Part 2

Coco looked round for François, who should have been beside him. There he was, close by, grinning. He called out something to keep up Coco’s courage, but in that inferno Coco couldn’t hear a word. Then, instantly, there was a gigantic explosion; and when Coco rose again, he looked—he grew numb. There was François on his back—with both legs queerly bent in an impossible position. With a sickening wave of nausea Coco saw that both the boy’s legs were shockingly crushed, all but torn off, and his red pantaloons were soaking in blood. François’s face was horrible now; his eyes were shining wildly. Coco, shrinking with horror, managed to crawl toward him....

In the hospital at Toulouse, when Coco told me this, lying in his cot, he shrank convulsively into himself with horror, just as he must have recoiled, I fancy, that day. He wouldn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed on the window. Coco told me then that François’s legs were torn “quite off”—he was sure of it; but I imagine that, in his agony of horror, Coco must have been mistaken, or François would have bled to death very quickly. Coco says he lived for nearly three-quarters of an hour. At any rate, his chum was done for, and suffering torments unspeakable.

“He just looked at me and begged me to kill him,” said Coco, his eyes still on the window. “He said”—Coco could hardly speak now—“he said if—I was his friend—I’d finish him—so he wouldn’t suffer. There was such a terrible noise of the shells bursting that I couldn’t quite hear at first— I had to hold my head close to get what he said.... He said—if he had helped me, ever—now was my chance to be his friend ... and put him out of his misery....”

We were silent for a while. I was looking at him, getting up my courage to ask a question. Finally I dared. I simply _had_ to ask it:

“_Did_ you do it, Coco?”

The tears poured into Coco’s eyes now. He shook his head slowly, without a word.

“Do you regret not having—done what he wanted, Coco?”

Coco said simply, “I don’t know. _I_ would have wanted to die quickly. Perhaps as his friend I ought to have done it. But I am a good Catholic, you know, m’sieur; and I was taught that it is a sin to take human life.” Quite naturally he added: “And yet I suppose I have killed a lot of Germans.” He shook his head wearily. “I can’t understand it. I must leave it for the church to decide. I did the best I could....”

VIII

At last he turned and looked at me with an expression that made me feel guilty enough at having asked. “But that isn’t all, m’sieur; I haven’t told you the worst part yet. Last week his father—François’s father—came here to see me. He asked me if I knew anything about François—how he died. What could I say? Of course I couldn’t tell him. I saw him fall—that’s all I said. And I was glad, then, that I hadn’t done it.... No, I can’t talk about it any more, m’sieur. Don’t ask me to, please!”

IX

For two hours the Twentieth Regiment endured the storm of shell. To advance a regiment of infantry like that without artillery support was surely an incredible piece of criminal stupidity. Some one had blundered. But there were many blunders in those early days of the campaign, and the truth hasn’t all come out even yet.

One interesting fact, however, did come out; although Coco didn’t hear of it for several days. It was a piece of sublime sentimentality impossible in any other than a French army; quite consistent with the character of the romantic, high-spirited colonel who had orated so grandiloquently at the Toulouse railway station. The night before the battle of Bertrix, the colonel had done a strange thing; he had, in the presence of his staff, burned the regimental colors. The enemy was in countless force against him. His Gallic sense of honor, when he was ordered to attack an impregnable position, told him that there was only one thing to do. He must go forward with his men, and die—but the flag must not be captured.

And so, go forward and die he did, that gallant old man. As Coco lay, under that August sun, in the rain of bursting shells, he heard a bugle ring out on the left flank. Four companies rose to their feet and charged that murderous wood. At their head the colonel ran, waving his sword—yes, just like the battle pictures, Coco swears—ran for a few hundred yards toward his inevitable death, and dropped—with his honor unsullied. Behind him his men dropped, too, in appalling numbers—dropped singly and in bunches till they faltered, stopped, then fell back.

At this, the whistles blew at last for the general retreat.

It was high time; for, at the sight of this destruction all over the field, men had already begun to jump up and run toward the rear. Now they all ran—everybody ran—with the shells and shrapnel chasing them. They threw away their knapsacks, they threw away their guns, they ran screaming and crying like children.

Coco threw away his knapsack and musette, too, but kept his rifle as he ran, making for a shelter in the woods on the other side of the road. “You’ve no idea how much worse they were, those shells; when I had turned my back I expected to be hit every moment. My spine fairly cringed.” The remnants of the colonels four companies were pulled together and attempted to cover the retreat. But the regiment had stampeded. The officers shouted and swore, they struck men with their swords, some were even shot, but nothing could stop the rout.

X

It was more than a rout, it was a panic. Into the wood the shells followed them—there seemed to be no escape. Every moment they expected to see the uhlans charging them down. Dodging this way, that way, deafened, shouting over here—over there—the shells dropping to right, to left, as if from the clouds, the men, breathless, exhausted, poured out upon a road, to stagger back almost run over by a clattering battery of guns galloping, too late, galloping toward the firing line. They stopped to pant, and rest; and then ran on.

In half an hour they were out of the range of the German artillery, and they halted exhausted, shamefaced, sick with terror and despair. The officers, too heartbroken even to swear at them, reformed their men with difficulty, and, herding them like frightened sheep, fell back in something like order till they came upon a line of trenches that had been occupied by the Germans.

The pits were filled instantly, and the men were beginning to regain their calmness and courage, when from a near-by hill the terrifying cannonade recommenced. The butchery recommenced—the explosions, and the screams.

Out of the trenches came all that were left alive, and there was no stopping the army now, till, hurrying all night long without food and rest, demoralized, it found its way back to Mouzon. Here the Seventeenth Corps was pulled together for a hasty review. The roll call showed that in Coco’s regiment there were 1,443 dead, wounded, or missing—fully one-third of its strength gone.

The men were in a fury of disappointment and rage against the generals who had been responsible for the massacre. Where was the artillery? Where were the stretcher bearers? Where were the ambulances and surgeons? Not one did Coco see during the battle, after the battle—nor even during that whole terrible retreat.

And it wasn’t at Mouzon alone that there was wondering, complaining, raging at the failure of the campaign. On the left wing the British expeditionary force, hot with rage at not being supported by General Percin, was falling back from defeat at Mons to pursuit at Bavay—and it was not yet out of danger. On the right, the Fifteenth Corps (fat cowards of the Midi) had turned tail and run in Lorraine. Oh, there was something rotten somewhere. Paris was wild. The Government was shuffled, and the President dealt out a new hand—his high trump was Millerand, new Minister of War, but his right bower was Joffre, commander in chief, of whom all the world was soon to hear. To Coco at Mouzon, the news came that the Fourth Army was to be commanded by General de Langle de Carry. Little did Coco care who commanded it. Much more important than that was that he would get one night’s good sleep on a sack of straw.

By this time the boy had begun to realize what war meant. That night he wrote to his aunt: “I have received my baptism of fire, but I am unhurt. It was terrible. Don’t be frightened, and be sure and write to my mother that you have had good news from me.” He signed the post card for the first time “Georges.” Coco had begun to be a man.

If it has ever been your lot to go without having your clothes off for two weeks—to march through dust and mud in them, sleep in them, fight in them, run in them—then you’ll understand how Georges Cucurou longed for a swim in the river Meuse—to bathe his poor, aching blistered feet. But no—up and out again at six o’clock next morning! Off on the road toward Belgium again. A counter-attack. All day and all night they marched.

XI

There was no singing, this time. The Twentieth was smarting with the shame of its defeat; it was savage for revenge; but, held in reserve behind the battle line, it had to wait listening to the booming cannon and the crackle of machine guns for an impatient hour—then they were ordered back to Mouzon.

At Mouzon, news of a fresh defeat awaited them. The town was now distraught, terror-stricken by the ever-nearing, ever-increasing thunder of the German cannonade. When Georges arrived at midnight, almost every house was lighted. The frenzied inhabitants were packing up or hiding their belongings, ready to fly. The “Bosches” were coming!

At dawn, Georges, sleeping by the road-side, was awakened to see a pathetic procession of refugees hurrying away to safety. Pathetic? It was tragic, comic, grotesque, sublime! Everyone was dressed in his best clothes; everyone carried bundles, carried hens, carried trunks, carried the Lord knows what—and the memories of 1870 to boot! Wagon after wagon passed, piled high with furniture, bags, boxes, baskets, and provisions, with women and children atop, and cows tied on behind. Whole families—three generations—trudged on foot, men and women and children, children, children, children, and weeping old grandmothers trundled along in wheelbarrows.

XII

It was a bitter sight for Georges, burning to defend his country. What was the French army good for, anyway, if it couldn’t protect this pretty, innocent little town, so charmingly scattered over the wooded heights of the Meuse? But Mouzon was doomed. Already the sappers with wires and sticks of melinite were blowing up the picturesque old stone bridge.

All next day Georges’s regiment, hidden in the woods, watched the shelling of the town; all next night, hungry, soaked with rain, enraged, they saw it burn, house by house, till at last the flames licked up the belfry of the church. That was the way they defended Mouzon.

Another day; another night of drenching rain in those wretched sopping woods, while the German guns boomed all about them. Georges and two other boys succeeded in building a dirty little shelter of branches covered with wet straw, and they crawled underneath. Water-soaked, the clumsy thing collapsed on top of them in the middle of the night; but, heavy with soldiers’ sleep, it took more than that to wake them. In the morning, however, a shell bursting only a few yards away did succeed in bringing them stumbling out from under the soggy mass—to find to their amazement that their regiment had already departed!

XIII

The shells began to fall thicker and faster; the Germans were indubitably near at hand. But where the devil was the regiment? There was no knowing, except that it was pretty sure to be getting away from those harrying shells. Chilled, the boys ran through the dripping woods till they came to a clearing. Here, looking down, they saw the Germans fording the Meuse! But not without trouble; a French battery had got their range, and was playing red havoc with them, slinging shell after shell of well-aimed shrapnel. By dozens they melted away under the fire, and the water was full of bobbing corpses drifting downstream.

“We just burst out laughing,” said Georges. “We couldn’t help it. Not that it was so funny to see men killed like that by the hundreds, but, after all _we_ had gone through—after the ghastly way we had been butchered at Bertrix, it really did me good to see those ‘Bosches’ suffering themselves at last!”

He didn’t laugh long. With the German reckless sacrifice of life, column after column was thrown into the river, until more and more got across. It was time for the boys to be moving now, and they set out toward the westward, tramped all day, eating nothing but the raw beets they dug up in the fields, and finally found the Seventeenth Corps at Raucourt.

They were just in time to join their regiment as it was ordered forward seven more miles for a new engagement. There, protected by the French batteries, they bivouacked. Glad enough was Georges of a chance to sleep. No fear of the coming battle could keep him awake by this time.

At dawn, while the vigilant searchlights were still playing across the opposite hillside, the French guns started firing, and, without breakfast, Georges’s battalion was ordered forward. In half an hour the enemy was discovered half a mile away. In the valley between opposite hills the shells were screeching now over their heads—from the French “75’s” the sound of the whizzing projectiles came high and dry like buzz saws—they burst with the awful battering of near-by thunder. The German “_marmites_” snorted through the air, and exploded with a deeper, more terrible crash. The regiment halted, and was deployed in four ranks—the first two lying on the ground, the third and fourth kneeling.

The men were mostly quite cool, but Georges confessed that he himself had hard work controlling his nerves while he waited for that attack. In ten minutes the enemy appeared from behind rising ground and came on—a long, gray-black line of thousands and thousands of men, a _thick_ line, swarming, multitudinous, nearer and nearer.

“Load!” coolly commanded the captains; “500 meters. Ready, now—_fire!_” Their salvo rang out. The heavy rows of Germans seemed to hesitate for a moment; but no, they were only stopping to fire. There came a sudden whistling in the air all about and the bullets flew—“for a terribly long minute,” as Georges described it—then the enemy came on again, and kept on coming, in a broad, thick wave, company after company. And only a battalion of four companies to resist them! Georges fired without aiming. What was the use of aiming at that horde of men? The boys jumped to their feet, fired again and again, and then, as their comrades dropped about them everywhere, they began to retreat, some picking up the wounded as they went. At first they withdrew in order, turning back to fire another volley; but when the Germans fixed their bayonets and came at them on the double-quick, the French broke, and ran for it, helter-skelter, this way and that, in a second rout, even worse than the first.

Georges ran with the rest, and the shrapnel followed him, killing men on either hand, in front, behind. Then, over the rise, came the uhlans, yelling, galloping in to cut them up. Looking back, Georges saw the cavalry sabering and lancing, and he ran like a deer for his life, ran up the hillside, ran into the woods. He ran for at least a mile with the thunder of the cannon still in his ears. When, finally, he stopped to take breath, it was only a fragment of his company that he found near him—some ten or eleven men, among them a sergeant. Where were the others? Nobody knew. The regiment, demoralized, had split up into numberless terrified detachments, and wandered all over the countryside. Such was the inglorious battle of Raucourt. Of the week following Georges could give no consecutive account. He remembers only that he and the others tramped and tramped for miles inquiring of peasants, gendarmes, of the stragglers, everyone, everywhere, the whereabouts of the Twentieth Regiment. They climbed over hills, they rested in little deserted villages where every house was gutted of furniture, doors open, rooms littered, and here and there a starved cat or two, lean and wild. The roads were alive with refugees, French and Belgian, all plodding mournfully toward the south, dreary processions of wagons and cattle and weeping women, children, and stony-eyed, sulky men. No, nobody had seen the Twentieth Regiment.

They tramped from Villers to Malmy, and, apparently (Georges isn’t quite sure where they _did_ go), from Malmy to Maire. At Le Vivier, or perhaps it was Mont Dieu, they found an infantry regiment, but it was not their own. The Twentieth should be down Vouziers way, said the officers. So they trudged on.

More and more stray men had joined Georges’s party. Few of them had knapsacks, some didn’t even have guns. Hats of all kinds; costumes—promiscuous but all disheveled. They were, by this time, a villainously whiskered lot—ragged, dirty, weary, famished, sullen, desperate—without discipline, without leaders. Occasionally, in some ransacked village they found stale bread or vegetables that they cooked in the woods; whatever else they ate was begged from the few frightened peasants that still remained on their farms.

There was one village, however, that Georges did remember, and that was Les Alleux. There he slept in an actual bed. How Les Alleux happened to be abandoned with all its houses undisturbed—with the clocks still going and the furniture in place, even the beds made up—Georges doesn’t know. Some sudden alarm had evidently caused the inhabitants to fly at a moment’s notice. What mainly interested him was that they had left their barnyards full of poultry.

Les Alleux was almost gay. There were some hundred soldiers collected there, now; all tatterdemalion stragglers from the rout, making the most of their unexpected good luck. There was almost everything to eat except bread. Georges fairly gorged himself on hot roast chicken and cheese, made merry with the rabble of soldiery, sang, smoked, and then slept for twelve solid hours, with his boots off on a delectable feather bed _and sheets_. And, for once, without the din of cannon in his ears.

This, however, was hardly the way to save his country. Georges’s conscience and the booming of German guns awoke him to his duty next morning. The mob scattered, fleeing south in a hurry. Georges’s party, he found when they started, had grown smaller. “I don’t know whether or not I ought to mention this detail,” he told me, “but at least it will show that I wasn’t quite so bad as the rest. But I think some of the boys found citizens clothes in the houses there at Les Alleux, and got away in them. At any rate, they didn’t come along with us.”

His Odyssey ended at a village called Pauvres on the highroad between Rethel and Vouziers. Here they found what was left of the Twentieth Regiment, and Georges was welcomed like one from the dead. All received new rifles and accoutrements, and the regiment was reorganized. Of its three battalions there remained hardly enough to form two—a third was made up of waifs and strays from other divisions.

XIV

The Twentieth Regiment now contained a sad and sorry lot of men, weary, discouraged, shamefaced, and sullen at their double defeat. But when they heard that the army was to retreat still further, and abandon all this rich, flourishing northern country to the invaders without a blow—why, it was incredible! What was the matter? Where were their reënforcements? Only fifteen days ago they had been marching enthusiastically up through the lovely forest of Argonne. Now they were going to retreat into Champagne. But they were too busy with preparations to spend much time sulking. The officers declared that they would lead their men to victory yet. So the retreat commenced to the booming accompaniment of the threatening German artillery.

Little did Georges know of cool old General Joffre and his desperate plans. Little did he imagine that the endless falling back, falling back, falling back through Champagne was to go down into history as a masterpiece of Fabian strategy. All he understood of that campaign was—day after day of retreating along the hard white roads, then into the fields and digging trenches; night after night standing ready in those clayey shoulder-deep holes, waiting for an attack, while the first line of the rear guard fought constantly with the enemy. So they did their best to hold back the flood of invaders. So they struggled with the booming cannon ever following them. It was hard, sour work! The men, exhausted with the digging and the marching and the watching, with their few hours’ sleep constantly interrupted by alarms, trudged hopelessly southward, too glum to talk. Constantly the officers encouraged them—“Just to that hill there, men! Come on!” but it took more than their optimism to restore the courage of the troops. Man after man stopped, absolutely incapable of going further, and slumped down by the side of the road only to be forced on, kicked on again by the corps of gendarmes which followed the march. If the column halted for a minute, half the men fell instantly asleep as they stood.

The minute the trenches were dug they had to prepare to receive the enemy. Mighty little food these days, and no fresh meat. Even water was scarce, as the men were forbidden to drink of springs till they had been inspected. Georges’s regiment was, for the most part of the retreat, held in the second line of the rear guard, and he was, therefore, in but one actual engagement. In the general campaign it was called, probably, only “a sharp skirmish.” But, to Georges, it was one of those crises when life says: “Come! Move up a notch!”

“I was on sentry duty at the end of the trench where the company was sleeping,” said Georges. “On Tuesday, the 2nd of September it was, near Souain. I knew everyone’s life depended on me, and it was a terrible strain. You know the enemy was always right on our heels, night and day. M’sieu, I was just all eyes, searching everywhere through the dark. It must have been about two in the morning, when I thought I saw something moving on the opposite hillside. At first I wasn’t quite sure. I had to pull my eyes away deliberately, and rest them on something else—you know how your eyes get when you stare too hard and too long; but then, when I looked again quickly, I was sure. Yes, the ‘Bosches’ were coming! It was horrible. I saw them creeping from one bush to another like snakes.

“I kicked the sergeant who was snoring at my feet and pointed. Instantly all our men were quietly awakened. My lieutenant told me to stay where I was and pretend not to see anything; but to choose my man and be ready to fire. Yes, monsieur; it was a ticklish job; I felt rather queer, I confess. I knew that I would be the very first one to be shot at. That was about the longest fifteen minutes I ever spent.

“Well, we let them crawl up, crawl up, to within a hundred meters and then just as they all jumped to their feet, the lieutenant shouted: ‘Fire at will!’ I was ready for the foremost man, and I let him have it right through the forehead. Here is his helmet, monsieur; see that hole?”

In the hospital at Toulouse, while I listened to his story, he held up a black helmet, trimmed with brass—with a spiked top. It had never left him since that day.

Yes, I saw that hole—the hole where he had killed his man. But, when I saw him look at that German helmet, there was an expression on his face that baffled me. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that Coco wasn’t there—Coco, with the lead pencil! No, this was a new person now on that bed in front of me. It was Georges Cucurou—and he would never be a boy again!

XV