Part 13

He led the way to the nearest tunnel entrance to the citadel. With the others I followed, eagerly listening to his explanations. But my mind was still in a whirl. That dark and desolate blood-soaked hill, the staunch old colonel, with the dewdrops in his white hair, recounting the valorous deeds of his fallen heroes, those acres on acres of graves, the ascending hosts of souls--were not some of them perhaps still lingering in this lonely spot, dazed by their violent severance from the flesh, ignorant that they had passed across? Would they not cry out at night for aid, for news of the battle front: “Why are we abandoned thus? Who wins? _Vaterland?_ _La Patrie?_”--the Americans, who had not engaged in this struggle, to be sure, but were now fighting in an even mightier struggle--all these things mingled confusedly in my mind like the unmatched parts of a puzzle.

Thanks to my classical education, I had no proper conception of what constitutes a modern fortress. I had vaguely imagined it as a city ringed round with a very substantial stone wall, crenelated and turreted, with dozens of peepholes for the doughty gunners to take pot shots at the enemy established outside. In the very heart of the city would be the citadel, which figured in my mind as a big, round, impregnable stone tower bristling with teethlike rows of cannon, its foundations naturally extending scores of feet underneath. Accordingly when we set out to traverse the long series of dimly-lit reverberating subterranean passages, descended flights of slimy stone stairs to lower and danker levels, stopped in gun and ammunition rooms, electric-plant rooms, kitchens, mess rooms, infirmaries, chapels, musées, cinema and rest rooms, dormitories, cavernous abodes, twenty, thirty and forty feet below ground, I began to wonder when we were going upstairs.

“But there is no upstairs,” responded M. Martin, laughing in answer to my query--“not in this citadel. Here it all is, just as you see, underground. You observed those big iron mushroom affairs six inches or so aboveground when we were up on the hill?”

“But I thought they were the observation posts of hidden guns--like that of the Big Bertha.”

“So they are--they are our own Big Berthas. Nevertheless, those observation posts are all the upstairs there is to this citadel. What do you suppose would happen to the superstructure of a fort if it were hit by a shell which made a crater as large as the one we saw on the hill--fifty feet across and twenty feet deep? Not much upstairs left, eh?”

So much for a classical education!

“And all the French troops eat and sleep and pray and drill down here? There are none billeted in Verdun?”

“There’s nobody in Verdun.”

“No old men and old women who still cling to their ruined firesides and creep out into the morning sunshine after a night’s bombardment?”

“Not a single soul. It’s a blanched city of the dead.”

By this time it was well upon six o’clock and we stopped for a moment to view a mess hall where, seated at long refectory tables, about four hundred poilus were taking sustenance from great steaming casseroles of ragout placed in the centers of the tables. Here indeed were the veritable heroes of Verdun! The indomitables! I looked for halos, but found none but the fragrant encircling wreaths of the smoking ragout, which the heroes were bolting down like one o’clock. These men, however, were no callow youths, but tough-muscled, tanned and bearded veterans--or if they were youths they were veteran youths with lines in their faces and gray in their hair. As the commanding officer loomed in the doorway they sprang to their feet as one man. The colonel waved them back to their stew, explaining that here were some of their allies--American friends. What a cheer it was that rose! Some of the Americans frankly wiped their eyes. The colonel beamed round upon us all with a kind of indulgent fatherly grace. His blue eyes caressed his troops with affectionate regard.

And as we departed he commented: “You will please note one thing: I did not order that cheer. It sprang spontaneously from the hearts of my men.”

He continued to speak of America, of the deep fraternal tenderness existing in the hearts of the French for the splendid young army from overseas; of the fine morale America was exhibiting in the business of food conservation; of the hope they had in American aviation. Simple, brave, friendly words from a brave, friendly soul.

We tramped on through vast resounding twilight caverns, slippery underfoot with mud and exuding large clammy dewdrops from the overarching walls. Sometimes it was pitch dark and a pocket torch or the outstretched hand of the colonel guided our course. Once we climbed by a kind of vertical ship’s ladder fastened against the solid wall up into the platform of a monstrous subterranean gun which hurled annihilation miles away. For months the Germans had been assiduously trying to locate that gun.

It was the colonel who suggested the idea of Verdun as a Mecca for tourist parties after the war.

“Here they will come,” he chuckled, “by train and ship loads from all over the civilized world to view this historic spot. They will passionately collect every old piece of shrapnel or cap or exploded cartridge, every stick, every brick, every stone. And when all of the veritable souvenirs have been snatched up doubtless our ingenious guardians of the citadel will resow the sacred ground with another artificial crop from a huge factory established hard by. ’Twill be an industry. They will charge--let me see--three francs admission.” And the colonel laughed heartily over his prophecy.

“But they will not have the commanding officer of the citadel for their guide!” interjected M. Martin slyly.

“If they have the commanding officer of the citadel for their guide it will be five francs,” said the colonel firmly. “Three francs for an ordinary tour; five francs with the commanding officer for guide. That is not too dear!”

They elaborated the idea with gayety. Instead of great rough soldiers with clattering bayonets and clumping boots, the hollow corridors would reverberate to soft, pretty laughter and the click-clack of ladies’ high-heeled boots. And downy college lads and pig-tailed misses, with bespectacled tutors bearing Baedekers--no, _mon Dieu_, not Baedekers; doubtless American histories!--and peaceful and portly papas and mammas who vaguely remembered the great war in their extreme youth would stroll through these echoing passages pensively, hand in hand. For it would then be a public musée, this impregnable citadel, and its tragic battles a troubled dream of yesterday.

“But in the meantime,” warned the colonel, laughing, “I am going to charge five francs!”

After the citadel he proceeded to show us the town, demolished beyond hope of reconstruction. Fine ancient façades with filigree stonework delicate as thread lace; matchless old cathedral closes of the fourteenth century designed and wrought in solid granite by a master mason who was also a master builder; fortification walls dating back to the days of the Cæsars; medieval turrets beneath which troubadour soldier lovers sang; glorious architecture of the Louis the Fourteenth period--ineffable masterpieces of structural art never to be reproduced on earth, they lay in smashed and huddled fragments on the ground.

We entered a church, its roof caved in, massive columns rent, holy statues razed, empty as an eggshell--the result of a single cannon shot.

“_Un coup de canon_--and there you are!” the colonel commented grimly.

We sped past the Big Canal and the Little Canal, tranquil stretches of twilight water, colored like gorgeous rose windows by a liberated gleam of the westering sun; reminiscent of Venice, with their overhanging houses, now glooming ruins whose window holes stared like sightless sockets of men blinded in battle; past the business and the residence sections of the city, dead and desolate as the tombs of the Pharaohs; and finally wound up to the summit of a hill whence, the colonel explained, we could obtain a comprehensive view of the havoc the Huns had wrought. And when we had gazed our fill on that tragic exhibition of arrogance and hate, the colonel, like the fine artist he was, led us into a lovely quiet garden close whose darkening air was sweet with the scent of hyacinths, violets, crocuses and spring roses. And kneeling down on the damp turf and getting out his clasp-knife he proceeded to gather us each a nosegay in honor of the event.

“For,” he observed sagely, “flowers are better souvenirs than bits of iron shells.”

When we wondered how he came to be possessed of a garden on this deserted hill-top among the crumbling ruins he explained it was his favorite point of observation. Knowing his love for the spot his men had secretly made this garden for him and tended it carefully and kept it in fresh bloom.

Returning to the citadel we dined once more in the famous mess room, this time with the colonel and all his officers. It was nine o’clock when we finally took leave of him, standing bareheaded in the rain to assure us of the warm pleasure we had given him! It had been an amazing day, crowded with images, emotions, events; and not least amazing was this French colonel, commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun, bubbling over with gayety and humor, filled with profound tenderness and knowledge of life, a savant, learned in history and languages, a distinguished warrior who had been tried in the fiery furnace of battle, and yet simple-hearted as a child or one of his beloved poilus.

It was long after midnight when we arrived in Nancy. Those two tiny fowls de luxe which cost eight dollars we had fallen on and devoured in the night. The following day, on our return to Paris, we learned that the battle to the north was still raging. But the Germans had been checked. Our troops, the ones we had seen moving north, were in the great struggle too. They were being heavily gassed and shelled.

“Worse than Verdun!” said my informant, an American who had just returned from the British Front. “I saw several hundred of our fellows who had been mustard-gassed, lying in a field hospital. They lay on cots, their smarting eyes bandaged with soothing lotions, and they talked to each other in low broken whispers. It gave one a choke in the throat to see all those stalwarts lying flat, eyes bandaged, whispering to the comrades they could not see. I tell you, it made me feel mighty ugly toward the Hun! I wished some of our peace propagandists at home might see that sight, hear those low, choking whispers!”

“What were they talking about? Home? Mother? Where is my wandering boy to-night?”

The officer gave a grim laugh. “Not by a jolly jugful! They were trying to fix the exact hour of the gas attack in order to reckon how soon they’d be back in the trenches to tackle the Hun!”

This, then, was the spirit of the Americans who had entered the great fight. It was the spirit of the poilus before Verdun. It was the spirit of that indomitable colonel who had replied that one hundred and ten thousand brave lives were not too many to give for such a cause. Verdun of to-day was the heritage of these men in khaki who lay with bandaged eyes and spoke in choked whispers. And the Verduns of to-morrow would be theirs by the same sign: The conquering force of spirit controlling the conquering force of arms.

BEHIND CHÂTEAU-THIERRY

This is a story of causes. And those causes produced certain effects. I hope you will be patient with the causes--which, like all causes, are more or less dull--and read on until you come to the effects. There I can promise you some excitement.

When, in the midst of the March offensive, so disastrous in its initial phase, General Foch took command of the various Allied armies in France with the intention of merging those several distinct and often conflicting units into a single compact whole, one and indivisable, which should be at least as supple and cohesive as that of the foe, nobody on the outside even dimly realized how fundamental, how far-reaching would be the changes involved. For after three years and a half of fighting as separate entities each nation had rutted deeply into its own peculiar manner of waging war. England held one sector; Belgium another; France another; and when American overseas soldiers landed in France they were assigned another portion of the line in Lorraine.

And of his own particular sector each nation was supreme lord, of both the front and the back areas, the advanced and the rear war zones. That was his terrain, his stronghold. Therein he could do as he pleased, make war as seemed to him best, without let or hindrance. Thus England built up one policy of war strategy, of transportation and hospitalization; France another; America a third. There were three autonomies, three great war chiefs, three grand headquarters. Each autonomy fought in a water-tight compartment, so to speak--water-tight so far as concerned the others; but unfortunately not water-tight to the boche.

So rigorously was this sense of independence held by each country, so distinctly did each nation cover its zone and its zone alone, that the fresh divisions held in reserve in back areas in case of a possible grand attack could not be stationed save in their own respective territories. French reserves could not be stationed in the British zone; British reserves could not be stationed in the French zone. Even if every sign pointed to a powerful massed action in one particular sector, all the neighboring sector could do was to hold mobile troops, together with trains and camions, in its own area ready to move. Naturally this caused great delay; precious time was lost in conveying troops.

For example, on March twenty-first, when the Fifth British Army fell back, fighting valiantly, before the furious onslaught of a Hun host of quadruple strength, and a temporary breach was made in the line which opened the road to Paris, the French generals, Pelle and Humbert, rushed up their reserves from Picardy and Champagne. These two generals had received special instructions from the French High Command to study the different hypotheses of attack on the British Front and to hold themselves responsible for all consequences. An agreement had been entered into by the British and the French commanders, fixing the sixth day of battle as the one when the French should intervene if necessary and come to the assistance of their British allies. But so fast and furious waxed the offensive, so urgent appeared the crisis to the onlooking French generals, that it was not six days but scarcely more than that number of hours when the blue casques of the French began to appear in the frightful mêlée and the German flood in full drive began to be stemmed.

But it was a narrow squeak. And a good part of its narrowness consisted in the fact that fresh troops could not be held in readiness behind the danger zone, but had to be transported by camion, without their organizations behind them, often without sufficient guns or ammunition, from a long distance, and then hurled without a minute’s rest into the very heart of the maelstrom. Had the French reserves been massed near at hand in the British back areas so that they could have gone immediately into action, there is no doubt that thousands of British soldiers, now German prisoners, hundreds of wounded in hospitals, not to speak of the loss of guns, supplies and evacuation hospitals along the entire front line of that sector, would have been saved to the Allied arms. It was a bitter, grim lesson, and its price was high. But not too high to pay for a unified command.

Now in the present engagements the Germans are meeting French, British, Americans and Italians, all within a few miles upon the same sector. They are intermingled and interwoven, as the need arises, regiment by regiment, company by company, and even man by man. The old partitions have been completely torn down.

One of the most distinctive features of the old régime was the hospitalization system. Here as elsewhere each nation carried on in its own fashion. The British evolved one type of organization; the French another; the Americans a third; so that there existed side by side three separate networks of systems, each elaborate, ramified, complete, which never touched each other. In the British sector, for example, the seriously wounded are evacuated as rapidly as possible back to England, where are located most of their big base hospitals. In the French system the evacuation hospitals are dotted all along the sector a few miles behind the firing line, with their large base and convalescent hospitals scattered throughout the interior, in the Midi or down on the Riviera, far from the rude northern winds. And when the Americans were assigned their sector in Lorraine they organized their system along similar lines.

First come the evacuation hospitals, as close up behind the Front as possible, in order to catch the wounded man within two, three or four hours of the time he falls on the field. Here he is operated on without delay, rendered fit for transportation, and then shipped to some big base farther back in the rear. As the hospital formation recedes from the advance zone of the army, and therefore from acute danger and unstable tenure arising from likelihood of capture, shelling and bombing raids, the bases grow in size and elaboration, until at some points they are vast beehives, community centers with a capacity of ten to twenty thousand beds. Between the two extremes of the formation, the evacuation hospitals just behind that invisible and most uncertain quantity called the front line and the big solid base situated some hundreds of kilometers away--between these two types there exists the greatest difference.

The base, as its name implies, is solid, immobile, permanent, steady as the Rock of Gibraltar or the skyscrapers of New York. The evacuation hospital, on the contrary, creeping up as close as possible behind the fighting forces is light, mobile, supple, easy to move, consisting largely of tents, stuff that can be loaded swiftly on trucks and motor lorries and carried away. If during a big push the line begins to sway perilously, to strain, to crack, with breaches showing here and there, and the order comes to retire, the evacuation hospital can fold up its tents like the Arab and silently steal away, not on camels but their modern substitutes, camions, with the orderlies on the rear truck, thumb to nose, wagging derisive fingers at the oncoming boche, who if he does break through will find--just nothing at all.

That is one difference between evacuation and base hospitals. And there are others. The bases do good straight honest and honorable surgical and medical work of the type that is known in America. They have a fine régime, and this régime is rarely overturned. They are, therefore, prosaic. But an evacuation hospital is dramatic, picturesque, full of potentialities and surprises, with tragedy, comedy and broad farce competing for first place every hour in the day.

Here during a big offensive, when Allied and enemy wounded are pouring in in a continuous stream, surgeons, nurses and personnel work like fiends under a tremendous pressure, twelve, twenty-four, even forty-eight hours at a stretch. Here are to be witnessed in the operating room running fights with death as tense and thrilling as anything upon the battlefield. Sometimes the wounded man is exactly upon the great divide, hovering between life and death, an extra hair’s weight capable of sending him to either side; shrapnel in his chest, his lungs full of blood, breathing like a trumpeter, suffering from shock, exhaustion, lack of food--and still able to smile up into the surgeon’s eyes and say faintly: “I’m all right, sir. Take that other poor guy. He’s worse off than me.”

In cases like these, three minutes more or less in the length of the operation spells all the difference between time and eternity. The surgical team works with the perfect union of a football eleven. In their white aprons, caps and masks they look like priests performing a rite. The sweat stands out on their foreheads. Their expert fingers move like lightning, yet precise, unhurried, sure.

In an operation of this kind, with life and death in the saddle and both riding hard, I have seen the assistant hold a watch on the operating team, as if it were a horse race, and call aloud the minutes, thus: “Three! Five! Seven! Ten!” Two minutes too long, and the patient may expire on the table, or die of pneumonia from the added strain of ether on the lungs. Here margins are short and time more precious than the weight of iron in rubies.

Here also is to be seen what is known as the new war surgery. The wounded men are X-rayed before entering the operating room, and the exact position of the foreign body indicated by an indelible cross on the patient’s skin. Consequently the surgeons need not go delving and exploring and guessing all over the landscape, but make a clean straight dive for the intruder. As the greatest danger in all these wounds is that of infection from the gas-gangrene germ, which infests the soil of France and therefore every particle of the soldier’s clothes, and as in addition the wounded are often forced to lie twelve, twenty-four or even thirty-six hours on the field on account of a violent enemy barrage, these wounds are often badly infected by this germ before ever they reach the evacuation hospital, near as that may be. In order, then, to prevent the further spread of the poison throughout the body the wound is laid wide open, the crushed and torn tissues shorn clean away, and a big clean wound created. This is thoroughly cleansed, packed with gauze soaked in Carrel solution, after which the entire area is wrapped in compresses, solidly bandaged, strapped or splinted--and the patient is ready to be shipped a hundred miles.

From this it will be seen that it is at the outset of the game, after the man is first wounded, that the time element is most precious. Upon the speed with which an ambulance can deliver a soldier to the nearest evacuation hospital, divest him of his dirty, infected clothes and lay him on the life-saving operating table depends largely the speed of his recovery and return to the lines. Delays there are bound to be--violent shelling of trenches, back areas or crossroads, which may block every form of transportation for hours. And it is to counteract these unavoidable delays that evacuation hospitals are creeping closer and closer up to the Front, risking bombardment and air raids in order to save a greater percentage of life and limb.

Behind these hospitals, then, stand the big solid bases, imposing, safe and sane. In front of them is still another formation. Briefly, it is something like this: A soldier is wounded on the field, in the trenches, in a wood. If alone, he applies his own first aid. If he has given it away to a comrade, he uses his belt for a tourniquet, his bootlaces--anything. If he cannot get at his wound or if he is knocked unconscious, he lies until he is picked up by friend or foe. If he is not picked up he “goes West,” joining the great host of immortal comrades, and all is well. That is the first step, where each individual attends to himself, is attended to by others or is lost.