Part 6

“I’m from Maine,” he said soberly, “a farmer, over draft age of course. But it looked to me like a kind o’ mean trick to make the boys do it all for us, so I come along, too.” He added, as if in partial explanation, “One of my uncles was with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”

“How do you like it, now you’re here?” I asked.

He looked at me heavily. “Like it? It’s hell!” he said.

“Have you been in active service?” I used my usual cowardly evasive phrase.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve killed some of ’em,” he answered me with brutal, courageous directness. He looked down at his hands as he spoke, big, calloused farmer’s hands, crooked by holding the plough-handles. As plainly as he saw it there, I saw the blood on them, too. His stern, dark, middle-aged face glowered down solemnly on those strong farmer’s hands. “It’s dirty work, but it’s got to be done,” he said, gravely, “and I ain’t a-going to dodge my share of it.”

A very dark-eyed, gracefully-built young soldier came loitering by now, and stopped near us, ostensibly to look at the passing troops, but evidently in order to share in the phenomenon of a talk in English with an American woman. I took him into the conversation with the usual query, “How do you do, and how do you like being in France?”

He answered with a strong Italian accent, and I dived into a dusty mental corner to bring out my half-forgotten Italian. In a moment we were talking like old friends. He had been born in Italy, yes, but brought up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His grandfather had been one of Garibaldi’s Thousand, so of course he had joined the American army and come to France among the first.

“Well, there are more than a Thousand of you this time,” I said, looking at the endless procession defiling before us.

“_Si, signora_, but it is a part of the same war. We are here to go on with what the Thousand began.”

Yes, that was true, John Brown’s soul and Garibaldi’s, and those of how many other fierce old fighting lovers of freedom were marching on there before my eyes, carried like invisible banners by all those strong young arms.

An elderly woman in well-brushed dowdy black came down the street toward us, an expression of care on her face. When she saw me she said, “Well, I’ve found you. They said you were in town to-day. Won’t you come back to the house with me? Something important. I’m terribly troubled with some American officers--oh, the war!”

I went, apprehensive of trouble, and found her house (save for a total absence of window-glass) in its customary speckless and shining order. She took me upstairs to what had been a bedroom and was now an office in the Quartermaster’s department. It was filled with packing-case improvised desks and with serious-faced, youngish American officers who, in their astonishment at seeing me, forgot to take their long black cigars out of their mouths.

“There!” said the woman-with-a-grievance, pointing to the floor. “Just look at that. Just _look_! I tell them and I _tell_ them, not to put their horrid boxes on the floor but to keep them on the linoleum, but they are so stupid, they can’t understand language that any child could take in! And they drag those boxes just full of nails all over the floor. I’m _sick_ of them and their scratches!”

A big gun boomed solemnly off on the horizon as accompaniment to this speech.

I explained in a neutral tone to the officers looking expectantly at me, what was at issue. I made no comment. None was needed evidently, for they said with a gravity which I found lovable that they would endeavor to be more careful about the floor, that indeed they had not understood what their landlady had been trying to tell them. I gave her their assurance and she went away satisfied.

As the door closed on her, they broke into broad grins and pungent exclamations. “Well, how about that! Wouldn’t that get you? With the town bombarded every night, to think the old lady was working herself up to a froth about her floor-varnish! And we thinking that every French person is breaking his heart over the invaded regions!”

One of them said, “I never thought of it before, but I bet you my Aunt Selina would do just that! I just bet if her town was bombarded she’d go right on shooing the flies out of her kitchen and mopping up her pantry floor with skim-milk. Why, the French are just like anybody, aren’t they? Just like our own folks!”

“They are,” I assured him, “so exactly like our own folks, like everybody’s own folks that it’s quite impossible to tell the difference.”

When I went away, the owner of the house was sweeping the garden-path clear of broken-glass. “This bombardment is such a nuisance!” she said disapprovingly. “I’d like to know what the place would be like if I didn’t stay to look after it.”

I looked at her enviously, securely shut away as she was by the rigid littleness of her outlook from any blighting comprehension of what was going on about her. But then, I reflected, there are instants when the comprehension of what is going on is not blighting. No, on the whole I did not envy her.

Outside the gate I fell in at once with a group of American soldiers. It was impossible to take a step in any direction in the town without doing this. After the invariable expressions of surprise and pleasure over seeing an American woman, came the invariable burst of eager narration of where they had been and what had been happening to them. They seemed to me touchingly like children, who have had an absorbing, exciting adventure and must tumble it all out to the first person they meet. Their haste, their speaking all at once, gave me only an incoherent idea of what they wished to say. I caught odd phrases, disconnected sentences, glimpses through pin-holes.

“One of the fellows, a conscript, that came to fill a vacant place in our lines, he was only over in France two weeks, and it was his first time in a trench. He landed there at six o’clock in the evening, and just like I’m telling you, at a quarter past six a shell up and exploded and buried him right where he stood. Yes, ma’am, you certainly do see some very peculiar things in this war.”

From another, “We took the whole lot of ’em prisoners, and passed ’em back to the rear, but out of the fifteen we took, eight died of sudden heart-disease before they got back to the prisoners’ camp.” (I tried not to believe this, but the fact that it was told with a laugh and received with a laugh reminded me gruesomely that we are the nation that permits lynching of helpless men by the mob.)

From another, “Some of the fellows say they think about the _Lusitania_ when they go after the _Boche_. I don’t have to come down as far as that. Belgium’s plenty good enough a whetstone for _my_ bayonet.” (This reminded me with a thrill that we are the nation that has always ultimately risen in defense of the defenseless.)

From another, “One of our own darkies went up to one of these here Senegalese and began talking United States to him. Of course the other darkey talked back in French, and ours said, ‘Why, you pore thing! You be’n over heah so long you dun forgot yo’ motheh-tongue!’”

From another, “Oh, I can’t stand the French! They make me tired! And their jabber! I seen some of ’em talk it so fast they couldn’t even understand each other! Honest, I did.”

From another, “There’s something that sort of _takes_ me about the life over here. I’m not going to be in any hurry to go back to the States and hustle my head off, after the war’s over.”

From another, “Not for mine. Me for Chicago the day after the _Boches_ are licked.”

They were swept away by a counter-current somewhere in the khaki ebb and flow about us, and I found myself with a start next to a _poilu_, yes a real _poilu_ with a faded horizon-blue uniform and a domed, battered, blue French casque, such a _poilu_ as had filled the town when I had lived there.

“Well,” I said to him, “things have changed here. The town’s khaki now.” He looked at me out of bright brown eyes, smiled, and entered into conversation. We talked, of course, of the American soldier, one of whom came up and stood at my elbow. When I stopped to speak to him, “Gee!” he said, “I wish I could rip it off like that. I can say ‘combien’ and ‘trop cher,’ but there I stick. Say, what does the Frenchman say about us? Now, since that little Belleau-wood business I guess they see we know a thing or two ourselves about how to run a war! They’re all right, of course; mighty fine soldiers, but Lord! you’d know by the way any one of them does business, as if he’s all day for it, that they couldn’t run a war _fast_, the way it ought to be run, the way we’re going to run it, now we’re here.”

I did not think it necessary to translate all of this to the bright-eyed little Frenchman on my other side, who began to talk as the American stopped. “You asked my opinion of the American troops, Madame. I will give it to you frankly. The first who came over, your regular army, the mercenaries, made a very bad impression indeed. All who have come since have made the best possible impression. They are really astonishingly courageous, and there could be no better, or more cordial comrades in the world. But oh! Madame, as far as they really know how to make modern war, they are children, just children! They make the mistakes we made four years ago. They have so much to learn of the technique of war, and they will lose so many men in learning it! It is sad to think of!”

I did not think it necessary to translate all this to the American who now shook hands with both of us and turned away. The Frenchman, too, after a look at the clock in the church-tower, made his compliments, saluted, and disappeared.

I walked forward and, coming to the church door, stepped inside. It was as though I had stepped into another world. I had found the only place in town where there were no soldiers. The great, gray, dim, vaulted interior was empty.

After the beat of the marching feet outside, after the shuffling to and fro of the innumerable men quartered in town, after the noisy shops crowded with khaki uniforms, after the incessant thunderous passage of the artillery and munitions-camions--the long, hushed quiet of the empty church rang loud in my ears. I wondered for just an instant if there could be any military regulation, forbidding our soldiers to enter the church; and even as I wondered, the door opened and a boy in khaki stepped in--one out of all those hordes. He crossed himself, took a rosary out of his pocket, knelt, and began his prayers.

Thirty-thousand soldiers were in that town that day. Whatever else we are, I reflected, we are not a people of mystics.

But then I remembered the American soldier who had said that Belgium was a good enough whetstone for his bayonet. I remembered the rough, gloomy farmer who did not want to shirk his share of the world’s dirty work. Perhaps there are various kinds of mystics.

Once outside the church I turned to look up Madame Larconneur, the valiant market-gardener who had been one of my neighbors, a tired young war-widow, with two little children, whom I had watched toiling early and late, day and night, to keep intact the little property left her by her dead soldier husband. I had watched her, drawing from the soil of her big garden, wet quite literally by her sweat, the livelihood for her fatherless little girls. I wondered what the bombardment of the town had done to her and her small, priceless home.

I found the street, I found the other houses there, but where her little, painfully, well-kept house had stood was a heap of stones and rubble, and in the place of her long, carefully tended rows of beans and cabbages and potatoes, were shell-holes where the chalky barren subsoil streaked the surface, and where the fertile black earth, fruit of years of labor, was irrevocably buried out of sight. Before all this, in her poor, neat black, stood the war-widow with her children.

I sprang forward, horrified, the tears on my cheeks. “Oh, Madame Larconneur, how awful! How awful!” I cried, putting out both hands to her.

She turned a white, quiet face on me and smiled, a smile that made me feel infinitely humble. “My little girls are not hurt,” she said, drawing them to her, “and as for all this--why, if it is a part of getting other people’s homes restored to them”--her gesture said that the price was not too high.

The look in her sunken eyes took me for an instant up into a very high place of courage and steadfastness. For the first time that day, the knot in my throat stopped aching. I was proud to have her put her work-deformed hands in mine and to feel on my cheeks her sister’s kiss.

It steadied me somewhat during the difficult next hour, when in the falling twilight I walked up and down between the long rows of raw earth, with the innumerable crosses, each with its new, bright American flag, fluttering in the sweet country air. I needed to recall that selfless courage, for my heart was breaking with sorrow, with guilt-consciousness, with protest, as I stood there, thinking of our own little son, of the mothers of the boys who lay there.

A squad of soldiers were preparing graves for the next day. As they dug in the old, old soil of the cemetery to make a place for the new flesh come from so far to lie there forever, a strong odor of corruption and decay came up in puffs and drifted away down toward the little town lying below us, in its lovely green setting, still shaking rhythmically to the ponderous passage of the guns, of the troops, of the camions.

At one side were a few recent German graves, marked with black crosses and others, marked with stones, dating from the war of 1870, that other nightmare when all this smiling countryside was blood-soaked--and how many times before that!

Above me, dominating the cemetery, stood a great monument of white marble, holding up to all those graves the ironic inscription, “Love ye one another.”

The twilight fell more and more deeply, and became darkness. The dull, steady surge of the advancing troops grew louder. Night had come, night no longer used for rest after labor in the sunlight, night which must be used to hurry troops and more troops forward over roads shelled by day.

They passed by hundreds, by thousands, an endless, endless procession--horses, mules, camions, artillery, infantry, cavalry; obscure shadowy forms no longer in uniform, no longer from Illinois, or Georgia or Vermont, no longer even American; only human--young men, crowned with the splendor of their strength, going out gloriously through the darkness to sacrifice.

“IT IS RATHER FOR US TO BE HERE DEDICATED”

“_It is rather for us to be here dedicated...._”

Out in the wheat-field, golden under a golden sun, I came suddenly on the young American soldier, lying dead, his face turned toward the _Bois de Belleau_. He was the stillest thing in all the silent countryside, ghostly quiet after the four-days’ din of battle, now gone forward and thundering on the horizon. Compared to his stillness, the wheat-stalks, broken and trampled as they were, seemed quivering conscious life; the trees, although half-shattered by the shell-fire, fluttered their bright leaves, vividly alive; the weeds by the roadside vibrated in triumph. They were wounded, mutilated, disfigured, but they had survived. They were alive. Only the soldier had not survived.

All men go a long journey to meet their death, through many days and months and years. But he and his comrades had gone a longer than any man before them. They had passed through all those days and months and years; and more than that, across unending miles of those other wheat-fields in a far country and across the unending miles of the ocean they saw for the first time; but far more than that, they had crossed incalculable gulfs of traditions, of prejudice, of the tyranny of old, fixed ideas.

He had come a long journey, he had trod a new road, he was fighting a new fight, this soldier who had turned his back on the limitations of the past, who was making forward into the future with all the strength and faith of his young manhood, when he met his sudden destiny and lay down forever in a wheat-field of France.

There he lay in a blessed, blessed stillness, having done his best.

Being still alive, and so not permitted to lie down by him to rest, I left him, and returned to a great city, any great city--all great cities everywhere in the world being the same.

I stood before the door of a shop. I saw an old, thin, work-deformed woman cowering before a well-fed man with a brutal voice who stood over her, angrily shouting at her that she had not sufficiently burnished the brass hinges of the great glass doors. With the rich abundance of the wheat-fields still golden before my eyes, I saw her cowering before him, all her sacred human dignity stripped from her by her need for food, by the fear of more hunger than even she could endure.

I saw a woman with a bloated, flabby body, strained together into a cohesion by steel bands, with a bloated, flabby face covered with red and white. Small glass-like pieces of white stone were thrust into the pierced flesh of her ears, gleamed on her protuberant bosom, on her puffed, useless fingers. With the roar of the distant battle still in my ears, I heard her saying, “The war is lasting too long! Lucette tells me that it’s impossible for her to get the right shade of silk for my corset; the only coiffeur who understands my hair has been sent to the front; and I have not had a bonbon in ten days.”

I saw a wretched, disinherited son of man, shaking with alcoholism, rotten with disease, livid with hunger, undone with hopelessness, flung on a bench like a ragged sack of old bones. Only the palsied trembling of his dirty hands showed that he lived. But with the awful odor of real death still in my nostrils, I perceived that he was alive, while the strong young soldier was dead.

I saw a man with a gross, pale countenance, with white fine linen and smooth black broad-cloth, who stepped confidently forward, not deigning to lift his eyes to the crowd about him, sure that they would give way before the costliness of his ring and pin.

In his soft, white hands he held a newly printed newspaper which, open at the news from the stock exchange, he read with an expression of eager rapacity. On his way stood a woman in all the fleshly radiance of her youth, with some of the holiness of youth still left on her painted mouth. She, looking at him hungrily, desperately, forced his eyes up to meet hers. With the glory of the dead soldier still in my soul, I saw the rapacity in his eyes change to lust, I saw an instant’s sickness in hers go out, quenched by the bravado of despair.

Oh, American soldier, lying still in the wheat-field of France, did you come so far a journey to meet your death in order that all this might continue?

“_Let us here highly resolve that all these dead shall not have died in vain...._”

THE DAY OF GLORY

_... if the armistice is signed, a salvo of cannon from the Invalides at eleven o’clock will announce the end of the war._

The clock hands crept slowly past ten and lagged intolerably thereafter. The rapid beating of your heart, telling off the minutes, brought eleven finally very near. Then the clock, your heart, all the world, seemed to stand still. The great moment was there. Would the announcing cannon speak? Such a terrible silence as the world kept during that supreme moment of suspense! It was the quintessence of all the moral torture of four nightmare years.

And then ... like a shock within your own body it came, the first solemn proclamation of the cannon, shaking the windows, the houses, the very sky, with its news. The war was over. The accursed guns had ceased tearing to pieces our husbands and our sons and our fathers.

Of all the hundreds of thousands of women who heard those guns, I think there was not one who did not feel instantly, scalding on her cheeks, the blessed tears--tears of joy! She had forgotten that there could be tears of joy. The horrible weight on the soul that had grown to be a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging flood; the horrible constriction around the heart loosened. We wept with all our might; we poured out once for all the old bitterness, the old horror. We felt sanity coming back, and faith and even hope, that forgotten possession of the old days.

When the first tears of deliverance had passed, and your knees had stopped shaking, and your heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your throat, why, then every one felt one common imperious desire, to leave the little cramping prison of his own walls, to escape out of the selfish circle of his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving with that of all his fellows, to make himself physically, as he felt spiritually, at one with rejoicing humanity.

And we all rushed out into the streets.

I think there never can have been such a day before, such a day of pure thanksgiving and joy for every one. For the emotion was so intense that, during the priceless hours of that first day, it admitted no other. Human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. The dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. We lived and drew our breath only in the knowledge that “firing had ceased at eleven o’clock that morning,” and that those who had fought as best they could for the Right had conquered. You saw everywhere supreme testimony to the nobility of the moment, women in black, with bits of bright-colored tricolor pinned on their long black veils, with at last a smile, the most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed eyes. They were marching with the others in the streets; every one was marching with every one else, arm in arm, singing:

_Allons, enfants de la patrie, Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_

The houses echoed to those words, repeated and repeated by every band of jubilant men and women and children who swept by, waving flags and shouting:

_Come, children of our country, The Day of Glory is here!_

Every group had at its head a permissionnaire or two in field uniform who had been pounced upon as the visible emblem of victory, kissed, embraced, covered with flowers, and set in the front rank to carry the largest flag. Sometimes there walked beside these soldiers working women with sleeping babies in their arms, sometimes old men in frock coats with ribbons in their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted, laughing little munition workers still in their black aprons, but with tricolored ribbons twisted in their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed ladies, sometimes women in long mourning veils, sometimes ragged old beggars, sometimes a cab filled with crippled soldiers waving their crutches--but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing jubilee. During those few blessed hours there was no bitterness, no evil arrogance, no revengeful fury. Any one who saw all that afternoon those thousands and thousands of human faces all shining with the same exaltation can never entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing them to be capable of that pure joy.

_The Day of Glory has come._

The crowd seemed to be merely washing back and forth in surging waves of thanksgiving, up and down the streets aimlessly, carrying flowers to no purpose but to celebrate their happiness. But once you were in it, singing and marching with the others, you felt an invisible current bearing you steadily, irresistibly, in one direction; and soon, as you marched, and grew nearer the unknown goal, you heard another shorter, more peremptory, rhythm mingling with the longer shout, repeated over and over:

_Allons, enfants de la patrie, Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_

Now people were beginning to shout: “To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!” Then you knew that you were being swept along to the Place de la Concorde, to salute the statue of Strasbourg, freed from her forty years of mourning and slavery.