A Volunteer Poilu Part 13

"It improves it," he pursued, as if he were revealing a confidential dogma. "The Boche bread is bad, very bad, much worse than a year ago.

Full of crumbles and lumps. Degoutant!"

The ambulance rolled up to the evacuation station, and my pastry cook alighted.

"When the war is over, come to my shop," he whispered benevolently, "and you shall have some tartes aux pommes a la mode de Saint-Denis with my wife and me."

"With fresh cream?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied seriously.

I accepted gratefully, and the good old soul gave me his address.

In the afternoon a sergeant rode with me. He was somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty, thick-set of body, with black hair and the tanned and ruddy complexion of outdoor folk. The high collar of a dark-blue sweater rose over his great coat and circled a muscular throat; his gray socks were pulled country-wise outside of the legs of his blue trousers. He had an honest, pleasant face; there was a certain simple, wholesome quality about the man. In the piping times of peace, he was a cultivateur in the Valois, working his own little farm; he was married and had two little boys. At Douaumont, a fragment of a sh.e.l.l had torn open his left hand.

"The Boches are not going to get through up there?"

"Not now. As long as we hold the heights, Verdun is safe." His simple French, innocent of argot, had a good country tw.a.n.g. "But oh, the people killed! Comme il y a des gens tues!" He p.r.o.nounced the final s of the word gens in the manner of the Valois.

"ca s'accroche aux arbres," he continued.

The vagueness of the ca had a dreadful quality in it that made you see trees and mangled bodies. "We had to hold the crest of Douaumont under a terrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope when the Germans tried to fortify them. Our 'seventy-fives' dropped sh.e.l.ls into the big craters as I would drop stones into a pond. Pauvres gens!"

The phrase had an earth-wide sympathy in it, a feeling that the translation "poor folks" does not render. He had taken part in a strange incident. There had been a terrible corps-a-corps in one of the craters which had culminated in a victory for the French; but the lieutenant of his company had left a kinsman behind with the dead and wounded. Two nights later, the officer and the sergeant crawled down the dreadful slope to the crater where the combat had taken place, in the hope of finding the wounded man. They could hear faint cries and moans from the crater before they got to it. The light of a pocket flash-lamp showed them a ma.s.s of dead and wounded on the floor of the crater--"un tas de mourants et de cadavres," as he expressed it.

After a short search, they found the man for whom they were looking; he was still alive but unconscious. They were dragging him out when a German, hideously wounded, begged them to kill him.

"Moi, je n'ai plus jambes," he repeated in French; "pitie, tuez-moi."

He managed to make the lieutenant see that if he went away and left them, they would all die in the agonies of thirst and open wounds. A little flickering life still lingered in a few; there were vague rales in the darkness. A rafale of sh.e.l.ls fell on the slope; the violet glares outlined the mouth of the crater.

"Ferme tes yeux" (shut your eyes), said the lieutenant to the German.

The Frenchmen scrambled over the edge of the crater with their unconscious burden, and then, from a little distance, threw hand-grenades into the pit till all the moaning died away.

Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and the organization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I went again to Verdun. The snow was falling heavily, covering the piles of debris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned houses.

Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow. Above the Meuse, above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope, rose the sh.e.l.l-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers of the still, tragic town. The drumming of the bombardment had died away. The river was again in flood. In a deserted wine-shop on a side street well protected from sh.e.l.ls by a wall of sandbags was a post of territorials.

To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was something Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin of the beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the wrecked houses gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood a two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fas.h.i.+oned seesaw fire pump. There were old clerks and bookkeepers among the soldier firemen--retired gendarmes who had volunteered, a country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant from the Lyonnais. Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and the outbreak of fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop. On that day only a few explosive sh.e.l.ls had fallen.

"Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?" said one of the pompiers to me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a cold, deserted house. The snow had blown through the sh.e.l.l-splintered window-panes. In the dining-room stood a table, the cloth was laid and the silver spread; but a green feathery fungus had grown in a dish of food and broken straws of dust floated on the wine in the gla.s.ses. The territorial took my arm, his eyes showing the pleasure of my responding curiosity, and whispered,--

"There were officers quartered here who were called very suddenly. I saw the servant of one of them yesterday; they have all been killed."

Outside there was not a flash from the batteries on the moor. The snow continued to fall, and darkness, coming on the swift wings of the storm, fell like a mantle over the desolation of the city.

The End