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 Chasseurs-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 Chasseurs 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 chasseurs-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 shells.
One of the ambulant artisans was just finishing 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 mass 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 Chasseurs, "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 passage, the close green covert above us.
The "bowel" went twisting down more and more sharply into a deep
ravine; and presently, at a bend, we came to a fir-thatched outlook,
where a soldier stood with his back to us, his eye glued to a
peep-hole in the wattled wall. Another turn, and another outlook;
but here it was the iron-rimmed eye of the mitrailleuse that stared
across the ravine. By this time we were within a hundred yards or so
of the German lines, hidden, like ours, on the other side of the
narrowing hollow; and as we stole down and down, the hush and
secrecy of the scene, and the sense of that imminent lurking hatred
only a few branch-lengths away, seemed to fill the silence with
mysterious pulsations. Suddenly a sharp noise broke on them: the rap
of a rifle-shot against a tree-trunk a few yards ahead.
"Ah, the sharp-shooter," said our guide. "No more talking,
please--he's over there, in a tree somewhere, and whenever he hears
voices he fires. Some day we shall spot his tree."
We went on in silence to a point where a few soldiers were sitting
on a ledge of rock in a widening of the "bowel." They looked as
quiet as if they had been waiting for their bocks before a Boulevard
cafe.
"Not beyond, please," said the officer, holding me back; and I
stopped.
Here we were, then, actually and literally in the first lines! The
knowledge made one's heart tick a little; but, except for another
shot or two from our arboreal listener, and the motionless
intentness of the soldier's back at the peep-hole, there was nothing
to show that we were not a dozen miles away.
Perhaps the thought occurred to our Captain of Chasseurs; for just
as I was turning back he said with his friendliest twinkle: "Do you
want awfully to go a little farther? Well, then, come on."
We went past the soldiers sitting on the ledge and stole down and
down, to where the trees ended at the bottom of the ravine. The
sharp-shooter had stopped firing, and nothing disturbed the leafy
silence but an intermittent drip of rain. We were at the end of the
burrow, and the Captain signed to me that I might take a cautious
peep round its corner. I looked out and saw a strip of intensely
green meadow just under me, and a wooded cliff rising abruptly on
its other side. That was all. The wooded cliff swarmed with "them,"
and a few steps would have carried us across the interval; yet all
about us was silence, and the peace of the forest. Again, for a
minute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of
evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol
of hate. Then the reaction of the unbelief set in, and I felt myself
in a harmless ordinary glen, like a million others on an untroubled
earth. We turned and began to climb again, loop by loop, up the
"bowel"--we passed the lolling soldiers, the silent mitrailleuse, we
came again to the watcher at his peep-hole. He heard us, let the
officer pass, and turned his head with a little sign of
understanding.
"Do you want to look down?"
He moved a step away from his window. The look-out projected over
the ravine, raking its depths; and here, with one's eye to the
leaf-lashed hole, one saw at last ... saw, at the bottom of the
harmless glen, half way between cliff and cliff, a grey uniform
huddled in a dead heap. "He's been there for days: they can't fetch
him away," said the watcher, regluing his eye to the hole; and it
was almost a relief to find it was after all a tangible enemy hidden
over there across the meadow...
The sun had set when we got back to our starting-point in the
underground village. The chasseurs-a-pied were lounging along
the roadside and standing in gossiping groups about the motor. It
was long since they had seen faces from the other life, the life
they had left nearly a year earlier and had not been allowed to go
back to for a day; and under all their jokes and good-humour their
farewell had a tinge of wistfulness. But one felt that this fugitive
reminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like a
dream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality: the
business of holding their bit of France.
It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier's
single-mindedness is so strong in all who have had even a glimpse of
the front; perhaps it is gathered less from what the men say than
from the look in their eyes. Even while they are accepting
cigarettes and exchanging trench-jokes, the look is there; and when
one comes on them unaware it is there also. In the dusk of the
forest that look followed us down the mountain; and as we skirted
the edge of the ravine between the armies, we felt that on the far
side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on
the near side the men who had been made by it.
