Part 19

When the Germans discovered these pendant figures, looking like sacks of old clothes in their dirty, baggy uniforms, they were violently wrathful; and for two weeks more the forests were scoured in an effort to exterminate the remnants of the regiment.

But there were no more Frenchmen hanged.

V

To understand the history of the four years which followed, gentlemen, it is necessary to understand the man Jacques Fontaine; it is necessary to understand the spirit of Frenchmen. It is necessary, in short, to comprehend France.

I believe I may be forgiven for holding that valor is a trait of most Frenchmen. And by valor I do not mean the bravery which can be taught, which is merely a form of habit. You may take the most craven material and teach it the habit of obedience, and you have what passes for a brave soldier; but the Frenchman is valorous before he is a soldier, and he is valorous when he is no longer a soldier. The whining beggar has valor; so has the peasant, and the comfortable bourgeois, and the man of birth and breeding. You will find it universally, my friends.

This is perhaps because the French are the great phrase-makers of the world. The turn of a phrase comes easily to them; and the turn of a phrase captivates and conquers them, so that they will die for it. Danton made a phrase that saved France. Verdun made another. Combine the two, my friends, and you have the spirit of France. Dare--and yield not. The valor of France is the valor that will die rather than violate those mighty phrases....

Thus I say Jacques Fontaine was valorous. Bravery is a tangible thing; valor defends the intangible. Bravery is steadfast, and it is sensible. Valor may be foolhardy. Valor is a form of pride. And Jacques Fontaine was proud. Thus, when the Germans hanged men of the regiment, he hanged Germans. He would have done the same, knowing that he himself must be hanged forthwith thereafter. For valor does not consider consequences.

But Jacques Fontaine was not only valorous; he was thrifty. And it was the combination of these two characteristics that enabled him to survive. It is this same combination which has enabled France to survive, my friends. She is valorous; but she is thrifty. She is audacious; but she is pre-eminently logical. Thus Jacques Fontaine; valorous and thrifty, audacious and logical.

Thrift was bred in him. It was thrift which enabled him to survive and keep his regiment alive. He saved supplies, munitions, guns, men.... He had no other belongings save the things of war; therefore he hoarded these things, and when his stores ran short, he secured fresh supplies.

When his stores ran short, he foraged through the land, and he raided the German trains. When munitions threatened to fail, he watched his opportunity to replenish them. When guns wore out, he got new ones. And when the wastage of these operations, the unceasing perils of this life reduced the numbers in his command, he attacked and liberated a convoy of prisoners and recruited his regiment once more.

Through it all, he kept careful records of his regimental life. These records show that at one time, this man and his tattered remnant of a regiment possessed three German machine guns, four hundred rifles, and almost fifty thousand cartridges. Besides clothing, and stores of food, all hidden in caches in the forest depths.

It was inevitable that he should be hunted. There were at least four determined attempts by the Germans to exterminate the regiment. One of these occupied six weeks; it cut the roll from a hundred and eighty men down to less than sixty; it reduced weapons and supplies to a minimum; and for the full six weeks, the men saw each other only now and then, in groups of two or three. For this was the secret of their survival; they scattered before the hunt, they became units, as difficult to find as the beasts of the forest in which they dwelt.

Yet always they survived. That is to say, a nucleus of men always survived; and the regiment could never die. The regimental colors were never captured; the regimental records were never found. And Jacques Fontaine, and Lupec, and a handful of others of the original regiment, preserved themselves and held the rest together.

Picture it to yourselves, my friends, if you can; this handful of men, cohering, enduring; and all around them by the hundred thousand, the enemy. Behind every tree, a possible rifle; in every wood, a potential ambush; in every comrade, the danger of a spy....

There were three spies in the regiment during those four years. The first was suspected and killed before he had reached the rendezvous. The second was detected on the third day when he stiffened at a barked command in German. The third, alone, was clever; he deceived them, he lived among them, he learned their plans, and when the chance came, he brought down a German force upon the rendezvous when almost the full command was there.

But Jaques Fontaine had never grown careless; he had made it a rule from the beginning to post twenty guards in a wide circle about the Ravine of the Cold Tooth when the regiment was assembled. And one of these guards escaped the attempt to overcome him, and gave warning just in time. The regiment flung out of the ravine, broke boldly through the jaws of the German trap, left half its strength in German hands ...

But the remnant escaped, and lived.

In the winter of 1915, this regiment was reduced to twenty-seven men. The next winter, at the time of the great hunt, when the men were tracked through the snow, they were cut down to fifty-four. The fall of 1917 was the time of the spy; and some seventy men went through that winter like the beasts, some of them nursing wounds for months on end. They stirred from their hiding places only once, and that was when they cut off a German patrol in which the spy rode, and took him from his comrades and hanged him to the beams of a barn.

They had been forced to leave the Ravine of the Cold Tooth, since the Germans knew that spot; they hid now under the shoulder of one of the little mountains. And there, that winter and the next spring, their numbers grew again....

They had ninety men in March; and the friendly peasants brought to them by devious ways soldiers of England and of France who were cut off in the great offensive of that year, so that in May they numbered a hundred and fifty men; and in June, close to two hundred.... And the Germans were too much concerned with other matters to divert so much as a regiment to run them down....

When in due time the hour came for them to fulfil their destiny, my friends, this regiment which Jacques Fontaine had kept alive numbered three hundred and ninety men, with rifles for all, and two machine guns, and cartridges to feed those clamoring things.... And Jacques prepared to strike his blow for France.

VI

It is certain, my friends, that I have failed to give you any comprehensive picture of the life of this poor regiment during the years of its isolation. It is impossible for you, who have always been well fed and comfortable, to imagine the hunger, the cold, the loneliness, the misery. Some of you have faced peril, perhaps for hours on end. But these men, gentlemen, faced death for years on end. There was never a moment when their lives were secure. They were like the animals in the forest about them; they slept fitfully; they squatted on their haunches while they ate, and were alert to spring to their feet at the least alarm. They subsisted on berries, on nuts, on uncooked grain pilfered from the fields which the Germans forced the peasants to cultivate; they snared rabbits, they were able, now and then, to kill larger game. And when desperation drove them, they attacked the Germans and wrested food from them at price of blood.

This existence was at best an ordeal; and when the Germans found time to try to hunt them down, it became torment. Regiments encircled them, beating through the woods, searching every brake and gully and ravine. Dogs tracked them, baying on their trails; their footprints in the snow, bloody and stumbling, led their pursuers through the forest. At one time, one of the little German princelings gave great sport to his friends by organizing a hunt for these men as he would have organized a hunt for the wild boars. When the beaters overcame a Frenchman, they took his weapons and let him go, and then the princeling and his friends charged the unarmed man with levelled lance, and ran him through.

The Frenchmen spoiled this sport by a stubborn refusal to run before the horses. Robbed of their weapons, they stood erect and faced their foe and took the steel in their breasts, so that the princeling was furious, and those with him were shamed, and the sport was broken off....

Of such things as this was existence for these men....

But I have been unjust in failing, before this, to speak of the peasants who helped them. Word of this regiment had gone abroad through the forest and the mountains. And wherever they went, they were welcomed, and given food, and shelter, and clothed.... And the peasants brought recruits to them, and brought them warnings, and information. They made endurance possible....

It was the peasants, in the end, who brought the word to Jacques Fontaine that told him his hour had come to strike. They came and they said the great battle to the southward was rolling nearer every day. This was at the time, you understand, when we had begun to push the German back; it was at the time when he was giving way each time a little more easily than the time before. We advanced one mile today, two miles tomorrow, three the day after....

And the word of this was abroad among the peasants in that part of France and of Belgium which the German still held. They were fermenting, as though these rumors of approaching liberation had been yeast cast among them....

They came, and they told Jacques Fontaine. And Jacques Fontaine, and wry-necked Lupec, cast about them to find a task for their hands.

The Germans were making up their mind, at this time, to draw back to a new defensive line, where, they counted on being able to hold us at last. And they were withdrawing slowly, a little here, and a little there, and a little yonder, day by day. Behind them they left a ruined country, every house destroyed, every fruit tree cut off at the roots.... But they were going back and back....

There was one line of railroad, along which the trains were pounding, day by day; and this line ran north and south past the fringe of the forest and the mountains where Jacques Fontaine and his regiment were hiding. The regiment was scattered, groups of four men and five and six dwelt here and there among the ravines. But when Jacques Fontaine and Lupec had considered, and had secretly scouted back and forth, and had decided upon what they wished to do, they sent runners to gather the regiment together.

There was a spot where the railroad line which the Germans were burdening so heavily crossed a little stream. On the north bank of this stream, and overlooking the bridge which spanned it, there rose a rocky hillock; and this hillock was topped by one of those ancient, ruined chateaus which were the chief beauty of France before the war. On three sides, sheer precipices fell away from the walls of this old chateau; on the other side, the way of ascent was steep and hard.

A dozen men could hold this spot against an army, so long as cannon were not concerned in the affair. And Jacques Fontaine believed the Germans had other uses for their cannon at this time.

So he gathered his regiment, and drew them near the spot he had chosen, and waited his time to strike.

There was, you understand, a guard set about this bridge. But the guard was not strong, for a strong guard was not considered necessary. There were soldiers passing constantly, working slowly northward in the great retreat; and the long trains of stores and supplies crossed one after another, through every day.

It was like a river of men and of supplies; one of the rivers of war. And on a certain night, Jacques Fontaine dammed that river. His men swept down, they overwhelmed the guard upon the bridge.... And they fired the petard which the Germans had themselves laid, to destroy that bridge when their forces should be across. They fired the petard, and the bridge disappeared in a great flame of orange fire; and Jacques Fontaine and his men fell back swiftly into the night. When dawn came, they were all within the walls of the old chateau, high above the bridge, commanding it. And when the German pioneers swarmed out to repair the bridge, Jacques and his men began to fire.

They swept the pioneers away, for they were marksmen, all. They had been trained for four years never to waste a cartridge; that was the thrift of Jacques Fontaine. And they wasted none now. They did not use the two machine guns. Those were reserved to repel the attack that was sure to come. They used their rifles, and they strove to make every bullet take its toll.

A troop train came north in the morning, and the Germans flung the men against the old chateau, up the steep path. The Frenchmen slaughtered them; they built a barricade of German bodies before the very muzzles of their guns. And more trains came, and were held up by the destroyed bridge. The dammed river began to rise, and grumble, and fret and fume.... The pioneers, down by the ruined bridge, strove fruitlessly under the hail of balls.

The second day, the Germans brought guns to bear. At first, there was only shrapnel, and it spattered harmlessly. But after that came high explosive; and each great shell, detonating amid the ruined walls of the chateau, turned every stone and pebble into a missile that swept to right and left and all about in a storm of death.

When three hundred men are huddled in a narrow area, a single shell will kill half of them. This happened, on that day. An hour after the bombardment began, not a hundred men remained alive upon the top of the little peak; an hour after that, scarce fifty remained, ...

But while it was easy to kill the first hundred, and while it was not difficult to kill the second hundred, it was very hard indeed to complete the extermination of the force. A dozen men may live where a hundred would perish; and at noon, the riflemen in the ruins of the old chateau still kept the ruined bridge cleared of men and none could toil there.

By that time, the congestion on the southern bank of the river had become so great that that tide overflowed. And Jacques Fontaine, with a scarf bound around his chest to crush back the blood that was leaking from his great body, could see and hear the roar of the French guns, ten miles away, harassing the fleeing enemy....

By mid-afternoon, French shells began to fall amid the huddle on the southern bank of the river; and at nightfall, the Germans broke, there....

They broke; they poured across the stream, wading, swimming, drowning. They broke in flight to escape the merciless guns. And the French planes overhead till dark was fully fallen marked their going, and signalled the guns that harassed the fleeing men.

Before that, the Frenchmen had been silenced; the Frenchmen of Jacques Fontaine, in the old chateau. There were some few of them still unwounded; there were others who breathed and groaned as they slowly died. There were not enough of them to keep the bridge clear; but that duty no longer was required of them. They had held up a division, till the French armies could come up and rout it. And the Germans, flinging one last charge against the old chateau, drew off to the north and left Jacques Fontaine and his men, masters of the field.

VII

I was with the army that came up to that bridge at dawn, my friends. And I was one of those who saw, floating in the first light above the ruined walls of the old chateau, a flicker of glorious color.... A banner, floating there....

Our skirmishers were flung across, pressing northward. Our engineers swarmed upon the ruined bridge, rebuilding....

And one patrol of men turned aside, by the road that led toward the chateau. They went to solve this riddle, gentlemen. They went to discover who it was that had set there, the banner of France.

They went carefully, one man ahead, others behind. They feared a trap; they did not understand....

I was with them. We came, thus, to a turn in the road; and we rounded it, and we saw our advance man at the halt, upon his horse, in the road ahead.

Toward this man were marching, down the road from the chateau, four men.

One of these men was tall, and strong, and bulky. And there was a scarf about his chest; and the scarf was red. Of the others, two marched proudly; two who had come unscathed through that hell where the chateau had stood. And the fourth, though there was a smeared bandage about his face and eyes, so that he held to the arm of Jacques Fontaine; this fourth man, my friends, held his head as high as any; and his shoulders were erect, and his steps were firm.

It was this fourth man who bore, resting it against his hip and steadying it with his other hand, the flag. They came on, these four, heads high. And though they were haggard, and stained, and worn, the banner above them was unsullied and unsoiled....

As they came toward us, we could hear them singing, in cracked and hoarse voices. Singing those immortal words of Rouget de l’Isle....

When they came near our vidette, where he sat his horse so quietly, they halted. And I saw then that these men still wore the red trousers and the blue coats of their ancient uniforms, which they had preserved for this occasion through the years. And we were all very still as we listened so that we heard the vidette challenge, in a ringing voice:

“Qui vive?”

There was, for me, something splendidly symbolic in the scene. For to that challenge, those battered but unconquerable men gave answer with one voice, one word.

“Qui vive?” the vidette challenged.

And the four answered hoarsely: “France!”

THE RIGHT WHALE’S FLUKES

’Ware th’ sparm whale’s jaw, an’ th’ right whale’s flukes!

--_Old Whaling Maxim._

I

In the old whaling museum on Johnny Cake Hill, there is a big room with a fireplace where, on a rainy or stormy day, the whaling captains like to gather; and when storms or cold keep him from his rocking chair on the after deck of his Fannie, Cap’n Mark Brackett climbs the hill to the old museum and establishes himself in a chair before the fire. From the windows, you may look down a short, steep street to the piers where great heaps of empty oil casks, brown with the grime of years of service, block the way. Tied up to the piers there may be an old square-rigger, her top hamper removed, and empty so that she rides high in the water and curtsies to every gust; and you will see squat little auxiliary schooners preparing for the summer’s cruising off Hatteras; and beyond these again the eye reaches across the lovely harbor to Fair Haven, gleaming in the sun.

The museum is rich with the treasures of the sea; and this room where the captains like to gather is the central treasure-house. An enormous secretary of mahogany veneer stands against one wall; and in cases about the room you will find old ship’s papers bearing the names of presidents a hundred years dead, pie-crimpers carved from the solid heart of a whale’s tooth, a little chest made by one of the Pitcairn Island mutineers, canes fashioned from a shark’s backbone or the jawbone of the cachalot, enormous locks, half a dozen careful models of whaling craft with the last rope and spar in place, and the famous English frigate, in its glass case at one side.

I found Cap’n Brackett there one afternoon, in an old chair before the fire, his black pipe humming like a kettle, his stout body relaxed in comfortable ease. He had advised me to read “Moby Dick,” and had loaned me the book; and when I entered, he looked up, a welcoming twinkle in the keen old eyes that lurk behind their ambush of leathery wrinkles, and saw the book in my hand.

“Read it?” he asked, between puffs.

“End to end,” I assured him.

“A great book. A classic, I say.”

I nodded, and drew up a chair beside him, and opened the volume to glance again across its pages and to dip here and there into that splendid chronicle of the hunt for the great white whale. The old man watched me over his pipe, and I looked up once and caught his eye.

“He’s stretching it a bit, of course,” I suggested. “You would never meet the same whale twice, in all the wastes of the Seven Seas.”

The cap’n’s eyes gleamed faintly. “Why not?” he asked.

“It’s too much of a coincidence.”

“It happens.”

One certain method to provoke Cap’n Brackett to narration is to pretend incredulity. I smiled in a wary fashion, and said nothing.

“There was one whale I saw four times, myself,” he asserted.

“How do you know it was the same?”

“He was marked.... And the hand of Fate was in it, too.”

I turned the leaves of the book, and chuckled provokingly, watching covertly the captain’s countenance; and, as I expected, he began presently to tell the story that was in his mind. His gruff old voice ran quietly along; the fire puffed and flared as the wind whistled down the chimney, the snow flurried past the windows and hid the harbor below us. Cap’n Brackett’s voice droned on.

II

“You never heard of Eric Scarf,” the old man thoughtfully began. “Not more’n three or four men alive now that knew him. He were mate of the Thomas Pownal when I knew him; a big, straight, fiery man, powerful and strong. He came of some Northland breed, with a great shock of yellow hair, and eyes as blue as the sea; but he was not like most Norsemen in being slow of speech and dull of wit. Quick he was; quick to speak, and quick to think, and quick to act; quick to anger, quick to take hurt, and quick to know Joan for the one woman, when she began that v’y’ge on the Thomas Pownal.

“James Tobbey was the captain of the Pownal; Joan was his daughter. She was a laughing girl, always laughing; a child. Her hair was fine-spun and golden, and it curled. When the fog got into it, it kinked into ringlets as crisp as blubber scraps. You wanted to rub them in your hands, and hear them crinkle and crackle between your palms. And her voice, when she laughed, was the same way, crisp and clean and strong; and her eyes were brown. Give a girl light curly hair and dark brown eyes, and any man’s heart will skip a beat or so at seeing her.

“She used to be everywhere about the ship, always laughing; and little Jem Marvel forever hobbling at her heels. Jem was a baby, a little crippled baby, the son of a sister of Joan’s who had died when Jem was born; and Jem’s father was dead before that, although no one knew it till the Andrew Thomes came back without him, two years after.

“Thomes had been a hard, bitter man; and little Jem took after him. The baby was black, black hair, black eyes, a swart skin; and when he dragged his withered leg about the deck at Joan’s heels, his face worked and grimaced with spleen that was terrible to watch. Maybe six or seven he was then; and for all Joan tended him like a mother, I’ve known him to rip out at her the black oaths that would rot a grown man’s lips.

“Cap’n Tobbey kept his eyes away from the boy; but Joan loved the little thing. None but her could bear with him.

“Eric Scarf was the only man aboard that ever tried to win the baby. I’ve seen him work for weeks at some dinkus he was making for the boy, only to have Jem scorn it when it was done. He put six months of whittling into a little model of the Pownal, with every rope in place; and when he gave it to Jem at last, the boy smashed it on the deck, and stamped upon the splinters.

“Eric but laughed. The mate was a hard man with men, quick with them; but with the child he was as gentle as Joan herself.