Part 12

Well, here were the men, hundreds of thousands of them, scattered over a vast camp ground. We met battalions of them swinging along the roads in step and singing a lively marching air. We came across them in sunny fields prodding dummy Huns with bayonets; we passed groups of them in remote and peaceful valleys picking off targets at rifle ranges. We met them at lonely crossroads, together with a French comrade, acting as military police. They gave us the salute that is known as the Pershing--bringing the hand smartly up to the forage cap in an abrupt little gesture full of style. And they invariably followed the salute with an infectious aftergrin. The salute was Pershing’s. The grin was all their own. We saw them tearing along roads at a breakneck clip in those snorting demons of motor-cycles called “wife-killers.” We overtook them driving camions and transports and mule teams.

Later we met an entire division on the move--artillery, infantry, ammunition and cook wagons--a long strung-out procession against the drab sky line. They were bound up there, they vaguely told us. But we knew and they knew that they were going to participate in a struggle compared to which life in the drowsy Toul sector was as but a holiday fête. We glimpsed them driving powerful American locomotives, beside which the diminutive French engines seemed like toys that one could pick up in the palm of the hand--and they leaned far out of their cabooses to cheer. We saw them packed like herrings in the dingy low-ceiled dining-rooms of provincial towns, drinking their _pinard_ diluted with water in true poilu style, then fetching out their makings and rolling a smoke in true American style. We saw them in camp, _en repos_, in hospital, on the march.

There is a pageantry about war when one sits back thus and views its effects from the outside--a kind of large, glittering nobility which thrills and quickens the blood despite oneself--until one sees the wrecks. And in the hospitals we began to get the wrecks. In ----, a famous old town turned into a hospital center, we stopped to look up some missing men. The other members of the party went to visit the wards, but I wandered about the streets and presently came upon a squad of privates in wrinkled, freshly disinfected uniforms, the tunics skin-tight, revealing the owners’ slim waists and finely swelling shoulder muscles. But they had a pale washed-out look, as if they themselves had undergone the ordeal of disinfection along with their uniforms. A lieutenant was calling the roll.

Aside from the line-up a few paces stood a husky private with a sulky lowering face. He had crowded his battered sombrero down over his bloodshot eyes and was scowling like a movie pirate. “What’s happening to those men?” I asked, nodding at the squad.

“They’ve been gassed and now they’re declared O. K. and are going back to the Front.”

He spoke in a curious broken rasping whisper, which I recognized.

“You’ve been gassed, too?” I hazarded.

“Yes,” he croaked. “And I’m just as well as any fellow in that gang. We all got it at the same time. But the doc, when he heard my voice, wouldn’t let me go. But damn it all, a guy don’t fight with his voice!”

“He’s playing favorites, that doc,” whispered another lank, humorous-eyed young giant strolling up, his peaked forage cap drawn low so as to shelter, if possible, those bloodshot eyes. “Wouldn’t let me out, either! Durn the durned docs, I say!”

“But you were burned as well as gassed,” I objected, for the entire lower part of his face and neck was an angry red peeling blister. “What kind of gas was it?” I demanded.

“Mustard. Burns your insides out if you get a bad case. I tell you I’ve had enough to last me one life. No more mustard on cold beef for mine!”

“And how is the gas-mask discipline?”

“Well, that depends on the battalion. In my battalion the commander was strong for drills. We had them morning, noon and night, and in the middle of the night. Seemed as if the old man had gone crazy on gas discipline. But when the big gas attack came we had only a four per cent casualty list, and the battalion alongside, which had been going easy on drills, caught it something fierce. Our battalion got recommended to G. H. Q. I caught my gas in a dugout the next day.”

“And you are still keen to get back into all that?”

“Am I?” he repeated, his eyes hardening. “I’ll tell you how I feel: When I first came over I had a kind of sneaking notion that Heinie wasn’t so dusky as he was painted. But I lost that notion pretty quick when I got up front and saw my lieutenant shot in the back by a boche prisoner who had thrown up his hands. Now I want to lick the Huns till they holler, and then keep on licking them for a year after that for the good of their souls.”

Inside of the hospital were grimmer cases. In one of the wards we came on a Texan with the bright, clear-gazing eyes that one sometimes finds in old sailors. They had taken his leg off. When we asked how he was making it he turned on us those straight deep eyes, and there was trouble in them.

“There’s just one thing I’m sorry for,” said he.

“What is that?”

“That I didn’t have more time.”

Time for what, I wondered. And then looking down on that wrecked body, with the covers lifted high over apparatus so as not to touch the tormented nerves, I thought I understood. He was sorry he didn’t have more time to get out of the way. That was it. It was what anybody would wish for--two, three, five seconds of grace to have gotten out of the way. Lying here through the long hours empty of everything but pain, he had doubtless worked out the problem to the finest precision, and he knew to the last trick just how much more time it would have taken to have dropped to the ground, to have eluded that exploding shell. Now all his life long he was going to regret the lack of those few precious seconds.

“Yes,” he repeated slowly, laboriously, the trouble still in his eyes, “I’d like to have had more time. Don’t seem right somehow. ’Tain’t fitting to be lying here with the show just begun. I’d like to have done more damage. But,” he brightened, “I’ve figured there’s still some jobs a peg-legged man can do over here. And I tell you one thing: I’m not going home till we’ve licked the Huns or the Huns have licked us.”

He laughed at the latter impossibility, and the laughter shook his body and turned him pale. And still he laughed on. I thought when he wished for more time that he was thinking in terms of self and personal safety, and all the time he had been thinking in the biggest terms of service to mankind.

It was not until the fifth day of our trip that Verdun loomed on the horizon as a rosy possibility. We were dining in Nancy at Voltaire’s with M. Martin, the _sous-préfet_ of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. M. Martin, it appeared, had never been in Verdun. Since we had business at a French hospital fifteen kilometers from the citadel he thought it possible, probable--of course, nothing was sure; absolutely no Verdun passes had been issued for ten days--still, one never could tell; and if we would like him to try--he paused to beam and smile--if we would give him our papers he would send them in to the Grand Quartier General, together with his own, and then--well, in short we would await the turn of events.

“Whether we shall be accorded permission at this crucial moment is doubtful,” he concluded. “But at any rate we may hope.”

So we turned in our papers and we hoped. To see Verdun at this crisis, when to the north millions of men were crashing together in terrific combat, with an appalling sanguinary back tide of wounded and dead, lent the occasion a deep significance, for Verdun to the whole world has become a symbol of confidence, a kind of ark of the covenant to battling mankind. I did not conceal from myself that what gave Verdun its specific interest to me was the news that our troops round Montdidier and Amiens were now engaged in the present titanic struggle. That fact took the famous fortress out of the list of mere great monuments of history; it made it in short our own, part and parcel of America, its glories our glories, its defense our defense, its high challenge our challenge, its victory our victory. But there was something more than that in the back of my mind. Verdun was behind the French, so to speak, finished history. Our Verduns were still of to-morrow, a promise, a prophecy. The actors were those humorous-eyed khaki-clad soldiers standing at lonely crossroads who had given us the smart little salute with the friendly aftergrin. Thus it was with the feeling of reading ahead of time a page of history not yet evoked but inevitable that I prepared to go to Verdun.

The past week had been of a piece with the raw spring weather, lowering, foggy or sluicing water by the liquid ton out of a somber sky. With one accord we prayed for sunshine in order to view the surrounding heights, Côte 304, Saint Mihiel, Douaumont, Veau and Mort Homme. But the day that dawned was brother to the rest--bleak, dark, with a clinging fog, which muffled the landscape and grew ever thicker as the hours passed. Our passes had arrived from French Headquarters, but the final visé, the permission to enter Verdun itself, must be obtained at V----, fifteen kilometers from the citadel, and if there was heavy shelling either of the fort or of the surrounding roads we should certainly be refused.

It was six o’clock in the morning when as guests of the French Government and of M. Martin in particular we clambered into a military automobile, one of those lean, powerful drab monsters that go cycloning along the highways behind the lines at a stupefying rate of speed. We had estimated that, including necessary stops at French hospitals containing American wounded, we should arrive at Verdun about noon. Therefore we had taken the precaution to bring our luncheon, with the intention of picnicking among the ruins and perhaps obtaining some coffee from the poilus’ mess. The _chefs d’oeuvrès_ of the provisions were two tiny cold fowl de luxe weighing about a pound apiece, which had cost eight round silver dollars.

The next four hours on my part were given to the task of keeping my hair and my ears on. For the wind as it swooped by tried to drive us bodily from the car; the cold congealed us in cramped positions and the fog chilled us to the bone. We could not discern the road twenty yards ahead. The car roared forward into a barrage of thick mist which shredded on the hillcrests only to sag more heavily in the valleys. This, M. Martin assured us, was typical Picardy weather. At crossroads where we were stopped by the police M. Martin presented his card of identity, signed in Joffre’s own hand, and we were waved onward with honorable presentations of arms. As we neared our destination we diverged from the straight highroad, making a detour, for some routes are reserved for ingoing and some for outgoing traffic, and these routes are constantly altered in order to safeguard materials and confound the Hun.

Arrived at V---- we drew up in a long rank of machines in front of Headquarters and M. Martin vanished to make his felicitations to the commandant and to telephone in to Verdun. Our fate still hung in the balance. The minutes slipped by. Generals--French, American, British--dashed up in their automobiles, descended, saluted and vanished or stood talking in earnest groups. Americans, recognizing compatriots, saluted us from streets and doorways and strolled over to ask of home and how the Statue of Liberty fared. She was a pretty fine old girl, _quoi?_--as the French say.

An hour passed. And still M. Martin tarried. At the end of twenty minutes more he reappeared down the end of a street, his civilian black standing out in striking relief against the motley of khaki and horizon-blue uniforms and gold braid.

“_En avant!_” he exclaimed gayly, climbing into the car. “They got the commanding officer of the citadel on the wire. He expects us and asked us to mess with his officers in the citadel, but I refused, as it will be long past one by the time we arrive. This fog after all has served us well. They are not bombarding the fortress to-day.”

I do not recall the last fifteen kilometers of that journey, save that we sped like the wind, straining our eyes through the mist for the first glimpse of the famous stronghold. Presently “There! There!” broke simultaneously from our lips, and a few minutes later we were rolling under a noble stone archway, green and mossy with age, which looked as if it had been reared in the days of Uther Pendragon, and were being greeted by the commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun. We were to take everything out of the car, said he, and come right in. Lunch was waiting. In vain M. Martin protested. The colonel waved his protests aside with a smile. He led us into the fortress, down a long underground tunnel, which rang hollowly beneath our feet, to a set of guests’ dressing rooms, where we repaired the ravages of the long ride. A few minutes later he returned, conducted us through another series of corridors, through an enormous mess hall, where the men as he entered sprang clattering to their feet, and ushered us into the officers’ mess room.

It was small, that dining room situated forty feet underground in the stone heart of the citadel, seating scarce a dozen persons, and simple, lofty-ceiled, severe. And yet it was a veritable jewel, flashing with rich strong colors, magnificent with its brilliant sheaths of battle flags, and glittering with the steel and silver and gold of its souvenirs of valor--armor and medals and trophies which gleamed from cabinet and wall. Here had collected at one time and another all the great chiefs of the Allies; and here the presumptuous Crown Prince had sworn to eat his triumphal banquet.

Over the mantelpiece hung the pennants of all the Entente Powers, a bright formidable array, topped with the watchword of the impregnable fortress, “_On ne passe pas_,” a phrase descending from the days of the Little Corporal. The opposite wall bore medals of honor--the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille Militaire and the Legion d’Honneur bestowed by a grateful nation upon the citadel itself, as if it possessed a glorious soul. Here and there hung heavy-studded shields surrounded by rayons of ancient swords and battle-axes.

What we ate or whether we ate I cannot recall. The colonel had left us, bidding us genially to make haste, as there was much to see, much to recount, and we sat drinking in the spell of that wondrous little room, steeped in the atmosphere of valor, hearkening to the voice of the past, rejoicing in the brave prophecy of the future, and trying to realize that even as we sat French and American troops were rushing north to stem the furious onslaught of the Hun.

“Well, now,” said the colonel, opening the door, “if you are refreshed we will begin. We shall take first the view of the heights, then I shall show you the fortress, and after that the ruins of Verdun.”

We had asked M. Martin to recount the history of the great offensive, and he had turned over the appeal to the commanding officer of the citadel, who had promised to describe the climax of the decisive battle on the exact spot where the Germans made their final stubborn stand and were beaten back with stupendous loss.

Outside, the weather had settled to a continuous drizzle. We wound round the hill by a serpentine road and presently attained its crest. Here we abandoned the car and stumbled over a torn and wrenched terrain, pitted with shell holes fifty feet across and partially filled with black filthy water. Filled also with old dismantled cannon, unexploded cartridges, rusted bayonets, twisted iron fragments of great shells, and an occasional sodden képi. Between these craters the hummocks were dotted with graves marked with a cross and the simple French _cocarde_. Standing under that bleak sky and gazing out across that sinister smitten landscape with its gaunt shot-off trees and its deep gashes of trenches marked by blood-red earth was like looking upon some huge monster frozen in a horrible death agony. It had been foully murdered, that hill, and it lay like a mutilated corpse, stiffly outflung, uncovered, indecent, its hideous wounds gaping up to the sky.

The colonel came to a halt. “Here we are,” he began. “Here is the farthest point that the enemy penetrated. Here he was beaten back--just at your feet, mademoiselle.” He pointed with his cane, and I stared down, expecting to see I scarce know what, some visible sign, some chalk mark or whitewashed tennis-court line, to identify that tremendous check. But there was nothing. My feet were pressing down a clump of fresh blue violets, wet-eyed from the rain. I stepped off them hastily.

The colonel continued his narrative. The wind blew back the heavy skirts of his greatcoat; his sturdy, compact figure, firmly planted as a statue, defied the elements; his leonine white head, which reminded one of Joffre’s, glistened with rain drops; his voice, gentle, level, dispassionate, filled one with utter conviction. We knew what he said was true. Here came the enemy from that direction--he pointed--and from there, and there, all converging on this one point. And when they were very near, advancing shoulder to shoulder in dense mass formation, two concealed French batteries, one from either side, opened on their serried columns a terrific enfilading fire. It was close-range slaughter--such as was going on even now in the north. Their first ranks lay in windrows. Their dead covered this hill like a carpet. And still their thinning numbers were filled with rushing hosts from behind and they pressed on and on, wave upon wave, the farthest of which had broken just at the point where we stood. There it was pushed back by a spirited counter thrust by the French _fantassins_.

“And your own troops, _mon colonel_, I suppose they gave a good account of themselves?” queried M. Martin.

“You have said it,” replied the colonel with proud simplicity. “My brave men in that attack covered and recovered themselves with glory.”

In the meantime, he continued, down below--he would show us presently--another strong enemy force had tried to force an entrance to the fortress at one of the tunnel exits. This exit, leading by a series of passages on different levels to the very innermost heart of the citadel, gave on the outside upon a contracted open space between two ridges, and was protected first by a deep surrounding fosse filled with a maze of barbed wire, and second by a fifteen-foot stone wall which formed part of the outer fortifications. Down this wall the Germans had leaped like a tumbling cataract. The first wave fell into the fosse and was followed by another and another, until the ancient moat was heaped level with a writhing human bridge across which the hostile troops rushed and gained the narrow space before the mouth of the tunnel.

“And were there no French machine guns playing upon them from the entrance?”

“Oh, yes--there were two seventy-fives,” said the colonel quietly, “less than a hundred yards away.” We could perhaps imagine, he continued, what carnage they wrought in that confined space. Germans had dropped down from that height like overripe fruit trained against a wall. The French gunners obliterated the first, the second, the third and the fourth waves; and the fifth broke right on the flaming snouts of their guns. The sixth gained the tunnel entrance. Here the garrison counter-attacked, and the enemy turned tail and ran. But not far. The wall was before them and the guns were behind. That particular hostile force was wiped out to a man.

The colonel’s calm voice flowed on and on, describing the desperate details of that epic attack, and now and again he pointed with his stick into the fog, locating great enemy batteries which had poured a deadly hail of shells upon this hill. Altogether, he said, the French had lost in killed during that six months’ offensive one hundred and ten thousand; the Germans more than half a million. And most of them had fallen on and round this height on which we stood. I looked about that somber, brooding, ghost-haunted hill, where half a million souls slain violently in battle had flown upward in a thick mist--and as I looked it seemed that the fog had a ruddy under tinge as if a subtle crimson reek exuded from the blood-drenched ground.

As the colonel continued his narrative I tried in fancy to reconstruct the vision of the battlefield. Of German prisoners I had seen a-plenty with their close-cropped, bullet-shaped heads and furtive yet arrogant eyes. The French poilus also--those gay, stout-hearted little men, some of the greatest fighters and the greatest phrase-makers on earth--were familiar figures in my mind. So that all the ingredients of the picture were at hand. Nevertheless, all unconsciously I kept making a curious mental error. The intensity of the combat still raging to the north somehow drew the picture out of focus, causing it to appear, not past history but something which was still actually going on. I knew it was past, and still it fused in my mind with the unfinished present.

Added to that, my brain was so saturated with images of our American troops as I had seen them the past week, and those images were so vivid, powerful and real that I could visualize nothing else. Thus, when the colonel said “_nos soldats_,” my mind unconsciously translated “our soldiers”; and I saw, not the horizon blue of the poilus but the clean, lithe khaki-clad Americans with their fresh faces and good-humored eyes. And when he said “Our brave troops charged here--and here--and here,” my mind saw “our brave troops charging here--and here--and here.” I tried to rid my mind of that delusion--for it was too painful on that dusky death-smitten hill, with the knowledge that even at that very moment our own brave troops were indeed charging to the north upon some other hill. But the past week had etched the images too deeply on my mind; and I could not wipe them out.

M. Martin interrogated the colonel concerning their losses.

“Yes,” replied the colonel soberly, “one hundred and ten thousand of our men fell.”

“One hundred and ten thousand of our men fell!” reiterated my heart with a pang. Never before had that figure seemed so monstrous. Why, that was one, two, three, four, five whole divisions! Our first division, that I had seen, our second, all those fine Rainbow fellows--pshaw! It was incredible!

“One hundred and ten thousand are a great many men to die!” I remarked aloud.

And even as I spoke, my mind, righting itself, said within itself: “But of course those one hundred and ten thousand men were Frenchmen! Not Americans. Our men have only just gone north. Don’t you remember, you saw the --th Division on the move?” Thus mentally I righted myself. Nevertheless, one hundred and ten thousand were indeed a great many men to die, and I repeated my remark.

“_Pas trop!_”--not too many!--replied the colonel simply. And those two words, soberly spoken, were the epitome of the Verdun spirit.

Later he pointed out a cemetery on a distant hillside containing five thousand fallen heroes. “In that one cemetery,” said he, “lie thirty of my own officers.”

“And you, you have been wounded, my colonel?” inquired M. Martin.

“Three times only,” replied the colonel with a shrug. “Once seriously. But I would not leave the citadel. I do not like hospitals--those white places. They are not for me. If I die I die here where I belong, with my men.”

The rain still continued, a steady drenching downpour. “But you may be thankful,” remarked the colonel, wiping his streaming face, “as otherwise this hill would be impossible. To-day the cannon are giving us a rest.”