Part 3

During that terrible retreat, Georges, had been a part of a working, fighting machine, tried to his utmost in mind and body. He had been hammered, hammered into shape. Hunger and fatigue had hardened him. Every day his nerves had been getting more tough and strong. If his duty consisted of retreating, digging, sleeping three or four hours a day, going without meat and often Without water or wine, he could do it.

On a post card, scrawled in haste from somewhere (no postmark, no date, no indication of any locality being permitted), he wrote to his aunt:

DEAR AUNT: _If we keep on retreating like this, we may perhaps get to Paris. I should be very glad to see you, of course, but I hope not. There must soon be an end of all this digging and digging, and victory will be ours. I am afraid you wouldn’t recognize your Georges._

Indeed, she wouldn’t have recognized him, but, not only because for weeks he had the dirt caked in his hands and hair and ears, and his uniform hung on him in rags, but partly too because already in his face there was beginning to show something more unlike the old Coco we had known than all that change in his outward self could make him. He had learned patience, perseverance, caution, confidence in his officers, and faith in the ultimate victory. He was uplifted by that great wave of high idealism that was transforming France.

Why that steady retreat, further and further south? Georges and Georges’s company, now that they were tempered by experience, now that they were raging to attack, couldn’t understand. But still they retreated and retreated. Back to Suippes they came.

It was a queer entrance that regiment made into Suippes. On the road, they had overtaken a troop of refugees who, utterly exhausted, could travel no further. The peasants had a panic of alarm at sight of the column, thinking that the Germans were already upon them. It was hard work reassuring them; and it ended in a comedy, the soldiers taking a hand at the migration. Old women were mounted in the handcarts they had been trying to pull and were given a ride into town. Soldiers unharnessed the donkeys and put the children on their backs. They pushed at the wagons, they helped along the graybeards, they carried babies in their arms. Georges, I think, must have begun to realize that he had grown up when he, a veteran now, marched into Suippes, carrying a big basket for a lad of fifteen who looked up to his soldier protector admiringly, and called him “M’sieu.”

No Frenchman will ever forget that dreadful first week of September, 1914. Every day the Germans grew nearer Paris, every day their cowardly aeroplanes sailed over the capital and dropped their futile threats. What was the French army doing? We hoped they were merely luring the enemy toward the forts of Paris where the big guns could smash them. But could the army hold the enemy back, even with that assistance? Paris was all nervous apprehension. Then that astounding news—the German army, almost within striking distance, was swerving to the southeast! What did it mean?

To Georges Cucurou, retreating before those hammering, hammering guns, that quick change in direction was quite as mysterious. From Suippes his regiment, without stopping to entrench now, marching day and night, instead of keeping on toward Paris, swung sharply to the east, along the road to Ste. Menehould. Then, as suddenly, they turned back again into Châlons.

Heavy cannonading was coming now from almost every direction except the south. Every man was tense with excitement—battle was in the air—surely _something_ was going to happen, _must_ happen! But further and further south they marched; and along the roads, now, the automobiles were flying like mad, night and day, some with officers, some flying the Red Cross flag. Over their heads there were French aeroplanes, every day the sky was never quite free of them. Georges caught his first sight of a British soldier—a khaki-clad dispatch rider on a motorcycle flying past, and another. They passed hundreds of Paris autobusses at the Division Headquarters, a long, long line that filled the village street at Sompuis, and ambulances, and cycle companies, and farriers’ wagons, the portable forges glowing red in the evening darkness. Georges recognized the Senegalese spahis in red flowing robes, he saw the Turcos from Morocco—big children they were, grinning black faces with shiny white teeth. A wagon flew past, with men inside feeding out telephone wire, hooking it with long poles into the ditch, or over bushes, out of the way, as they galloped on. Best of all, he began to get fresh meat for dinner, from the portable kitchens that hurried from company to company along the road. But always, never stopping, night or day, more exciting than all the rest, never forgotten, no matter what happened, in the north, growing ever nearer—the steady rumbling thunder of the German guns.

XVI

The camp of Mailly was a busy place. At the aeroplane sheds the biplanes and Blériots were constantly going and coming, circling in the air, or making ready in long rows upon the level field. The vast plain was filled with troops of all sorts in seemingly inextricable confusion: chasseurs, on horseback, in pale blue tunics, the Alpine chasseurs, with drooping blue _berets_ on their heads, and leggings; cuirassiers with their breastplates and long horsehair plumes, and zouaves with embroidered jackets and baggy red trousers. The Twentieth Regiment, tattered and tired, with many heads bandaged and many with feet through their shoes, dusty, hollow-eyed, marched past, not yet too despairing, as fresh troops greeted them, to cry in answer “_Vive la France!_” They were not boys now, they were soldiers tempered in the crucible of war. And among them marched Georges Cucurou, with a Prussian helmet tied to his knapsack with a shoestring—a Prussian helmet with a hole through its brass front!

Already rumors were flying fast from column to column. Why this concentration of troops? Why this wide circle swung around the camp of Mailly? _Mon Dieu!_ could it be that they were to retreat no longer? That, at last, they were to make a stand? A hope like a gaining fire sprang up and swept from man to man.

It was early in the morning of Sunday, September 6, that on the heights south of Mailly the regiment was assembled for review. To the accompaniment of an incessant, raging bombardment from the German cannon, the colonel read aloud this message from General Joffre, Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces:

_Children of France, the hour of the great battle has arrived! Lift up your hearts! If you wish your Country everlasting honor, let every man die at his post, if necessary, rather than surrender another inch of ground, and the victory will be ours._

It was not Gallic sentimentality now. It was the voice of a leader who wasted no words.

There was a shout of rejoicing—“_Vive la France!_” Emotion swept the ranks and men wept without shame. The tremendous suggestion put into those thousands of minds had a terrible potency. Georges said that morning he felt as if he were intoxicated; he grew suddenly like a giant. It seemed as if nothing on earth could possibly resist them, now.

Bread and biscuits were handed out and the Twentieth Regiment was hurried to a wood two miles away. Already they had begun to move northward. But again it was their fate to be held in reserve, while the brunt of the attack was given to other troops. The Twentieth was held in the woods all day, all night, while the shells rained in from every direction. Most fell in front or behind, but occasionally a “_marmite_” would hit the column with devastating fury, and send its mutilated victims flying. There was nothing for it, however, but to stay and stay on, till the last man was killed if need were. Whatever happened, the Germans must _not_ get by!

At dawn, they advanced to the edge of the woods; but, the instant they emerged into the fields, shells and shrapnel poured on them in a torrent. So they held their post. Monday passed without their stirring from those woods. No commissary wagons came with food—nothing could live in the open. They munched their emergency rations, dry biscuits. Monday night, Tuesday, Tuesday night, and still they stayed. A dispatch rider, wounded in the arm, brought orders for them to hold hard and never flinch.

Nothing to eat now but grains of coffee. The water was gone from their canteens, long ago; but the men stretched out their overcoats in the rain, and drank the pools of water as fast as they collected. And, always, night and day, the thunder of the German guns about them. The din was so terrific that the men had fairly to shout to each other—they were almost deaf.

XVII

On Wednesday morning another messenger got through with orders to advance. From that corpse-strewn wood there emerged a band of men that might have been taken for theatrical desperadoes. Uniforms in shreds, coats gone, shoes gone, knees sticking through trousers legs, and elbows through sleeves, all plastered with mud to a uniform gray, like khaki; wild-eyed with hunger and reckless now, everyone’s nerves on edge, cursing, weeping, mad, ready for anything except more inaction!

_Forward!_ The men, famished as they were, yelled at the sound of that welcome word. Anywhere, out of that infernal wood—anywhere, through any hell, to get at the enemy! Forward they went on the run like hounds after hare, and the run warmed them up. The sun came out and they raced on, steaming. “We didn’t mind the shells at all, then,” said Coco. “Lying on the ground waiting for them at Bertrix we had nothing to do but be afraid—but now we had no time. All we thought of was to get at those cursed ‘Bosches’ as fast as we could.” And so through the bursting shells, across the wide field to rising ground.

It was there, on that hillside, they got a sight of what had happened during those deadly days along the Marne. First, rows and rows of twisted, limp-lying Frenchmen, dead for long, thrown by the shells into horribly fantastic groups; and sickening heads and limbs lying scattered alone. Bodies everywhere, mostly resting face up to the sky, eyes open, staring. In places they were stretched regularly in long straight lines; on other fields the corpses were dotted all about singly. “One had to jump over them every minute,” said Georges. Further on, the French dead were mingled with Germans, piled sometimes four high like a football scrimmage.

Then, in a sparsely wooded tract they passed the relics of a bayonet fight—fearful! Apparently, the French African troops had chased a battalion of retreating Germans up against a wall, and the bodies were, well—the “Turcos” do not stab merely in the breast—they do not stab merely to kill—they stab anywhere, they stab joyfully, like demons.

More and more German dead were passed, leaped over, even trod on where the way was narrow, and still the thundering of cannon came from every side. It seemed as if the whole world were fighting—as if all the old quiet ways of life had ceased to exist, even in memory. Still they pushed forward, marched to the west of Vitry-le-François, crossed the Marne on a pontoon bridge at Blacy under a rain of rifle fire, and hurried through a beet field for a crest above the long, white, poplar-lined national road at Couvrol.

The “Bosches” were in retreat! A motorcyclist, racing from Vitry to Châlons with dispatches, had stopped to yell out the news.

As Georges struggled desperately up through the soft loam, his view was extended over the country about the Marne. Here, on those same wide rolling plains, Attila and all his Huns had fought his ancestors when France was but a nucleus of scattered Roman settlements; and here that horde had been defeated and driven back to their wildernesses. Now, no matter in which direction he gazed, he could see the modern barbarians strewing destruction. Puffs of smoke were in the air everywhere, but thickest about Vitry-le-François.

The shells from the French “75’s” burst beautifully with a cloud of jet black and white. The fleecy snowy-white puffs, gray red in the center, showed where the shrapnel sent its shower of leaden balls. But, oftener than all the rest, came the droning “_marmites_” of the German big guns, bursting with heavy thunder in a sudden reddish flash, changing into a spume of drab smoke, edged with white.

To the westward, village after village was smoking. Machine guns were spitting, crackling along the roads, volleys of rifle fire snapped from every wood. Up and up went the Twentieth Regiment, till it came to the top of the little hill.

Smack-bang in their faces, a salvo of bullets greeted the men. Another volley, another! Georges, staggering back, taken by surprise with the others, as men dropped all about him, caught sight on a low hillside beyond of a deep gray mass of men extended in battle front only a hundred meters away. There, waiting to hold back the advance, was at least a full regiment of infantry—one of those hundreds of little rear guards that were left absolutely unsupported, to cover the German retreat, and to fight to the death without hope of success.

The Twentieth, rallying instantly, shouted a defiant answer to the German “Hurrahs,” and sent its volley into the enemy. Beside Georges, a man named Charles Griffe, one of the few of his friends left from Toulouse, suddenly fell, clasping his hands over his head as he crumpled down. The sudden excitement seemed to hypnotize Georges. “The blood seemed to boil in my head,” he expressed it. He didn’t hear the command to fix bayonets at all; the first thing he knew he was running like a machine, yelling with the others, down into the ravine and up the other side, and always with the horror of those points of gleaming steel ahead, climbing zig-zag up the slope toward—what? It seemed impossible to go against that row of sharp bayonets and live.

XVIII

So much Georges told me; more he would not tell, at first, except that he thought the Germans stopped firing at about thirty meters distance, and began to sing the “_Wacht am Rhein_.”

Now I have always wanted to know the details of a typical bayonet fight—just how the issue is decided, why a Frenchman might not win here, and a German there, and so keep the victory uncertain. That, in fact, was one of the things I went to Toulouse to find out. But, to get any vivid picture of that bloody encounter was impossible. Georges simply shook his head. “It was too horrible,” he said.

At last he confessed reluctantly that when he saw the men ahead of him bayoneting the Germans, jabbing like madmen, he too gave a jump, and shut his eyes and stabbed at something he had seen in front of him, advancing with a long steel point—something that suddenly stopped singing, and squealed “like a wounded horse,” he said.

“I remember only that I pulled out my bayonet, and felt a jet of warm blood strike my face,” Georges went on, when I forced him. “Then, I must have almost fainted, I think; I don’t know what happened till I found myself wiping my face, and something was holding me. It was the bayonet of that German’s that was caught in the wing of my overcoat, somehow—and he was lying on the ground with the blood still coming out of his stomach. There were lots of our men on the ground, but lots more of Germans. The rest of them were running; they were two hundred meters away by this time, and our men were after them, sticking them like pigs.... The sight of it made me sick.... When they came back, I was standing there, just leaning on my gun, swaying ... and it was raining ... I didn’t know it was raining at all till then ... but the blood was almost entirely washed off my coat.... Isn’t that enough, m’sieur? I cant _bear_ to think about it.”

XIX

When the Twentieth was gathered together for roll call, it was found that there were 150 dead or wounded. Some 300 Germans were stretched upon the ground. But the enemy must be pursued. So forward, with great precautions, to a farm, their headquarters—but it was found to be empty; so here they halted for a rest, the young men still panting with the exertion and excitement of the fight. “I tried to smoke my pipe,” said Georges, “but I had to give it up.”

With the artillery still hammering all about—but mostly the French batteries of “75’s” now, pounding away in fours—the Twentieth stayed till night, and sent its wounded to the rear—for the stretcher bearers and ambulances were right up behind these days, with plenty to do. Here the regiment received with yells and tears the news of the victory of this five days’ battle of the Marne. It was too good to be true.

The captain of Georges’s company, with his arm in a sling, was a Frenchman, and now it was time for more rhetoric. He had an appreciative audience, this time. “You are men!” he announced, “you have done your duty, and France is proud of you.” But France, it appeared from his talk, was not yet free; and the moral of his discourse was that there was still considerable work to do, and he ended with the word “_Forward!_”

So, forward they went, next morning, gloriously in pursuit of the enemy, now some ten miles away. Forward, with their bayonets stained by German blood at last. Forward, all the forenoon, past villages wrecked and plundered by the barbarians; past houses gutted and outraged and burned; past trembling, fear-struck peasants offering what was left of their bread and wine. Forward all the afternoon, along the roads strewn with helmets, knapsacks, and empty wine bottles; past German camps in the open, littered with armchairs and clocks and silver plate, mattresses and broken pianos, and bottles, bottles, bottles—with sheep and cattle cut open, rotting; past dead horses everywhere, disemboweled, legs up. Forward at sunset, past wrecked automobiles, burned to masses of curly iron; past caissons smashed by shells, and bicycles without number abandoned along the road. Forward, in the moonlight across battle fields where the dead lay in windrows in shocking confusion, mutilated abominably, dead in the long fresh trenches, filling every gallery and compartment, dead in the woods, dead on green meadows where in the cool night air wisps of trailing mist hovered near the ground and the stench was in their nostrils till they sickened and hurried on, rinsing their mouths with water!

Forward across the swath, leagues wide, of death and hate and ruin, forward, forward all that night!

XX

Three hours’ rest, and then _again_ forward! At noon, a farm. _Halt!_ Georges was one of the three who went forward, dodging from wall to wall, to reconnoiter. There seemed to be some secret hidden there—the roof was blown off, the windows smashed, devastation everywhere about—but it might still conceal some desperate foe. As he approached the closed door, he saw a stain on the stone step, where a little dark stream of something had dried. He pushed open the door—butchery! More than two hundred Germans who had taken refuge there had found appalling death when two howitzer shells had converted them into an incredible mass of mere bleeding flesh. No fear now need any Frenchman have of those grim Germans—save only the fear of infection. Georges flung back the door and fled.

Could he find worse horrors? Let him tell.

“On Friday, after we had been relieved, we were held in reserve in the rear, and detailed to pick up the German deserters and waifs that were hiding in the woods all over the country. They were a sorry enough lot, frightened to death at first, when they threw up their hands at sight of us, but glad enough to be made prisoners and not have to work, when they found they were not going to be killed. After the wanton destruction of innocent villages we had seen—they had even destroyed the fire engines—it was pretty hard to refrain from knocking these brutes down with the butts of our rifles. We heard many stories of the atrocities they had committed in their baffled rage, but the one thing I saw was enough for me.

“We were marching through a little wood in the Department of the Marne—somewhere between Posesse and Givry, it was, I think. The company ahead suddenly began to slow up and halt—they were pointing at something, but the officers cried: ‘Go on! _Go on!_’ Of course we were curious to know what it was they were looking at, and we halted, too. Well, our officers couldn’t hold us—or they didn’t try to. Some of us ran up through the trees on the right-hand side of the road to look closer.

“Eight French soldiers, m’sieur, with ropes round their necks, hanging to the limbs of the trees! I was right close to them. I saw them plainly. I know. They were riddled with bullet holes. And in among them, m’sieur, was hanging the body of a little girl. About twelve years old, I should say. _She_ was shot, too. She was so pretty.... The officers called us back. There was no time to cut them down, even; we were hurrying along to keep in touch with the advance.

“Yes, m’sieur, we all saw it. Why, there is a man in this very hospital now who saw it, too. Last week there came a commissioner down here on purpose to get our affidavit about it, for some report of the Government.”

XXI

Georges’s story is almost told, now; there remains only the end of his soldiering, which was to be eventful to the last. After following the fighting body for three days, the Twentieth Regiment was ordered into the first line.

The Germans, having now retreated to the Aisne, and eastward to the strategic positions long since prepared and mapped by German spies, had made a stand. So on toward Ville-sur-Tourbes Georges marched, the firing every moment getting hotter. They were evidently advancing against a very strong position, so that when they swung westward to the little village of Le Mesnil they began to be subjected to continuous shelling and to rifle fire that grew worse and worse. But still no enemy was in sight.

Again the Twentieth had to wait for the French artillery to arrive in front of a black wood that poured out destruction. Lying in the brush, Georges wondered whether it would all end as before. As before, each man waited for his time to come; but now, seasoned, hopeful, he could joke at death.

“There’s a _marmite_ for you!” a corporal would sing out, as a German shell came screaming to the right; and, as the shrapnel exploded, “Look out for the prunes!” a man would yell, “they’re coming your way!” Georges was taking it all coolly enough, thinking, he told me, how much those hurtling shells sounded like a subway train rolling into a station—rather more like an express traveling past without stopping. And so, when a sergeant near him yelled, “Look out—here comes our portion!” he only laughed and ducked under the little shelter of brush and earth he had been building.

XXII

But Georges laughed too soon, he ducked just too late! There was a terrific explosion, and suddenly he felt paralyzed all over—as if by an electric shock. No pain anywhere at first; only a fearful feeling that something dire had happened to him. He was stunned; “sort of upside-down, all over,” he said. Dragging himself out of the shower of dirt, dazed and frightened, he saw that his left foot was covered with blood. Then, a sudden leap of pain! He had a savage burst of anger that he should have been so treated. The pain every moment grew more excruciating....

Just how he got to the rear he didn’t know, but after crawling and limping somehow, with his rifle as a crutch, he found himself at last by the wall of a house outside the village, and there he lay down to rest.