II
The time had come to remember our promise and hurry away from
Clermont; but a few miles farther our attention was arrested by the
sight of the Red Cross over a village house. The house was little
more than a hovel, the village--Blercourt it was called--a mere
hamlet of scattered cottages and cow-stables: a place so easily
overlooked that it seemed likely our supplies might be needed there.
An orderly went to find the _medecin-chef_, and we waded after him
through the mud to one after another of the cottages in which, with
admirable ingenuity, he had managed to create out of next to nothing
the indispensable requirements of a second-line ambulance:
sterilizing and disinfecting appliances, a bandage-room, a pharmacy,
a well-filled wood-shed, and a clean kitchen in which "tisanes" were
brewing over a cheerful fire. A detachment of cavalry was quartered
in the village, which the trampling of hoofs had turned into a great
morass, and as we picked our way from cottage to cottage in the
doctor's wake he told us of the expedients to which he had been put
to secure even the few hovels into which his patients were crowded.
It was a complaint we were often to hear repeated along this line of
the front, where troops and wounded are packed in thousands into
villages meant to house four or five hundred; and we admired the
skill and devotion with which he had dealt with the difficulty, and
managed to lodge his patients decently.
We came back to the high-road, and he asked us if we should like to
see the church. It was about three o'clock, and in the low porch the
cure was ringing the bell for vespers. We pushed open the inner
doors and went in. The church was without aisles, and down the nave
stood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets. In almost every
one lay a soldier--the doctor's "worst cases"--few of them wounded,
the greater number stricken with fever, bronchitis, frost-bite,
pleurisy, or some other form of trench-sickness too severe to permit
of their being carried farther from the front. One or two heads
turned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the men
did not move.
The cure, meanwhile, passing around to the sacristy, had come out
before the altar in his vestments, followed by a little white
acolyte. A handful of women, probably the only "civil" inhabitants
left, and some of the soldiers we had seen about the village, had
entered the church and stood together between the rows of cots; and
the service began. It was a sunless afternoon, and the picture was
all in monastic shades of black and white and ashen grey: the sick
under their earth-coloured blankets, their livid faces against the
pillows, the black dresses of the women (they seemed all to be in
mourning) and the silver haze floating out from the little acolyte's
censer. The only light in the scene--the candle-gleams on the altar,
and their reflection in the embroideries of the cure's
chasuble--were like a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk.
For a while the long Latin cadences sounded on through the church;
but presently the cure took up in French the Canticle of the Sacred
Heart, composed during the war of 1870, and the little congregation
joined their trembling voices in the refrain:
"_Sauvez, sauvez la France,
Ne l'abandonnez pas!_"
The reiterated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in the
nave: "_Sauvez, sauvez la France_," the women wailed it near the
altar, the soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones; but
the bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more, as the day
faded, the church looked like a quiet grave-yard in a battle-field.
After we had left Sainte Menehould the sense of the nearness and
all-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid. Every road
branching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound:
Varennes, le Four de Paris, le Bois de la Grurie, were not more than
eight or ten miles to the north. Along our own road the stream of
motor-vans and the trains of ammunition grew longer and more
frequent. Once we passed a long line of "Seventy-fives" going single
file up a hillside, farther on we watched a big detachment of
artillery galloping across a stretch of open country. The movement
of supplies was continuous, and every village through which we
passed swarmed with soldiers busy loading or unloading the big vans,
or clustered about the commissariat motors while hams and quarters
of beef were handed out. As we approached Verdun the cannonade had
grown louder again; and when we reached the walls of the town and
passed under the iron teeth of the portcullis we felt ourselves in
one of the last outposts of a mighty line of defense. The desolation
of Verdun is as impressive as the feverish activity of
Chalons. The civil population was evacuated in September, and
only a small percentage have returned. Nine-tenths of the shops are
closed, and as the troops are nearly all in the trenches there is
hardly any movement in the streets.
The first duty of the traveller who has successfully passed the
challenge of the sentinel at the gates is to climb the steep hill to
the citadel at the top of the town. Here the military authorities
inspect one's papers, and deliver a "permis de sejour" which must be
verified by the police before lodgings can be obtained. We found the
principal hotel much less crowded than the Haute Mere-Dieu at
Chalons, though many of the officers of the garrison mess
there. The whole atmosphere of the place was different: silent,
concentrated, passive. To the chance observer, Verdun appears to
live only in its hospitals; and of these there are fourteen within
the walls alone. As darkness fell, the streets became completely
deserted, and the cannonade seemed to grow nearer and more
incessant. That first night the hush was so intense that every
reverberation from the dark hills beyond the walls brought out in
the mind its separate vision of destruction; and then, just as the
strained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased. A
moment later, in a court below my windows, a pigeon began to coo;
and all night long the two sounds strangely alternated...
On entering the gates, the first sight to attract us had been a
colony of roughly-built bungalows scattered over the miry slopes of
a little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by the
sign: "Evacuation Hospital No. 6." The next morning we went to visit
it. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital
use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon in
charge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into a
double row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots,
scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor; and the immense
ward is warmed by a row of stoves down the central passage. In the
bungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to be
kept for a time before being transferred to the hospitals in the
town. In one bungalow an operating-room has been installed, in
another are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from the
trenches. Every possible device for the relief of the wounded has
been carefully thought out and intelligently applied by the surgeon
in charge and the _infirmiere major_ who indefatigably seconds him.
Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour, almost, on the
dreadful August day when four thousand wounded lay on stretchers
between the railway station and the gate of the little park across
the way; and it has gradually grown into the model of what such a
hospital may become in skilful and devoted hands.
Verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severely
wounded who cannot be sent farther from the front. Among them St.
Nicolas, in a big airy building on the Meuse, is an example of a
great French Military Hospital at its best; but I visited few
others, for the main object of my journey was to get to some of the
second-line ambulances beyond the town. The first we went to was in
a small village to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's
lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others.
The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance
had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military
authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean,
and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms.
The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were
heated by stoves. The great need, here as everywhere, was for
blankets and clean underclothing; for the wounded are brought in
from the front encrusted with frozen mud, and usually without having
washed or changed for weeks. There are no women nurses in these
second-line ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemed
intelligent, and anxious to do the best they could for their men in
conditions of unusual hardship. The principal obstacle in their way
is the over-crowded state of the villages. Thousands of soldiers are
camped in all of them, in hygienic conditions that would be bad
enough for men in health; and there is also a great need for light
diet, since the hospital commissariat of the front apparently
supplies no invalid foods, and men burning with fever have to be fed
on meat and vegetables.
In the afternoon we started out again in a snow-storm, over a
desolate rolling country to the south of Verdun. The wind blew
fiercely across the whitened slopes, and no one was in sight but the
sentries marching up and down the railway lines, and an occasional
cavalryman patrolling the lonely road. Nothing can exceed the
mournfulness of this depopulated land: we might have been wandering
over the wilds of Poland. We ran some twenty miles down the
steel-grey Meuse to a village about four miles west of Les Eparges,
the spot where, for weeks past, a desperate struggle had been going
on. There must have been a lull in the fighting that day, for the
cannon had ceased; but the scene at the point where we left the
motor gave us the sense of being on the very edge of the conflict.
The long straggling village lay on the river, and the trampling of
cavalry and the hauling of guns had turned the land about it into a
mud-flat. Before the primitive cottage where the doctor's office had
been installed were the motors of the surgeon and the medical
inspector who had accompanied us. Near by stood the usual flock of
grey motor-vans, and all about was the coming and going of cavalry
remounts, the riding up of officers, the unloading of supplies, the
incessant activity of mud-splashed sergeants and men.
The main ambulance was in a grange, of which the two stories had
been partitioned off into wards. Under the cobwebby rafters the men
lay in rows on clean pallets, and big stoves made the rooms dry and
warm. But the great superiority of this ambulance was its nearness
to a canalboat which had been fitted up with hot douches. The boat
was spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shut off by a gay curtain
of red-flowered chintz. Those curtains must do almost as much as the
hot water to make over the _morale_ of the men: they were the most
comforting sight of the day.
Farther north, and on the other bank of the Meuse, lies another
large village which has been turned into a colony of eclopes.
Fifteen hundred sick or exhausted men are housed there--and there
are no hot douches or chintz curtains to cheer them! We were taken
first to the church, a large featureless building at the head of the
street. In the doorway our passage was obstructed by a mountain of
damp straw which a gang of hostler-soldiers were pitch-forking out
of the aisles. The interior of the church was dim and suffocating.
Between the pillars hung screens of plaited straw, forming little
enclosures in each of which about a dozen sick men lay on more
straw, without mattresses or blankets. No beds, no tables, no
chairs, no washing appliances--in their muddy clothes, as they come
from the front, they are bedded down on the stone floor like cattle
till they are well enough to go back to their job. It was a pitiful
contrast to the little church at Blercourt, with the altar lights
twinkling above the clean beds; and one wondered if even so near the
front, it had to be. "The African village, we call it," one of our
companions said with a laugh: but the African village has blue sky
over it, and a clear stream runs between its mud huts.
We had been told at Sainte Menehould that, for military reasons, we
must follow a more southerly direction on our return to
Chalons; and when we left Verdun we took the road to
Bar-le-Duc. It runs southwest over beautiful broken country,
untouched by war except for the fact that its villages, like all the
others in this region, are either deserted or occupied by troops. As
we left Verdun behind us the sound of the cannon grew fainter and
died out, and we had the feeling that we were gradually passing
beyond the flaming boundaries into a more normal world; but
suddenly, at a cross-road, a sign-post snatched us back to war: _St.
Mihiel_, 18 _Kilometres_. St. Mihiel, the danger-spot of the region,
the weak joint in the armour! There it lay, up that harmless-looking
bye-road, not much more than ten miles away--a ten minutes' dash
would have brought us into the thick of the grey coats and spiked
helmets! The shadow of that sign-post followed us for miles,
darkening the landscape like the shadow from a racing storm-cloud.
Bar-le-Duc seemed unaware of the cloud. The charming old town was in
its normal state of provincial apathy: few soldiers were about, and
here at last civilian life again predominated. After a few days on
the edge of the war, in that intermediate region under its solemn
spell, there is something strangely lowering to the mood in the
first sight of a busy unconscious community. One looks
instinctively, in the eyes of the passers by, for a reflection of
that other vision, and feels diminished by contact with people going
so indifferently about their business.
A little way beyond Bar-le-Duc we came on another phase of the
war-vision, for our route lay exactly in the track of the August
invasion, and between Bar-le-Duc and Vitry-le-Francois the high-road
is lined with ruined towns. The first we came to was Laimont, a
large village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it; then comes
Revigny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely
levelled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle
of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between
scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop-fronts,
handsome doorways, the colonnaded court of a public building. A few
miles farther lies the most piteous of the group: the village of
Heiltz-le-Maurupt, once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, now
an ugly waste like the others, and with a little church so stripped
and wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside like
a human victim.
In this part of the country, which is one of many cross-roads, we
began to have unexpected difficulty in finding our way, for the
names and distances on the milestones have all been effaced, the
sign-posts thrown down and the enamelled _plaques_ on the houses at
the entrance to the villages removed. One report has it that this
precaution was taken by the inhabitants at the approach of the
invading army, another that the Germans themselves demolished the
sign-posts and plastered over the mile-stones in order to paint on
them misleading and encouraging distances. The result is extremely
bewildering, for, all the villages being either in ruins or
uninhabited, there is no one to question but the soldiers one meets,
and their answer is almost invariably "We don't know--we don't
belong here." One is in luck if one comes across a sentinel who
knows the name of the village he is guarding.
It was the strangest of sensations to find ourselves in a chartless
wilderness within sixty or seventy miles of Paris, and to wander, as
we did, for hours across a high heathery waste, with wide blue
distances to north and south, and in all the scene not a landmark by
means of which we could make a guess at our whereabouts. One of our
haphazard turns at last brought us into a muddy bye-road with long
lines of "Seventy-fives" ranged along its banks like grey ant-eaters
in some monstrous menagerie. A little farther on we came to a
bemired village swarming with artillery and cavalry, and found
ourselves in the thick of an encampment just on the move. It seems
improbable that we were meant to be there, for our arrival caused
such surprise that no sentry remembered to challenge us, and
obsequiously saluting _sous-officiers_ instantly cleared a way for
the motor. So, by a happy accident, we caught one more war-picture,
all of vehement movement, as we passed out of the zone of war.
We were still very distinctly in it on returning to Chalons,
which, if it had seemed packed on our previous visit, was now
quivering and cracking with fresh crowds. The stir about the
fountain, in the square before the Haute Mere-Dieu, was more
melodramatic than ever. Every one was in a hurry, every one booted
and mudsplashed, and spurred or sworded or despatch-bagged, or
somehow labelled as a member of the huge military beehive. The
privilege of telephoning and telegraphing being denied to civilians
in the war-zone, it was ominous to arrive at night-fall on such a
crowded scene, and we were not surprised to be told that there was
not a room left at the Haute Mere-Dieu, and that even the sofas in
the reading-room had been let for the night. At every other inn in
the town we met with the same answer; and finally we decided to ask
permission to go on as far as Epernay, about twelve miles off. At
Head-quarters we were told that our request could not be granted. No
motors are allowed to circulate after night-fall in the zone of war,
and the officer charged with the distribution of motor-permits
pointed out that, even if an exception were made in our favour, we
should probably be turned back by the first sentinel we met, only to
find ourselves unable to re-enter Chalons without another
permit! This alternative was so alarming that we began to think
ourselves relatively lucky to be on the right side of the gates; and
we went back to the Haute Mere-Dieu to squeeze into a crowded corner
of the restaurant for dinner. The hope that some one might have
suddenly left the hotel in the interval was not realized; but after
dinner we learned from the landlady that she had certain rooms
permanently reserved for the use of the Staff, and that, as these
rooms had not yet been called for that evening, we might possibly be
allowed to occupy them for the night.
At Chalons the Head-quarters are in the Prefecture, a coldly
handsome building of the eighteenth century, and there, in a
majestic stone vestibule, beneath the gilded ramp of a great festal
staircase, we waited in anxious suspense, among the orderlies and
_estafettes_, while our unusual request was considered. The result
of the deliberation, was an expression of regret: nothing could be
done for us, as officers might at any moment arrive from the General
Head-quarters and require the rooms. It was then past nine o'clock,
and bitterly cold--and we began to wonder. Finally the polite
officer who had been charged to dismiss us, moved to compassion at
our plight, offered to give us a _laissez-passer_ back to Paris. But
Paris was about a hundred and twenty-five miles off, the night was
dark, the cold was piercing--and at every cross-road and railway
crossing a sentinel would have to be convinced of our right to go
farther. We remembered the warning given us earlier in the evening,
and, declining the offer, went out again into the cold. And just
then chance took pity on us. In the restaurant we had run across a
friend attached to the Staff, and now, meeting him again in the
depth of our difficulty, we were told of lodgings to be found near
by. He could not take us there, for it was past the hour when he had
a right to be out, or we either, for that matter, since curfew
sounds at nine at Chalons. But he told us how to find our way
through the maze of little unlit streets about the Cathedral;
standing there beside the motor, in the icy darkness of the deserted
square, and whispering hastily, as he turned to leave us: "You ought
not to be out so late; but the word tonight is _Jena_. When you give
it to the chauffeur, be sure no sentinel overhears you." With that
he was up the wide steps, the glass doors had closed on him, and I
stood there in the pitch-black night, suddenly unable to believe
that I was I, or Chalons Chalons, or that a young man
who in Paris drops in to dine with me and talk over new books and
plays, had been whispering a password in my ear to carry me
unchallenged to a house a few streets away! The sense of unreality
produced by that one word was so overwhelming that for a blissful
moment the whole fabric of what I had been experiencing, the whole
huge and oppressive and unescapable fact of the war, slipped away
like a torn cobweb, and I seemed to see behind it the reassuring
face of things as they used to be.
The next morning dispelled that vision. We woke to a noise of guns
closer and more incessant than even the first night's cannonade at
Verdun; and when we went out into the streets it seemed as if,
overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground. Waylaid at one
corner after another by the long tide of troops streaming out
through the town to the northern suburbs, we saw in turn all the
various divisions of the unfolding frieze: first the infantry and
artillery, the sappers and miners, the endless trains of guns and
ammunition, then the long line of grey supply-waggons, and finally
the stretcher-bearers following the Red Cross ambulances. All the
story of a day's warfare was written in the spectacle of that
endless silent flow to the front: and we were to read it again, a
few days later, in the terse announcement of "renewed activity"
about Suippes, and of the bloody strip of ground gained between
Perthes and Beausejour.
