Part 11

“No; but it’s this way, ma’am. My wife, she’s went and divorced me. And it’s all along of my bad die-ges-tion. I don’t blame her no way. I reckon that bad die-ges-tion did sort of get between her and me. But that ain’t what I aim to say in the letter. It’s about this here new insurance. I’ve made mine out in her name.”

“But if she’s divorced you on account of your bad die-ges-tion she has no claim on you now.”

“I don’t give a whoop in hell about that,” he responded soberly. “I want her to get it, that’s all. And I kind of thought maybe you might fix it up for me in a letter, so’s she’d understand, and tell her I don’t bear no grudge. I got a bad die-ges-tion.”

And so I fixed it up for him in a letter; and there’s one woman in America who has lost a man with a mighty good heart even if he has a bad die-ges-tion.

January 10th.

Transferred again. But this time I’m settled for good. This is a canteen of Type Number Three, in the French war zone, in a big transportation center within sound of the guns of Verdun. Anywhere from three to ten thousand troops pass through daily. Here again, this canteen is absolutely different from the two others, because the conditions are different. It is a canteen which the French call _grand luxe_. A beautiful spacious building, given by the French Government; tastefully decorated interiors; rest rooms with papers, writing materials, piano, tables and easy-chairs; restaurant; sleeping quarters, hot baths; gardens with statuary; and _abris_ in case of aërial attack--altogether the poilu’s delight.

“_Très chic, hein?_” murmurs the Frenchman. He stares about him at the clean airy place, gay with chintz curtains, painted garlands on the walls, and even the electric globes veiled with soft yellow Chinese silk. And he catches the idea at once. “_Pas militaire, pas du tout du tout._” That’s it exactly. It’s not military at all at all. The French artist who conceived the scheme was so nauseated with everything military that he let himself loose on this canteen to make it cozy and homelike and gay. Its soft beauty delights the poilu; and its baths, its disinfecting plants where he can rid himself of vermin, its kiosk where he can buy his beloved _pinard_, its hot chocolate--made with milk, after an American recipe--contribute to make it a very paradise of canteens. Its fame is known all over the French war zone. The poilus come miles to see if it’s as good as report.

At night in the rest room they lie outstretched in those canvas easy-chairs--just how easy none but a weary poilu can know!--and they stare through dreamy half-closed eyes at the warm charm of the place, soaking it in at every pore; the smoke of countless cigarettes rises in a kind of enchanted mist; there is an occasional bubble of laughter or the low-toned give-and-take of _copains_ round the brazier; but chiefly there is silence, luxurious well-earned ease for tired limbs--linked sweetness long drawn out. Occasionally, when the wind is right, a vague distant rumble seems to echo in the air. Is it thunder, or is it bombardment? Or are those ears so accustomed to the ceaseless roar of heavy artillery that they still hear it resounding, even in this quiet spot? A poilu rolls over, opens one eye, listens.

“What is that? _Les canons?_”

His companion cocks an ear.

“_Mais non._”

“_Mais oui._”

“You’re crazy! Whence, then?”

The first soldier sits up and takes his bearings.

“’Tis Verdun,” he proclaims. “_N’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?_”

“Yes,” replies the canteener at the desk; “we can often hear the guns of Verdun on a thick night.”

“Me--I come from Verdun,” says the poilu, always ready for a chat.

“Were you one of those who held Verdun when the Crown Prince made that terrible attack?”

“_Oui._”

“Ah, those glorious heroes of Verdun!” murmurs the canteener with misty eyes.

The simple poilu looks at her, puzzled, angry, and finally blazes forth:

“Heroes! Heroes! I’m always hearing about those people--those heroes. But I never saw anything of them. They weren’t in the fight. I tell you, it was we, we Frenchmen alone, who won Verdun!”

The canteener apologizes to the unconscious hero.

In a canteen of this description, serving anywhere from three to ten thousand men a day, the work must be organized down to its last detail. And it is. The mechanism runs as smoothly as a well-oiled automobile. For one thing, our directrice has a “flair” for handling people, for getting along with the French domestics--we have a kitchen staff alone of twenty--and for making her workers contented and at home. Nor is the work itself so hard as in the other canteens. For one thing, labor is plentiful. For another, we live in a town. And in our time off we can shop or stroll or laze about the comfortable big house we’ve leased for quarters. Our hours, too, are well arranged. As the canteen remains open all night and meals are served straight round the clock, the day is divided into four shifts: From seven A.M. to one P.M.; from one to seven; from seven to eleven-thirty; and from eleven-thirty P.M. to seven A.M. In addition there is an extra shift to help at the rush hours, which occur usually about ten A.M. and four P.M. At these times the big dining-room resembles nothing so much as a six-o’clock subway rush. The poilus are packed in tight as they can squeeze--every one with his head pointed toward the _caissé_, where are sold the tickets for the _repas complet_. Each meal costs seventy-five centimes.

January 16th.

Of all the shifts I love the morning best. Then the men come storming in so ravenous that it’s a pleasure to see them eat. And then is when they’re gayest. The afternoon is apt to be prosaic. But the night shift is the most interesting of all. Then things seem to stand out, to take on personality, to become more alive, vivid and real. Then impressions, pictures, scenes are stamped on the brain as clean as if cut with a die, true in every trivial detail. Soldiers playing cards by the light of a flickering candle, their huge ungainly shadows capering up against the wall.

Now and again from the shadows emerges a clear profile, aquiline, delicate, a living medallion with closed eyes. Over in yonder corner, for example, is a boy fast asleep. His head tilted against the wall reveals a face as finely chiseled as any on an old Roman coin. His curly lashes lie flat on his thin cheeks. His nostrils are slightly pinched. Two perpendicular lines run from nose to jaw. How young he looks, how white and worn! His mobile mouth, softly closed, droops at the corners, like that of a tired child. He stirs and mutters something. And now he smiles! He is dreaming, that boy, I know. If his mother could see him now!... The rear door opens, the guard thrusts in a head and calls a certain train. The young soldier rouses, staggers for his pack, drunk with sleep, his face still soft with dreams.

I remember one night a slumbering poilu sprang to his feet, shouting “_Aux armes!_” And his voice was so thrilling and terrible, so charged with hoarse command, that all the soldiers leaped up, wide awake on the instant, and glared wildly about them. The next minute the room was filled with curses, not loud but deep.

Work of this kind, hard and monotonous as it undoubtedly is, is yet the most satisfying in the world--provided one has a gift for it. It takes hold of the heart. It is immediate, it has the warm personal touch, and it ties you straight up with humanity in the raw. The abstract philosophy of the war--who is the most to blame and why--ceases to vex you. You become absorbed in your own little circle. Life beyond it seems remote. You love the poilu and he loves you--and makes no bones about it. So let the Huns rage over behind yonder ridge, and imagine vain things. Somehow, all that does not concern you. You have become confident, gay, certain of destiny--like the simple little poilu. It’s service that does it.

Last night when I returned home from work it had stopped raining. Overhead the great overturned cup of sky glittered and gleamed--with half its stars dropped down into the dark flowing river by my side. And there was a second moon down there, pale and drowned. An enchanted mist, fine as a bride’s veil, hung over all. By night the Marne is beautiful. Far off came the boom of the Verdun guns, that hammering which has been going on now for years, “as if two armies of giants were striking unceasingly at an unshakable gate of bronze.” Here it was nothing but an echo on the wind. There, as one Tommy put it, it was “hell multiplied by six.”

They say the Germans will break through this way. I think of the thousand thousand poilus who have tramped through our canteen, each one an anonymous hero--and I smile. It’s all right. Let the Huns come on!

OLD GLORY AND VERDUN

In the beginning we did not intend to go to Verdun. We did not dream that it was even within the bright realms of possibility. At the moment--a supremely painful and suspense-filled moment, fraught with danger to France and the Allied world--Verdun belonged strictly to the forbidden zone. Forbidden to all outsiders, men and women, to all civilians and civilian affairs; forbidden, indeed, to all the world save those grim horizon-blue-clad veterans who were rushing northward by trainloads, together with heavy effectives.

Permission had been stopped. Stopped also the parcels to the Front. It was not the hour for the manifestation of woman or love or the transmission of tokens of affection. It was the hour for men and arms. Paris, a military camp shelled in the day by long-range guns and bombed in the night by Gothas, was locked to the north with a staunch lock, and the Grand Quartier General held the key. You could come in if you chanced to be caught up there when the storm broke, but you could not get out again. For it was the closing week of March, 1918. The long-awaited, much-heralded offensive had arrived. For months it had been the first word in the mouths of privates, officers, statesmen, editors--the entire civilized world. When, where, how--some one of those three aspects of the universal question cropped up in every conversation in the course of half an hour.

Well, now we knew the partial answer to those three questions. For the shadow of the menace of the long months was beginning to realize itself; it had become flesh and dwelt among us, a fabulous red monster of carnage and slaughter up there in the north.

When the Germans struck their first sledge-hammer blow and the Fifth British Army recoiled before the blow the entire line from north to south felt the thrill of the shock. Paris, the goal of the enemy, felt it, too, and there went up from the city a kind of big sigh, a long exhalation, which was almost a breath of relief. At any rate the long suspense was past. At the end of the third or fourth day refugees began to pour in by thousands, a poor, tragic, dazed procession, twice bereft of their scanty possessions. They brought with them wild, incoherent, garbled accounts of the terrible sanguinary losses on both sides.

Paris, perhaps all France, possesses the feminine temperament. In hours of ease she is willful, coy and hard to please--especially with strangers; she is charming, baffling, impatient, outspoken over the foibles of her best friends and allies, keenly aware of the ridiculous, gay with a spice of maliciousness; her caricatures, often grossly unjust, are masterpieces of fine satirical wit. But in the hour of trial she gathers herself together with a courage, a poise and a profound tenderness for those of her people who have been stricken that are exceedingly good to see.

And that is what happened now. Paris found immediate food and shelter for the fugitives; printed proclamations that appeared all over the city, bidding the citizens to remain steadfast and unshaken in their faith of victory and put no credence in lying rumors; and at the same time, as the Big Berthas continued their vehement spitting at intervals, and the air raids harried and took toll of the city’s innocent poor--for it is chiefly the workers, the servants, the little people of Paris living in the top stories up under the roofs who had to descend each night to the caves at the call of the siren--the newspapers urged all families who could afford it, all those who had children or old or sick to remove themselves out of the new zone of danger to the tranquillity of the country. And thousands followed the wise advice. Hôtels de luxe were emptied inside of a week. Shopkeepers and workers who could manage to leave ordained a spring holiday and departed to their relatives in the provinces. It was an exodus. There were left the big wide empty places of Paris, filled with a gray-blue gossamer mist soft as chiffon, which wrapped all the city in an enchanted web; the tranquil garden walks deserted by children, vivid with rhododendrons and the drifting pink and white petals of chestnut blooms; and the good solid block of reliable Paris citizens, neither frightened nor fugitive, who had lived through the Marne and the Mons and the Champagne and the Verdun attacks, and who read the disquieting communiqués with composed faces and went about their affairs as usual.

Practically no troops are now routed through the capital, but occasionally one saw small detachments of _fantassins_ with their heavy marching equipment filing through the empty squares. They did not look warlike, those poilus, veterans of four years, when they appeared in the streets of Paris. They marched slowly, laboriously, one foot lagging after the other, shoulders bent beneath the weight of the kit, their eyes fixed on the ground. The horizon-blue uniforms were faded and patched and their clumsy storm coats with the skirts buttoned back gave them an indescribably pathetic air. Seen thus at twilight and melting into the dusky background there was something about these somber, slow-plodding, burdened figures that hurt the heart. One felt an overwhelming tenderness, a pity for these brave little men. And yet these were the selfsame poilus who a few days later stemmed the furious German tide--and they sang as they went into battle. And nearly four years they sang!

It would not be untrue to say that underneath her courageous calm Paris did not feel the cruel strain of that first uncertain week of the offensive. The strain of the situation was brought home to me, waiting for my passes, by several incidents. Naomie, the trim little _femme de chambre_, pretty as a pink camellia, whose voice has the soft deep throb of a cello, went about with a face as pale as the linen she bore on her arm. And as she made the bed and swept and aired the room she wept, quietly, steadily, the silvery globules stealing silently one by one down her cheeks. When they obstructed her vision she stopped, brushed them away methodically and went on. My pillow was wet with Naomie’s tears.

“I am ashamed, mademoiselle; I ask pardon to be like this,” she murmured one morning when I had caught her outright drying her eyes. “One must be strong these days. But my husband, he has been transferred up north on the British line. And now I have not heard from him, here it is over a week. Before he always sent me a little word each day. He never failed--some little word each day.” She plaited the counterpane with unseeing eyes as she muttered: “Ten days! Yes, it is that--just. And not one little word. But one must be strong, _n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle_?”

The next disturbing thing that happened was the news that B---- had deserted. His wife was my friend. B---- was a Frenchman in a famous fighting regiment, sensitive, fine-strung, none too strong, who had been in the trenches since 1914. What evil of fear, irritation, revolt or sheer brain collapse led to the decision we shall never know. But one day he threw down his gas mask in the midst of an attack and walked out of the trenches. His battalion had been incessantly shelled for weeks. In the front-line trenches they were hammered by the guns. In the back areas, _en repos_, they caught the bombs. No sleep in either place. This kept up week after week. And suddenly, like an elephant, B---- had “gone bad.”

He appeared suddenly in Paris at a time when not a single Frenchman was on leave; and he walked the boulevards with the number of that famous fighting regiment on the collar of his tunic blazing forth for all the world to see. It was a miracle he was not instantly caught. As it was he was a prisoner; for he had no papers, and therefore he could not send a telegram or register at a hotel or take a train or leave the city. A friend telegraphed for B----’s wife, who was in the country, sending a noncommittal wire so as not to alarm B----’s mother, an ardent patriot, who would have instantly handed over her recreant son to the police. The wife arrived. To her B---- declared his intention of joining the Foreign Legion. That meant that his brain flare or momentary cowardice had passed.

Anyone may join the Foreign Legion. There no embarrassing questions are asked. They take on all comers, and then pitch them headlong into the very hottest hell of the battle. Accordingly B----, knowing that if he could once win to their offices he would be safe from arrest, stole out from his doorway one morning and, avoiding officers and gendarmes, gained the recruiting bureau.

But here an unexpected blow fell. The recruiting end of the bureau had been shifted to Lyons. But how to get there! He could not ride in a train or a public conveyance. He could not dine openly in a restaurant or sleep in a hotel. And to be seen tramping south in this crisis meant certain arrest and death. However, there was nothing for it but to make the attempt--to walk by night and lie hidden in the day. He started forth--and no word has been heard of him since.

In time the news of his desertion leaked out. And the gendarme on the beat took it upon himself to rebuke Madame B---- for having such a villain husband. He is a fat, greasy, bald-headed little man, this gendarme, who sits long over his grenadine, and has never been nearer the Front than the city fortifications.

Madame B flew at him like a fury.

“Have you ever been out there--fat _embusqué_?” she shrilled, shaking her finger under his nose. “Have you fought four years in that hell? Been wounded five times, had fever, rheumatism, suffered from shell shock, been made deaf from bombardment, had your nerves shattered so that you never sleep? Is your hair turned gray at twenty-five years? Oh, my God! No? Then keep your mouth shut! ’Tis not for such as you to speak of this war! ’Tis for those who have endured.”

It was this courage made human by the private griefs of the people of France, who after four weary, crucifying years were still bearing the cross, filling the breach, saving the day, and saving it with a superb dash despite individual heartbreaks, that filled my mind as, our passes obtained, we journeyed northward. It seemed to me that perhaps the month of March, 1918, was to be made memorable by the fact that at that particular time America began definitely to shift to her own young shoulders the weight of the agonizing burden France had borne so long. For this reason the opening offensive marked a transition period, for theretofore we had held only quiet sectors.

But it was not the fact of the shifting of the outward burden that interested me so much as to discover if possible whether that shift was to extend also to the spirit--whether the soul of France, the soul of her soldiers, her poilus, was to pass into the soul of this new, strong, eager young Army. For the quality that distinguishes the poilu from his enemies and from his allies alike is not brute force, or body fitness, or stubborn pride, or stiff resistance, or obedience, or cohesion, or physical valor--but sheer spiritual stamina. He has an invincible come-back. His soul can’t be beat. The French, who are an extremely clannish race, say that they feel a closer bond with Americans than with any other people on earth. This is not mere diplomatic balder-dash. They declare that aside from possessing the same democratic ideals, the same passion for scientific research, there is a decided similarity of temperament. In both peoples there are the same swiftness of perception, the same suppleness of mind, lightness of wit and comradeliness toward life and toward each other which have made France like one great family. And now that the two nations in this offensive are fighting side by side and brigade by brigade, the French in their speeches and editorials and communiqués have announced that the spiritual metal of the two armies is the same; that the spontaneous, unquenchable, “_En avant! Toujours en avant!_” quality of attack, attack, and again attack of the French poilu is also the salient characteristic of the newcomers. It was this particular declaration that put a keener edge on my observations during my journey. I was on the lookout for signs in our men of the conquering will of the poilu.

It is not germane to the subject to describe in detail that eight-day motor trip through the heart of the American war zone in France. We covered each day hundreds of kilometers of the lovely rolling meadow and hill country of Lorraine--orchards, fields and woods radiant in shimmering green, clothed in primal light of leaf. We passed scores of red-tiled hamlets, each the identical facsimile of the other, with steaming manure heaps adorning the front yards of prominent citizens, hens and bouncing babies scratching therein, and toothless old dames sitting on the doorsteps peering out upon the world with faded eyes.

We stopped at numerous American base-hospital centers, some in stone cantonments, formerly army barracks turned over by the French; some former hotel resorts; and still others brand-new frame buildings, entire villages with duck-board streets. We motored through endless series of _repos_ stations, one following hard upon another like beads on a string, of English, American, French, Italian, Portuguese, Annamite and Senegalese troops. At the close of the day in the rosy smolder of the afterglow we hunted aviation camps in the advanced war zone, and found the vast aërodromes so shrewdly camouflaged that we could scarcely discern them from the dappled landscape. We passed through the center where is situated the training school for army officers, a beautiful old fortressed town set like a coronet high on a wooded hill. We stayed the night at Army Headquarters in a hotel packed with the hierarchy of the General Staff, where automobiles with flags drew up before the door and mackintoshed generals beribboned and bestarred strode in out of the lashing rain.

Our quest took us from the drowsy, tranquil rear of the war zone clear up to the Luneville sector beyond Toul, where we witnessed two air fights in the course of one morning. It was the portion of France given over to the American effort. We traversed and crisscrossed it back and forth and from end to end. And everywhere we met the same phenomenon--the lithe, clean-limbed, khaki-clad American soldier. The land was alive with him! Several months previously I had been over this same territory, and then even a Red Cross man was a rare animal which the natives paused to regard. Now, after eight months, the entire countryside hummed and buzzed like a vast beehive. It was the visible result before our eyes of all the sweat and labor and strain of a mighty nation intent on a single goal--to transport men to France.