With the French in France and Salonika Part 8

American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.]

"Eight degrees to the left, sir," he barked, "four thousand yards."

The men behind the guns were extremely young, but, like most artillerymen, alert, sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks with swift, catlike certainty. The sight of the two strangers seemed to surprise them as much as the man in the grave had startled us.

There were two boy officers in command, one certainly not yet eighteen, his superior officer still under twenty.

"I suppose you're all right," said the younger one. "You couldn't have got this far if you weren't all right."

He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not successful. He was too lonely, too honestly glad to see any one from beyond the mountains that hemmed him in. They stretched on either side of him to vast distances, ma.s.sed barriers of white against a gray, sombre sky; in front of him, to be exact, just four thousand yards in front of him, were Bulgarians he had never seen, but who were always with their sh.e.l.ls ordering to "move on,"

and behind him lay a muddy road that led to a rail-head, that led to transports, that led to France, to the Channel, and England. It was a long, long way to England. I felt like taking one of the boy officers under each arm, and smuggling him safely home to his mother.

"You don't seem to have any supports," I ventured.

The child gazed around him. It was growing dark and gloomier, and the hollows of the white hills were filled with shadows. His men were listening, so he said bravely, with a vague sweep of the hand at the encircling darkness, "Oh, they're about--somewhere. You might call this," he added, with pride, "an independent command."

You well might.

"Report when ready!" chanted his superior officer, aged nineteen.

He reported, and then the guns spoke, making a great flash in the twilight.

In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was trying to make a photograph of the guns.

"Take it on the recoil," advised the child officer. "It's sure to stick.

It always does stick."

The men laughed, not slavishly, because the officer had made a joke, but as companions in trouble, and because when you are abandoned on a mountainside with a lame gun that jams, you must not take it lying down, but make a joke of it.

The French chauffeur was pumping his horn for us to return, and I went, shamefacedly, as must the robbers who deserted the babes in the wood.

In farewell I offered the boy officer the best cigars for sale in Greece, which is the worse thing one can say of any cigar. I apologized for them, but explained he must take them because they were called the "King of England."

"I would take them," said the infant, "if they were called the 'German Emperor.'"

At the door of the car we turned and waved, and the two infants waved back. I felt I had meanly deserted them--that for his life the mother of each could hold me to account.

But as we drove away from the cellars of mud, the gun that stuck, and the "independent command," I could see in the twilight the flashes of the guns and two lonely specks of light.

They were the "King of England" cigars burning bravely.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN SERBIA

SALONIKA, December, 1915.

The chauffeur of an army automobile must make his way against cavalry, artillery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men marching, and ambulances filled with wounded, over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons. It is therefore necessary for him to drive with care. So he drives at sixty miles an hour, and tries to sc.r.a.pe the mud from every wheel he meets.

In these days of his downfall the greatest danger to the life of the war correspondent is that he must move about in automobiles driven by military chauffeurs. The one who drove me from the extreme left of the English front up to hill 516, which was the highest point of the French front, told me that in peace times he drove a car to amuse himself. His idea of amusing himself was to sweep around a corner on one wheel, exclaim with horror, and throw on all the brakes with the nose of the car projecting over a precipice a thousand yards deep. He knew perfectly well the precipice was there, but he leaped at it exactly as though it were the finish line of the Vanderbilt cup race. If his idea of amusing himself was to make me sick with terror he must have spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.

The approaches to hill 516, the base of the hill on the side hidden from the Bulgarians, and the trenches dug into it were crowded with the French. At that point of the line they greatly outnumbered the English.

But it was not the elbow touch of numbers that explained their cheerfulness; it was because they knew it was expected of them. The famous scholar who wrote in our school geographies, "The French are a gay people, fond of dancing and light wines," established a tradition.

And on hill 516, although it was to keep from freezing that they danced, and though the light wines were melted snow, they still kept up that tradition and were "gay."

They laughed at us in welcome, crawling out of their igloos on all fours like bears out of a cave; they laughed when we photographed them crowding to get in front of the camera, when we scattered among them copies of _L'Opinion_, when up the snow-clad hillside we skidded and slipped and fell. And if we peered into the gloom of the shelters, where they crouched on the frozen ground with snow dripping from above, with shoulders pressed against walls of icy mud, they waved spoons at us and invited us to share their soup. Even the dark-skinned, sombre-eyed men of the desert, the tall Moors and Algerians, showed their white teeth and laughed when a "seventy-five" exploded from an unsuspicious bush, and we jumped. It was like a camp of Boy Scouts, picnicking for one day, and sure the same night of a warm supper and bed. But the best these _poilus_ might hope for was months of ice, snow, and mud, of discomfort, colds, long marches carrying heavy burdens, the pain of frost-bite, and, worst of all, homesickness. They were sure of nothing: not even of the next minute. For hill 516 was dotted with oblong rows of stones with, at one end, a cross of green twigs and a soldier's cap.

The hill was the highest point of a ridge that looked down into the valleys of the Vardar and of Bodjinia. Toward the Bulgarians we could see the one village of Kosturino, almost indistinguishable against the snow, and for fifty miles, even with gla.s.ses, no other sign of life.

Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes, and snow. When the "seventy-fives"

spoke with their smart, sharp crack that always seems to say, "Take that!" and to add, with aristocratic insolence, "and be d.a.m.ned to you!"

one could not guess what they were firing at. In Champagne, where the Germans were as near as from a hundred to forty yards; in Artois, where they were a mile distant, but where their trench was as clearly in sight as the b.u.t.ts of a rifle-range, you could understand. You knew that "that dark line over there" was the enemy.

A year before at Soissons you had seen the smoke of the German guns in a line fifteen miles long. In other little wars you had watched the sh.e.l.ls destroy a blockhouse, a village, or burst upon a column of men. But from hill 516 you could see no enemy; only mountains draped in snow, silent, empty, inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be attacking fifty miles of landscape with tiny pills of steel. But although we could not see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes on hill 516, and from somewhere out of the inscrutable mountains sh.e.l.ls burst and fell. They fell very close, within forty feet of us, and, like children being sent to bed just at dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the trenches and drove us away.

While on "516" we had been in Bulgaria; now we returned to Serbia, and were halted at the village of Valandova. There had been a ceremony that afternoon. A general, whose name we may not mention, had received the _medaille militaire_. One of the French correspondents asked him in recognition of which of his victories it had been bestowed. The general possessed a snappy temper.

"The medal was given me," he said, "because I was the only general without it, and I was becoming conspicuous."

It had long been dark when we reached Strumnitza station, where we were to spend the night in a hospital tent. The tent was as big as a barn, with a stove, a cot for each, and fresh linen sheets. All these good things belong to the men we had left on hill 516 awake in the mud and snow. I felt like a burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleeps in his bed. There was another tent with a pa.s.sageway filled with medical supplies connecting it with ours. It was in darkness, and we thought it empty until some one exploring found it crowded with wounded and men with frozen legs and hands. For half an hour they had been watching us through the pa.s.sageway, making no sign, certainly making no complaint.

John Ba.s.s collected all our newspapers, candles, and boxes of cigarettes, which the hospital stewards distributed, and when we returned from dinner our neighbors were still wide awake and holding a smoking concert. But when in the morning the bugles woke us we found that during the night the wounded had been spirited away, and by rail transferred to the hospital s.h.i.+ps. We should have known then that the army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly, so leisurely, that it seemed like merely a s.h.i.+fting from one point of the front to another.

We dined with the officers and they certainly gave no suggestion of men contemplating retreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner was served had been completed only that afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement, and the interior walls were covered with whitewash. The cement was not yet dry, nor, as John McCutcheon later discovered when he drew caricatures on it, neither was the whitewash. There were twenty men around the dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes and Standard Oil cans, and so close together you could use only one hand. So, you gave up trying to cut your food, and used the free hand solely in drinking toasts to the army, to France, and the Allies. Then, to each Ally individually. You were glad there were so many Allies. For it was not Greek, but French wine, of the kind that comes from Rheims. And the army was retreating. What the French army offers its guests to drink when it is advancing is difficult to imagine.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph by R. H. Davis._

Headquarters of the French commander in Gravec, Serbia.]

We were waited upon by an enormous negro from Senegal with a fez as tall as a giant firecracker. Waiting single-handed on twenty men is a serious matter. And because the officers laughed when he served the soup in a tin basin used for was.h.i.+ng dishes his feelings were hurt. It was explained that "Chocolat" in his own country was a prince, and that unless treated with tact he might get the idea that waiting on a table is not a royal prerogative. One of the officers was a genius at writing impromptu verses. During one course he would write them, and while Chocolat was collecting the plates would sing them. Then by the light of a candle on the back of a sc.r.a.p of paper he would write another and sing that. He was rivalled in entertaining us by the officers who told anecdotes of war fronts from the Marne to Smyrna, who proposed toasts, and made speeches in response, especially by the officer who that day had received the Croix de Guerre and a wound.

I sat next to a young man who had been talking learnedly of dumdum bullets and Parisian restaurants. They asked him to recite, and to my horror he rose. Until that moment he had been a serious young officer, talking boulevard French. In an instant he was transformed. He was a clown. To look at him was to laugh. He was an old roue, senile, pitiable, a bourgeois, an apache, a lover, and his voice was so beautiful that each sentence sang. He used words so difficult that to avoid them even Frenchmen will cross the street. He mastered them, played with them, caressed them, sipped of them as a connoisseur sips Madeira: he tossed them into the air like radiant bubbles, or flung them at us with the rattle of a mitrailleuse. When in triumph he sat down, I asked him, when not in uniform, who the devil he happened to be.

Again he was the bored young man. In a low tone, so as not to expose my ignorance to others, he said.

"I? I am Barrielles of the Theatre Odeon."

We were receiving so much that to make no return seemed ungracious, and we insisted that John T. McCutcheon should decorate the wall of the new mess-room with the caricatures that make the Chicago _Tribune_ famous.

Our hosts were delighted, but it was hardly fair to McCutcheon. Instead of his own choice of weapons he was asked to prove his genius on wet whitewash with a stick of charred wood. It was like asking McLaughlin to make good on a ploughed field. But in spite of the fact that the whitewash fell off in flakes, there grew upon the wall a tall, gaunt figure with gleaming eyes and teeth. Chocolat paid it the highest compliment. He gave a wild howl and fled into the night. Then in quick succession, while the Frenchmen applauded each swift stroke, appeared the faces of the song writer, the comedian, the wounded man, and the commanding officer. It was a real triumph, but the surprises of the evening were not at an end. McCutcheon had but just resumed his seat when the newly finished rear wall of the mess-hall crashed into the room. Where had been rocks and cement was a gaping void, and a view of a garden white with snow.

While we were rescuing the song writer from the debris McCutcheon regarded the fallen wall thoughtfully.

"They feared," he said, "I was going to decorate that wall also, and they sent Chocolat outside to push it in."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph, copyright by American Press a.s.sociation._