CHAPTER IV

AFTER THE ARMISTICE

AFTER the burial work at St. Souplet was over, great covered lorries took us back the sixty miles or more to Corbie, in the vicinity of Amiens, which was to be our rest area. We greeted its paved streets, its fairly intact houses, its few tiny shops, as the height of luxury. Here and there a roof was destroyed or a wall down, for the enemy had come within three miles of Corbie in their drives earlier in the year. But we were in rest and comparative plenty at last. We saw real civilians again, not merely the few old people and little children left behind in the towns we had liberated. We had regular meals again and a chance to purchase a few luxuries beside, such as French bread at a shop and hard candy at the "Y." We no longer heard the whine of the shell or whistle of the bullet, nor smelled gas, nor slept in cellars. I was even lucky enough to capture a thick spring mattress which, with my blankets, made a bed that even a certain staff colonel envied me. A home-made grate in the fire-place fitted it for a tiny coal fire; the window frames were re-covered with oiled paper; we read the London Daily Mail in its Paris edition only one day late, instead of seeing it every ten days and then often two weeks out of date.

My billet, which I obtained from the British town major, was a tall, narrow house just off the principal square, very pleasant indeed in dry weather. Its chief defect was a huge shell-hole in the roof through which the water poured in torrents when it rained, so that we had to cover ourselves with our rubber shelter-halves when we slept at night. The shell-hole, however, was a constant source of fuel, and we burned the laths and wood-work, of which small pieces were lying all about the top floor, until we found means to obtain a small but steady supply of coal. The house afforded room, after I had preempted it, for the Senior Chaplain of the Division, the Division Burial Officer and myself, together with our three orderlies.

Even in dry weather there was some excitement about the old house. There was the time when some tipsy soldiers, seeing the light in the Senior Chaplain's room late at night, mistook the place for a cafe and came stumbling in for a drink. When they saw the chaplain, they suddenly sobered and accepted very gravely the drink of water he offered them from his canteen. On another day the old woman who owned the house came in with her son, a French lieutenant, to take away her furniture. We did not mind losing the pretty inlaid table--we were soldiers and could stand that--but our mattresses and chairs were a different matter. None of us could argue with her torrential flow of French, but Lieutenant Curtiss, the Burial Officer, suddenly felt his real attack of flu redoubled in violence and had to take to his mattress. So the old lady finally relented sufficiently to leave us our beds and a chair or two, while her son became our devoted friend at the price of an American cigar.

I think that I shall never forget Corbie, with its narrow streets, its half-ruined houses, its great ancient church of gray, with one transept a heap of ruins, and the straight rows of poplars on both sides of the Somme Canal,--a bit of Corot in the mist of twilight. I remember the quiet, gray square one day with the American band playing a medley from the "Chocolate Soldier," for all the world like a phonograph at home. I remember the great memorial review of the division by General O'Ryan in honor of our men who had fallen; the staff stood behind the General at the top of a long, gentle slope, with three villages in the distance, the church looming up with its square, ruined tower, and the men spread out before us, a vanishing mass of olive drab against the dull shades of early winter.

I remember the day when three of us chaplains made the long trip back to our division cemeteries at St. Emelie, Bony and Guillemont Farm to read the burial service over those many graves, the result of the terrible battle at the Hindenburg Line. Chaplain Burgh, Protestant, of the 105th Infantry, Chaplain Eilers, Catholic, of the 106th Infantry, and I were sent back the fifty miles or more by automobile for this duty. It happened that it rained that day, as on most days, and the car was an open one. So the few soldiers still about in that deserted region had the rare sight of three cold and dripping chaplains standing out in the mud and rain to read the burial services, one holding his steel helmet as an umbrella over the prayerbook from which the other read, and then accepting the same service in return. There was none of the panoply of war, no bugle, firing party or parade, just the prayer uttered for each man in the faith to which he was born or to which he had clung. We did not even know the religion of every man buried there, but we knew that our prayers would serve for all.

We were lucky to be in Corbie on November 11th when the armistice was signed. Day after day we had stopped at Division Headquarters to inspect the maps and study the color pins which were constantly moving forward across France and Belgium. It was a study that made us all drunk with enthusiasm. We were under orders to move toward the front again on the 9th of November and to enter the lines once more on November 14th. The men had had very little rest and no fresh troops had come up to fill the losses made by wounds, exposure and disease. Our men could never hold a full divisional area now; only the knowledge of the wonders they had already accomplished made us consider it possible that they could fight again so soon. Time after time when their strength and spirit seemed both exhausted they had responded and gone ahead. Now they deserved their rest.

We greeted the good news very calmly; the German prisoners were a little more elated; the French went mad with ecstasy. It was the only time I have ever seen Frenchmen drunk, heard them go home after midnight singing patriotic songs out of key. In Amiens, where several thousand of the inhabitants had returned by that time, the few restaurants were crowded and gaiety was unrestrained. I heard a middle-aged British lieutenant sing the "Marseillaise" with a pretty waitress in the "Cafe de la Cathedral" the following evening, and respond when asked to repeat it in the main dining room. He returned to our side room decidedly redder than he had gone out. "Why, the whole British general staff's in there!" he gasped. But he received only applause without a reprimand. The war was over and for the moment all France was overcome with joy and all the allied armies with relief and satisfaction.

After the armistice the front line work, with its absorption on the problems of the wounded and the dead, became a thing of the past. The chaplain could now turn to the more normal aspects of his work, to religious ministration, personal service, advice and assistance in the thousands of cases which came before him constantly. In fact, on the whole his work became much the same as it had been in training camp in the States. A few differences persisted; in France the chaplain was without the magnificent backing of the Jewish communities at home, which were always so eager to assist in entertaining and helping the Jewish men in the nearby camps. The Jewish Welfare Board with its excellent workers could never cover the entire field as well as it could at home in America. Then there were special problems because the men were so far away from home, because the mail service was poor, because worries about allotments were more acute than if home had been nearer, and because the alien civilization and language never made the men feel quite comfortable.

In the Corbie area the 27th Division was scattered about in twelve villages, the farthest one eight miles from division headquarters. Transportation was still common on the roads, though often I had to walk and once I made the trip to Amiens in the cab of a locomotive when neither train nor truck was running, and found a ride back in an empty ambulance which had brought patients to the evacuation hospital. The villages were almost deserted, and were in rather bad condition after their nearness to the German advance of 1918, so that the men could be crowded together and were very easy to reach in a body. I began making regular visits to the various units of the division, meeting the men, holding services, receiving their requests and carrying them out as well as possible. And I was constantly making new acquaintances, as the wounded and sick began coming back from the hospitals to rejoin the division.

I had the opportunity of an occasional visit to Amiens, a city built for a hundred thousand, but at the time inhabited by only a few thousand of the more venturesome inhabitants, who had returned to open shops and restaurants for the British, Australian and American troops. On account of lack of competition, prices were extreme even for France in war-time. The great cathedral was piled high with sandbags to protect its precious sculptures, but it stood as always, the sentinel of the city, visible ten miles away as one approached. The Church Army Hut of the British forces afforded separate accommodations for enlisted men and officers, and I had the pleasure of afternoon tea once or twice with some of the latter. Amiens was an unsatisfactory place to shop, but my baggage had not been found and winter was coming on fast, so I had to replace some of my possessions at once at any prices that might be demanded.

Our mess held its formal celebration on November 17th, with Lieutenant Robert Bernstein, the French liaison officer, as the guest of honor because of his exact prediction of the date of the armistice when he had returned from a visit to Paris several weeks previously. Our mess, officers' mess number two of division headquarters, had an international character through his presence and that of Captain Jenkins of the British army, and a special tone of comradeship through the influence of the president of the mess, Major Joseph Farrell, the division disbursing officer. So for once we had the rare treat of turkey and wine, feeling that the occasion demanded it.

I felt little pleasure in the jollity of the evening, however. I had just received a letter that day telling me of the death of one of my twin babies of the flu; it had happened almost a month before, while I was on the lines and quite out of reach of any kind of word. The war, through its attendant epidemics, gathered its victims also from among the innocent, far from the scene of struggle. I felt then that my grief was but a part of the universal sacrifice. With all these other parents, whose older sons died at the front in actual fighting, or whose younger ones were caught denuded of medical protection at home, I hoped that all this sacrificial blood might bring an end to war. To-day that faith is harder and that consolation seems a mockery, for we seem to be preparing for another struggle even while children are dying of hunger in central Europe and massacres of helpless Jews are still not yet ended in the east. When I received the news I took a long walk amid the most peaceful