment peculiar to the breed. The Gunner at my side made no comment. He was content to let his Arm speak for itself, but when one big gun in a sticky place fell out of alignment for an instant I saw his eyebrows contract. The artillery passed on
They are like our Cavalry in that their horses are in high condition, and they talk hopefully of getting past the barbed wire one of these days and coming into their own. Meantime, they are employed on "various work as requisite," and they all sympathize with our rough-rider of Dragoons who flatly refused to take off his spurs in the trenches. If he had to die as a damned infantryman, he wasn't going to be buried as such. A troop-horse of a flanking squadron decided that he had had enough of war, and jibbed like Lot's wife. His rider (we all watched him) ranged about till he found a stick,
THE BOCHE AS MR. SMITH
The Commander of that Army Corps came up to salute. The cars went away with the Generals and the Minister for War; the Army passed out of sight over the ridges to the north; the peasant women stooped again to their work in the fields,
"For the same reason," another responded, "that society did not realize that the late Mr. Smith, of your England, who married three wives, bought baths in advance for each of them, and, when they had left him all their money, drowned them one by one."
"And were the baths by any chance called Denmark, Austria, and France in 1870?" a third asked.
"No, they were respectable British
4. IV
THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
We passed into the zone of another army and a hillier country, where the border villages lay more sheltered. Here and there a town and the fields round it gave us a glimpse of the furious industry with which France makes and handles material and troops. With her, as with us, the wounded officer of experience goes back to the drill-ground to train the new levies. But it was always the little crowded, defiant villages, and the civil population waiting unweariedly and cheerfully on the unwearied, cheerful army,
Or a fat old lady making oration against some wicked young soldiers who, she says, know what has happened to a certain bottle of wine. "And I meant it for all--yes, for all of you --this evening, instead of the
Or a girl at work with horses in a ploughed field that is dotted with graves. The machine must avoid each sacred plot. So, hands on the plough-stilts, her hair flying forward, she shouts and wrenches till her little brother runs up and swings the team out of the furrow. Every aspect and detail of life in France seems overlaid with a smooth patina of long-continued war--everything except
A CITY AND WOMAN
We found a city among hills which knew itself to be a prize greatly coveted by the Kaiser. For, truly, it was a pleasant, a desirable, and an insolent city. Its streets were full of life; it boasted an establishment almost as big as Harrod's and full of buyers, and its women dressed and shod themselves with care and grace, as befits ladies who, at any time, may be ripped into rags by bombs from aeroplanes. And there was another city whose population seemed to be all soldiers in training; and yet another given up to big guns
After that, we came to a little town of pale stone which an Army had made its headquarters. It looked like a plain woman who had fainted in public. It had rejoiced in many public institutions that were turned into hospitals and offices; the wounded limped its wide, dusty streets, detachments of Infantry went through it swiftly; and utterly bored motor-lorries cruised up and down roaring, I suppose, for something to look at or to talk to. In the centre of it I found one Janny, or rather his marble bust, brooding over a minute iron-railed garden of half-dried asters opposite a shut-up school, which it appeared from the inscription Janny
FRENCH OFFICERS
The guns began to speak again among the hills that we dived into; the air grew chillier as we climbed; forest and wet rocks closed round us in the mist, to the sound of waters trickling alongside; there was a tang of wet fern, cut pine, and the first
Said the Governor of those parts thoughtfully: "The main thing was to get those factory chimneys smoking again." (They were doing so in little flats and villages all along.) "You won't see any girls, because they're at work in the textile factories. Yes, it isn't a bad country for summer hotels, but I'm afraid it won't do for winter sports. We've only a metre of snow, and it doesn't lie, except when you are hauling guns up mountains. Then, of course, it drifts and freezes like Davos. That's our new railway below there. Pity it's too misty to see the view."
But for his medals, there was
One notices this approximation of type in the higher ranks, and many of the juniors are cut out of the very same cloth as ours. They get whatever fun may be going: their performances are as incredible and outrageous as the language in which they describe them afterward is bald, but convincing, and--I overheard the tail-end of a yarn told by a child of twenty to some other babes. It was veiled in the obscurity of the French tongue, and the points were lost in shouts of laughter --but I imagine the subaltern among his equals displays just as much reverence
"And what did he say then?"
"Oh, the usual thing. He held his breath till I thought he'd burst. Then he damned me in heaps, and I took good care to keep out of his sight till next day."
But officially and in the high social atmosphere of Headquarters their manners and their meekness are of the most admirable. There they attend devoutly on the wisdom of their seniors, who treat them, so it seemed, with affectionate confidence.
FRONT THAT NEVER SLEEPS
When the day's reports are in, all along the front, there is a man, expert
"The Boche is above all things observant
"Yes, my General. That was exactly what he did to me when I --did so and so. He was quite silent for a day. Then--he stole my patent."
"And you?"
"I had a notion that he'd do that, so I had changed the specification."
Thus spoke the Staff, and so it is among the junior commands, down to the semi-isolated posts where boy-Napoleons live on their own, through unbelievable adventures. They are inventive young devils, these veterans
THE BUSINESS OF WAR
The French are less reticent than we about atrocities committed by the Boche, because those atrocities form part of their lives. They are not tucked away in reports of Commissions, and vaguely referred to as "too awful." Later on, perhaps, we shall be unreserved in our turn. But they do not talk of them with any babbling heat or bleat or make funny little appeals to a "public opinion" that, like the Boche, has gone underground.
If he is a civilian he may--as he does--say things about his Government, which, after all, is very like other popular governments. (A lifetime spent in watching how the cat jumps does not make lion-tamers.) But there is very little human rubbish
A CONTRAST IN TYPES
This is written in a garden of smooth turf, under a copper beech, beside a glassy mill-stream, where soldiers of Alpine regiments are writing letters home, while the guns shout up and down the narrow valleys.
A great wolf-hound, who considers himself in charge of the old-fashioned farmhouse, cannot understand why his master, aged six, should be sitting
"But you are French, little one?" says the giant, with a yearning arm round the child.
"Yes," very slowly mouthing the French words; "I--can't --speak--French--but--I--am--French."
The small face disappears in the big beard.
Somehow, I can't imagine the Marechal des Logis killing babies--even if his superior officer, now sketching the scene, were to order him!
. . . . . . .
The great building must once have been a monastery. Twilight softened its gaunt wings, in an angle of which were collected fifty prisoners,
They stood in some sort of military formation preparatory to being marched off. They were dressed in khaki, the colour of gassed grass, that might have belonged to any army. Two wore spectacles, and I counted eight faces of the fifty which were asymmetrical--out of drawing on one side.
"Some of their later drafts give us that type," said the Interpreter. One of them had been wounded in the head and roughly bandaged. The others seemed all sound. Most of them looked at nothing, but several were vividly alive with terror that cannot keep the eyelids still, and a few wavered on the grey edge of collapse.
They were the breed which, at the word of command, had stolen out to drown women and children; had raped women in the streets at the word of command; and, always at the word of command, had sprayed petrol, or squirted flame; or defiled the property and persons of their captives. They stood there outside all humanity. Yet they were made in the likeness of humanity. One realized it with a shock when the bandaged creature began to shiver, and they shuffled off in response to the orders of civilized men.
5. V
LIFE IN TRENCHES ON THE MOUNTAIN SIDE
Very early in the morning I met Alan Breck, with a half-healed bullet-scrape across the bridge of his nose, and an Alpine cap over one ear. His people a few hundred years ago had been Scotch. He bore a Scotch name, and still recognized the head of his clan, but his French occasionally ran into German words, for he was an Alsatian on one side.
"This," he explained, "is the very best country in the world to fight in. It's picturesque and full of cover. I'm
It might have been the hills under Mussoorie, and what our cars expected to do in it I could not understand. But the demon-driver who had been a road-racer took the 70 h.p. Mercedes and threaded the narrow valleys, as well as occasional half-Swiss villages full of Alpine troops, at a restrained thirty miles an hour. He shot up a new-made road, more like Mussoorie than ever, and did not fall down the hillside even once. An ammunition-mule of a mountain-battery met him at a tight corner, and began to climb a tree.
"See! There isn't another place in France where that could happen,"
The mule was hauled down by his tail before he had reached the lower branches, and went on through the woods, his ammunition-boxes jinking on his back, for all the world as though he were rejoining his battery at Jutogh. One expected to meet the little Hill people bent under their loads under the forest gloom. The light, the colour, the smell of wood smoke, pine-needles, wet earth, and warm mule were all Himalayan. Only the Mercedes was violently and loudly a stranger.
"Halt!" said Alan at last, when she had done everything except imitate the mule.
"The road continues," said the demon-driver seductively.
"Yes, but they will hear you if you go on. Stop and wait. We've a mountain battery to look at."
They were not at work for the moment, and the Commandant, a grim and forceful man, showed me some details of their construction. When we left them in their bower--it looked like a Hill priest's wayside shrine--we heard them singing through the steep-descending pines. They, too, like the 75's, seem to have no pet name in the service.
It was a poisonously blind country. The woods blocked all sense of direction above and around. The ground was at any angle you please, and all sounds were split up and muddled by the tree-trunks, which acted as silencers. High above us the respectable,
TRENCHES
A machine-gun loosed a few shots in the fumbling style of her kind when they feel for an opening. A couple of rifle shots answered. They might have been half a mile away or a hundred yards below. An adorable country! We climbed up till we found once again a complete tea-garden of little sunk houses, almost invisible in the brown-pink recesses of the thick forest. Here the trenches began, and with them for the next few
IN THE FRONT LINE
There were no trees above us now. Their trunks lay along the edge of the trench, built in with stones, where necessary, or sometimes overhanging it in ragged splinters or bushy tops.
We met the Colonel at the head of an indescribable pit of ruin, full of sunshine, whose steps ran down a very steep hillside under the lee of an almost vertically plunging parapet. To the left of that parapet the whole hillside was one gruel of smashed trees, split stones, and powdered soil. It might have been a rag-picker's dump-heap on a colossal scale.
Alan looked at it critically. I think he had helped to make it not long before.
"We're on the top of the hill now, and the Boches are below us," said he. "We gave them a very fair sickener lately."
"This," said the Colonel, "is the front line."
There were overhead guards against hand-bombs which disposed me to believe him, but what convinced me most was a corporal urging us in whispers not to talk so loud. The men were at dinner, and a good smell of food filled the trench. This was the first smell I had encountered in my long travels uphill--a mixed, entirely wholesome flavour of stew, leather, earth, and rifle-oil.
FRONT LINE PROFESSIONALS
A proportion of men were standing to arms while others ate; but dinner-time
"The Boches got their soup a few days ago," some one whispered. I thought of the pulverized hillside, and hoped it had been hot enough.
We edged along the still trench, where the soldiers stared, with justified contempt, I thought, upon the civilian who scuttled through their life for a few emotional minutes in order to make words out of their blood. Somehow it reminded me of coming in late to a play and incommoding a long line of packed stalls. The whispered dialogue was much the same: "Pardon!" "I beg your pardon, monsieur." "To the right, monsieur." "If monsieur will lower his head." "One sees best from here,
The loopholes not in use were plugged rather like old-fashioned hives. Said the Colonel, removing a plug: "Here are the Boches. Look, and you'll see their sandbags." Through the jumble of riven trees and stones one saw what might have
HANDY TRENCH-SWEEPERS
I loved that Colonel! He knew his men and he knew the Boches --had
We held on through the maze, past trench-sweepers of a handy light pattern, with their screw-tailed charge all ready; and a grave or so; and when
"No flat plains," said Alan. "No hunting for gun positions --the hills are full of them--and the trenches close together and commanding each other. You see what a beautiful country it is."
The Colonel confirmed this, but from another point of view. War was his business, as the still woods could testify--but his hobby was his trenches. He had tapped the mountain streams and dug out a laundry where a man could wash his shirt and go up and be killed in it,
And there came a priest, who was a sub-lieutenant, out of a wood of snuff-brown shadows and half-veiled trunks. Would it please me to look at a chapel?
. . . . . . .
A BOMBARDED TOWN
Alan carried me off to tea the same evening in a town where he seemed to know everybody. He had spent the afternoon on another mountain top, inspecting gun positions; whereby he had been shelled a little--marmite is the slang for it. There had been no serious marmitage, and he had spotted a Boche position which was marmitable.
"And we may get shelled now," he added, hopefully. "They shell this town whenever they think of it. Perhaps they'll shell us at tea."
It was a quaintly beautiful little place, with its mixture of French and German ideas; its old bridge and gentle-minded river, between the cultivated hills. The sand-bagged cellar doors, the ruined houses, and the holes in the pavement looked as unreal as the violences of a cinema against that soft and simple setting. The people were abroad in the streets, and the little children were playing. A big shell gives notice enough for one to get to shelter, if the shelter is near enough. That appears to be as much as any one expects in the world where one is shelled, and that world
CASES FOR HOSPITAL
The house where we took tea was the "big house" of the place, old and massive, a treasure house of ancient furniture. It had everything that the moderate heart of man could desire --gardens, garages, outbuildings, and the air of peace that goes with beauty in age. It stood over a high cellarage, and opposite the cellar door was a brand-new blindage of earth packed between timbers. The
"Yes, they are all civil cases," said he.
They come without much warning--a woman gashed by falling timber; a child with its temple crushed by a flying stone; an urgent amputation case, and so on. One never knows. Bombardment, the Boche text-books say, "is designed to terrify the civil population so that they may put pressure on their politicians to conclude peace." In real life, men are very rarely soothed by the sight of their women being tortured.
We took tea in the hall upstairs, with a propriety and an interchange
"Nice people, aren't they?" Alan went on.
"Oh, very nice. And--and such good tea."
He managed to convey a few of his sentiments to Alan after dinner.
"But what else could the people have done?" said he. "They are French."
6. VI
THE COMMON TASK OF A GREAT PEOPLE
"This is the end of the line," said the Staff Officer, kindest and most patient of chaperons. It buttressed itself on a fortress among hills. Beyond that, the silence was more awful than the mixed noise of business to the westward. In mileage on the map the line must be between four and five hundred miles; in actual trench-work many times that distance. It is too much to see at full length; the mind does not readily break away from the obsession of its
Yet there are no words to give the essential simplicity of it. It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely as in the Stone Age. If it goes, all that keeps us from the Beast goes with it. One sees this at the front as clearly as one sees the
Where the rifle and the bayonet serve, men use those tools along the front. Where the knife gives better results, they go in behind the hand-grenades with the naked twelve-inch knife. Each race is supposed to fight in its own way, but this war has passed beyond all the known ways. They say that the Belgians in the north settle accounts with a certain dry passion which has varied very little since their agony began. Some sections of the English line have produced a soft-voiced, rather reserved type, which does its work with its mouth shut. The French carry
The last I saw of the front was Alan Breck speeding back to his gun-positions among the mountains; and I wondered what delight of what household the lad must have been in the old days.
SUPPORTS AND RESERVES
Then we had to work our way, department by department, against the tides of men behind the line--supports
In spite of their love of drama, there is not much "window-dressing" in the French character. The Boche, who is the priest of the Higher Counter-jumpery, would have had half the neutral Press out in cars to
"This is our affair," they argue. "Everybody concerned is taking part in it. Like the review you saw the other day, there are no spectators."
"But it might be of advantage if the world knew."
Mine was a foolish remark. There is only one world to-day, the world of the Allies. Each of them knows what the others are doing and--the rest doesn't matter. This is a curious but delightful fact to realize at first hand. And think what it will be later, when we shall all circulate among each other and open our hearts
I lay that night at a little French town, and was kept awake by a man, somewhere in the hot, still darkness, howling aloud from the pain of his wounds. I was glad that he was alone, for when one man gives way the others sometimes follow. Yet the single note of misery was worse than the baying and gulping of a whole ward. I wished that a delegation of strikers could have heard it.
. . . . . . .
That a civilian should be in the war zone at all is a fair guarantee of his good faith. It is when he is outside the zone unchaperoned that questions begin, and the permits are looked into. If these are irregular--
PARIS--AND NO FOREIGNERS
He would have loved his Paris as we found it. Life was renewing itself in the streets, whose drawing and proportion one could never notice
"Now why," asked a shopkeeper,
"Perhaps," I began, "you might make them too welcome."
He laughed. "We should make them as welcome as our own army. They would enjoy themselves." I had a vision of British officers, each with ninety days' pay to his credit, and a damsel or two at home, shopping consumedly.
"And also," said the shopkeeper, "the moral effect on Paris to see more of your troops would be very good."
But I saw a quite English Provost-Marshal losing himself in chase of defaulters of the New Army who
A PEOPLE TRANSFIGURED
If one asked after the people that gave dinners and dances last year, where every one talked so brilliantly of such vital things, one got in return the addresses of hospitals. Those pleasant hostesses and maidens seemed
I recalled one Frenchwoman in particular, because she had once explained to me the necessities of civilized life. These included a masseuse, a manicurist, and a maid to look after the lapdogs. She is employed now, and has been for months past, on the disinfection and repair of soldiers' clothes. There was no need to ask after the men one had known. Still, there was no sense of desolation. They had gone on; the others were getting ready.
All France works outward to the Front--precisely as an endless chain of fire-buckets works toward the conflagration. Leave the fire behind you and go back till you reach the source of supplies. You will find no break, no pause, no apparent haste, but never any slackening. Everybody has his or her bucket, little or big, and nobody disputes how they should be used. It is a people possessed of the precedent and tradition of war for existence, accustomed to hard living and hard labour, sanely economical by temperament, logical by training, and illumined and transfigured by their resolve and endurance.
You know, when supreme trial overtakes an acquaintance whom till
THE NEW WAR
One sees this not alone in the--it is more than contempt of death--in the godlike preoccupation of her people under arms which makes them put death out of the account, but in the equal passion and fervour with which her people throughout give themselves
Similarly with stables, barricades, and barbed-wire work, the clearing and piling away of wrecked house-rubbish, the serving of meals till the service rocks on its poor tired feet, but keeps its temper; and all the unlovely, monotonous details that go with war.
The women, as I have tried to show,
A NATION'S CONFIDENCE
The same logic saves them a vast amount of energy. They knew Germany in '70, when the world would not believe in their knowledge; they
Out of these things is born their power of recuperation in their leisure; their reasoned calm while at work; and their superb confidence in their arms. Even if France of to-day stood alone against the world's enemy, it would be almost inconceivable to imagine her defeat now; wholly so to imagine any surrender. The war will go on till the enemy is finished. The French do not know when that hour will come; they seldom speak of it; they do not amuse themselves with dreams of triumphs or terms. Their business is war, and they do their business.
France at War: On the Frontier of Civilization | ||