On the Edge of the War Zone Part 15

I have always told you that I did not find the balance of things much changed, and I don't. I am afraid that you cannot cultivate, civilize, humanize--choose your word--man to such a point that, so long as he is not emasculated, his final argument in the cause of honor and justice will not be his fists--with or without a weapon in them--which is equivalent to saying, I am afraid, that so long as there are two men on earth there will always be the chance of a fight.

Thus far February has been a droll month. I have seen Februaries in France which have been spring-like, with the chestnut trees in bud, and the primroses in flower, and lilacs in leaf. This February has been a strange mixture of spring awkwardly slipping out of the lap of winter and climbing back again. There have been days when the sun was so warm that I could drive without a rug, and found furs a burden; there have been wonderful moonlit nights; but the most of the time, so far, it has been nasty. On warm days flowers began to sprout and the buds on the fruit-trees to swell. That made Pere sigh and talk about the lune rousse. We have had days of wind and rain which be- longed in a correct March. I am beginning to realize that the life of a farmer is a life of anxiety. If I can take Pere's word for it, it is always cold when it should not be; the hot wave never arrives at the right moment; when it should be dry it rains; and when the earth needs water the rain refuses to fall. In fact, on his testimony, I am convinced that the weather is never just right, except to the mere lover of nature, who has nothing to lose and nothing to gain by its caprices.

The strange thing is that we all stand it so well. If anyone had told me that I could have put up with the life I have been living for two winters and be none the worse for it, I should have thought him heartless.

Yet, like the army, I am surely none the worse for it, and, in the army, many of the men are better for it. The youngsters who come home on leave are as rugged as possible. They have straightened up and broadened their chests. Even the middle-aged are stronger. There is a man here who is a master mason, a hard-working, ambitious, honest chap, very much loved in the commune. He worked on my house, so I know him well. Before the war he was very delicate. He had chronic indigestion, and constantly recurring sore throats. He was pale, and his back was beginning to get round. As he has five children, he is in an ammunition factory. He was home the other day.

I asked him about his health, he looked so rosy, so erect, and strong.

He laughed, and replied: "Never so well in my life. I haven't had a cold this winter, and I sleep in a board shanty and have no fire, and I eat in a place so cold my food is chilled before I can swallow it. My indigestion is a thing of the past. I could digest nails!"

You see I am always looking for consolations in the disaster. One must, you know.

XXII

March 2, 1916

We are living these days in the atmosphere of the great battle of Verdun. We talk Verdun all day, dream Verdun all night--in fact, the thought of that great attack in the east absorbs every other idea. Not in the days of the Marne, nor in the trying days of Ypres or the Aisne was the tension so terrible as it is now. No one believes that Verdun can be taken, but the anxiety is dreadful, and the idea of what the defence is costing is never absent from the minds even of those who are firmly convinced of what the end must be.

I am sending you a Forain cartoon from the Figaro, which exactly expresses the feeling of the army and the nation.

You have only to look on a map to know how important the position is at Verdun, the supposed-to-be-strongest of the four great fortresses-- Verdun, Toul, Epinay, and Belfort--which protect the only frontier by which the Kaiser has a military right to try to enter France, and which he avoided on account of its strength.

Verdun itself is only one day's march from Metz. If you study it up on a map you will learn that, within a circuit of thirty miles, Verdun is protected by thirty-six redoubts. But what you will not learn is that this great fortification is not yet connected with its outer redoubts by the subterranean pa.s.sages which were a part of the original scheme. It is that fact which is disturbing. Every engineer in the French army knows that the citadel at Metz has underground communications with all its circle of outer ramparts. Probably every German engineer knows that Verdun's communication pa.s.sages were never made.

Isn't it strange (when we remember that, even in the days of walled cities, there were always subterraneans leading out of the fortified towns beyond the walls--wonderful works of masonry, intact today, like those of Provins, and even here on this hill) that a nation which did not want war should have left unfinished the protection of such a costly fortress?

You probably knew, as usual, before we did, that the battle had begun. We knew nothing of it here until February 23, three days after the bombardment began, with the French outer lines nine miles outside the city, although only twenty-four hours after was the full force of the German artillery let loose, with fourteen German divisions waiting to march against the three French divisions holding the position. Can you wonder we are anxious?

We have been buoyed up for weeks by the hope of an Allied offensive--and instead came this!

The first day's news was bad, so was that of the 24th. I have never since the war began felt such a vibrant spirit of anxiety about me. To add to it, just before midnight on the 24th snow began to fall. In the morning there was more snow on the ground than I had ever seen in France. It was a foot deep in front of the house, and on the north side, where it had drifted, it was twice that depth. This was so unusual that no one seemed to know what to do. Amelie could not get to me.

No one is furnished with foot-gear to walk in snow, except men who happen to have high galoshes. I looked out of the window, and saw Pere shovelling away to make a path to the gate, but with an iron shovel it was a long pa.s.sage. It was nine o'clock before he got the gate open, and then Amelie came slipping down. Pere was busy all day keeping that path open, for the snow continued to fall.

This meant that communications were all stopped. Trains ran slowly on the main lines, but our little road was blocked. It continued to snow for two days, and for two days we had no news from the outside world.

On the morning of the 27th one of our old men went to the Demi- Lune and watched for a military car coming in from Meaux. After hours of waiting, one finally appeared. He ran into the road and hailed it, and as the chauffeur put on his brakes, he called:

"Et Verdun?"

"Elle tient," was the reply, and the auto rushed on.

That was all the news we had in those days.

When communications were opened the news we got was not consoling. First phase of the battle closed six days ago--with the Germans in Douaumont, and the fighting still going on--but the spirit of the French not a jot changed. Here, among the civilians, they say: "Verdun will never fall," and out at the front, they tell us that the poilus simply hiss through their clenched teeth, as they fight and fall, "They shall not pa.s.s." And all the time we sit inactive on the hilltop holding that thought. It's all we can do.

We were livened up a bit last week because the village clown was on his home leave. He is a lad of twenty-three with a young wife and a little three-year-old girl, who has learned to talk since "dada" saw her, and is her father right over--full of fun, good-humor, and laughter.

I have told you that we almost never hear war talk. We did hear some while our local clown was home, but how much was true and how much his imagination I don't know. Anyway, his drollery made us all laugh. His mother-in-law had died since he left, and when his wife wept on his shoulder, he patted her on the back, and winked over his shoulder at his admiring friends, as he said: "Chut, ma fille, if you are going to cry in these days because someone dies, you'll have no time to sleep. Only think of it, the old lady died in bed, and that is everything which is most aristocratic in these days."

I regret to say that this did not console wife one bit.

As he never can tell anything without acting it out, he was very comic when he told about the battle in which the Prussian Guard was wiped out. He is in the artillery, and he acted out the whole battle. When he got to the point where the artillery was ordered to advance, he gave an imitation of himself scrambling on to his gun, and swaying there, as the horses struggled to advance over the rough road ploughed with sh.e.l.l, until they reached the field where the Guard had fallen.

Then he imitated the gesture of the officer riding beside the guns, and stopping to look off at the field, as, with a shrug, he said: "Ah, les beaux gars" then swung his sabre and shouted: "En avant!"

Then came the imitation of a gunner hanging on his gun as the gun- carriage went b.u.mping over the dead, the sappers and petrole brigade coming on behind, ready to spray and fire the field, shouting: "Allez aux enfers, beaux gars de Prusse, et y attendre votre kaiser!"

It was all so humorous that one was shocked into laughter by the meeting of the comic and the awful. I laughed first and shuddered afterward. But we do that a great deal these days.

I don't think I told you that I had found a wonderful woman to help me one day in the week in the garden. Her name is Louise, and she was born in the commune, and has worked in the fields since she was nine years old. She is a great character, and she is handsome--very tall and so straight--thirty-three, married, with three children,--never been sick in her life. She is a brave, gay thing, and I simply love to see her striding along the garden paths, with her head in the air, walking on her long legs and carrying her body as steadily as though she had a bucket of water on her head. It is beautiful.

Well, Louise has a brother named Joseph, as handsome as she is, and bigger. Joseph is in the heavy artillery, holding a mountain-top in Alsace, and, would you believe it, he has been there twenty months, and has never seen a German.

Of course, when you think of it, it is not so queer, really. The heavy artillery is miles behind the infantry, and of course the gunners can't see what they are firing at--that is the business of the officers and the eyes of the artillery--the aeroplanes. Still, it is queer to think of firing big guns twenty months and never seeing the targets. Odder still, Joseph tells me he has never seen a wounded or a dead soldier since the war began. Put these little facts away to ponder on.

It is a war of strange facts.

XXIII

April 28, 1916

I have lived through such nerve-trying days lately that I rarely feel in the humor to write a letter.

Nothing happens here.

The spring has been as changeable as even that which New England knows. We had four fairly heavy snowstorms in the first fortnight of the awful fighting of Verdun. Then we had wet, and then unexpected heat--the sort of weather in which everyone takes cold. I get up in the morning and dress like a polar bear for a drive, and before I get back the sun is so hot I feel like stripping.

There is nothing for anyone to do but wait for news from the front. It is the same old story--they are see-sawing at Verdun, with the Germans much nearer than at the beginning--and still we have the firm faith that they will never get there. Doesn't it seem to prove that had Germany fought an honest war she could never have invaded France?

Now, in addition, we've all this strain of waiting for news from Dublin.

The affairs of the whole world are in a mess.

There are many aspects of the war which would interest you if you were sitting down on my hilltop with me--conditions which may seem more significant than they are. For example, the Government has sent back from the front a certain number of men to aid in the farm work until the planting is done. Our commune does not get many of these. Our old men and boys and women do the work fairly well, with the aid of a few territorials, who guard the railway two hours each night and work in the fields in the daytime. The women here are used to doing field work, and don't mind doing more than their usual stunt.

I often wonder if some of the women are not better off than in the days before the war. They do about the same work, only they are not bothered by their men.

In the days before the war the men worked in the fields in the summer, and in the carriere de platre, at Mareuil-les-Meaux, in the winter. It was a hard life, and most of them drank a little. It is never the kind of drunkenness you know in America, however. Most of them were radical Socialists in politics--which as a rule meant "ag'in' the government." Of course, being Socialists and French, they simply had to talk it all over. The cafe was the proper place to do that--the provincial cafe being the workingman's club. Of course, the man never dreamed of quitting until legal closing hour, and when he got home, if wife objected, why he just hit her a clip,--it was, of course, for her good,--"a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree,"--you know the adage.

Almost always in these provincial towns it is the woman who is thrifty, and often she sees but too little of her man's earnings. Still, she is, in her way, fond of him, tenacious in her possession of him, and Sundays and fete days they get on together very handsomely.

All the women here, married or not, have always worked, and worked hard. The habit has settled on them. Few of them actually expect their husbands to support them, and they do not feel degraded because their labor helps, and they are wonderfully saving. They spend almost nothing on their clothes, never wear a hat, and usually treasure, for years, one black dress to wear to funerals. The children go to school bareheaded, in black pinafores. It is rare that the humblest of these women has not money put aside.