Chapter 13

When I tell you that these soldiers say, "Men who have not been at Verdun have not seen the war yet," and then add that the life of the 118th here looks like a long picnic, and that they make play of their work, play of their grenade practice, which they vary with football, play of their twenty miles hikes, I give you leave to laugh at my way of seeing the war, and I'll even laugh with you.

That reminds me that I never see a thousand or so of these boys on the big plain playing what they call football that I don't wish some American chaps were here to teach them the game. All they do here is to throw off their coats and kick the ball as far, and as high, as possible, and run like racers after it, while the crowd, massed on the edge of the field, yells like mad. The yelling they do very well indeed, and they kick well, and run well. But, if they only knew the game-- active, and agile, and light as they are--they would enjoy it, and play it well.

I had one of the nicest thrills I have had for many a day soon after the 118th arrived.

It was a sunny afternoon. I was walking in the road, when, just at the turn above my house, two officers rode round the corner, saluted me, and asked if the road led to Quincy. I told them the road to the right at the foot of the hill, through Voisins, would take them to Quincy. They thanked me, wheeled their horses across the road and stood there. I waited to see what was going to happen--small events are interesting here. After a bit one of them said that perhaps I would be wise to step out of the road, which was narrow, as the regiment was coming.

I asked, of course, "What regiment?" and "What are they coming for?" and he answered "The 118th," and that it was simply "taking a walk."

So I sauntered back to my garden, and down to the corner by the hedge, where I was high above the road, and could see in both directions. I had hardly got there when the head of the line came round the corner. In columns of four, knapsacks on their backs, guns on their shoulders, swinging at an easy gait, all looking so brown, so hardy, so clear-eyed, the men from Verdun marched by.

I had thought it cold in spite of the sun, and was well wrapped up, with my hands thrust into my big muff, but these men had beads of perspiration standing on their bronzed faces under their steel helmets.

Before the head of the line reached the turn into Voisins, a long shrill whistle sounded. The line stopped. Someone said: "At last! My, but this has been a hot march," and in a second every man had slipped off his knapsack and had a cigarette in his mouth.

Almost all of them dropped to the ground, or lay down against the bank. A few enterprising ones climbed the bank, to the field in front of my lawn, to get a glimpse of the view, and they all said what everyone says: "I say, this is the best point to see it."

I wondered what they would say to it if they could see it in summer and autumn if they found it fine with its winter haze.

But that is not what gave me my thrill.

The rest was a short one. Two sharp whistles sounded down the hill. Instantly everyone slipped on his sac, shouldered his gun, and at that minute, down at the corner, the military band struck up "Chant du Départ." Every hair on my head stood up. It is the first time I have heard a band since the war broke out, and as the regiment swung down the hill to the blare of brass--well, funnily enough, it seemed less like war than ever. Habit is a deadly thing. I have heard that band--a wonderful one, as such a regiment deserves,--many times since, but it never makes my heart thump as it did when, so unexpectedly, it cut the air that sunny afternoon.

I had so often seen those long lines marching in silence, as the English and the French did to the Battle of the Marne, as all our previous regiments have come and gone on the hillside, and never seen a band or heard military music that I had ceased to associate music with the soldiers, although I knew the bands played in the battles and the bugle calls were a part of it.

We have had all sorts of military shows, which change the atmosphere in which the quiet about us had been for months and months only stirred by the far-off artillery.

One day, we had a review on the broad plain which lies along the watershed between the Marne and the Grande Morin, overlooking the heights on the far side of both valleys, with the Grande Route on one side, and the walls to the wooded park of the handsome Château de Quincy on the other. It was an imposing sight, with thousands of steel-helmeted figures sac au dos et bayonnette au canon, marching and counter-marching in the cold sunshine, looking in the distance more like troops of Louis XIII than an evolution from the French conscript of the ante-bellum days of the pantalon rouge.

Two days later we had the most magnificent prise d'armes on the same plain that I have ever seen, much more stirring--though less tear-moving--than the same ceremony in the courtyard of the Invalides at Paris, where most foreigners see it. At the Invalides one sees the mutilés and the ill. Here one only saw the glory. In Paris, the galleries about the court, inside the walls of the Soldiers' Home, are packed with spectators. Here there were almost none. But here the heroes received their decorations in the presence of the comrades among whom they had been won, in the terrible battles of Verdun. It was a long line of officers, and men from the ranks, who stood so steadily before the commander and his staff, inside the hollow square, about the regimental colors, to have their medals and crosses fastened on their faded coats, receive their accolade, and the bravos of their companions as their citations were read. There were seven who received the Légion d'Honneur.

It was a brave-looking ceremony, and it was a lovely day--even the sun shone on them.

There was one amusing episode. These celebrations are always a surprise to the greater part of the community, and, in a little place like this, it is only by accident that anyone sees the ceremony. The children are always at school, and the rest of the world is at work, so, unless the music attracts someone, there are few spectators. On the day of the prise d'armes three old peasants happened to be in a field on the other side of the route nationale, which skirts the big plain on the plateau. They heard the music, dropped their work and ran across the road to gape. They were all men on towards eighty--too old to have ever done their military service. Evidently no one had ever told them that all Frenchmen were expected to uncover when the flag went by. Poor things, they should have known! But they didn't, and you should have seen a colonel ride down on them. I thought he was going to cut the woollen caps off their heads with his sabre, at the risk of decapitating them. But I loved what he said to them.

"Don't you know enough to uncover before the flag for which your fellow citizens are dying every day?"

Isn't that nice? I loved the democratic "fellow citizens"--so pat and oratorically French.

I flung the Stars and Stripes to the French breezes on the 7th in honor of the rupture. It was the first time the flag has been unfurled since Captain Simpson ordered the corporal to take it down two years ago the third of last September. I had a queer sensation as I saw it flying over the gate again, and thought of all that had happened since the little corporal of the King's Own Yorks took it down,--and the Germans still only forty-two miles away.

XXXV

February 26, 1917

What do you suppose I have done since I last wrote to you?

I have actually been to the theatre for the first time in four years. Would you ever have believed that I could keep out of the theatre such a long time as that? Still, I suppose going to the theatre--to a sort of variety show--seems to you, who probably continue to go once or twice a week, a tame experience. Well, you can go to the opera, which I can't do if I like, but you can't see the heroes of Verdun not only applauding a show, but giving it, and that is what I have been doing not only once but twice since I wrote you.

I am sure that I have told you that our ambulance is in the salle de récréation of the commune, which is a small rectangular room with a stage across one end. It is the only thing approaching a theatre which the commune boasts. It is well lighted, with big windows in the sides, and a top-light over the stage. It is almost new, and the walls and pointed ceiling are veneered with some Canadian wood, which looks like bird's-eye maple, but isn't.

It is in that hall that the matinées, which are given every other Sunday afternoon, take place. They are directed by a lieutenant-colonel, who goes into it with great enthusiasm, and really gets up a first-class programme.

The boys do all the hard work, and the personnel of the ambulance aids and abets with great good humor, though it is very upsetting. But then it is for the army--and what the army wants these days, it must have.

Luckily the men in our ambulance just now are either convalescent, or, at any rate, able to sit up in bed and bear excitement. So the beds of the few who cannot be dressed are pushed close to the stage, and around their cots are the chairs and benches of their convalescent comrades. The rest of the beds are taken out. The big military band is packed into one corner of the room. Chairs are put in for the officers of the staff and their few invited guests--there are rarely more than half a dozen civilians. Behind the reserved seats are a few benches for the captains and lieutenants and the rest of the space is given up to the poilus, who are allowed to rush when the doors are opened.

Of course the room is much too small, but it is the best we have. The wide doors are left open. So are the wide windows, and the boys are even allowed to perch on the wall opposite the entrance, from which place they can see the stage.

The entire programme is given by the poilus; only one performer had a stripe on his sleeve, though many of them wore a decoration. What seems to me the prettiest of all is that all the officers go, and applaud like mad, even the white-haired generals, who are not a bit backward in crying "Bis, bis!" like the rest.

The officers are kind enough to invite me and the card on my chair is marked "Mistress Aldrich." Isn't that Shakesperian? I sit among the officers, usually with a commandant on one side and a colonel on the other, with a General de Division, and a Général de Brigade in front of me, and all sorts of gilt stripes about me, which I count with curiosity, now that I have learned what they mean, as I surreptitiously try to discover the marks that war has made on their faces--and don't find them.

The truth is, the salle is fully as interesting to me as the performance, good as that is--with a handsome, delicate-looking young professor of music playing the violin, an actor from the Palais Royale showing a diction altogether remarkable, two well-known gymnasts doing wonderful stunts on horizontal bars, a prize pupil from the Conservatory at Nantes acting, as only the French can, in a well- known little comedy, two clever, comic monologists of the La Scala sort, and as good as I ever heard even there, and a regimental band which plays good music remarkably. There is even a Prix de Rome in the regiment, but he is en congé, so I 've not heard him yet. I wonder if you take it in? Do you realize that these are the soldiers in the ranks of the French defence? Consider what the life in the trenches means to them!

They even have artists among the poilus to paint back drops and make properties. So you see it is one thing to go to the theatre and quite another to see the soldiers from Verdun giving a performance before such a public--the men from the trenches going to the play in the highest of spirits and the greatest good humor.

At the first experience of this sort I did long to have you there. It was such a scene as I could not have believed possible in these days and under these conditions if I had not actually taken part in it.

As soon as the officers had filed in and taken their seats the doors and windows were thrown open to admit "la vague," and we all stood up and faced about to see them come. It was a great sight.

In the aisle down the centre of the hall--there is only one,--between the back row of reserved seats, stood Mlle. Henriette, in her white uniform, white gloved, with the red cross holding her long white veil to the nurse's coiffe which covered her pretty brown hair. Her slight, tall, white figure was the only barrier to prevent "la vague" from sweeping right over the hall to the stage. As they came through the door it did not seem possible that anything could stop them--or even that they could stop themselves--and I expected to see her crushed. Yet two feet from her, the mass stopped--the front line became rigid as steel and held back the rest, and, in a second, the wave had broken into two parts and flowed into the benches at left and right, and, in less time than it takes you to read this, they were packed on the benches, packed in the windows, and hung up on the walls. A queer murmur, half laugh and half applause, ran over the reserved seats, and the tall, thin commandant beside me said softly, "That is the way they came out of the trenches at Verdun." As I turned to sit down I had impressed on my memory forever that sea of smiling, clean-shaven, keen-eyed, wave on wave of French faces, all so young and so gay-- yet whose eyes had looked on things which will make a new France.

I am sending you the programme of the second matinée--I lost that of the first.

I do wish, for many reasons, that you could have heard the recitation by Brochard of Jean Bastia's "L'Autre Cortege," in which the poet foresees the day "When Joffre shall return down the Champs Elysées" to the frenzied cries of the populace saluting its victorious army, and greeting with wild applause "Pétain, who kept Verdun inviolated," "De Castelnau, who three times in the fray saw a son fall at his side," "Gouraud, the Fearless," "Marchand, who rushed on the Boches brandishing his cane," "Mangin, who retook Douaumont," and "All those brave young officers, modest even in glory, whose deeds the world knows without knowing their names," and the soldier heroes who held the frontier "like a wall of steel from Flanders to Alsace,"--the heroes of Souchez, of Dixmude, of the Maison du Passeur, of Souain, of Notre Dame de Lorette, and of the great retreat. It made a long list and I could feel the thrill running all over the room full of soldiers who, if they live, will be a part of that triumphal procession, of which no one talks yet except a poet.

But when he had pictured that scene the tempo of the verse changed: the music began softly to play a Schumann Reverie to the lines beginning: "But this triumphal cortège is not enough. The return of the army demands another cortège,"--the triumph of the Mutilés-- the martyrs of the war who have given more than life to the defence of France--the most glorious heroes of the war.

The picture the poet made of this "other cortège" moved the soldiers strangely. The music, which blended wonderfully with Brochard's beautiful voice, was hardly more than a breath, just audible, but always there, and added greatly to the effect of the recitation. There was a sigh in the silence which followed the last line--and an almost whispered "bravo," before the long shouts of applause broke out.

It is the only number on any programme that has ever touched, even remotely, on war. It came as a surprise--it had not been announced. But the intense, rather painful, feeling which had swept over the audience was instantly removed by a comic monologue, and I need not tell you that these monologues,--intended to amuse the men from the trenches and give them a hearty laugh,--are usually very La Scala--that is to say--rosse. But I do love to hear the boys shout with glee over them.

The scene in the narrow streets of Quincy after the show is very picturesque. The road mounts a little to Moulignon, and to see the blue-grey backs of the boys, quite filling the street between the grey walls of the houses, as they go slowly back to their cantonnements, makes a very pretty picture.

It does seem a far cry from this to war, doesn't it? Yet isn't it lucky to know and to see that these boys can come out of such a battle as Verdun in this condition? This spirit, you see, is the hope of the future. You know, when you train any kind of a dog to fight, you put him through all the hard paces and force him to them, without breaking his spirit. It seems to me that is just what is being done to the men at the front.

XXXVI

March 1, 1917

Well, I have been very busy for some time now receiving the regiment, and all on account of the flag. It had been going up in the "dawn's early light," and coming down "with the twilight's last gleaming" for some weeks when the regiment marched past the gate again. I must tell you the truth,--the first man who attempted to cry "Vivent les Etats-Unis" was hushed by a cry of "Attendez-patience-- pas encore," and the line swung by. That was all right. I could afford to smile,--and, at this stage of the game, to wait. You are always telling me what a "patient man" Wilson is. I don't deny it. Still, there are others.

The first caller that the flag brought me was on the morning after the regiment marched by it. I was upstairs. Amélie called up that there was "un petit soldat" at the door. They are all "les petits soldats" to her, even when they are six feet tall. She loves to see them coming into the garden. I heard her say to one of them the other day, when he "did not wish to disturb madame, if she is busy," "Mais, entrez donc. Les soldats ne gênent jamais ma maîtresse."

I went downstairs and found a mere youngster, with a sergeant's stripe on his sleeve, blushing so hard that I wondered how he had got up the courage to come inside the gate. He stammered a moment. Then he pointed to the flag, and, clearing his throat, said:

"You aire an Américaine?"

I owned it.

"I haf seen the flag--I haf been so surprised--I haf had to come in."

I opened the door wide, and said: "Do," and he did, and almost with tears in his eyes--he was very young, and blonde--he explained that he was a Canadian.

"But," I said, "you are a French Canadian?"

"Breton," he replied, "but I haf live in Canada since sixteen." Then he told me that his sister had gone to New Brunswick to teach French seven years ago, and that he had followed, that, when he was old enough, he had taken out his naturalization papers, and become a British subject in order to take up government land; that he had a wheat farm in Northern Canada--one hundred and sixty acres, all under cultivation; that he was twenty when the war broke out, and that he had enlisted at once; that he had been wounded on the Somme, and came out of the hospital just in season to go through the hard days at Verdun.

As we talked, part of his accent wore away. Before the interview was over he was speaking English really fluently. You see he had been tongue-tied at his own temerity at first. When he was at ease--though he was very modest and scrupulously well-mannered--he talked well.

The incident was interesting to me because I had heard that the French Canadians had not been quick to volunteer, and I could not resist asking him how it happened that he, a British subject, was in the French army.

He reddened, stammered a bit, and finally said: "After all I am French at heart. Had England fought any other nation but France in a war in which France was not concerned it would have been different, but since England and France are fighting together what difference can it make if my heart turned to the land where I was born?"

Isn't the naturalization question delicate?

I could not help asking myself how England looked at the matter. I don't know. She has winked at a lot of things, and a great many more have happened of late about which no one has ever thought. There are any number of officers in the English army today, enrolled as Englishmen, who are American citizens, and who either had no idea of abandoning their country, or were in too much of a hurry to wait for formalities. I am afraid all this matter will take on another color after "this cruel war is over."

This boy looked prosperous, and in no need of anything but kind words in English. He did not even need cigarettes. But I saw him turn his eyes frequently towards the library, and it occurred to me that he might want something to read. I asked him if he did, and you should have seen his eyes shine,--and he wanted English at that, and beamed all over his face at a heap of illustrated magazines. So I was able to send him away happy.

The result was, early the next morning two more of them arrived--a tall six-footer, and a smaller chap. It was Sunday morning, and they had real, smiling Sunday faces on. The smaller one addressed me in very good English, and told me that the sergeant had said that there was an American lady who was willing to lend the soldiers books. So I let them loose in the library, and they bubbled, one in English, and the other in French, while they revelled in the books.

Of course I am always curious about the civil lives of these lads, and it is the privilege of my age to put such questions to them. The one who spoke English told me that his home was in London, that he was the head clerk in the correspondence department of an importing house. I asked him how old he was, and he told me twenty-two; that he was in France doing his military service when the war broke out; that he had been very successful in England, and that his employer had opposed his returning to France, and begged him to take out naturalization papers. He said he could not make up his mind to jump his military service, and had promised his employer to return when his time was up,--then the war came.

I asked him if he was going back when it was over.

He looked at me a moment, shook his head and said, "I don't think so. I had never thought of such a thing as a war. No, I am too French. After this war, if I can get a little capital, I am going into business here. I am only one, but I am afraid France needs us all."

You see there again is that naturalization question. This war has set the world thinking, and it was high time.

One funny thing about this conversation was that every few minutes he turned to his tall companion and explained to him in French what we were talking about, and I thought it so sweet.

Finally I asked the tall boy--he was a corporal and had been watching his English-speaking chum with such admiration--what he did in civil life.

He turned his big brown eyes, on me, and replied: "I, madame? I never had any civil life."

I looked puzzled, and he added: "I come of a military family. I am an orphan, and I am an enfant de troupe."

Now did you know that there were such things today as "Children of the Regiment"? I own I did not. Yet there he stood before me, a smiling twenty-year old corporal, who had been brought up by the regiment, been a soldier boy from his babyhood.

In the meantime they had decided what they wanted for books. The English-speaking French lad wanted either Shakespeare or Milton, and as I laid the books on the table for him, he told his comrade who the two authors were, and promised to explain it all to him, and there wasn't a sign of show-off in it either. As for the Child of the Regiment, he wanted a Balzac, and when I showed him where they were, he picked out "Eugénie Grandet," and they both went away happy.

I don't need to tell you that when the news spread that there were books in the house on the hilltop that could be borrowed for the asking, I had a stream of visitors, and one of these visits was a very different matter.