The Soul of the War Part 31

Imagine the life of one of these cavalrymen, as I heard it described by many of them in the beginning of the war.

They were sent forward on a reconnaissance--a patrol of six or eight.

The enemy was known to be in the neighbourhood. It was necessary to get into touch with him, to discover his strength, to kill some of his outposts, and then to fall back to the division of cavalry and report the facts. Not an easy task! It quite often happened that only one man out of six came back to tell the tale, surprised at his own luck. The German scouts had clever tricks.

One day near Bethune they played one of them--a favourite one. A friend of mine led six of his dragoons towards a village where Uhlans had been seen. They became visible at a turn of the road, and after firing a few shots with their carbines turned tail and fled. The French dragoons gave chase, across some fields and round the edge of a quiet wood. Suddenly at this point the Uhlans reined in their horses and out of the wood came the sudden shattering fire of a German quickfirer. Fortunately it was badly aimed, and my friend with his six dragoons was able to gallop away from that infernal machine which had so cleverly ambushed them.

There was no rest for the cavalry in those first days of the war. The infantry had its bivouac every day, there was rest sometimes in the trenches, but the cavalry had to push on always upon new adventures to check the enemy in his advance.

A young Russian officer in the French dragoons told me that he had been fighting since the beginning of the war with never more than three hours sleep a night and often no sleep at all. On many nights those brief hours of rest were in beetroot fields in which the German shrapnel had been searching for victims, and he awakened now and then to listen to the well-known sound of that singing death before dozing off again.

It was "Boot and saddle" at four o'clock in the morning, before the dawn. It was cold then--a cold which made men tremble as with an ague. A cup of black coffee was served, and a piece of bread.

The Russian officer of French dragoons, who has lived in British Colonies, saw a vision then--a false mirage--of a British breakfast. It was the thought of grilled bloaters, followed by ham and eggs, which unmanned him for a moment. Ten minutes later the cavalry was moving away. A detachment was sent forward on a mission of peril, to guard a bridge. There was a bridge near Bethune one night guarded by a little patrol. It was only when the last man had been killed that the Germans made their way across.

Through the darkness these mounted men leaned forward over their saddles, peering for the enemy, listening for any jangle of stirrup or clink of bit. On that night there came a whisper from the cavalry leader.

"They are coming! ... Quiet there!"

A file of dark shadows moved forward. The dragoons swung their carbines forward. There was a volley of shots before a cry rang out.

"Cessez feu! Cessez feu!"

The cry had been heard before from German officers speaking excellent French, but this time there was no treachery in it. The shadows who moved forward through the night were Frenchmen changing from one trench to another.

16

The infantryman had a hard time, too. It was true that theoretically he might sometimes s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours of sleep in a trench or out in an open field, but actually the coldness of the night was often an acute agony, which kept him awake. The food question was a difficult one.

When there was heavy fighting to be done, and rapid marching, the provisions became as theoretical as the hours of sleep.

I heard the graphic recital of a sergeant of infantry, which was typical of many others in those early days.

His section awakened one morning near Armentieres with a famis.h.i.+ng hunger, to find an old peasant woman coming up with a great barrow-load of potatoes.

"These are for your breakfast, my little ones," she said. "See, I have some f.a.ggots here. If you care to make a fire there will be roast potatoes for you in twenty minutes."

"Madame, you are too kind," said my sergeant. He helped to make the fire, to pack it with potatoes. He added his eloquence to that of his comrades when the fragrant smell made his nostrils quiver. And just as the potatoes were nearly done up came a motor cyclist with orders that the section was to move on immediately to a place fifteen kilometres away. It was a tragedy! There were tearful farewells to those potatoes. Fifteen kilometres away there was a chateau, and a friendly lady, and a good cook who prepared a dinner of excellent roast beef and most admirable fried potatqes. And just as the lady came to say "Mes amis, le diner est servi," up panted a Belgian cyclist with the news that German cavalry was advancing in strong force accompanied by 500 motor-cars with mitrailleuses and many motor-cycles, and a battery of horse artillery. It was another tragedy!

And the third took place sixteen hours later, when this section of infantry which had been marching most of that time lay down on an open field to sleep without a supper.

Yet--"Nothing matters except the rain," said a friend of mine in the French artillery. He shrugged his shoulders as he spoke, and an expression of disgust came upon his bearded face. He was thinking, perhaps, of his beloved guns which lose their mobility in the quagmires of the fields. But the rain is bad also for men and beasts. It takes eight days for a French overcoat to get thoroughly dry after a bad wetting. Even the cavalryman's cloak is a poor s.h.i.+eld against the driving rain, and at night wet straw or a water pool in a trench is not a pleasant kind of bed.

"War," said one of the French officers with whom I have chatted, "is not only fighting, as some people seem to think. The physical discomforts are more dangerous to one's health than shrapnel. And it is--par exemple--the impossibility of changing one's linen for weeks and weeks which saps one's moral fibre more than the risk of losing one's head."

The risk of death is taken lightly by all these men. It is curious, indeed, that almost every French soldier has a conviction that he will die in battle sooner or later. In moments of imagination he sees his own corpse lying out in the field, and is full of pity for his wife and children. But it does not destroy his courage or his gift of gaiety or his desire to fight for France or his sublime endurance of pain.

The wounded men who pour down from the battlefields are incredibly patient. I have seen them stand on a wounded leg to give their places in a railway-carriage to peasant women with their babies. They have used their bandaged hands to lift up the baskets of refugees. They forget their wounds in remembering their adventures, and the simple soldier describes his combats with a vivid eloquence not to be attained by the British Tommy, who has no gift of words.

The French soldier has something in his blood and strain which uplifts him as a fighting man, and gives him the quality of chivalry. Peasant or bourgeois or of patrician stock he has always the fine manners of a gentleman, and to know him in the field is to love the humour and temper of the man.

17

Yet there were some men in the French army, as in our own, who showed how thin is the veneer which hides the civilized being from the primitive savage, to whom there is a joy in killing, like the wild animal who hunts his prey in the jungles and desert places. One such man comes to my mind now. He was in the advanced lines near Albert, but was always restless in the trench. As soon as darkness came he would creep out and crawl on his belly across the swampy ground to a deep hole dug by the explosion of a marmite quite close to the German lines. Here he found a hiding-place from which he could take "pot shots" at any German soldiers who under cover of darkness left their burrows to drag in the bodies of their comrades or to gather bits of wood with which to make a floor to their trenches.

They were quite unconscious of that man in the hole staring down the length of his rifle, and listening intently for any sound which would betray an enemy. Every night he shot two or three men, perfectly patient in his long cold vigil if he could have that "luck." Then at dawn he would crawl back again, bringing a helmet or two with him, a cartridge belt or some other trophy as a sign of his success.

One night he shot a man who had stumbled quite close to his pit, and some great instinct of pity for his victim stirred in him, so that he risked a double journey over the open ground to fetch a spade with which he buried the man. But soon afterwards he added to his "bag"

of human life. In his own trench he spoke very little and always seemed to be waiting for the hour when he could crawl out again like a Red Indian in search of scalps. He was the primitive man, living like one of his ancestors of the Stone Age, except for the fire-stick with which he was armed and the knowledge of the arts and beauties of modern life in his hunter's head. For he was not a French Canadian from the backwoods, or an Alpine cha.s.seur from lonely mountains, but a well-known lawyer from a French provincial town, with the blood and education of a gentleman. As a queer character this man is worth remembering by those who study the psychology of war, but he is not typical of the soldiers of France, who in the ma.s.s have no blood-l.u.s.t, and hate butchering their fellow beings, except in their moments of mad excitement, made up of fear as well as of rage, when to the shout of "En avant!" they leap out of the trenches and charge a body of Germans, stabbing and slas.h.i.+ng with their bayonets, clubbing men to death with the b.u.t.t-ends of their rifles, and for a few minutes of devilish intoxication, with the smell of blood in their nostrils, and with bloodshot eyes, rejoicing in slaughter.

"We did not listen to the cries of surrender or to the beseeching plaints of the wounded," said a French soldier, describing one of these scenes. "We had no use for prisoners and on both sides there was no quarter given in this Argonne wood. Better than fixed bayonets was an unfixed bayonet grasped as a dagger. Better than any bayonet was a bit of iron or a broken gun-stock, or a sharp knife.

In that hand-to-hand fighting there was no shooting but only the struggling of interlaced bodies, with fists and claws grabbing for each other's throats. I saw men use teeth and bite their enemy to death with their jaws, gnawing at their windpipes. This is modern war in the twentieth century--or one scene in it--and it is only afterwards, if one escapes with life, that one is stricken with the thought of all that horror which has debased us as low as the beasts--lower than beasts, because we have an intelligence and a soul to teach us better things."

The soldiers of France have an intelligence which makes them, or most of them, revolt from the hideous work they have to do and cry out against this infamy which has been thrust upon them by a nation which compelled the war. Again and again, for nine months and more, I have heard French soldiers ask the question, "Why are such things allowed by G.o.d? What is the use of civilization if it leads to this?" And, upon my soul, I could not answer them.

18

The mobilization of all the manhood of France, from boys of eighteen and nineteen to men of forty-five, was a demonstration of national unity and of a great people rising as one man in self-defence, which to the Englishman was an astounding and overwhelming phenomenon. Though I knew the meaning of it and it had no real surprises for me, I could never avoid the sense of wonderment when I met young aristocrats marching in the ranks as common soldiers, professors, poets, priests and painters, as hairy and dirty as the poilus who had come from the farms and the meat markets, millionaires and the sons of millionaires driving automobiles as military chauffeurs or as orderlies to officers upon whom they waited respectfully, forbidden to sit at table with them in public places, and having to "keep their place" at all times. Even now I am astonished at a system which makes young merchants abandon their businesses at a moment's notice to serve in the ranks, and great employers of labour go marching with their own labourers, giving only a backward glance at the ruin of their property and their trade. There is something magnificent in this, but all one's admiration of a universal military service which abolishes all distinctions of cla.s.s and wealth--after all there were not many embusques, or privileged exemptes--need not blind one to abuses and unnecessary hards.h.i.+ps inflicted upon large numbers of men.

Abuses there have been in France, as was inevitable in a system like this, and this general call to the colours inflicted an enormous amount of suffering upon men who would have suffered more willingly if it had been to serve France usefully. But in thousands and hundreds of thousands of cases there was no useful purpose served. General Joffre had as many men as he could manage along the fighting lines.

More would have choked up his lines of communication and the whole machinery of the war. But behind the front there were millions of men in reserve, and behind them vast bodies of men idling in depots, crowded into barracks, and eating their hearts out for lack of work. They had been forced to abandon their homes and their professions, and yet during the whole length of the war they found no higher duty to do for France than sweep out a barrack-yard or clean out a military latrine. It was especially hard upon the reformes--men of delicate health who had been exempted from their military service in their youth but who now were re-examined by the Conseil de Revision and found "good for auxiliary service in time of war."

To the old soldiers who have done their three years a return to the barracks is not so distressing. They know what the life is like and the rude discipline of it does not shock them. But to the reforme, sent to barracks for the first time at thirty-five or forty years of age, it is a moral sacrifice which is almost unendurable. After the grief of parting from his wife and children and the refinements of his home, he arrives at the barracks inspired by the best sentiments, happy in the idea of being useful to his country, of serving like other Frenchmen. But when he has gone through the great gate, guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, when he has changed his civil clothes for an old and soiled uniform, when he has found that his bed is a filthy old mattress in a barn where hundreds of men are quartered, when he has received for the first time certain brief and harsh orders from a sous- officier, and finally, when he goes out again into the immense courtyard, surrounded by high grey walls, a strange impression of solitude takes hold of him, and he finds himself abandoned, broken and imprisoned.

Many of these reformes are men of delicate health, suffering from heart or chest complaints, but in these barracks there is no comfort for the invalid. I know one of them in which nearly seven hundred men slept together in a great garret, with only one window and a dozen narrow skylights, so that the atmosphere was suffocating above their rows of straw trusses, rarely changed and of indescribable filth. But what hurts the spirits of men who have attained good positions in civil life, who have said to this man "Go!"

and he goeth, and to that man "Come!" and he cometh, is to find their positions reversed and to be under the orders of a corporal or sergeant with a touch of the bully about him, happy to dominate men more educated and more intelligent than himself. I can quote an example of an aristocrat who, in spite of his splendid chateau in the country, was mobilized as a simple soldat.

At the barracks this gentleman found that his corporal was a labourer in the village where the old chateau stands. In order to amuse himself the corporal made M. le Chatelain do all the dirtiest jobs, such as sweeping the rooms, cleaning the staircases and the lavatories. At the same barracks were a number of priests, including an archipretre, who was about to become a bishop. Even the most ferocious anti- clericals in the caserne had to acknowledge that these men were excellent soldiers and good comrades. They submitted to all inconveniences, did any task as though it were a religious duty, and submitted to the rough life among men of foul speech with a wonderful resignation. But that did not save them from the tyranny of a sous-officier, who called them the hardest names his tongue could find when they made any faux pas in their barrack drill, and swore as terribly as those in Flanders when they did not obey his commands with the lightning rapidity of soldiers who have nothing more to learn.

These cases could be multiplied by hundreds of thousands, and for men of refinement there was a long torture in their barracks when there was no mental satisfaction in useful work for France. Yet their sacrifice has not been in vain perhaps. "They serve who only stand and wait," and they proved by their submission to the system a loyalty and a patriotism equal to those who went into the trenches. They, too, who know what war means--for war is not only at the front--will come back with a deep-rooted hatred of militarism which will make it more difficult in future for politicians who breathe out fire and slaughter and urge a people to take up arms for any other cause than that of self- defence.

19

It is curious how long the song of La Ma.r.s.eillaise has held its power. It has been like a leit-motif through all the drama of this war in France, through the spirit of the French people waiting patiently for victory, hiding their tears for the dead, consoling their wounded and their cripples, and giving their youngest and their manhood to the G.o.d of War. What is the magic in this tune so that if one hear it even on a cheap piano in an auxiliary hospital, or sc.r.a.ped thinly on a violin in a courtyard of Paris, it thrills one horribly? On the night of August 2, when I travelled from Paris to Nancy, it seemed to me that France sang La Ma.r.s.eillaise--the strains of it rose from every wayside station --and that out of its graveyards across those dark hills and fields, with a thin luminous line on the far horizon the ghosts of slain soldiers rose to sing it to those men who were going to fight again for liberty.

Since then it has always been in my ears. I heard it that night in Amiens when the French army was in retreat, and when all the young men of the city, not yet called to the colours because of their youth, escaped hurriedly on truck trains before a bridge was blown up, so that if they stayed they would be prisoners in German hands. It was these boys who sang it, with fresh, clear voices, joining in a fine chorus, though not far away the soldiers of France were limping through the night from abandoned positions:

Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes, Mugir ces feroces soldats?

Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras Egorger nos fils, nos compagnes!

Aux armes, citoyens!

Formez vos bataillons!

Marchons!

I listened to those boys' voices, and something of the history of the song put its spell upon me then. There was the pa.s.sion of old heroism in it, of old and b.l.o.o.d.y deeds, with the wild wars of revolution and l.u.s.t for liberty. Rouget de Lisle wrote it one night at Strasburg, when he was drunk, says the legend. But it was not the drunkenness of wine which inspired his soul. It was the drunkenness of that year 1792, when the desire of liberty made Frenchmen mad. . . The men of Ma.r.s.eilles came singing it into Paris. The Parisians heard and caught up the strains. It marched to the victories of the Republican armies. "We fought one against ten," wrote a French general, "but La Ma.r.s.eillaise was on our side." "Send us," wrote another general, "ten thousand men and one copy of La Ma.r.s.eillaise, and I will answer for victory."