Poems by Alan Seeger Part 3

We put in a very pleasant week here--nine hours of guard at night in our outposts up on the hillside; in the daytime sleep, or foraging in the ruined villages, loafing in the pretty garden of the chateau, or reading up in the library. We have cleaned this up now, and it is an altogether curious sensation to recline here in an easy-chair, reading some fine old book, and just taking the precaution not to stay in front of the gla.s.sless windows through which the sharpshooters can snipe at you from their posts in the thickets on the slopes of the plateau, not six hundred metres away.

Sometimes our artillery opens up and then you lay down your book for a while, and, looking through a peek-hole, watch the 75's and 120's throw up fountains of dirt and debris all along the line of the enemy's trenches.

"Spring has come here at last," so the letter closes, "and we are having beautiful weather. I am going in swimming in the Aisne this afternoon for the first time. In fine health and spirits."

During the summer, the Legion was moved about a good deal from sector to sector, and Alan often found himself in pleasant places, and got a good deal of positive enjoyment out of his life.

On June 18, 1915, he wrote to his mother:

You must not be anxious about my not coming back. The chances are about ten to one that I will. But if I should not, you must be proud, like a Spartan mother, and feel that it is your contribution to the triumph of the cause whose righteousness you feel so keenly.

Everybody should take part in this struggle which is to have so decisive an effect, not only on the nations engaged but on all humanity.

There should be no neutrals, but everyone should bear some part of the burden.

If so large a part should fall to your share, you would be in so far superior to other women and should be correspondingly proud.

There would be nothing to regret, for I could not have done otherwise than I did, and I think I could not have done better.

Death is nothing terrible after all. It may mean something even more wonderful than life. It cannot possibly mean anything worse to the good soldier.

The same note recurs in a letter of two weeks later (July 3):

Whether I am on the winning or losing side is not the point with me: it is being on the side where my sympathies lie that matters, and I am ready to see it through to the end. Success in life means doing that thing than which nothing else conceivable seems more n.o.ble or satisfying or remunerative, and this enviable state I can truly say that I enjoy, for had I the choice I would be nowhere else in the world than where I am.

In this letter he says that an article about Rupert Brooke in which his name was mentioned "gave him rather more pain than pleasure, for it rubbed in the matter which most rankled in his heart, that he never could get his book of poems published before the war."

However he consoles himself with the reflection that the M.S.

is probably as safe at Bruges as anywhere else. "We have finished our eighth month on the firing line," he says, "and rumors are going round of an imminent return to the rear for reorganization."

These rumors proved to be well founded, and on July 17, he wrote on a picture-postcard representing the Lion of Belfort:

We have finally come to the rear for a little rest and reorganization, and are cantoned in a valley not far from Belfort, in the extreme east of France, very near the Swiss frontier. Since I wrote you last, all the Americans in the regiment received 48 hours permission in Paris, and it was a great happiness to get back even for so short a while and to see again old scenes and faces after almost a year's absence.

We shall be here several weeks perhaps.

Three weeks later (August 8) he wrote to his mother:

. . . I have always had the pa.s.sion to play the biggest part within my reach, and it is really in a sense a supreme success to be allowed to play this.

If I do not come out, I will share the good fortune of those who disappear at the pinnacle of their careers. Come to love France and understand the almost unexampled n.o.bility of the effort this admirable people is making, for that will be the surest way of your finding comfort for anything that I am ready to suffer in their cause.

The spell of rest lasted some two months, and then the Legion returned to the front in time for the battle in Champagne "in which" he writes "we took part from the beginning, the morning of the memorable 25th. September." I cannot resist quoting at some length from the admirably vivid letter in which he gave an account of this experience:

The part we played in the battle is briefly as follows.

We broke camp about 11 o'clock the night of the 24th, and marched up through ruined Souain to our place in one of the numerous 'boyaux'

where the 'troupes d'attaque' were ma.s.sed. The cannonade was pretty violent all that night, as it had been for several days previous, but toward dawn it reached an intensity unimaginable to anyone who has not seen a modern battle. A little before 9.15 the fire lessened suddenly, and the crackle of the fusillade between the reports of the cannon told us that the first wave of a.s.sault had left and the attack begun.

At the same time we received the order to advance. The German artillery had now begun to open upon us in earnest. Amid the most infernal roar of every kind of fire-arms, and through an atmosphere heavy with dust and smoke, we marched up through the 'boyaux' to the 'tranchees de depart'.

At shallow places and over breaches that sh.e.l.ls had made in the bank, we caught momentary glimpses of the blue lines sweeping up the hillside or silhouetted on the crest where they poured into the German trenches.

When the last wave of the Colonial brigade had left, we followed.

'Bayonette au canon', in lines of 'tirailleurs', we crossed the open s.p.a.ce between the lines, over the barbed wire, where not so many of our men were lying as I had feared, (thanks to the efficacy of the bombardment) and over the German trench, knocked to pieces and filled with their dead. In some places they still resisted in isolated groups. Opposite us, all was over, and the herds of prisoners were being already led down as we went up.

We cheered, more in triumph than in hate; but the poor devils, terror-stricken, held up their hands, begged for their lives, cried "Kamerad", "Bon Francais", even "Vive la France".

We advanced and lay down in columns by twos behind the second crest.

Meanwhile, bridges had been thrown across trenches and 'boyaux', and the artillery, leaving the emplacements where they had been anch.o.r.ed a whole year, came across and took position in the open, a magnificent spectacle. Squadrons of cavalry came up.

Suddenly the long, unpicturesque 'guerre de tranchees' was at an end, and the field really presented the aspect of the familiar battle pictures, -- the battalions in manoeuvre, the officers, superbly indifferent to danger, galloping about on their chargers. But now the German guns, moved back, began to get our range, and the sh.e.l.ls to burst over and around batteries and troops, many with admirable precision. Here my best comrade was struck down by shrapnel at my side,--painfully but not mortally wounded.

I often envied him after that. For now our advanced troops were in contact with the German second-line defenses, and these proved to be of a character so formidable that all further advance without a preliminary artillery preparation was out of the question. And our role, that of troops in reserve, was to lie pa.s.sive in an open field under a sh.e.l.l fire that every hour became more terrific, while aeroplanes and captive balloons, to which we were entirely exposed, regulated the fire.

That night we spent in the rain. With portable picks and shovels each man dug himself in as well as possible. The next day our concentrated artillery again began the bombardment, and again the fusillade announced the entrance of the infantry into action.

But this time only the wounded appeared coming back, no prisoners.

I went out and gave water to one of these, eager to get news.

It was a young soldier, wounded in the hand. His face and voice bespoke the emotion of the experience he had been through, in a way that I will never forget. "Ah, les salauds!" he cried, "They let us come right up to the barbed wire without firing. Then a hail of grenades and b.a.l.l.s. My comrade fell, shot through the leg, got up, and the next moment had his head taken off by a grenade before my eyes."

"And the barbed wire, wasn't it cut down by the bombardment?"

"Not at all in front of us." I congratulated him on having a 'blessure heureuse' and being well out of the affair.

But he thought only of his comrade and went on down the road toward Souain nursing his mangled hand, with the stream of wounded seeking their 'postes de secours'.

He then tells how, in spite of substantial gains, it gradually "became more and more evident that the German second line of defence presented obstacles too serious to attempt overcoming for the moment, and we began going up at night to work at consolidating our advanced trenches and turning them into a new permanent line." To this time, perhaps, belongs the incident related by Rif Baer, an Egyptian, who was his comrade and best friend in the regiment.

A piece of difficult trench work was allotted to the men, to be finished in one night. "Each was given the limit, that he was supposed to be able to complete in the time.

It happened that Rif Baer was ill, and, after working a while, his strength gave out. Alan completed his own job and R. B.'s also, and although he was quite exhausted by the extra labour, his eyes glowed with happiness, and he said he had never done anything in his life that gave him such entire satisfaction."

Summing up the results of the battle, Alan wrote (still in the same letter, October 25): "It was a satisfaction at least to get out of the trenches, to meet the enemy face to face and to see German arrogance turned into suppliance. We knew many splendid moments, worth having endured many trials for. But in our larger aim, of piercing their line, of breaking the long deadlock, of entering Vouziers in triumph, of course we failed." Then he proceeds:

This affair only deepened my admiration for, my loyalty to, the French.

If we did not entirely succeed, it was not the fault of the French soldier.

He is a better man, man for man, than the German. Anyone who had seen the charge of the Marsouins at Souain would acknowledge it.

Never was anything more magnificent. I remember a captain, badly wounded in the leg, as he pa.s.sed us, borne back on a litter by four German prisoners. He asked us what regiment we were, and when we told him, he cried "Vive la Legion," and kept repeating "Nous les avons en. Nous les avons en." He was suffering, but, oblivious of his wound, was still fired with the enthusiasm of the a.s.sault and all radiant with victory. What a contrast with the German wounded on whose faces was nothing but terror and despair. What is the stimulus in their slogans of "Gott mit uns" and "Fuer Koenig und Vaterland"

beside that of men really fighting in defense of their country?

Whatever be the force in international conflicts of having justice and all the principles of personal morality on one's side, it at least gives the French soldier a strength that's like the strength of ten against an adversary whose weapon is only brute violence.

It is inconceivable that a Frenchman, forced to yield, could behave as I saw German prisoners behave, trembling, on their knees, for all the world like criminals at length overpowered and brought to justice.

Such men have to be driven to the a.s.sault, or intoxicated.

But the Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a pa.s.sion beside which any of the other forms of experience that are reckoned to make life worth while seem pale in comparison.