The Soul of the War Part 32

A hundred years and more have pa.s.sed since then, but the tune has not gone stale. Again and again in the Orders of the Day one read that "the company went into action singing La Ma.r.s.eillaise, Lieutenant X was still singing when, after carrying the enemy's position, he was shot in the throat"; or "the Cha.s.seurs Alpins climbed the ridge to the song of La Ma.r.s.eillaise."

The spirit of it runs through the narrative of a French infantryman who described an action in the Argonne, where his regiment held a village heavily attacked by the enemy. There was street-fighting of the fiercest kind, and hand-to-hand combats in the houses and even in the cellars. "Blood," he wrote, "ran in the gutters like water on a rainy day." The French soldiers were being hard pressed and reserves came with their new regiments in the nick of time.

"Suddenly the Ma.r.s.eillaise rang out while the bugles of the three regiments sounded the charge. From where we stood by the fire of burning houses we could see the action very clearly, and never again shall I see anything more fantastic than those thousands of red legs charging in close ranks. The grey legs began to tremble (they do not love the bayonet), and the Ma.r.s.eillaise continued with the bugles, while bur guns vomited without a pause. Our infantry had closed with the enemy. Not a shot now, but cold steel... Suddenly the charge ceased its bugle-notes. They sounded instead the call to the flag. Au drapeau! Our flag was captured! Instinctively we ceased fire, thunderstruck. Then very loud and strong the Ma.r.s.eillaise rang out above the music of the bugles, calling Au drapeau again and again."

"We saw the awful melee, the struggle to the death with that song above all the shouting and the shrieks... You who imagine you know La Ma.r.s.eillaise because you have heard it played at prize distributions must acknowledge your error. In order to know it you must have heard it as I have tried to tell you, when blood is flowing and the flag of France is in danger."

To this soldier it is an intolerable thought that he should hear the hymn of victory sung at a "prize distribution," or in a music-hall scented with the perfume of women. But even in a music-hall in Paris, or in a third-rate cabaret in a provincial town, the song may be heard with all its magic. I heard it one night in such a place, where the song was greater than the singer. French poilus were in the hall, crippled or convalescent, after their day of battle, and with their women around them they stood at attention while the national hymn was sung. They knew the meaning of it, and the women knew. Some of them became quite pale, with others faces flushed. Their eyes were grave, but with a queer fire in them as the verses rang out. ... It seemed to me as I stood there in this hall, filled with stale smoke and woman's scent, that I smelt blood, and gunpowder, and heard through the music of the Ma.r.s.eillaise the shouts of hoa.r.s.e voices, charging with the bayonet, the screams of wounded, and then the murmur of a battlefield when dawn comes, lighting the tattered flags of France.

20

The soldiers of France in that strange land called la-bas had one consolation which should have helped them a little--did help them, I think, more than a little--to endure the almost intolerable misery of their winter quarters at the front in one of the wettest half years within living memory. They stood in the waterlogged trenches, s.h.i.+vering and coughing, they tramped through cotton-wool mists with heavy overcoats which had absorbed many quarts of rain, they slept at nights in barns through which the water dripped on to puddled straw, or in holes beneath the carts with dampness oozing through the clay walls, or in boggy beetroot fields under a hail of shrapnel, and their physical discomfort of coldness and humidity was harder to bear than their fear of death or mutilation.

But throughout those months of mud and blood a spirit came to visit them in their trenches, and though it could not cure frozen feet or put a healing touch for men spitting blood and coughing their lungs away, it warmed the hearts of men who otherwise would have been chilled to a moral death. The love of women and of all those people who had not been called upon to fight went out to those poilus at the front, in waves of emotion which reached as far as the advanced trenches. By millions of letters, which in spite of an almost hopeless muddle of the postal service did at last reach the soldier, they knew that France, the very heart of France, was full of pity and hero-wors.h.i.+p and yearning for them. By the gifts which came to them--after months of delay, sometimes--not only from their own kinsfolk but from unknown benefactors, school children, convents, societies, and all cla.s.ses of men and women, they knew that their sufferings were understood and that throughout the country there was a great prayer going up-- from freethinkers as well as from Catholic souls--that the soldiers of France might be blessed with victory and that they might have the strength to endure the cruelties of war.

It may be thought that this sentiment would not comfort a man lying on his stomach as sentinel on outpost duty, staring through the mist and rain, and listening for the slightest sound of an approaching enemy, or a man crouching beneath a ledge of earth, waiting for the quiet words of En avant! which would make him scramble up and go into a storm of sh.e.l.ls with a fair chance of being cut to bits by flying scythes. But in truth the sentiment that came welling up to those men at the front was of infinite comfort and kept alight a flame in them which no winter wind could douse. That sentinel on his stomach, gripping a cold rifle with numbed hands, and cursing silently the fate which had brought him to this agony, checked the fear that Avas creeping up to his heart--was that a line of Boches stealing through the mist?--when he thought that the women he knew, the folk in the Normandy village, the old cure, and all the spirit of France had made a hero of him and expected him to bear himself bravely, and in imagination stood beside him to share his vigil. In order not to spoil the image they had made of him, to live up to their ideals of him he must hold on and kill these little devils of fear, and die, if need be, as a gallant soldier of France. It would be fine to come back with a stripe on his arm, perhaps with the military medal on his breast... But oh, the pain in those frozen feet of his! and the coldness of this bed of mud!

Poor devils! hundreds of them have told me their stories and at the end of a tale of misery have said: "I do not complain, you know. It's war, and I am glad to do my duty for the sake of France." And yet sometimes, when they thought back, to the homes they had left, and their old ways of civil life, they had moments of weakness in which all the strength of their souls seemed to ebb away.

"It's fatal to think of one's life before the war," said a young Frenchman who sat with me at the table of a little cafe not far from the front. He was a rich young man, with a great business in Paris which had been suspended on the first day of mobilization, and with a pretty young wife who had just had her first baby. Now he was a simple soldier, and for nine months he had not seen Paris or his home or his pretty wife. The baby's eyes were grey-blue, it seemed, but he had not been able to test the truth of that description.

"As a rule," he said, "one doesn't think back to one's old life. A great gulf lies between us and the past and it is as though one had been born again just to be a soldier in this war. The roots of our former existence have been torn up. All one's old interests have been buried. My wife? I hardly ever think of her. My home? Is there such a place? It is only at night, or suddenly, sometimes, as one goes marching with one's company that one's thoughts begin to roam back over old grounds for a moment or two. The other fellows know what one's silence means, and one's deafness, so that one doesn't hear a neighbour's joke or answer his question. It gives one a horrible heartache and one is overwhelmed with depression... Great G.o.d, how long is this war going to last?"

21

It is only those who have been to the front in France who can realize the life of the men there as it went on month after month--the misery of it, the dreariness of it, the lack of any thrill except that of fear. At the end of April in this year 1915 I went to the most desolate part of the French front, along the battlefields of Champagne, where after nine months of desperate fighting the guns were still at work ceaselessly and great armies of France and Germany were still divided from each other by a few barren meadows, a burnt wood or two, a river bank, a few yards of trenches and a zone of Death.

It was in Champagne-Pouilleuse--mangy Champagne it is called, because it has none of the richness of the vineyard country, but is a great stretch of barren land through which the chalk breaks out in bald patches. The spirit of war brooded over all this countryside, and I pa.s.sed through many ruined villages, burnt and broken by incendiarism and sh.e.l.l-fire. Gradually as we approached nearer to the front, the signs of ordinary life were left behind, and we came into a region where all the activities of men were devoted to one extraordinary purpose, and where they lived in strange conditions.

No civilian came this way unless as a correspondent under the charge of a staff officer. The labourers on the roadside--carting stones to this country of chalk--were all in uniform. No women invaded this territory except, where, here and there, by rare chance, a wrinkled dame drove a plough across a lonely field. No children played about the brooks or plucked the wild flowers on the hillsides.

The inhabitants of this country were all soldiers, tanned by months of hard weather, in war-worn clothes, dusty after marching down the long, white roads, hard and tough in spite of a winter's misery, with calm, resolute eyes in spite of the daily peril of death in which they live.

They lived in a world which is as different from this known world of ours as though they belonged to another race of men inhabiting another planet, or to an old race far back behind the memory of the first civilization. For in this district of Champagne, the soldiers of France were earth-men or troglodytes, not only in the trenches, but for miles behind the trenches. When the rains came last autumn they were without shelter, and there were few villages on this lonely stretch of country in which to billet them. But here were soft, chalky ridges and slopes in which it was not difficult to dig holes and caverns. The troops took to picks and shovels, and very soon they built habitations for themselves in which they have been living ever since when not in the trenches.

I was invited into some of these subterranean parlours, and ducked my head as I went down clay steps into dim caves where three or four men lived in close comrades.h.i.+p in each of them. They had tacked the photographs of their wives or sweethearts on the walls, to make these places "homelike," and there was s.p.a.ce in some of them for wood fires, which burned with glowing embers and a smoke that made my eyes smart, so that by the light of them these soldiers would see the portraits of those who wait for them to come back, who have waited so patiently and so long through the dreary months.

But now that spring had come the earth-men had emerged from their holes to bask in the sun again, and with that love of beauty which is instinctive in a Frenchman's heart, they were planting gardens and shrubberies outside their chalk dwellings with allegorical designs in c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls or white stones.

"Tres chic!" said the commandant to a group of soldiers proud to their handicraft.

And chic also, though touching in its sentiment, was a little graveyard behind a fringe of branches which mask a French battery. The gunners were still at work plugging out sh.e.l.ls over the enemy's lines, from which came answering sh.e.l.ls with the challenge of death, but they had found time to decorate the graves of the comrades who had been "unfortunate." They had twined wild flowers about the wooden crosses and made borders of blossom about those mounds of earth.

It was the most beautiful cemetery in which I have ever stood with bared head. Death was busy not far away. Great guns were speaking in deep, reverberating tones, which gave a solemn import to the day; but Nature was singing to a different tune.

"It is strange, is it not," said our commandant, "this contrast between war and peace? Those cherry trees comfort one's spirit."

He was a soldier in every fibre of his being, but behind those keen, piercing eyes of his there was the sentiment of France stirred now by the beauty through which we pa.s.sed, in spite of war. We drove for a mile or more down a long, straight road which was an avenue of cherry trees. They made an archway of white blossom above our heads, and the warm sun of the day drew out their perfume. Away on either side of us the fields were streaked with long rays of brilliant yellow where saffron grew as though the sun had split bars of molten metal there, and below the hillside the pear-blossom and cherry- blossom which bloomed in deserted orchards lay white and gleaming like snow on the Swiss peaks in summer.

"Even war is less horrible now that the sun s.h.i.+nes," said a French officer.

The sky was cloudlessly blue, but as I gazed up into a patch of it, where a winged machine flew high with a humming song, five tiny white clouds appeared quite suddenly.

"They are sh.e.l.ling him," said the commandant. "Pretty close too."

Invisible in the winged machine was a French aviator, reconnoitring the German lines away over Beausejour. Afterwards he became visible, and I talked with him when he had landed in the aviation field, where a number of aeroplanes stood ready for flight.

"They touched her three times," he said, pointing to his machine.

"You can see the holes where the shrapnel bullets pierced the metal sheath."

He showed me how he worked his mitrailleuse, and then strolled away to light a cigarette against the wind. He had done his morning job, and had escaped death in the air by half an inch or so. But in the afternoon he would go up again--2000 feet up above the German guns--and thought no more of it than of just a simple duty with a little sport to keep his spirits up.

"We are quite at home here," said one of the French officers, leading the way through a boyau, or tunnel, to a row of underground dwellings which had been burrowed out of the earth below a high ridge overlooking the German positions opposite Perthes, Mesnil-lez- Hurlus, and Beause-jour, where there had been some of the most ferocious fighting in the war, so that the names of those places have been written in blood upon the history of France.

"You see we have made ourselves as comfortable as possible," said the general, who received us at the doorway of the little hole which, with delightful irony, he called his "palace." He is an elderly man, this general who has held in check some of the most violent a.s.saults of the German army, but there was a boyish smile in his eyes and none of the harshness of old age in the sweetness of his voice. He lived in a hole in the earth with just a peep-hole out of which he could see the German lines on the opposite hills and his won trenches down below.

As he spread out his maps and explained the positions of his batteries and lines, I glanced round his room--at the truckle-bed which filled the length of it, and the deal table over which he was bending, and the wooden chair in which he sat to think out the problems of his task. There was only one touch of colour in this hole in the hillside, and it belonged to a bunch of carnations placed in a German sh.e.l.l and giving out a rich odour so that some of the beauty of spring had come into this hiding-place where an old man directed the operations of death. "Look," said the general, pointing to the opposite lines, "here is Crest 196, about which you gentlemen have written so much in newspapers."

It was just a rise in the ground above the ravine which divided us from the German ridges, but I gazed at it with a thrill, remembering what waves of blood have washed around this hillock, and how many heroes of France have given their lives to gain that crest. Faintly I could see the lines of German trenches with their earthworks thrown up along the hillsides and along the barren fields on each side of the ravine, where French and German soldiers are very close to each other's tunnels. From where we stood subterranean pa.s.sages led to the advanced trenches down there, and to a famous "trapeze" on the right of the German position, forming an angle behind the enemy's lines, so that now and again their soldiers might be seen.

"It is not often in this war that we can see our enemy unless we visit them in their trenches, or they come to us," said the general, "but a few days ago, when I was in the trapeze, I saw one of them stooping down as though gathering something in his hands or tying up his boot-laces." Those words were spoken by a man who had commanded French troops for nine months of incessant fighting which reveal the character of this amazing war. He was delighted because he had seen a German soldier in the open and found it a strange unusual thing. Not a sign of any human being could I see as I gazed over the great battlefields of France. There was no glint of helmets, no flash of guns, no movements of regiments, no stirring of the earth. There was a long tract of country in which no living thing moved: utterly desolate in its abandonment. Yet beneath the earth here, close to us as well as far away, men crouched in holes waiting to kill or to be killed, and all along the ridges, concealed in dug-outs or behind the low-lying crests, great guns were firing so that their thunder rolled across the ravines, and their smoke-clouds rested for a little while above the batteries.

The general was pointing out a spot on Hill 196 where the Germans still held a ridge. I could not see it very clearly, or at least the general thought my eyes were wandering too much to the right.

"I will drop a sh.e.l.l there," he said, and then turned to a telephone operator who was crouched in a hole in the wall, and gave an order to him.

The man touched his instrument and spoke in the mouthpiece.

"C'est la batterie?"

There was a little crackling in the telephone, like twigs under a pot, and it seemed as though a tiny voice were speaking from a great distance.

"Now!" said the general, pointing towards the crest.

I stared intently, and a second later, after a solitary thunderstroke from a heavy gun, I saw a sh.e.l.l burst and leave a soft white cloud at the very spot indicated by the old man at my side. I wondered if a few Germans had been killed to prove the point for my satisfaction. What did it matter--a few more deaths to indicate a mark on the map? It was just like sweeping a few crumbs off the table in an argument on strategy.

In another hole to which the general took me was the officers' mess-- about as large as a suburban bathroom. At the end of the dining-table the captain was shaving himself, and laughed with embarra.s.sment at our entry. But he gave me two fingers of a soapy hand and said "Enchante" with fine courtesy.

Outside, at the top of the tunnel, was another group of officers, who seemed to me cheery men in spite of all the hards.h.i.+ps of their winter in a subterranean world. The spring had warmed their spirits, and they laughed under the blue sky. But one of them, who stood chatting with me, had a sudden thrill in his voice as he said, "How is Paris?"

He spoke the word again and said, "Paris!" as though it held all his soul.

22

There was the real spirit of old-world chivalry in a chateau of France which I visited two days ago. This old building, with its high gables and pointed roofs, holds the memory of many great chapters in French history. Attila the Hun came this way with his hordes, checked and broken at last, as centuries later, not far away, 100,000 Germans were checked and broken by Dumouriez and the French army of 1792 on the plain of Valmy.

A French officer pointed to a tablet on the wall of the chateau commemorating that victory, and said: "Perhaps history will be repeated here by the general whom you will see later on." He stooped down and rubbed some dust off a stone, revealing a tracing of the footprint of Henri IV, who once crossed this threshold, and on the way upstairs pointed to other memorial tablets of kings and princes, statesmen and soldiers, who had received the hospitality of this old house.