Part 5

Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, the firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of parklike country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see against the background of the foliage throwing it into relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shrapnel shells, renewed with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.

This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns in sight; only a diaphanous, man-made nimbus against masses of autumn green which was raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall grass. Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.

There was hard fighting; a lot of French and Germans were being killed in the direction of Compiègne and Noyon to-day. Another dip into another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the muffled firing of a line of infantry were audible. Yes, we were getting up with the army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road we were on. Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.

Ahead was the army’s stomach on wheels; a procession of big motor transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision of a battleship fleet at sea. We should have known that they belonged to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pass. All army transports are like that. What the deuced right has anybody to pass? They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front of them. Our automobile in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut that an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of; which proves again how clearly European armies are tied to their fine roads. We got out, and here was our statesman putting his shoulder to the wheel again. That is the way of the French in war. Everybody tries to help. By this time the transport chauffeurs also remembered that they were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are polite even in time of war, they let us by.

A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.

“Stop here!” he called.

Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard instantly and obeyed. In front of them was a line of single horse-drawn carts, with an extra horse in the rear. They could take paths that the motor-trucks could not. Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as a relic of how armies were fed in other days. For the first time I was realising what the automobile means to war. It brings the army impedimenta close up to the army’s rear; it means a reduction of road space occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.

All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport broken down. And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been an army on the road. The valuable part of our experience was exactly in this: a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all the vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter-marching and attack. Order one was to expect afterwards behind the siege line of trenches when there had been time to establish a routine; organisation and smooth organisation you had here at the climax of a month’s strain. It told the story of the character of the French army and the reasons for its success other than its courage. The brains were not all with the German Staff.

That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours, we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our advance still continuing? For then, the winter trench-fighting was unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as following up success with success. Paris, rising from gloom to optimism, hoped to see the Germans put out of France. The appetite for victory grew after a week’s bulletins which moved the flags forward on the map every day.

Another turn and Soissons was hidden from view by a woodland. Here we came upon what looked like a leisurely family party of reserves. The French army, a small section of French army along a road! And thus, if one would see the whole it must be in bits along the roads when not on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in the genial afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to rest. Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of the last month.

The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being done by the others at the front. These were waiting near a forks which could take them to the right or the left, as the situation demanded. At their rear, their supply of small arms ammunition; in front, caissons of shells for a battery speaking from the woods near by; a troop of cavalry drawn up, the men dismounted, ready; and ahead of them more reserves ready; everything ready.

This was where the general wanted the body of men and equipment to be, and here they were. There were no dragging ends in the rear, so far as I could see; nobody complaining that food or ammunition was not up; no aide looking for somebody who could not be found; no excited staff officer rushing about shouting for somebody to look sharp for somebody had made a mistake. The thing was unwarlike; it was like a particularly well-thought-out route march. Yet at the word that company of cavalry might be in the thick of it, at the point where they were wanted; the infantry rushing to the support of the firing-line; the motor transport facing around for withdrawal, if need be. It was only a little way, indeed, into the zone of death from the rear of that compact column.

Thousands of such compact bodies on as many roads, each seemingly a force by itself and each a part of the whole, which could be a dependable whole only when every part was ready, alert, and up where it belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle-line three hundred miles long. The general must know what to depend on, mile by mile, in his plans. Millions of human units are grouped in increasingly larger units, harmonised according to set forms. The most complex of all machines is that of a vast army, which yet must be kept most simple. No unit acts without regard to the others; every one must know how to do his part. The parts of the machine are standardised. One is like the other in training, uniform, and every detail, so that one can replace another. Oldest of all trades this of war; old experts the French. What one saw was like manœuvres. It must be like manœuvres or the army would not hold together. Manœuvres are to teach armies coherence; war tries out that coherence, which you may not have if some one does not know just what to do; if he is uncertain in his rôle. Haste leads to confusion; haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to hasten when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its routine with the smoothness of a well-rehearsed play.

Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of his people and make the most of their virtues.

Thus, we had a French army’s historical part reversed: a French army falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy blow. Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had organised in their mass offensive the _élan_ which means fast marching and hard blows. Thus, we found the supposedly excitable French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge--ah, you can always depend on a Frenchman to charge!

Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it; one thought that they realised it. Their individual intelligence and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and homogeneity, rather than accepted the dictum of any war lord. Difficult to think that each had left a vacancy at a family board; difficult to think that they were not automatons in a process of endless routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.

Of old, one knew the wants of soldiers. One needed no hint of what was welcome at the front. Never at any front were there enough newspapers or tobacco. Men smoke twice as much as usual in the strain of waiting for action, men who do not use tobacco at all get the habit. Ask the G. A. R. men who fought in our great war if this is not true. Then, too, when your country is at war, when back at home hands stretch for every fresh edition and you at the front know only what happens in your alley, think what a newspaper from Paris means out on the battle-line seventy miles from Paris. So I brought a bundle of newspapers.

Monsieur, the sensation is beyond even the French language to express-- the sensation of sitting down by the roadside with this morning’s edition and the first cigarette for twenty-four hours.

“_C’est épatant! C’est chic, ça! C’est magnifique! Alors, nom de Dieu! Tiens! Hélas! Voilà! Merci, mille remerciements!_”--it was an army of Frenchmen with ready words, quick, telling gestures, pouring out their volume of thanks as the car sped by, and we tossed out our newspapers at intervals, so that all should have a look.

An _Écho de Paris_ that fell into the road was the centre of a flag-rush, which included an officer. Most unmilitary--an officer scrambling at the same time as his men! In the name of the Kaiser, what discipline!

Then the car stopped long enough for me to see a private give the paper to his officer, who was plainly sensible of a loss of dignity, with the courtesy which said, “A thousand pardons, _mon capitaine_!” and the _capitaine_ began reading the newspaper aloud to his men. Scores of human touches which were French, republican, democratic!

With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned, native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing onto the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our reserve supply was not visible, and an officer’s sharp command saved us from being invested by storm.

As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were kept back out of range of the German shells, making the town a dead space between them and the firing-line which was beyond. When the Germans retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as it was their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the main square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German guns when the French infantry passed through. Soissons was not a German town.

We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters of shops that had not been torn down by shell-fire closed. Soissons was as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the ridge back of the town.

The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and see the _soixante-quinze_ and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction of the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom of an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the Germans. If that battery were on the opposite side under cover of any one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another shot--and we were not sure that the battery was not on the other side of the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery fire to one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were scattered, according to the accepted practice, and from the central firing-station word to fire was being passed first to one gun and then to another.

Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town. Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward and bullets were waiting for them. They had rolled over on their backs, their rigid hands still in the position of grasping their rifles after the manner of crouching skirmishers.

Our statesman said that we had better give up trying to locate the battery; and one of the officers called a halt to trying to go up to the firing-line on the part of a personally conducted party, after we stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and that freedom in spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the French call _élan_. Whenever one asked a question of a French private you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know. This definiteness, the result of military training, as well as the Gallic lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know his part. This young man, you realised, had tasted the “salt of life,” as Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had known the intoxication of a charge.

“Does everything go well?” M. Doumer asked.

“It is not going at all, now. It is sticking,” was the answer. “Some Germans were busy up there in the stone quarries while the others were falling back. They have a covered trench and rapid-fire gun positions to sweep a zone of fire which they have cleared.”

Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dugouts as shelter from shells!

There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private saying: “Now this is what the general ought to do!” It was Napoleon’s own plan revealed. “You keep still!” he said. “This army has too many generals.”

“They mean to make a stand,” the private went on. “It’s an ideal place for it. There is no use of an attack in front. We’d be mowed down by machine guns.” The br-r-r of a dozen shots from a German machine gun gave point to his conclusion. “Our infantry is hugging what we have and entrenching. You better not go up. One has to know the way, or he’ll walk right into a sharpshooter’s bullet”--instructions that would have been applicable a year later when you were about to visit a British trench in almost the same location.

The siege warfare of the Aisne line had already begun. It was singular to get the first news of it from a private in Soissons and then to return to Paris and London, on the other side of the curtain of secrecy, where the public thought that the Allied advance would continue.

“_Allons!_” said our statesman, and we went to the town square, where German guns had carpeted the ground with branches of shade trees and torn off the fronts of houses, revealing sections of looted interior which had been further messed by shell-bursts. Some women and children and a crippled man came out-of-doors at sight of us. M. Doumer introduced himself and shook hands all around. They were glad to meet him in much the same way as if he had been on an election campaign.

“A German shell struck there across the square only half an hour ago,” said one of the women.

“What do you do when there is shelling?” asked M. Doumer.

“If it is bad we go into the cellar,” was the answer; an answer which implied that peculiar fearlessness of women, who get accustomed to fire easier than men. These were the fatalists of the town, who would not turn refugee; helpless to fight, but grimly staying with their homes and accepting what came with an incomprehensible stoicism, which possibly had its origin in a race-feeling so proud and bitter that they would not admit that they could be afraid of anything German, even a shell.

“And how did the Germans act?”

“They made themselves at home in our houses and slept in our beds, while we slept in the kitchen,” she answered. “They said if we kept indoors and gave them what they wanted we should not be harmed. But if any one fired a shot at their troops or any arms were found in our houses, they would burn the town. When they were going back in a great hurry--how they scattered from _our_ shells! We went out in the square to see _our_ shells, monsieur!”

What mattered the ruins of her home? _Our_ shells had returned vengeance.

Arrows with directions in German, “This way to the river,” “This way to Villers-Cotteret,” were chalked on the standing walls; and on door-casings the names of the detachments of the Prussian Guard billeted there, all in systematic Teutonic fashion.

“Prince Albrecht Joachim, one of the Kaiser’s sons, was here and I talked with him,” said the Mayor, who thought we should enjoy a morsel from court circles in exchange for a copy of the _Écho de Paris_ which contained the news that Prince Albrecht had been wounded later. The mayor looked tired, this local man of the people, who had to play the shepherd of a stricken flock. Afterwards, they said that he deserted his charge and a lady, Mme. Macherez, took his place. All I know is that he was present that day; or at least a man who was introduced to me as mayor; and he was French enough to make a _bon mot_ by saying that he feared there was some fault in his hospitality because he had been unable to keep his guest.

“May I have this _confiture_?” asked a battle-stained French orderly, coming up to him. “I found it in that ruined house there--all the Germans had left. I haven’t had a _confiture_ for a long time and, monsieur, you cannot imagine what a hunger I have for _confitures_.”

All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts. The reserves were around their campfires making savoury stews for the evening meal. They would sleep where night found them on the sward under the stars, as in wars of old. That scene remains indelible as one of many while the army was yet mobile, before the contest became one of the mole and of the beaver.

Though one had already seen many German prisoners in groups and convoys, the sight of two on the road fixed the attention because of the surroundings and the contrast suggested between French and German natures. Both were young, in the very prime of life, and both Prussian. One was dark-complexioned, with a scrubbly beard which was the product of the war. He marched with such rigidity that I should not have been surprised to see him break into a goose-step. The other was of that mild, blue-eyed, tow-haired type from the Baltic provinces, with the thin white skin which does not tan but burns. He was frailer than the other and he was tired; oh, how tired! He would lag and then stiffen back his shoulders and draw in his chin and force a trifle more energy into his step.

A typical, lively French soldier was escorting the pair. He looked pretty tired, too, but he was getting over the ground in the natural, easy way in which man is meant to walk. The aboriginal races, who have a genius for long distances on foot, do not march in the German fashion, which looks impressive, but lacks endurance. By the same logic, the cayuse’s gait is better for thirty miles day in and day out than the high-stepping carriage horse’s.

You could realise the contempt which those two martial Germans had for their captor. Four or five peasant women refugees by the roadside unloosened their tongues in piercing feminine satire and upbraiding.

“You are going to Paris, after all! This is what you get for invading our country; and you’ll get more of it!”

The little French soldier held up his hand to the women and shook his head. He was a chivalrous fellow, with imagination enough to appreciate the feelings of an enemy who has fought hard and lost. Such as he would fight fair and hold this war of the civilisations up to something like the standards of civilisation.

The very tired German stiffened up again, as his drill sergeant had taught him, and both stared straight ahead, proud and contemptuous, as their Kaiser would wish them to do. I should recognise the faces of these two Germans and of that little French guard if I saw them ten years hence. In ten years, what will be the Germans’ attitude toward this war and their military lords?

It is not often that one has a senator for a guide; and I never knew a more efficient one than our statesman. His own curiosity was the best possible aid in satisfying our own. Having seen the compactness and simplicity of an army column at the front, we were to find that the same thing applied to high command. A sentry and a small flag at the doorway of a village hotel: this was the headquarters of the Sixth Army, which General Manoury had formed in haste and flung at von Kluck with a spirit which crowned his white hairs with the audacity of youth. He was absent, but we might see something of the central direction of one hundred and fifty thousand men in the course of one of the most brilliant manœuvres of the war, before staffs had settled down to office existence in permanent quarters. That is, we might see the little there was to see: a soldier telegrapher in one bedroom, a soldier typewritist in another, officers at work in others. One realised that they could pack up everything and move in the time it takes to toss enough clothes into a bag to spend a night away from home. Apparently, when the French fought they left red tape behind with the bureaucracy.

From his seat before a series of maps on a sitting-room table an officer of about thirty-five rose to receive us. It struck me that he exemplified self-possessed intelligence and definite knowledge; that he had coolness and steadiness plus that acuteness of perception and clarity of statement which are the gift of the French. You felt sure that no orders which left his hand wasted any words or lacked explicitness. The Staff is the brains of the army, and he had brains.

“All goes well!” he said, as if there were no more to say. All goes well! He would say it when things looked black or when they looked bright, and in a way that would make others believe it.

Outside the hotel were no cavalry escorts or commanders, no hurrying orderlies, none of the legendary physical activity that is associated with an army headquarters. An automobile drove up, an officer got out; another officer descended the stairs to enter a waiting car. The wires carry word faster than the cars. Each subordinate commander was in his place along that line where we had seen the puffs of smoke against the landscape, ready to answer a question or obey an order. That simplicity, like art itself, which seems so easy is the most difficult accomplishment of all in war.