Part 2

We scarcely noticed them, for we raced along with ever-increasing speed, because the night of late October was already closing rapidly in upon us. As the day advanced a mist almost wintry in character thickened around us like a shroud. Silence pervaded with still deeper melancholy all that countryside, which, although the barbarians had been expelled from it, still had memories of all those butcheries, ravings, outcries, and conflagrations.

In the midst of a forest, near a hamlet, of which nothing remained save fragments of calcined walls, there were two graves lying side by side. Near these I halted to look at a little girl of twelve years, quite alone there, arranging bunches of flowers sprinkled with water, some poor chrysanthemums from her ruined plot of garden, some wild flowers too, the last scabious of the season, gathered in that place of mourning.

"Were they friends of yours, my child, those two who are sleeping there?"

"Oh no, sir, but I know that they were Frenchmen; I saw them being buried. They were young, sir, and their moustaches were scarcely grown."

There was no inscription on these crosses, soon to be blown down by winter winds and to crumble away in the grass. Who were they? Sons of peasants, of simple citizens, of aristocrats? Who weeps for them? Is it a mother in skilfully fashioned draperies of crape? Is it a mother in the homely weeds of a peasant woman? Whichever it be, those who loved them will live and die without ever knowing that they lie mouldering there by the side of a lonely road on the northern boundary of France; without ever knowing that this kind little girl, whose own home lay desolate, brought them an offering of flowers one autumn evening, while with the advent of night a bitter cold was descending upon the forest which wrapped them round.

Farther on I came to a village, the headquarters of a general officer in command of an army corps. Here an officer joined me in my motor car, who undertook to guide me to one particular point of the vast battle front.

We drove on rapidly for another hour through a country without inhabitants. In the meantime we passed one of these long convoys of what were once motor-omnibuses in Paris, but have been converted since the war into slaughter-houses on wheels. Townspeople, men and women, sat there once, where now sides of beef, all red and raw, swing suspended from hooks. If we did not know that in those fields yonder there were hundreds of thousands of men to be fed we might well ask why such things were being carted in the midst of this deserted country through which we are hastening at top speed.

The day is waning rapidly, and a continuous rumbling of a storm begins to make itself heard, unchained seemingly on a level with the earth. For weeks now this same storm has thundered away without pause along a sinuous line stretching across France from east to west, a line on which daily, alas! new heaps of dead are piled up.

"Here we are," said my guide.

If I were not already familiar with the new characteristics wherewith the Germans have endued a battle front, I should believe, in spite of the incessant cannonade, that he had made a mistake, for at first sight there is no sign either of army or of soldiers. We are in a place of sinister aspect, a vast plain; the greyish ground is stripped of its turf and torn up; trees here and there are shattered more or less completely, as if by some cataclysm of thunderbolts or hailstones. There is no trace of human existence, not even the ruins of a village; nothing characteristic of any period, either of historical or even of geological development. Gazing into the distance at the far-flung forest skyline fading on all sides into the darkening mists of twilight, we might well believe ourselves to have reverted to a prehistoric epoch of the world's history.

"Here we are."

That means that it is time to hide our motor car under some trees or it will attract a rain of shells and endanger the lives of our chauffeurs, for in that misty forest opposite there are many wicked eyes watching us through wonderful binoculars, by whose aid they are as keen of sight as great birds of prey. To reach the firing-line, then, it is incumbent on us to proceed on foot.

How strange the ground looks! It is riddled with shell-holes, resembling enormous craters; in another place it is scarred and pierced and sown with pointed bullets, copper cartridge-cases, fragments of spiked helmets, and barbarian filth of other sorts. But in spite of its deserted appearance, this region is nevertheless thickly populated, only the inhabitants are no doubt troglodytes, for their dwellings, scattered about and invisible at first sight, are a kind of cave or molehill, half covered with branches and leaves. I had seen the same kind of architecture once upon a time on Easter Island, and the sight of these dwellings of men in this scenery of primeval forest completes our earlier impression of having leapt backwards into the abyss of time.

Of a truth, to force upon us such a reversion was a right Prussian artifice. War, which was once a gallant affair of parades in the sunshine, of beautiful uniforms and of music, war they have rendered a mean and ugly thing. They wage it like burrowing beasts, and obviously there was nothing left for us but to imitate them.

In the meantime here and there heads look out from the excavations to see who is coming. There is nothing prehistoric about these heads, any more than there is about the service-caps they are wearing; these are the faces of our own soldiers, with an air of health and good humour and of amusement at having to live there like rabbits. A sergeant comes up to us; he is as earthy as a mole that has not had time to clean itself, but he has a merry look of youth and gaiety.

"Take two or three men with you," I say to him, "and go and unpack my motor car, down there behind the trees. You will find a thousand packets of cigarettes and some picture-papers which some people in Paris have sent you to help to pass the time in the trenches."

What a pity that I cannot take back and show, as a thanksgiving to the kind donors, the smiles of satisfaction with which their gifts were welcomed.

Another mile or two have still to be covered on foot before we reach the firing-line. An icy wind blows from the forests opposite that are yet more deeply drowned in black mists, forests in the enemy's hands, where the counterfeit thunderstorm is grumbling. This plain with its miserable molehills is a dismal place in the twilight, and I marvel that they can be so gay, these dear soldiers of ours, in the midst of the desolation surrounding them.

I cross this piece of ground, riddled with holes; the tempest of shot has spared here and there a tuft of grass, a little moss, a poor flower. The first place I reach is a line of defence in course of construction, which will be the second line of defence, to meet the improbable event of the first line, which lies farther ahead, having to be abandoned. Our soldiers are working like navvies with shovels and picks in their hands. They are all resolute and happy, anxious to finish their work, and it will be formidable indeed, surrounded as it is with most deadly ambushes. It was the Germans, I admit, whose scheming, evil brains devised this whole system of galleries and snares; but we, more subtle and alert than they, have, in a few days, equalled them, if we have not beaten them, at their own game.

A mile farther on is the first line. It is full of soldiers, for this is the trench that must withstand the shock of the barbarians' onset; day and night it is always ready to bristle with rifles, and they who hold the trench, gone to earth scarcely for a moment, know that they may expect at any minute the daily shower of shells. Then heads, rash enough to show themselves above the parapet, will be shot away, breasts shattered, entrails torn. They know, too, that they must be prepared to encounter at any unforeseen hour, in the pale sunlight or in the blackness of midnight, onslaughts of those barbarians with whom the forest opposite still swarms. They know how they will come on at a run, with shouts intended to terrify them, linked arm in arm into one infuriated mass, and how they will find means, as ever, to do much harm before death overtakes them entangled in our barbed wire. All this they know, for they have already seen it, but nevertheless they smile a serious, dignified smile. They have been nearly a week in this trench, waiting to be relieved, and they make no complaints.

"We are well fed," they say, "we eat when we are hungry. As long as it does not rain we keep ourselves warm at night in our fox-holes with good thick blankets. But not all of us yet have woollen underclothing for the winter, and we shall need it soon. When you go back to Paris, Colonel, perhaps you will be so kind as to bring this to the notice of Government and of all the ladies too, who are working for us."

("Colonel"--the soldiers have no other title for officers with five rows of gold braid. On the last expedition to China I had already been called colonel, but I did not expect, alas! that I should be called so again during a war on the soil of France.)

These men who are talking to me at the edge of, or actually in, the trench belong to the most diverse social grades. Some were leisured dandies, some artisans, some day labourers, and there are even some who wear their caps at too rakish an angle and whose language smacks of the ring, into whose past it is better not to pry too curiously. Yet they have become not only good soldiers, but good men, for this war, while it has drawn us closer together, has at the same time purified us and ennobled us. This benefit at least the Germans will, involuntarily, have bestowed upon us, and indeed it is worth the trouble. Moreover our soldiers all know to-day why they are fighting, and therein lies their supreme strength. Their indignation will inspire them till their latest breath.

"When you have seen," said two young Breton peasants to me, "when you have seen with your own eyes what these brutes do in the villages they pass through, it is natural, is it not, to give your life to try to prevent them from doing as much in your own home?"

The cannonade roared an accompaniment in its deep, unceasing bass to this ingenuous statement.

Now this is the spirit that prevails inexhaustibly from one end of the fighting-line to the other. Everywhere there is the same determination and courage. Whether here or there, a talk with any of these soldiers is equally reassuring, and calls forth the same admiration.

But it is strange to reflect that in this twentieth century of ours, in order to protect ourselves from barbarism and horror, we have had to establish trenches such as these, in double and treble lines, crossing our dear country from east to west along an unbroken front of hundreds of miles, like a kind of Great Wall of China. But a hundred times more formidable than the original wall, the defence of the Mongolians, is this wall of ours, a wall practically subterranean, which winds along stealthily, manned by all the heroic youth of France, ever on the alert, ever in the midst of bloodshed.

The twilight this evening, under the sullen sky, lingers sadly, and will not come to an end. It appeared to me to begin two hours ago, and yet it is still light enough to see. Before us, distinguishable as yet to sight or imagination, lie two sections of a forest, unfolding itself beyond range of vision, the contours of its more distant section almost lost in darkness. Colder still grows the wind, and my heart contracts with the still more painful impression of a backward plunge, without shelter and without refuge, into primeval barbarism.

"Every evening at this hour, Colonel, for the last week, we have had our little shower of shells. If you have time to stay a short while you will see how quickly they fire and almost without aiming."

As for time, well, I have really hardly any to spare, and, besides, I have had other opportunities of observing how quickly they fire "almost without aiming." Sometimes it might be mistaken for a display of fireworks, and it is to be supposed that they have more projectiles than they know what to do with. Nevertheless I shall be delighted to stay a few minutes longer and to witness the performance again in their company.

Ah! to be sure, a kind of whirring in the air like the flight of partridges--partridges travelling along very fast on metal wings. This is a change for us from the muffled voice of the cannonade we heard just before; it is now beginning to come in our direction. But it is much too high and much too far to the left--so much too far to the left that they surely cannot be aiming at us; they cannot be quite so stupid. Nevertheless we stop talking and listen with our ears pricked--a dozen shells, and then no more.

"They have finished," the men tell me then; "their hour is over now, and it was for our comrades down there. You have no luck, Colonel; this is the very first time that it was not we who caught it, and, besides, you would think they were tired this evening, the Boches."

It is dark and I ought to be far away. Moreover, they are all going to sleep, for obviously they cannot risk showing a light; cigarettes are the limit of indulgence. I shake hands with a whole line of soldiers and leave them asleep, poor children of France, in their dormitory, which in the silence and darkness has grown as dismal as a long, common grave in a cemetery.

VI

THE PHANTOM BASILICA

_October, 1914._

To gaze upon her, our legendary and wonderful basilica of France, to bid her a last farewell before she should crumble away to her inevitable downfall, I had ordered a _detour_ of two hours in my service motor car at the end of some special duty from which I was returning.

The October morning was misty and cold. The hillsides of Champagne were deserted that day, and their vineyards with dark brown leaves, wet with rain, seemed to be wrapped completely in a kind of shining fleece. We had also passed through a forest, keeping our eyes open and our weapons ready in case of a meeting with Uhlan marauders.

At last, far away in the fog, uplifting all its great height above a sprinkling of reddish squares, doubtless the roofs of houses, we saw the form of a mighty church. This was evidently the basilica.

At the entrance to Rheims there are defences of all kinds: stone barriers, trenches, _chevaux de frise_, sentinels with crossed bayonets. To gain admission it is not sufficient to be in uniform and military accoutrements; explanations have to be made and the countersign given.

In the great city where I am a stranger, I have to ask my way to the cathedral, for it is no longer in sight. Its lofty grey silhouette, which, viewed from afar, dominated everything so imposingly, as a castle of giants would dominate the houses of dwarfs, now seems to have crouched down to hide itself.

"To get to the cathedral," people reply, "you must first turn to the right over there, and then to the left, and then to the right, etc."

And my motor car plunges into the crowded streets. There are many soldiers, regiments on the march, motor-ambulances in single file, but there are many ordinary footfarers, too, unconcerned as if nothing were happening, and there are even many well-dressed women, with prayer-books in their hands, in honour of Sunday.

At a street-crossing there is a gathering of people in front of a house whose walls bear signs of recent damage, the reason being that a shell has just fallen there. It is just one of their little brutal jests, so to speak; we understand the situation, look you; it is a simple pastime, just a matter of killing a few persons, on a Sunday morning for choice, because there are more people in the streets on Sunday mornings. But it seems, indeed, as if this town had reconciled itself to its lot, to live its life watched by the remorseless binoculars, under the fire of savages lurking on the neighbouring hillside. The wayfarers stop for a moment to look at the walls and the marks made by the shell-bursts, and then they quietly continue their Sunday walk. This time, we are told, it is women and little girls who lie weltering in their blood, victims of that amiable peasantry. We hear about it, and then think no more of the matter, as if it were of the smallest importance in times such as these.

This quarter of the town is now deserted. Houses are closed; a silence as of mourning prevails. And at the far end of a street appear the tall grey gates, the lofty pointed arches with their marvellous carvings and the soaring towers. There is no sound; there is not a living soul in the square where the phantom basilica still stands in majesty, where the wind blows cold and the sky is dark.

The basilica of Rheims still keeps its place as if by miracle, but so riddled and rent it is, that it seems ready to collapse at the slightest shock. It gives the impression of a huge mummy, still erect and majestic, but which the least touch would turn into ashes. The ground is strewn with its precious fragments. It has been hastily enclosed with a hoarding of white wood, and within its bounds lies, in little heaps, its consecrated dust, fragments of stucco, shivered panes of glass, heads of angels, clasped hands of saints, male and female. The calcined stone-work of the tower on the left, from top to bottom, has assumed a strange colour like that of baked flesh, and the saints, still standing upright in rank on the cornices, have been decorticated, as it were, by fire. They have no longer either faces or fingers, yet, still retaining their human form, they resemble corpses ranged in rows, their contours but faintly defined under a kind of reddish shroud.

We make a circuit of the square without meeting anyone, and the hoarding which isolates the fragile, still wonderful phantom is everywhere firmly closed.

As for the old palace attached to the basilica, the episcopal palace where the kings of France were wont to repose on the day of their coronation, it is nothing more than a ruin, without windows or roof, blackened all over by tongues of flame.

What a peerless jewel was this church, more beautiful even than _Notre-Dame de Paris_, more open to the light, more ethereal, more soaringly uplifted with its columns like long reeds, astonishingly fragile considering the weight they bear, a miracle of the religious art of France, a masterpiece which the faith of our ancestors had wakened into being in all its mystic purity before the sensual ponderousness of that which we have agreed to call the Renaissance had come to us from Italy, materialising and spoiling all. Oh, how gross, how cowardly, how imbecile was the brutality of those who fired those volleys of scrap-iron with full force against tracery of such delicacy, that had stayed aloft in the air for centuries in confidence, no battles, no invasions, no tempests ever daring to assail its beauty.

That great, closed house yonder in the square must be the archbishop's palace. I venture to ring at the door and request the privilege of entering the church.

"His Eminence," I am told, "is at Mass, but would soon return, if I would wait."

And while I am waiting, the priest, who acts as my host, tells me the history of the burning of the episcopal palace.

"First of all they sprinkled the roofs with I know not what diabolical preparation; then, when they threw their incendiary bombs, the woodwork burnt like straw, and everywhere you saw jets of green flame which burned with a noise like that of fireworks."

Indeed the barbarians had long prepared with studied foresight this deed of sacrilege, in spite of their idiotically absurd pretexts and their shameless denials. That which they had desired to destroy here was the very heart of ancient France, impelled as much by some superstitious fancy as by their own brutal instincts, and upon this task they bent their whole energy, while in the rest of the town nothing else, or almost nothing, suffered damage.

"Could no attempt be made," I ask, "to replace the burnt roof of the basilica, to cover over as soon as possible these arches, which will not otherwise withstand the ravages of next winter?"

"Undoubtedly," he replies, "there is a risk that at the first falls of snow, the first showers of rain, all this will crumble to ruins, more especially as the calcined stones have lost their power of resistance. But we cannot even attempt to preserve them a little, for the Germans do not let us out of their sight. It is the cathedral, always the cathedral, that they watch through their field-glasses, and as soon as a single person appears in the bell turret of a tower the rain of shells begins again. No, there is nothing to be done. It must be left to the grace of God."

On his return, His Eminence graciously provides me with a guide, who has the keys of the hoarding, and at last I penetrate into the ruins of the basilica, into the nave, which, being stripped bare, appears the loftier and vaster for it.

It is cold there and sad enough for tears. It is perhaps this unexpected chill, a chill far more piercing than that of the world without, which at first grips you and disconcerts you. Instead of the somewhat heavy perfume that generally hangs about old basilicas, smoke of so much incense burned there, emanations of so many biers blessed by the priests, of so many generations who have hastened there to wrestle and pray--instead of this, there is a damp, icy wind which whistles through crevices in the walls, through broken windows and gaps in the vaults. Towards those vaults up yonder, pierced here and there by shrapnel, the eyes are raised, immediately, instinctively, to gaze at them. The sight is led up towards them, as it were, by all those columns that jut out, shooting aloft in sheaves, for their support. They have flying curves, these vaults, of exquisite grace, so designed, it seems, that they may not hinder prayers in their upward flight, nor force back to earth a gaze that aims at heaven. One never grows tired of bending the head backwards to gaze at them, those sacred vaults hastening to destruction. And then high up, too, quite high up, throughout the whole length of the nave, is the long succession of those almost ethereal pointed arches which support the vaults and arches, alike, yet not rigidly uniform, and so harmonious, despite their elaborate carving, that they give rest to the eye that follows them upwards in their soaring perspective. These vast ceilings of stone are so airy in appearance, and moreover so distant, that they do not oppress or confine the spirit. Indeed they seem freed from all heaviness, almost insubstantial.

Moreover, it is wiser to move on under that roof with head turned upward and not to watch too closely where the feet may fall, for that pavement, reverberating rather sadly, has been sullied and blackened by charred human flesh. It is known that on the day of the conflagration the church was full of wounded Germans lying on straw mattresses, which caught fire, and a scene of horror ensued, worthy of a vision of Dante; all these beings, their green wounds scorched by the flames, dragged themselves along screaming, on red stumps, trying to win through doors too narrow. Renowned, too, is the heroism of those stretcher-bearers, priests and nuns, who risked their lives in the midst of falling bombs in their attempt to save these unhappy wretches, whom their own German brothers had not even thought to spare. Yet they did not succeed in saving all; some remained and were burnt to death in the nave, leaving unseemly clots of blood on the sacred flagstones, where formerly processions of kings and queens had slowly trailed their ermine mantles to the sound of great organs and plain-song.