Etext of A Volunteer Poilu
By Henry Sheahan
1888-1968
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916

TO
PROFESSOR CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND
OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY

DEAR COPEY,

At Verdun I thought of you, and the friendly hearth of Hollis It
seemed very far away from the deserted, snow-swept streets of the
tragic city. Then suddenly I remembered how you had encouraged
me and many others to go over and help in any way that we could;
I remembered your keen understanding of the Epic, and the deep
sympathy with human beings which you taught those whose
privilege it was to be your pupils. And so you did not seem so far
away after all, but closer to the heart of the war than any other
friend I had.

I dedicate this book to you with grateful affection after many years
of friendship.

HENRYTOPSFIELD,

September, 1916

Preface

I HAVE ventured to call this book A Volunteer Poilu
principally because we were known to the soldiers of the
Bois-le-Prˆtre as "les Poilus Americains." Then, too, it was my
ambition to do for my comrades, the French private soldiers, what
other books have done for the soldiers of other armies. The title
chosen, however, was more than complimentary; it was but just. In
recognition of the work of the Section during the summer, it was,
in October, 1915, formally adopted into the French army; a French
officer became its administrative head, and the drivers were given
the same papers, pay, and discipline as their French comrades.

I wish to thank many of my old friends of Section II, who have
aided me in the writing of this book.

HENRY SHEAHAN

.

ContentsI. THE ROCHAMBEAU S'EN VA-T-EN GUERRE

A war-time voyage --- The Rochambeau ---Loading ammunition
and food supplies --- Personalities on board --- The dyestuffs agent
--- The machine lathes man --- The Swede from Minnesota who
was on his way to the Foreign Legion --- His subsequent history ---
The talk aboard --- The French officer --- His philosophy of war ---
Ernest Psichari --- Arrival at Bordeaux --- The Arabs at the docks
--- The convalescent soldiers ---Across La Beauce ---The French
countryside in war-time.

II. AN UNKNOWN PARIS IN THE NIGHT AND RAIN

Paris, rain, and darkness --- The Gardens of the Tuileries --- The
dormitory --- The hospital at night --- Beginning of the Champagne
offensive --- The Gare de la Chapelle at two in the morning --- The
wounded --- The Zouave stretcher-bearers --The Arabs in the
abandoned school ---Suburban Paris at dawn --- The home of the
deaconesses.

III. THE GREAT SWATHE OF THE LINES

Nancy --- The porter's story --- Getting to the front --- What the
phrase "the front" really means ---The sense of the front ---The
shell zone --- The zone of quiet --- My quarters in the shelled
house ---The fire shells --- Bombarded at night --- Death of the
soldier fireman.

IV. LA FOR T DE BOIS-LE-PR TRE

Le Bois-le-Prˆtre --- Description-History ---Les Glycines, "Wisteria
Villa" -The Road to the trenches --- At the trenches --- The
painter's idea of "le sinistre dans l'art" --- The sign post --- The
zone of violence --- The Quart-en-R‚serve --- The village caught in
the torment of the lines --- The dead on the barbed wire --- "The
Road to Metz."

V. THE TRENCHES IN THE "WOOD OF DEATH."

The Trenches --- Organization --- Nature of the war --- Food,
shelters, clothing, ammunition, etc. ---A typical day in the trenches
--- Trench shells or "crapouilots" --- In the abri --- The tunnel ---
The doctrinaire lieutenant of engineers.

VI. THE GERMANS ATTACK

The piano at Montauville --- An interrupted concert --- At the
Quart --- The battle for the ridge of the Wood --- Fall of the
German aeroplane --- Psychology of the men in the trenches ---
Religion in the trenches.

VII. THE TOWN IN THE TRENCHES

Poor old " Pont " --- Description of the town --- A civilian's story
--- The house of the Captain of the Papal Zouaves --- Church of St.
Laurent --- The Cemetery and its guardian.

VIII. MESSIEURS LES POILUS DE LA GRANDE GUERRE

En repos-- -A village of troops --- Manners and morals --- The
concert --- The journal of the Bois-le-Prˆtre --- Various poilus.

IX. PREPARING THE DEFENSE OF VERDUN

En permission --- State of France --- The France of 1905 and the
France of 1915 --The class of 1917 --- Bar-le-Duc: --- The air raid
--- Called to Verdun.

X. THE GREAT DAYS OF VERDUN

Verdun in 1912 --- Verdun on the night of the first great attack ---
The hospital --- The shelled cross road ---The air shell --The pastry
cook's story --- The cultivateur of the Valois and the crater at
Douaumont ---The pompiers of Verdun---"Do you want to see an
odd sight?"---Verdun in storm and desolation.

CHAPTER I  THE ROCHAMBEAU S'EN VA-T-EN GUERRE

MOORED alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the
land, the cargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the
Compagnie G‚n‚rale was being loaded with American supplies for
the France of the Great War. A hot August sun struck spots and
ripples of glancing radiance from the viscous, oily surface of the
foul basin in which she lay inert; the air was full of sounds, the
wheezing of engines, the rattling of cog-checks, and the rumble of
wheels and hoofs which swept, in sultry puffs of noise and odor,
from, the pavements on the land. Falling from the exhausts, a
round, silvery-white cascade poured into the dark lane between the
wharf and the deck, and sounded a monotonous, roaring
underchord to the intermingled dins. At the sun-bathed bow, a
derrick gang lowered bags of flour into the open well of the hold;
there were commands in French, a chugging, and a hissing of
steam, and a giant's dutch of dusty, hundred-kilo flour-bags from
Duluth would swing from the wharf to the Rochambeau, sink, and
disappear. In some way the unfamiliar language, and the sight of
the thickset, French sailor-men, so evidently all of one race, made
the Rochambeau, moored in the shadow of the sky-scrapers, seem
mysteriously alien. But among the workers in the hold, who could
be seen when they stood on the floor of the open hatchway, was a
young, red-headed, American longshoreman clad in the trousers
part of a suit of brown-check overalls; sweat and grime had
befouled his rather foolish, freckled face, and every time that a
bunch of flour-bags tumbled to the floor of the well, he would cry
to an invisible somebody --- "More dynamite, Joe, more
dynamite!"

Walking side by side, like ushers in a wedding procession, two of
the ship's officers made interminable rounds of the deck. Now and
then they stopped and looked over the rail at the loading
operations, and once in low tones they discussed the day's
communiqu‚. "Pas grand' chose" (not much of anything), said he
whom I took to be the elder, a bearded, seafaring kind of man.
"We have occupied a crater in the Argonne, and driven back a
German patrol (une patrouille Boche) in the region of Nom‚ny."
The younger, blond, pale, with a wispy yellow mustache, listened
casually, his eyes fixed on the turbulence below. The derrick gang
were now stowing away clusters of great wooden boxes marked
the Something Arms Company. "My brother says that American
bullets are filled with powder of a very good quality " (d'une trŠs
bonne qualit‚), remarked the latter. "By the way, how is your
brother?" asked the bearded man. "Very much better," answered
the other; "the last fragment (‚clat) was taken out of his thigh just
before we left Bordeaux." They continued their walk, and three
little French boys wearing English sailor hats took their places at
the rail.

As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a
level with the upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for
farewells; and little groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes.
There was a good deal of worrying about submarines; one heard
fragments of conversations --- "They never trouble the Bordeaux
route" --- "Absolutely safe, je t'assure "; and in the accents of Iowa
the commanding advice, "Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim!
Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund, snappy American drummer,
and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for "the success of
his business." Two young Americans with the same identical
oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black Frenchman, with
a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth, paraded
lonelily. A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back to
the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, wept at the going
of a younger woman, and ruined an elaborate make-up with
grotesque traceries of tears. "Give him my love," she sobbed; "tell
him that the business is doing splendidly and that he is not to buy
any of Lafitte's laces next time he goes to Paris en permission." A
little later, the Rochambeau, with slow majesty, backed into the
channel, and turned her bow to the east.

The chief interest of the great majority of her passengers was
commercial; there were American drummers keen to line their
pockets with European profits; there were French commis
voyageurs who had been selling articles of French manufacture
which had formerly been made by the Germans; there were
half-official persons who had been on missions to American
ammunition works; and there was a diplomat or two. From the
sample trunks on board you could have taken anything from a pair
of boots to a time fuse. Altogether, an interesting lot. Palandeau, a
middle-aged Frenchman with a domed, bald forehead like Socrates
or Verlaine, had been in America selling eau-de-cologne.

"Then you are getting out something new?" I asked.

"Yes, and no," he answered. "Our product is the old-fashioned
eau-de-cologne water with the name 'Farina' on it."

"But in America we associate eau-de-cologne with the Germans,"
said I. "Does n't the bottle say 'Johann Maria Farina'? Surely the
form of the name is German."

"But that was not his name, monsieur; he was a Frenchman, and
called himself 'Jean Marie.' Yes, really, the Germans stole the
manufacture from the French. Consider the name of the article,
'eau-de-cologne,' is not that French?"

"Yes," I admitted.

"Alors," said Palandeau; "the blocus has simply given us the power
to reclaim trade opportunities justly ours. Therefore we have
printed a new label telling the truth about Farina, and the Boche
'Johann Maria' is 'kapout.'"

"Do you sell much of it?"

"Quantities! Our product is superior to the Boche article, and has
the glamour of an importation. I await the contest without
uneasiness."

"What contest?"

"When Jean Marie meets Johann Maria---aprŠs la guerre," said
Palandeau with a twinkle in his eye.

In the deck chair next to mine sat a dark, powerfully built young
Iowan with the intensely masculine head of a mediaeval soldier.
There was a bit of curl to the dark-brown hair which swept his
broad, low forehead, his brown eyes were devoid of fear or
imagination, his jaw was set, and the big, aggressive head rested
on a short, muscular neck. He had been a salesman of machine
tools till the "selling end" came to a standstill.

"But did n't the munitions traffic boom the machine-tool industry?"
I asked.

"Sure it did. You ought to have seen what people will do to get a
lathe. You know about all that you need to make shells is a
machine lathe. You can't get a lathe in America for love or money
--- for anything" --- he made a swift, complete gesture --- "all
making shells. There is n't a junk factory in America that has n't
been pawed over by guys looking for lathes --- and my God! what
prices! Knew a bird named Taylor who used to make water pipes
in Utica, New York --- had a stinking little lathe he paid two
hundred dollars for, and sold it last year for two thousand. My firm
had so many orders for months ahead that it didn't pay them to
have salesmen ---so they offered us jobs inside; but, God, I can't
stand indoor work, so I thought I'd come over here and get into the
war. I used to be in the State Cavalry. You ought to have seen how
sore all those Iowa Germans were on me for going," he laughed.
"Had a hell of row with a guy named Schultz."

Limping slightly, an enormous, grizzled man approached us and
sat down by the side of the ex-machinist. Possibly a yellow-gray
suit, cut in the bathrobe American style, made him look larger than
he was, and though heavily built and stout, there was something
about him which suggested ill health. One might have thought him
a prosperous American business man on his way to Baden-Baden.
He had a big nose, big mouth, a hard eye, and big, freckled hands
which he nervously opened and closed.

"See that feller over there?" He pointed to a spectacled individual
who seemed lost in melancholy speculation at the rail --- "Says he's
a Belgian lieutenant. Been over here trying to get cloth. Says he
can't get it, the firms over here have n't got the colors. Just think of
it, there is n't a pound of Bernheim's blue in the whole country!"

"I thought we were beginning to make dyes of our own," said the
Iowan.

"Oh, yes, but we haven't got the hang of it yet. The product is
pretty poor. Most of the people who need dyes are afraid to use the
American colors, but they've got to take what they can get. Friend
of mine, Lon Seeger, of Seeger, Seeger & Hall, the carpet people
in Hackensack, had twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats
spoiled on him last week by using home dyes."

The Belgian lieutenant, still standing by the rail, was talking with
another passenger, and some fragments of the conversation drifted
to our ears. I caught the words --- "My sister --- quite unexpected
--- barely escaped --- no doubt of it --- I myself saw near Malines
--perfectly dreadful --- tout-…-fait terrible."

"Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of mats all spoiled, colors
ran, did n't set, no good. This war is raising the devil with the
United States textiles. Maybe the Germans won't get a glad hand
when they come back. We hear that they're going to flood the
market with good, low-priced dyes so as to bust up the new
American plants. Have n't you heard them hollerin' for tariff
protection? I'm going over to look up a new green dye the French
are getting out. We hear it's pretty good stuff. What are you boys
doing, looking for contracts?"

The Iowan replied that he hoped to get into an English cavalry
regiment, and I mentioned the corps I had joined.

"Well, don't get killed," exclaimed the dyestuffs agent paternally,
and settled down in his chair for a nap.

It was the third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color of
the American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising
and falling under the August sun. From the rail I saw coming
toward us over the edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer
marked with two white blotches which, as the vessel neared,
resolved themselves into painted reproductions of the Swedish
flag. Thus passed the Thorvald, carrying a mark of the war across
the lonely seas.

"That's a Swedish boat," said a voice at my elbow.

"Yes," I replied.

A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a
downy face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me.
There was something psychologically wrong with his face; it had
that look in it which makes you want to see if you still have your
purse.

"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota," he continued.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Oscar Petersen," he answered.

"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded.

"You bet," he replied ---and an instant later --- "Are you?"

I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the
same kind of experience he later became communicative. He had
run away from home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth
year in a reform school, and the rest of his time as a kind of
gangster in Chicago. I can't imagine a more useless existence than
the one he revealed. At length he "got sick of the crowd and got
the bug to go to war," as he expressed it, and wrote to his people to
tell them he was starting, but received no answer. " My father was
a Bible cuss," he remarked cheerfully, --- "never got over my
swiping the minister's watch."

A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his
going to enlist in the Foreign Legion --- "popular young man very
well known in the ---th ward," said the article. He showed me, too,
an extraordinary letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter
written in pencil on the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled
note-paper, and enclosing five dollars. "I hope you will try to
avenge the Lusitania," it said among other things. The letter was
signed by a woman.

"Do you speak French?" I asked.

"Not a word," he replied. "I want to be put with the Americans or
the Swedes. I speak good Swedish."

Months later, on furlough, I saw in a hospital at Lyons a college
classmate who had served in the Foreign Legion. "Did you know a
fellow named Petersen?" I asked.

"Yes, I knew him," answered my friend; "he lifted a fifty-franc
note from me and got killed before I could get it back."

"How did it happen?"

"Went through my pockets, I imagine."

" Oh, no, I meant how did he get killed?"

"Stray shell sailed in as we were going through a village, and
caught him and two of the other boys."

"You must not make your friend talk too much," mumbled an old
Sister of Charity rather crossly.

The two young men with the same identical oddity of gait were
salesmen of artificial legs, each one a wearer and demonstrator of
his wares. The first, from Ohio, had lost his leg in a railroad
accident two years before, and the second, a Virginian with a
strong accent, had been done for in a motor-car smashup. One
morning the man from Ohio gave us a kind of danse macabre on
the deck; rolling his trouser leg high above his artificial shin, he
walked, leaped, danced, and ran. "Can you beat that? " he asked
with pardonable pride. "Think what these will mean to the
soldiers." Meanwhile, with slow care, the Virginian explained the
ingenious mechanism.

Strange tatters of conversation rose from the deck. "Poor child, she
lost her husband at the beginning of the war " --- "Third shipment
of bosses " --- "I was talking with a feller from the Atlas Steel
Company" --- "�douard is somewhere near Arras"; there were
disputes about the outcome of the war, and arguments over profits.
A voluble French woman, whose husband was a pastry cook in a
New York hotel before he joined the forces, told me how she had
wandered from one war movie to another hoping to catch a
glimpse of her husband, and had finally seen "some one who
resembled him strongly" on the screen in Harlem. She had a
picture of him, a thin, moody fellow with great, saber whiskers
like Rostand's and a high, narrow forehead curving in on the sides
between the eyebrows and the hair. "He is a Chasseur alpin," she
said with a good deal of pride, " and they are holding his place for
him at the hotel. He was wounded last month in the shoulder. I am
going to the hospital at Lyons to see him." The day's sunset was at
its end, and a great mass of black clouds surged over the eastern
horizon, turning the seas ahead to a leaden somberness that
lowered in menacing contrast to the golden streaks of dying day.
The air freshened, salvos of rain fell hissing into the dark waters,
and violet cords of lightning leaped between sea and sky. Echoing
thunder rolled long through unseen abysses. In the deserted salon I
found the young Frenchman with the star-shaped scar reading an
old copy of "La Revue." He had been an officer in the
Chasseurs-…-pied until a fearful wound had incapacitated him for
further service, and had then joined the staff of a great,
conservative Parisian weekly. The man was a disciple of Ernest
Psichari, the soldier mystic who died so superbly at Charleroi in
the dreadful days before the Marne. From him I learned something
of the French conception of the idea of war. It was not
uninteresting to compare the French point of view with the
German, and we talked late into the night while the ship was
plunging through the storm. An article in the review, "La
Psychologie des Barbares," was the starting-point of our
conversation.

"You must remember that the word 'barbarian' which we apply to
the Germans, is understood by the French intellectually," said he.
"Not only do German atrocities seem barbarous, but their thought
also. Consider the respective national conceptions of the idea of
war. To the Germans, war is an end in itself, and in itself and in all
its effects perfect and good. To the French mind, this conception
of war is barbaric, for war is not good in itself and may be fatal to
both victor and vanquished." (He spoke a beautiful, lucid French
with a sort of military preciseness.)

"It was Ernest Psichari who revealed to us the raison d'ˆtre of arms
in modern life, and taught us the meaning of war. To him, war was
no savage ru‚e, but the discipline of history for which every nation
must be prepared, a terrible discipline neither to be sought, nor
rejected when proffered. Thus the Boches, once their illusion of
the glory of war is smashed, have nothing to fall back on, but the
French point of view is stable and makes for a good morale.
Psichari was the intellectual leader of that movement for the
regeneration of the army which has saved France. When the
doctrines of pacificism began to be preached in France, and cries
of 'A bas l'arm‚e' were heard in the streets, Psichari showed that
the army was the only institution left in our industrialized world
with the old ideals and the power to teach them. Quand on a tout
dit, the military ideals of honor, duty, and sacrifice of one's all for
the common good are the fundamentals of character. Psichari
turned this generation from a generation of dreamers to a
generation of soldiers, knowing why they were soldiers, glad to be
soldiers. The army saved the morale of France when the Church
had lost its hold, and the public schools had been delivered to the
creatures of sentimental doctrinaire government. Was it not a pity
that Psichari should have died so young?"

"Did you know him?" I asked.

"Yes; I saw something of him in Africa. The mystery of the East
had profoundly stirred him. He was a dark, serious fellow with
something of the profile of his grandfather, Ernest Renan. At
Charleroi, after an heroic stand, he and every man of his squad
died beside the guns they served."

Long after, at the Bois-le-Prˆtre, I went to the trenches to get a
young sergeant. His friends had with clumsy kindness gathered
together his little belongings and put them in the ambulance. "As
tu trouv‚ mon livre?" (Have you found my book?) he asked
anxiously, and they tossed beside the stretcher a trench-mired copy
of Psichari's "L'Appel des Armes."

One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and
anchored at the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde. A
spindly lighthouse was flashing, seeming more to reflect the
sunlight from outside than to be burning within, and a current the
color of coffee and cream with a dash of vermilion in it, went by
us mottled with patches of floating mud. From the deck one had an
extraordinary view, a ten-mile sweep of the strangely colored
water, the hemisphere of the heavens all of one greenish-blue tint,
and a narrow strip of nondescript, sandy coast suspended somehow
between the strange sea and unlovely sky. At noon, the
Rochambeau. began at a good speed her journey up the river,
passing tile-roofed villages and towns built of pumice-gray stone,
and great flat islands covered with acres upon acres of leafy,
bunchy vines. There was a scurry to the rail; some one cried,
"Voil… des Boches," and I saw working in a vineyard half a dozen
men in gray-green German regimentals. A poilu in a red cap was
standing nonchalantly beside them. As the Rochambeau, following
the channel, drew incredibly close to the bank, the Germans leaned
on their hoes and watched us pass, all save one, who continued to
hoe industriously round the roots of the vines, ignoring us with a
Roman's disdain. "Comme ils sont laids" (How ugly they are), said
a voice. There was no surprise in the tone, which expressed the
expected confirmation of a past judgment. It was the pastry cook's
voluble wife who had spoken. The land through which we were
passing, up to that time simply the pleasant countryside of the
Bordelais, turned in an instant to the France of the Great War.

Late in the afternoon, the river, slowly narrowing, turned a great
bend, and the spires of Bordeaux, violet-gray in the smoky rose of
early twilight, were seen just ahead. A broad, paved, dirty avenue,
with the river on one side and a row of shabby houses on the other,
led from the docks to the city, and down this street, marching with
Oriental dignity, came a troop of Arabs. There was a picture of a
fat sous-officier leading, of brown-white rags and mantles waving
in the breeze blowing from the harbor, of lean, muscular,
black-brown legs, and dark, impassive faces. "Algerian recruits,"
said an officer of the boat. It was a first glimpse at the universality
of the war; it held one's mind to realize that while some were
quitting their Devon crofts, others were leaving behind them the
ancestral well at the edges of the ancient desert. A faint squeaking
of strange pipes floated on the twilight air.

There came an official examination of our papers, done in a
businesslike way, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were
free to land in France. That evening a friend and I had dinner in a
great caf‚ opening on the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried
to analyze the difference between the Bordeaux of the past and the
Bordeaux of the war. The ornate restaurant, done in a kind of Paris
Exhibition style, and decorated with ceiling frescoes of rosy, naked
Olympians floating in golden mists and sapphire skies, was full of
movement and light, crowds passed by on the sidewalks, there
were sounds --- laughter.

"Looks just the same to me," said my friend, an American
journalist who had been there in 1912. "Of course there are more
soldiers. Outside of that, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the
town has not changed."

But there was a difference, and a great difference. There was a
terrible absence of youth. Not that youth was entirely absent from
the tables and the trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and
unhealthy-looking, afraid to meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the
pitiable jeunesse that could not pass the physical examination of
the army. Most of the other young men who bent over the tables
talking, or leaned back on a divan to smoke cigarettes, were
strangers, and I saw many who were unquestionably Roumanians
or Greeks. A little apart, at a corner table, a father and mother
were dining with a boy in a uniform much too large for him; ---I
fancied from the cut of his clothes that he belonged to a young
squad still under instruction in the garrisons, and that he was
enjoying a night off with his family. Screened from the rest by a
clothes rack, a larky young lieutenant was discreetly conversing
with a "daughter of joy," and an elderly English officer, severely
proper and correct, was reading "Punch" and sipping red wine in
Britannic isolation. Across the street an immense poster
announced, "Conference in aid of the Belgian Red Cross --- the
German--- Outrages in Louvain, Malines, and LiŠge --illustrated."

We finished our dinner, which was good and not costly, and
started to walk to our hotel. Hardly had we turned the corner of the
Place, when the life of Bordeaux went out like a torch
extinguished by the wind. It was still early in the evening, there
was a sound of an orchestra somewhere behind, yet ahead of us,
lonely and still, with its shops closed and its sidewalks deserted,
was one of the greater streets of Bordeaux. Through the drawn
curtains of second stories over little groceries and baker-shops
shone the yellow light of lamps. What had happened to the Jean,
Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the war began? What
tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these silent windows not
conceal? And every French city is much the same; one notices in
them all the subtle lack of youth, and the animation of the great
squares in contrast to the somber loneliness of streets and quarters
which once were alive and gay. At the Place de l'Op‚ra in Paris,
the whirlpool of Parisian life is still turning, but the great streets
leading away from the Place de l'�toile are quiet. Young and old,
laborer and shopkeeper, boulevardier and apache are far away
holding the tragic lines.

The next morning at the station, I had my first glimpse of that
mighty organization which surrounds the militaire. There was a
special entrance for soldiers and a special exit for soldiers, and at
both of these a long file of blue-clad poilus waited for the
countersigning of their furlough slips and military tickets. The
mud of the trenches still stained the bottom edges of their
overcoats, and their steel helmets were dented and dull. There was
something fine about the faces collectively; there was a certain
look of tried endurance and perils bravely borne. I heard those on
furlough telling the names of their home villages to the officer in
charge, ---pleasant old names, Saint-Pierre aux Vignes, La Tour du
Roi.

A big, obese, middle-aged civilian dressed in a hideous greenish
suit, and wearing a pancake cap, sat opposite me in the
compartment I had chosen. There was a hard, unfriendly look in
his large, fat-encircled eyes, a big mustache curved straight out
over his lips, and the short finger nails of his square, puffy fingers
were deeply rimmed with dirt. He caught sight of me reading a
copy of an English weekly, and after staring at me with an interest
not entirely free from a certain hostility, retreated behind the pages
of the "Matin," and began picking his teeth. Possibly he belonged
to that provincial and prejudiced handful to whom England will
always be "Perfidious Albion," or else he took me for an English
civilian dodging military service. The French press was following
the English recruiting campaign very closely, and the system of
volunteer service was not without its critics. "Conscription being
considered in England" (On discute la conscription en Angleterre),
announced the "Matin" discreetly.

It was high noon; the train had arrived at Angoulˆme, and was
taking aboard a crowd of convalescents. On the station platform,
their faces relentlessly illumined by the brilliant light, stood about
thirty soldiers; a few were leaning on canes, one was without a
right arm, some had still the pallor of the sick, others seemed
able-bodied and hearty. Every man wore on the bosom of his coat
about half a dozen little aluminum medals dangling from bows of
tricolor ribbon. "Pour les bless‚s, s'il vous plaŒt," cried a tall young
woman in the costume and blue cape of a Red-Cross nurse as she
walked along the platform shaking a tin collection box under the
windows of the train.

To our compartment came three of the convalescents. One was a
sturdy, farmhand sort of fellow, with yellow hair and a yellow
mustache --- the kind of man who might have been a Norman; he
wore khaki puttees, brown corduroy trousers, and a jacket which
fitted his heavy, vigorous figure rather snugly. Another was a little
soul dressed in the "blue horizon" from head to foot, a homely
little soul with an egg-shaped head, brown-green eyes, a retreating
chin, and irregular teeth. The last, wearing the old tenue, black
jacket and red trousers, was a good-looking fellow with rather
handsome brown eyes. Comfortably stretched in a corner, the
Norman was deftly cutting slices of bread and meat which he
offered to his companions. Catching sight of my English paper, all
three stared at me with an interest and friendliness that was in
psychological contrast to the attitude of the obese civilian.

" Anglais? " asked the Norman.

The civilian watched for my answer.

"Non --- Am‚ricain," I replied.

"Tiens," they said politely.

"Do you speak English? " asked the homely one. "Yes," I
answered.

The Norman fished a creased dirty letter and a slip of paper from
his wallet and handed them to me for inspection.

"I found them in a trench we shared with the English," he
explained. "These puttees are English; a soldier gave them to me."
He exhibited his legs with a good deal of satisfaction.

I examined the papers that had been given me. The first was a
medical prescription for an antilice ointment and the second an
illiterate letter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about
somebody whom the writer was having trouble to manage, "now
that you are n't here." I translated as well as I could for an attentive
audience. "Toujours les totos," they cried merrily when I explained
the prescription. A spirit of good fellowship pervaded the
compartment, till even the suspicious civilian unbent, and handed
round post-card photographs of his two sons who were somewhere
en Champagne. Not a one of the three soldiers could have been
much over twenty-one, but they were not boys, but men, serious
men, tried and disciplined by war. The homely one gave me one of
his many medals which he wore "to please the good Sisters"; on
one side in an oval of seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and on the
other, the determined features of General Joffre.

Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce. Distant
villages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black against
the burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the
sweeping golden plain. We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and
shuttered, though the harvests had been gathered and stacked.
There was something very tragic in those deserted, outlying farms.
The train began to rattle through the suburbs of Paris. By the
window stood the Norman looking out on the winking red and
violet lights of the railroad yard. "This Paris?" he asked. "I never
expected to see Paris. How the war sets one to traveling!"

CHAPTER II  AN UNKNOWN PARIS IN NIGHT AND RAIN

IT was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I
was strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun
was drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods
and athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French
autumn, so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the
end of the mighty vista of the Champs �lys‚es, the Arc de
Triomphe rose, brown and vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet
city, and an aeroplane was maneuvering over the Place de la
Concorde, a moving speck of white and silver in the soft,
September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy show the laughter
of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of treble
shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel," squeaked a voice.
Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards,
was a prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform
belabored with a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic
effect, lifted its puzzled, wooden head to the laughing children.
Beneath a little Prussian helmet was the head of William of
Germany, caricatured with Parisian skill into a scowling, green
fellow with a monster black mustache turned up to his eyes. "Lie
down! " cried the Zouave doll imperiously. "Here is a love pat for
thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche." And he struck him
down again with his staff.

Soldiers walked in the garden, --- permissionnaires (men on
furlough) out for an airing with their rejoicing families, smart
young English subalterns, and rosy-fleshed, golden-haired
Flemings of the type that Rubens drew. But neither their presence
nor the sight of an occasional mutil‚ (soldier who has lost a limb),
pathetically clumsy on his new crutches, quite sent home the
presence of the war. The normal life of the city was powerful
enough to engulf the disturbance, the theaters were open, there
were the same crowds on the boulevards, and the same gossipy
spectators in the sidewalk caf‚s. After a year of war the Parisians
were accustomed to soldiers, cripples, and people in mourning.
The strongest effect of the war was more subtle of definition, it
was a change in the temper of the city. Since the outbreak of the
war, the sham Paris that was "Gay Paree" had disappeared, and the
real Paris, the Paris of tragic memories and great men, had taken
its place. An old Parisian explained the change to me in saying,
"Paris has become more French." Deprived of the foreigner, the
city adapted itself to a taste more Gallic; faced with the realities of
war, it exchanged its artificiality for that sober reasonableness
which is the normal attitude of the nation.

At noon I left the garden and strolled down the Champs �lys‚es to
the Porte Maillot. The great salesrooms of the German motor-car
dealers had been given by the Government to a number of military
charities who had covered the trade signs with swathes and
rosettes of their national colors. Under the banner of the Belgians,
in the quondam hop of the Mercedes, was an exhibition of leather
knickknacks, baskets, and dolls made by the blind and mutilated
soldiers. The articles --- children's toys for the most part, dwarfs
that rolled over and over on a set of parallel bars, Alsatian lasses
with flaxen hair, and gay tops --- were exposed on a row of tables a
few feet back from the window. By the Porte Maillot, some of the
iron saw-horses with sharpened points, which had formed part of
the barricade built there in the days of the Great Retreat, lay, a
villainous, rusty heap, in a grassy ditch of the city wall; a few
stumps of the trees that had been then cut down were still visible,
and from a railroad tie embedded in the sidewalk hung six links of
a massive chain. Through this forgotten flotsam on the great shore
of the war, the quiet crowds went in and out of the Maillot
entrance to the Bois de Boulogne. There was a sense of order and
security in the air. I took a seat on the terrace of a little restaurant.
The gar‡on was a small man in the fifties, inclined to corpulence,
with a large head, large, blue-gray eyes, purplish lips, and
blue-black hair cut pompadour. As we watched the orderly,
Sunday crowds going to the great park, we fell into conversation
about the calmness of Paris. "Yes, it is calm," he said; "we are all
waiting (nous attendons). We know that the victory will be ours at
the finish. But all we can do is to wait. I have two sons at the
front." He had struck the keynote. Paris is calmly waiting ---
waiting for the end of the war, for victory, for the return of her
children.

Yet in this great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty
blues, and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was
another Paris, a terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early
in the afternoon a dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest.
It began to rain.

In a great garret of the hospital, under a high French roof, was the
dormitory of the volunteers attached to the Paris Ambulance
Section. At night, this great space was lit by only one light, a
battered electric reading-lamp standing on a kind of laboratory
table in the center of the floor, and window curtains of dark-blue
cambric, waving mysteriously in the night wind, were supposed to
hide even this glimmer from the eyes of raiding Zeppelins.
Looking down, early in the evening, into the great quadrangle of
the institution, one saw the windows of the opposite wing veiled
with this mysterious blue, and heard all the feverish unrest of a
hospital, the steps on the tiled corridors, the running of water in
the bathroom taps, the hard clatter of surgical vessels, and
sometimes the cry of a patient having a painful wound dressed. But
late at night the confused murmur of the battle between life and
death had subsided, the lights in the wards were extinguished, and
only the candle of the night nurse, seen behind a screen, and the
stertorous, breathing of the many sleepers, brought back the
consciousness of human life. I have often looked into the wards as
I returned from night calls to the station where we received the
wounded, and been conscious, as I peered silently into that
flickering obscurity, of the vague unrest of sleepers, of the various
attitudes assumed, the arms outstretched, the upturned throats, and
felt, too, in the still room, the mystic presence of the Angel of
Pain.

It was late at night, and I stood looking out of my window over the
roofs of Neuilly to the great, darkened city just beyond. From
somewhere along the tracks of the "Little Belt" railway came a
series of piercing shrieks from a locomotive whistle. It was raining
hard, drumming on the slate roof of the dormitory, and somewhere
below a gutter gurgled foolishly. Far away in the corridor a gleam
of yellow light shone from the open door of an isolation room
where a nurse was watching by a patient dying of gangrene. Two
comrades who had been to the movies at the Gaumont Palace near
the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilant whispers of the evening's
entertainment, and one of them said, "That war film was a corker;
did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?" "Yuh, damn
good," answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. It was a
strange crew that inhabited these quarters; there were idealists,
dreamers, men out of work, simple rascals and adventurers of all
kinds. To my right slept a big, young Westerner, from some totally
unknown college in Idaho, who was a humanitarian enthusiast to
the point of imbecility, and to the left a middle-aged rogue who
indulged in secret debauches of alcohol and water he cajoled from
the hospital orderlies. Yet this obscure and motley community was
America's contribution to France. I fell asleep.

"Up, birds!"

The lieutenant of the Paris Section, a mining engineer with a
picturesque vocabulary of Nevadan profanity, Was standing in his
pajama trousers at the head of the room, holding a lantern in his
hand. "Up, birds!" he called again. "Call's come in for Lah
Chapelle." There were uneasy movements under the blankets,
inmates of adjoining beds began to talk to each other, and some lit
their bedside candles. The chief went down both sides of the
dormitory, flashing his lantern before each bed, ragging the sleepy.
"Get up, So-and-So. Well, I must say, Pete, you have a hell of a
nerve." There were glimpses of candle flames, bare bodies
shivering in the damp cold, and men sitting on beds, winding on
their puttees. "Gee! listen to it rain," said somebody. "What time is
it?" "Twenty minutes past two." Soon the humming and drumming
of the motors in the yard sounded through the roaring of the
downpour.

Down in the yard I found Oller, my orderly, and our little Ford
ambulance, number fifty-three. One electric light, of that sickly
yellow color universal in France, was burning over the principal
entrance to the hospital, just giving us light enough to see our way
out of the gates. Down the narrow, dark Boulevard Inkerman we
turned, and then out on to a great street which led into the "outer"
boulevard of De Batignolles and Clichy. To that darkness with
which the city, in fear of raiding aircraft, has hidden itself, was
added the continuous, pouring rain. In the light of our lamps, the
wet, golden trees of the black, silent boulevards shone strangely,
and the illuminated advertising kiosks, which we passed, one after
the other at the corners of great streets, stood lonely and drenched,
in the swift, white touch of our radiance. Black and shiny, the
asphalt roadway appeared to go on in a straight line forever and
forever.

Neither in residential, suburban Neuilly nor in deserted
Montmartre was there a light to be seen, but when we drew into
the working quarter of La Chapelle, lights appeared in the
windows, as if some toiler of the night was expected home or
starting for his labor, and vague forms, battling with the rain or in
refuge under the awning of a caf‚, were now and then visible.
From the end of the great, mean rue de La Chapelle the sounds of
the unrest of the railroad yards began to be heard, for this street
leads to the freight-houses near the fortifications. Our objective
was a great freight station which the Government, some months
before, had turned into a receiving-post for the wounded; it lay on
the edge of the yard, some distance in from the street, behind a
huddle of smaller sheds and outbuildings. To our surprise the rue
de La Chapelle was strewn with ambulances rushing from the
station, and along two sides of the great yard, where the
merchandise trucks had formerly turned in, six or seven hundred
more ambulances were waiting. We turned out of the dark,
rain-swept city into this hurly-burly of shouts, snorting of engines,
clashing of gears, and whining of brakes, illuminated with a
thousand intermeshing beams of headlights across whose
brilliance the rain fell in sloping, liquid rods. "Quick, a small car
this way!" cried some one in an authoritative tone, and number
fifty-three ran up an inclined plane into the enormous shed which
had been reserved for the loading of the wounded into the
ambulances.

We entered a great, high, white-washed, warehouse kind of place,
about four hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, built of
wood evidently years before. In the middle of this shed was an
open space, and along the walls were rows of ambulances.
Brancardiers (stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were
loading wounded into these cars, and as soon as one car was filled,
it would go out of the hall and another would take its place. There
was an infernal din; the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was
full of blue gasoline fumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was
increasing every minute, were carried the wounded, often nothing
but human bundles of dirty blue cloth and fouled bandages. Every
one of these wounded soldiers was saturated with mud, a
gray-white mud that clung moistly to their overcoats, or, fully dry,
colored every part of the uniform with its powder. One saw men
that appeared to have rolled over and over in a puddle bath of this
whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister mixture of
blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded
soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human
relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of
the trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds,
the soldier comes from the train a sight for which only the great
heart of Francis of Assisi could have adequate pity. Oller and I
went through an opening in a canvas partition into that part of the
great shed where the wounded were being unloaded from the
trains. In width, this part measured four hundred feet, but in length
it ran to eight hundred. In two rows of six each, separated by an
aisle about eight feet wide, were twelve little houses, about forty
feet square, built of stucco, each one painted a different color. The
woodwork of the exterior was displayed through the plaster in the
Elizabethan fashion, and the little sheds were clean, solidly built,
and solidly roofed. In one of these constructions was the bureau of
the staff which assigned the wounded to the hospitals, in another
was a fully equipped operating-room, and in the others, rows of
stretcher-horses, twenty-five to a side, on which the wounded were
laid until a hospital number had been assigned them.. A slip, with
these hospital numbers on it, the names of the patients, and the
color of the little house in which they were to be found, was then
given to the chauffeur of an ambulance, who, with this slip in hand
and followed by a number of stretcher-bearers, immediately
gathered his patients. A specimen slip might run thus --- "To
Hospital 32, avenue de l'I‚na, Paul Chaubard, red barraque, Jules
Adamy, green barraque, and Alphonse Fort, ochre barraque." To
give a French touch to the scene, this great space, rapidly filling
with human beings in an appalling state of misery, as the aftermath
of the offensive broke on us, was decorated with evergreen trees
and shrubs so that the effect was that of an indoor fair or
exhibition; you felt as if you might get samples of something at
each barraque, as the French termed the little houses. To the side
of these there was a platform, and a sunken track running along the
wall, and behind, a great open space set with benches for those of
the wounded able to walk. Some fifty great, cylindrical braziers,
which added a strange bit of rosy, fiery color to the scene, warmed
this space. When the wounded had begun to arrive at about
midnight, a regiment of Zouaves was at hand to help the regular
stretcher-bearers; these Zouaves were all young, "husky" men
dressed in the baggy red trousers and short blue jacket of their
classic uniform, and their strength was in as much of a contrast to
the weakness of those whom they handled as their gay uniform
was in contrast to the miry, horizon blue of the combatants. There
was something grotesque in seeing two of these powerful fellows
carrying to the wagons a dirty blue bundle of a human being.

With a piercing shriek, that cut like a gash through the uproar of
the ambulance engines, a sanitary train, the seventh since
midnight, came into the station, and so smoothly did it run by, its
floors on a level with the main floor, that it seemed an illusion,
like a stage train. On the platform stood some Zouaves waiting to
unload the passengers, while others cleared the barraques and
helped the feeble to the ambulances. There was a steady line of
stretchers going out, yet the station was so full that hardly a bit of
the vast floor space was unoccupied. One walked down a narrow
path between a sea of bandaged bodies. Shouldering what baggage
they had, those able to walk plodded in a strange, slow tempo to
the waiting automobiles. All by themselves were about a hundred
poor, ragged Germans, wounded prisoners, brothers of the French
in this terrible fraternity of pain.

About four or five hundred assis (those able to sit up) were waiting
on benches at the end of the hall. Huddled round the rosy,
flickering braziers, they sat profoundly silent in the storm and din
that moved about them, rarely conversing with each other. I
imagine that the stupefaction, which is the physiological reaction
of an intense emotional and muscular effort, had not yet worn
away. There were fine heads here and there. Forgetful of his
shattered arm, an old fellow, with the face of Henri Quatre, eagle
nose, beard, and all, sat with his head sunken on his chest in
mournful contemplation, and a fine-looking, black-haired, dragoon
kind of youth with the wildest of eyes clung like grim death to a
German helmet. The same expression of resigned fatalism was
common to all.

Sometimes the chauffeurs who were waiting for their clients got a
chance to talk to one of the soldiers. Eager for news, they clustered
round the wounded man, bombarding him with questions.

"Are the Boches, retreating?"

"When did it begin?"

"Just where is the attack located?"

"Are things going well for us?"

The. soldier, a big young fellow with a tanned face, somewhat pale
from the shock of a ripped-up forearm, answered the questions
good-naturedly, though the struggle had been on so great a scale
that he could only tell about his own hundred feet of trench.
Indeed the substance of his information was that there had been a
terrible bombardment of the German lines, and then an attack by
the French which was still in progress.

"Are we going to break clear through the lines?"

The soldier shrugged his shoulders. "They hope to," he replied.

Just beyond us, in one of the thousand stretchers on the floor, a
small bearded man had died. With his left leg and groin swathed in
bandages, he lay flat on his back, his mouth open, muddy, dirty,
and dead. From time to time the living on each side stole curious,
timid glances at him. Then, suddenly, some one noticed the body,
and two stretcher-bearers carried it away, and two more brought a
living man there in its place.

The turmoil continued to increase. At least a thousand
motor-ambulances, mobilized from all over the region of Paris,
were now on hand to carry away the human wreckage of the great
offensive. Ignorant of the ghastly army at its doors, Paris slept. The
rain continued to fall heavily.

"Eh la, comrade."

A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed me
from his stretcher.

"You speak French?"

I nodded.

"I am going to ask you to do me a favor --- write to my wife who is
here in Paris, and tell her that I am safe and shall let her know at
once what hospital I am sent to. I shall be very grateful."

He let his shoulders sink to the stretcher again and I saw him now
and then looking for me in the crowd. Catching my eye, he smiled.

A train full of Algerian troops came puffing into the station, the
uproar hardly rising above the general hubbub. The passengers
who were able to walk got out first, some limping, some walking
firmly with a splendid Eastern dignity. These men were Arabs and
Moors from Algeria and Tunisia, who had enlisted in the colonial
armies. There was a great diversity of size and racial type among
them, some being splendid, big men of the type one imagines
Othello to have been, some chunkier and more bullet-headed, and
others tall and lean with interesting aquiline features. I fancy that
the shorter, rounder-skulled ones were those with a dash of black
blood. The uniform, of khaki-colored woolen, consisted of a
simple, short-waisted jacket, big baggy trousers, puttees, and a red
fez or a steel helmet with the lunar crescent and "R.F." for its
device. We heard rumors about their having attacked a village.
Advancing in the same curious tempo as the French, they passed to
the braziers and the wooden benches. Last of all from the train,
holding his bandaged arm against his chest, a native corporal with
the features of a desert tribesman advanced with superb,
unconscious stateliness. As the Algerians sat round the braziers,
their uniforms and brown skins presented a contrast to the pallor of
the French in their bedraggled blue, but there was a marked
similarity of facial expression. A certain racial odor rose from the
Orientals.

My first assignment, two Algerians and two Frenchmen, took me
to an ancient Catholic high school which had just been improvised
into a hospital for the Oriental troops. It lay, dirty, lonely, and
grim, just to one side of a great street on the edge of Paris, and had
not been occupied since its seizure by the State. Turning in
through an enormous door, lit by a gas globe flaring and flickering
in the torrents of rain, we found ourselves in an enormous, dark
courtyard, where a half-dozen ambulances were already waiting to
discharge their clients. Along one wall there was a flight of steps,
and from somewhere beyond the door at the end of this stair shone
the faintest glow of yellow light.

It came from the door of a long-disused schoolroom, now turned
into the receiving-hall of this strange hospital. The big, high room
was lit by one light only, a kerosene hand lamp standing on the
teacher's desk, and so smoked was the chimney that the wick gave
hardly more light than a candle. There was just enough
illumination to see about thirty Algerians sitting at the school
desks, their big bodies crammed into the little seats, and to
distinguish others lying in stretchers here and there upon the floor.
At the teacher's table a little French adjutant with a trim, black
mustache and a soldier interpreter were trying to discover the
identity of their visitors.

" Number 2215," (num‚ro deux mille deux cent quinze), the
officer cried; and the interpreter, leaning over the adjutant's
shoulder to read the name, shouted, "M‚h‚met Ali."

There was no answer, and the Algerians looked round at each
other, for all the world like children in a school. It was very
curious to see these dark, heavy, wild faces bent over these disused
desks.

"Number 2168" (num‚ro deux mille cent soixante huit), cried the
adjutant.

"Abdullah Taleb," cried the interpreter.

" Moi," answered a voice from a stretcher in the shadows of the
floor.

"Take him to room six," said the adjutant, indicating the speaker to
a pair of stretcher-bearers. In the quieter pauses the rain was heard
beating on the panes.

There are certain streets in Paris, equally unknown to tourist and
Parisian --- obscure, narrow, cobble-stoned lanes, lined by walls
concealing little orchards and gardens. So provincial is their
atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to
believe one's self on the fringe of an old town, just where little
bourgeois villas begin to overlook the fields; but to consider one's
self just beyond the heart of Paris is almost incredible. Down such
a street, in a great garden, lay the institution to which our two
Frenchmen were assigned. We had a hard time finding it in the
night and rain, but at length, discovering the concierge's bell, we
sent a vigorous peal clanging through the darkness. Oller lifted the
canvas flap of the ambulance to see about our patients.

"All right in there, boys?"

"Yes," answered a voice.

"Not cold?

"Non. Are we at the hospital?"

"Yes; we are trying to wake up the concierge."

There was a sound of a key in a lock, and a small, dark woman
opened the door. She was somewhat spinstery in type, her thin,
black hair was neatly parted in the middle, and her face was
shrewd, but not unkindly.

"Deux bless‚s (two wounded), madame," said I.

The woman pulled a wire loop inside the door, and a far-off bell
tinkled.

"Come in," she said. "The porter will be here immediately."

We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and
a carbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall.

"Are they seriously wounded?" she asked.

"I cannot say."

A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a
small, beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of
rubber boots, and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into
the room.

"Two wounded have arrived," said the lady. "You are to help these
messieurs get out the stretchers. "

The porter looked out of the door at the taillight of the ambulance,
glowing red behind its curtain of rain.

"Mon Dieu, what a deluge! " he exclaimed, and followed us forth.
With an "Easy there," and "Lift now," we soon had both of our
clients out of the ambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of
the odd, stiff, little room, strange intruders of its primness; the
first, a big, heavy, stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet,
and the second a small, nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang
and bright, uneasy eyes. The mud-stained blue of the uniforms
seemed very strange, indeed, beside the Victorian furniture
upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A middle-aged servant --- a
big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature, probably the porter's
wife --- entered, followed by two other women, the last two
wearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and the same
pattern of white wristlets and collar. We then carried the two
soldiers upstairs to a back room, where the old servant had filled a
kind of enamel dishpan with soapy water. Very gently and deftly
the beefy old porter and his wife took off the fouled, blood-stained
uniforms of the two fighting men, and washed their bodies, while
she who had opened the door stood by and superintended all. The
feverish, bright-eyed fellow. seemed to be getting weaker, but the
big peasant conversed with the old woman in a low, steady tone,
and told her that there had been a big action.

When Oller and I came downstairs, two little glasses of sherry and
a plate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us. There was
something distinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in
the demeanor of the two prim ladies who stood by. It roused my
curiosity. Finally one of them said: --

"Are you English, gentlemen?"

"No," we replied; "Americans."

"I thought you might be English," she replied in that language,
which she spoke very clearly and fluently. "Both of us have been
many years in England. We are French Protestant deaconesses, and
this is our home. It is not a hospital. But when the call for more
accommodations for the wounded came in, we got ready our two
best rooms. The soldiers upstairs are our first visitors."

The old porter came uneasily down the stair. "Mademoiselle Pierre
says that the doctor must come at once," he murmured, "the little
fellow (le petit) is not doing well."

We thanked the ladies gratefully for the refreshment, for we were
cold and soaked to the skin. Then we went out again to the
ambulance and the rain. A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning.
Later in the morning, I saw a copy of the "Matin" attached to a
kiosk; it said something about "Grande Victoire."

Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of
Paris, bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La
Chapelle. For three days and nights the Americans and all the other
ambulance squads drove continuously. It was a terrible phase of
the conflict to see, but he who neither sees nor understands it
cannot realize the soul of the war. Later, at the trenches, I saw
phases of the war that were spiritual, heroic, and close to the
divine, but this phase was, in its essence, profoundly animal.

CHAPTER III THE GREAT SWATHE OF THE LINES

THE time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region
whence came the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself,
share the life of the French soldier. Late one evening in October, I
arrived in Nancy and went to a hotel I had known well before the
war. An old porter, a man of sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray
hair, and a florid face almost devoid of expression, carried up my
luggage, and as I looked at him, standing in the doorway, a simple
figure in his striped black and yellow vest and white apron, I
wondered just what effect the war had had on him. Through the
open window of the room, seen over the dark silhouette of the
roofs of Nancy, shone the glowing red sky and rolling smoke of the
vast munition works at Pompey and Frouard.

"You were not here when I came to the hotel two years ago," said
1.

"No," he answered; "I have been here only since November, 1914."

"You are a Frenchman? There was a Swiss here, then."

"Yes, indeed, I am Fran‡ais, monsieur. The Swiss is now a waiter
in a caf‚ of the Place Stanislas. It is something new to me to be a
hotel porter."

"Tiens. What did you do?"

"I drove a coal team, monsieur."

"How, then, did you happen to come here?"

"I used to deliver coal to the hotel. One day I heard that the Swiss
had gone to the caf‚ to take the place of a gar‡on whose class had
just been called out. I was getting sick of carrying the heavy sacks
of coal, and being always out of doors, so I applied for the porter's
job."

"You are satisfied with the change."

"Oh, yes, indeed, monsieur."

"I suppose you have kinsmen at the front."

"Only my sister's son, monsieur."

"In the active forces?"

"No, he is a reservist. He is a man thirty-five years of age. He was
wounded by a shrapnel ball in the groin early in the spring, but is
now at the front again."

"What does he do en civil?"

"He is a furniture-maker, monsieur."

He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off
down the green velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator.
In the street below a crowd was coming out of the silky white
radiance of the lobby of a cinema into the violet rays thrown upon
the sidewalk from the illuminated sign over the theater door. There
are certain French cities to which the war has brought a real
prosperity, and Nancy was then one of them. The thousands of
refugees from the frontier villages and the world of military
officials and soldier workmen mobilized in the ammunition
factories had added to the population till it was actually greater
than it had been before the war, and with this new population had
come a development of the city's commercial life. The middle
class was making money, the rich were getting richer, and Nancy,
hardly more than eighteen or nineteen miles from the trenches,
forgot its danger till, on the first day of January, 1916, the
Germans fired several shells from a giant mortar or a marine piece
into the town, one of which scattered the fragments of a big
five-story apartment house all over Nancy. And on that afternoon
thirty thousand people left the city.

The day on which I was to go across the great swathe of the front
to the first-line trenches dawned cool and sunny. I use the word
"swathe" purposely, for only by that image can the real meaning of
the phrase "the front" be understood. The thick, black line which
figures on the war-maps is a great swathe of country running, with
a thousand little turns and twists that do not interfere with its
general regularity, from the summits of the 'Vosges to the yellow
dunes of the North Sea. The relation of the border of this swathe to
the world beyond is the relation of sea to land along an irregular
and indented coast. Here an isolated, strategic point, fiercely
defended by the Germans, has extended the border of the swathe
beyond the usual limits, and villages thirteen and fourteen miles
from the actual lines have been pounded to pieces by long-range
artillery in the hope of destroying the enemy's communications;
there the trenches cross an obscure, level moor upon whose
possession nothing particular depends, and the swathe narrows to
the villages close by the lines. This swathe, which begins with the
French communications, passes the French trenches, leaps "No
Man's Land," and continues beyond the German trenches to the
German communications, averages about twenty-two miles in
width. The territory within this swathe is inhabited by soldiers,
ruled by soldiers, worked by soldiers, and organized for war.
Sometimes the transition between civilian life and the life of the
swathe is abrupt, as, for instance, at Verdun, where the villages
beyond the lines have been emptied of civilian inhabitants to make
room for the soldiery; but at other times the change is gradual and
the peasants continue to work fields almost in the shadow of the
trenches. Since the line of trenches was organized by the Germans
only after a series of engagements along the front, during which
the battle-line oscillated over a wide territory, the approach to the
swathe is often through a region of desolated villages sometimes
far removed from the present trenches. Such is the state of affairs
in the region of the Marne, the Argonne, and on the southern bank
of the Moselle. Moss-overgrown and silent, these villages often
stand deserted in the fields at the entrance to the swathe, fit heralds
of the desolation that lies beyond.

Imagine, then, the French half of the swathe extending from the
edge of the civilian world to the barbed-wire entanglements of No
Man's Land. Within this territory, in the trenches, in the artillery
positions, in the villages where troops are quartered (and they are
quartered in every village of the swathe), and along all the
principal turns and corners of the roads, a certain number of shells
fall every twenty-four hours, the number of shells per locality
increasing as one advances toward the first lines. There are certain
disputed regions, that of Verdun in particular, where literally the
whole great swathe has been pounded to pieces, till hardly one
stone of a village remains on another, and during the recent
offensive in the Somme the British are said to have systematically
wiped out every village, hamlet, and road behind the German
trenches to a depth of eighteen miles. Yet, protected from rifle
bullets and the majority of shells by a great wooded hill, the
inhabitants of M-----, one mile from the lines of the Bois-le-Prˆtre,
did a thriving business selling fruit to the soldiers, and I once saw
an old peasant woman, who was digging potatoes in her garden
when a small shell burst about two hundred feet from her, shake
her fist toward the German lines, mutter something, and plod
angrily home to her cellar. There are rarely any children close to
the trenches, but in villages that are only occasionally shelled, the
school is open, and the class hurries to the cellar at the first alarm.

The lieutenant of the American Section, a young Frenchman who
spoke English not only fluently, but also with distinction, came to
Nancy to take me to the front. It was a clear, sunny morning, and
the rumble of the commercial life of Nancy, somewhat later in
starting than our own, was just beginning to be heard. Across the
street from the breakfast-room of the hotel, a young woman
wearing a little black cape over her shoulders rolled up the
corrugated iron shutter of a confectioner's shop and began to set
the window with the popular patriotic candy boxes, aluminum
models of a " seventy-five " shell tied round with a bow of narrow
tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a white apron and blue jumpers
went by carrying a basket of bread on his head; and from the
nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant dressed in a black
uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the morning I was
contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; that
night I was in a cellar seeking refuge from fire shells.

"Please give me all your military papers," said my officer. I handed
over all the cards, permits, and licenses that had been given me,
and he examined them closely.

"Allons, let us go," he said to his chauffeur, a young soldier
wearing the insignia of the motor-transportation corps.

"How long does it take us to get to the lines, mon lieutenant? "

"About an hour. Our headquarters are thirty kilomŠtres distant."

The big, war-gray Panhard began to move. I looked round, eager to
notice anything that marked our transition from peace to war.
Beyond the Nancy, built in the Versailles style by the exiled
Stanislaus, lay the industrial Nancy which has grown up since the
development of the iron mines of French Lorraine in the eighties.
Through this ugly huddle we passed first: there were working men
on the sidewalks, gamins in the gutters, --- nothing to remind one
of the war.

"Halt!"

At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small,
gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car. From the door of
a neighboring wineshop, a hideous old woman, her uncombed,
tawny yellow hair messed round her coarse, shiny face, came out
to look at us.

"Your papers, please," said a red-faced, middle-aged sergeant
wearing a brown corduroy uniform, who, walking briskly on
enormous fat legs, had followed the sentry out into the street. The
lieutenant produced the military permit to travel in the army zone
---the ordre de mouvement, a printed form on a blue sheet about
the size of a leaf of typewriter paper.

"Pass," said the sergeant, and saluted. The sentry retired to his post
on the sidewalk. At the door of the wineshop the woman continued
to stare at us with an animal curiosity. Possibly our English-like
uniforms had attracted her attention; the French are very curious
about les Anglais. Over the roof of an ugly row of working men's
barracks, built of mortar and trimmed with dingy brick, came the
uproar of a great industry, the humming clang of saws, the ringing
of iron on iron, and the heart-beat thump of a great hammer that
shook the earth. In a vast, detached building five great furnaces
were crowned with tufts of pinkish fire, workmen were crossing
the cindery yard dragging little carts and long strips of iron, and a
long line of open freight cars was being emptied of coal.

"They are making shells," said the lieutenant in the tone that he
might have said, "They are making candy."

Another sentry held us up at the bridge where the road crosses the
Moselle as it issues from the highlands to the southwest.

Beyond the bridge, running almost directly north to Metz, lay the
historic valley of the Moselle. Great, bare hills, varying between
seven hundred and a thousand feet in height, and often carved by
erosion into strange, high triangles and abrupt mesas, formed the
valley wall. The ground color of the hills was a warm buff-brown
with a good deal of iron-red in it, and the sky above was of a light,
friendly blue. A strange, Egyptian emerald of new wheat, a certain
deep cobalt of cloud shadows, and a ruddy brownness, of field and
moor are the colors of Lorraine. Here and there, on the meadows
of the river and the steep flanks of the hills, were ancient,
red-roofed villages. Across the autumnal fields the smoke and
flame of squalid Pompey loomed strangely.

There were signs of the war at Marbache, fourteen kilomŠtres from
Nancy, slight signs, to be sure, but good ones --- the presence of a
military smithy for the repair of army wagons, several of which
stood by on rusty wheels, and a view of some twenty or thirty
artillery caissons parked under the trees. But it was at B-----,
sixteen kilomŠtres from Nancy, and sixteen from the lines, that I
first felt the imminence of the war. The morning train from Nancy
had just stopped, to go no farther for fear of shells, and beyond the
station the tracks of the once busy Nancy-Metz railroad advanced,
rusty, unused, and overgrown with grass, into the danger zone. Far
behind now lay civilian Pompey, and Marbache shared by soldiers
and civilians. B----- was distinctly a village of the soldiery. The
little hamlet, now the junction where the wagon-trains supplying
the soldiery meet the great artery of the railroad, was built on the
banks of a canal above the river. The color of these villages in
Lorraine is rather lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the
local buff-yellow stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown
tone that goes well with the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown
landscape. A glorious sky of silvery white cloud masses, pierced
with sunlight and islanded with soft blue, shone over the soldier
village. There were no combatants in it when we passed through,
only the old poilus who drove the wagons to the trenches and the
army hostlers who looked after the animals. There were pictures of
soldier grooms leading horses down a narrow, slimy street between
brown, mud-spattered walls to a drinking-trough; of horses lined
up along a house wall being briskly curry-combed by big, thick-set
fellows in blousy white overalls and blue fatigue caps; and of
doors of stables opening on the road showing a bedding of brown
straw on the earthen floor. There was a certain stench, too, the
smell of horse-fouled mud that mixed with that odor I later was
able to classify as the smell of war. For the war has a smell that
clings to everything military, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, and
cantonments, and saturates one's own clothing, a smell
compounded of horse, chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human
beings. At the guarded exit of the village to the shell zone was a
little military cemetery in which rows of wooden crosses stood
with the regularity of pins in a paper.

Two kilomŠtres farther on, at Dieulouard, we drew into the shell
zone. A cottage had been struck the day before, and the shell,
arriving by the roof, had blown part of the front wall out into the
street. In the fa‡ade of the house, to the left of a door hanging
crazily on its hinges, an irregular oval hole, large enough to drive a
motor-car through, rose from the ground and came to a point just
below the overhang of the roof. The edges of the broken stone
were clean and new in contrast to the time-soiled outer wall of the
dwelling.

A pile of this clean stone lay on the ground at the outer opening of
the orifice, mixed with fragments of red tiles.

"They killed two there yesterday," said the lieutenant, pointing out
the d‚bris.

The village, a farming hamlet transformed by the vicinity of a
great foundry into something neither a village nor a town, was full
of soldiers; there were soldiers in the streets, soldiers standing in
doorways, soldiers cooking over wood fires, soldiers everywhere.
And looking at the muddy village-town full of men in uniforms of
blue, old uniforms of blue, muddy uniforms of blue, in blue that
was blue-gray and blue-green from wear and exposure to the
weather, I realized that the old days of beautiful, half-barbaric
uniforms were gone forever, and that, in place of the old romantic
war of cavalry charges and great battles in the open, a new, more
terrible war had been created, a war that had not the chivalric
externals of the old.

After Dieulouard began the swathe of stillness.

Following the western bank of the canal of the Moselle the road
made a great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river,
and then mounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur
the road went through lonely fields, in which were deserted
farmhouses surrounded by acres of neglected vines, now rank and
Medusa-like in their weedy profusion. Every once in a while,
along a rise, stood great burlap screens so arranged one behind the
other as to give the effect of a continuous line when seen from a
certain angle.

"What are those for?"

"To hide the road from the Germans. Do you see that little village
down there on the crest? The Boches have an observatory there,
and shell the road whenever they see anything worth shelling."

....

Fig. 2. Burlap screens to hide ........Fig. 3. Carrying down the dead 

the road from the Germans ..............after the attack.

A strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and
decay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued to
shine on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the
world was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had
changed. A village lay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells
and half deserted. Beyond the still, shell-spattered houses, a great
wood rose, about a mile and a half away, on a ridge that stood
boldly against the sky. Running from the edge of the trees down
across an open slope to the river was a brownish line that stood in
a little contrast to the yellower grass. Suddenly, there slowly rose
from this line a great puff of grayish-black smoke which melted
away in the dear, autumnal air.

"See," said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he
would have shown at a bonfire --- "those are the German trenches.
We have just fired a shell into them."

Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of
Pont-…-Mousson. The road was now everywhere screened carefully
with lengths of light-brown burlap, and there was not a single
house that did not bear witness to the power of a shell. The sense
of "the front" began to possess me, never to go, the sense of being
in the vicinity of a tremendous power. A ruined village, or a
deserted town actually on the front does not bring to mind any
impression of decay, for the intellect tends rather to consider the
means by which the destruction has been accomplished. One sees
villages of the swathes so completely blown to pieces that they are
literally nothing but earthy mounds of rubbish, and seeing them
thus, in a plain still fiercely disputed night and day between one's
own side and the invisible enemy, the mind feels itself in the
presence of force, titanic, secret, and hostile.

Beyond Pont-…-Mousson the road led directly to the trenches of the
Bois-le-Prˆtre, less than half a mile away. But the disputed
trenches were hidden behind the trees, and I could not see them.
Through the silence of the deserted town sounded the muffled
boom of shells and trench engines bursting in the wood beyond,
and every now and then clouds of gray-black smoke from the
explosion would rise above the brown leaves of the ash trees. The
smoke of these explosions rose straight upwards in a foggy
column, such as a locomotive might make if, halted on its tracks
somewhere in the wood, it had put coal on its fires.

With the next day I began my service at the trenches, but the war
began for me that very night.

A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted
apartment house had been assigned me. It was nine o'clock, and I
was getting ready to roll up in my blankets and go to sleep.
Beneath the starlit heavens the street below was black as pitch
save when a trench light, floating serenely down the sky,
illuminated with its green-white glow the curving road and the line
of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous villas. There was not a sound to
be heard outside of an occasional rifle shot in the trenches,
sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet balls. I
went round to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen
windows to the lines. A little action, some quarrel of sentries,
perhaps, was going on behind the trees, just where the wooded
ridge sloped to the river. Trench light after trench light rose,
showing the disused railroad track running across the unharvested
fields. Gleaming palely through the French window at which I was
standing, the radiance revealed the deserted kitchen, the rusty
stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished watertap above the stone
sink. The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke upon my cars.

My own room was lit by the yellow flame of a solitary candle,
rising, untroubled by the slightest breath of wind, straight into the
air. A large rug of old-rose covered the floor, an old-rose velvet
canopy draped a long table, hanging down at the comers in
straight, heavy creases, and the wallpaper was a golden yellow
with faint stripes of silvery-gray glaze. By the side of the wooden
bed stood a high cabinet holding about fifty terra cotta and
porcelain figurines, shiny shepherdesses with shiny pink cheeks,
Louis XV peasants with rakes on their shoulders, and three little
dogs made of a material the color of cocoa. The gem of the
collection was an eighteenth-century porcelain of a youth and a
maid sitting on opposite sides of a curved bench over whose center
rose a blossoming bush. The youth, dressed in black, and wearing
yellow stockings, looked with an amorous smile at the girl in her
gorgeous dress of flowering brocade.

A marbly-white fireplace stood in the comer, overhung by a great
Louis XV mirror with a gilt frame of rich, voluptuous curves. On
the mantel lay a scarf of old-rose velvet smelling decidedly musty.
Alone, apart, upon this mantel, as an altar, stood a colored plaster
bust of Jeanne d'Arc, showing her in the beauty of her winsome
youth. The pale, girlish face dominated the shadowy room with its
dreamy, innocent loveliness.

There came a knock at the door, and so still was the town and the
house that the knock had the effect of something dramatic and
portentous. A big man, with bulging, pink cheeks, a large, chestnut
mustache, and brown eyes full of philosophic curiosity, stood in
the doorway. The uniform that he was wearing was unusually neat
and clean.

"So you are the American I am to have as neighbor," said he.

"Yes," I replied.

"I am the caporal in charge of the d‚p“t of the engineers in the
cellar," continued my visitor, "and I thought I'd come in and see
how you were."

I invited him to enter.

"Do you find yourself comfortable here, son?"

"Yes. I consider myself privileged to have the use of the room.
Have a cigarette?"

"Are these American cigarettes?"

"Yes."

"Your American tobacco is fine, son. But in America everybody is
a millionaire and has the best of everything --is n't that so? I should
like to go to America."

"A Frenchman is never happy out of France."

Comfortably seated in a big, ugly chair, he puffed his cigarette and
meditated.

"Perhaps you are right," he admitted. "We Frenchmen love the
good things, and think we can get them in France better than
anywhere else. The solid satisfactions of life ---good wine --- good
cheese." He paused. "You see, son, all that (tout ‡a) is an affair of
mine --- in civilian life (dans le civil) I am a grocer at Macon in
Bourgogne."

For a little while we talked of Burgundy, which I had often visited
in my student days at Lyons. There came another pause, and the
Burgundian said:

"Well, what do you think of this big racket (ce grand fracas)?"

"I have not seen enough of it to say."

"Well, I think you are going to get a taste of it to-night. I heard our
artillery men (nos artiflots) early this morning firing their
long-range cannon, and every time they do that the Boches throw
shells into Pont-…-Mousson. I have been expecting an answer all
day. If they start in to-night, get up and come down cellar, son.
This house was struck by a shell two weeks ago."

The shadowy, candlelit room and the dark city became at his
words more mysterious and hostile. The atmosphere seemed
pervaded by some obscure, endless, dreadful threat. It was getting
toward ten o'clock.

"Is this the only room you have? I have never been in this suite."

"No, there is another room. Would you like to see it?"

He followed me into a small chamber from which everything had
been stripped except a bedside table, a chair, and a crayon portrait
of a woman. The picture, slightly tinted with flesh color, was that
of a bourgeoise on the threshold of the fifties, and the still
candle-flame brought out in distinct relief the heavy, obese
countenance, the hair curled in artificial ringlets, and the gold
crucifix which she wore on her large bosom. The Burgundian's
attention centered on this picture, which he examined with the air
of a connoisseur of female beauty.

"Lord, how ugly she is!" he exclaimed. "She might well have
stayed. Such an old dragon would have no reason to fear the
Boches." And he laughed heartily from his rich lips and pulled his
mustache.

"Don't forget to hurry to the cellar, son," he called as he went
away.

At his departure the lonely night closed in on me again. Far, far
away sounded the booming of cannon.

I am a light sleeper, and the arrival of the first shell awakened me.
Kicking off my blankets, I sat up in bed just in time to catch the
swift ebb of a heavy concussion. A piece of glass, dislodged from a
broken pane by the tremor, fell in a treble tinkle to the floor. For a
minute or two there was a full, heavy silence, and then several
objects rolled down the roof and fell over the gutters into the
street. It sounded as if some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto
the house-roof from the height of the clouds. Another silence
followed. Suddenly it was broken by a swift, complete sound, a
heavy boom-roar, and on the heels of this noise came a throbbing,
whistling sigh that, at first faint as the sound of ocean on a distant
beach, increased with incredible speed to a whistling swish, ending
in a HISH of tremendous volume and a roaring, grinding burst.
The sound of a great shell is never a pure bang; one hears, rather,
the end of the arriving HISH, the explosion, and the tearing
disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one grinding
hammer-blow of terrific violence. On the heels of this second shell
came voices in the dark street, and the rosy glow of fire from
somewhere behind. More lumps, fragments of shell that had been
shot into the air by the explosion, rained down upon the roof. I got
up and went to the kitchen window. A house on one of the silent
streets between the city and the lines was on fire, great volumes of
smoke were rolling off into the starlit night, and voices were heard
all about murmuring in the shadows. I hurried on my clothes and
went down to the cellar.

The light of two candles hanging from a shelf in loops of wire
revealed a clean, high cellar; a mess of straw was strewn along one
wall, and a stack of shovels and picks, some of them wrapped in
paper, was banked against the other. In the straw lay three oldish
men, fully clad in the dark-blue uniform which in old times had
signaled the Engineer Corps; one dozed with his head on his arm,
the other two were stretched out flat in the mysterious grossness of
sleep. A door from the cellar to a sunken garden was open, and
through this opening streamed the intense radiance of the rising
fire. At the opening stood three men, my visitor of the evening, a
little, wrinkled man with Napoleon III whiskers and imperial, and
an old, dwarfish fellow with a short neck, a bullet head, and
close-clipped hair. Catching sight of me, the Burgundian said: --

"Well, son, you see it is knocking (‡a tape) ce soir."

Hearing another shell, he slammed the door, and stepped to the
right behind the stone wall of the cellar.

"Very bad," croaked the dwarf. "The Boches are throwing fire
shells."

"And they will fire shrapnel at the poor bougres who have to put
out the fires," said the little man with the imperial.

"So they will, those knaves," croaked the dwarf in a voice entirely
free from any emotion.

"That fire must be down on the Boulevard Ney," said the bearded
man.

"There is another beginning just to the right," said the Burgundian
in the tone of one retailing interesting but hardly useful
information.

"There will be others," croaked the dwarf, who, leaning against the
cellar wall, was trying to roll a cigarette with big, square, fumbling
fingers. And looking at a big, gray-haired man in the hay, who had
turned over and was beginning to snore, he added: " Look at the
new man. He sleeps well, that fellow" (ce type l…).

"He looks like a Breton," said the man with the imperial.

"An Auvergnat --- an Auvergnat," replied the dwarf in a tone that
was meant to be final.

The soldier, who had just been sent down from Paris to take the
place of another recently invalided home, snored on, unconscious
of our scrutiny. The light from the fires outside cast a rosy glow on
his weather-worn features and sparse, silvery hair. His own
curiosity stirred, the corporal looked at his list.

"He came from Lyons," he announced. "His name is Alphonse
Reboulet."

"I am glad he is not an Auvergnat," growled the dwarf. "We should
have all had fleas."

A shell burst very near, and a bitter odor of explosives came
swirling through the doorway. A fragment of the shell casing
struck a window above us, and a large piece of glass fell by the
doorway and broke into splinters. The first fire was dying down,
but two others were burning briskly. The soldiers waited for the
end of the bombardment, as they might have waited for the end of
a thunderstorm.

"Tiens --- here comes the shrapnel," exclaimed the Burgundian.
And he slammed the door swiftly.

A high, clear whistle cleaved the flame-lit sky, and about thirty
small shrapnel shells burst beyond us.

"They try to prevent any one putting out the fires," said the
Burgundian confidentially. "They get the range from the light of
the flames."

Another dreadful rafale (volley) of shrapnel, at the rate of ten or
fifteen a minute, came speeding from the German lines.

"They are firing on the other house, now."

"Who puts out the fires?"

"The territorials who police and dean up the town. Some of them
live two doors below."

The Burgundian pointed down the garden to a door opening, like
our own, on to an area below the level of the street. Suddenly, a
gate opening on a back lane swung back, and two soldiers entered,
one carrying the feet and the other the shoulders of a third. The
body hung clumsily between them like a piece of old sacking.

"Tiens --- some one is wounded," said the Burgundian. " Go, thou,
Badel, and see who it is."

The dwarf plodded off obediently.

"It is Palester," he announced on his return, the type that had the
swollen jaw last month."

"What's the matter with him?"

"He's been killed."

CHAPTER IV  LA FOR T DE BOIS-LE-PR TRE

BEGINNING at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of
bare, desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and
descends to the river in a number of great, wooded ridges
perpendicular to the northward-flowing stream. The town of
Pont-…-Mousson lies an apron of meadowland spread between two
of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle and the ridge of the
Bois-le-Prˆtre. The latter is the highest of all the spurs of the
valley. Rising from the river about half a mile to the north of the
city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, and was seen
from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking the
sky-line to the northwest. The hamlet of MaidiŠres, in which our
headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a
point where the amphitheater of Pont-…-Mousson, crowding
between the two ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply
tilted to the west.

The Bois-le-Prˆtre dominated at once the landscape and our minds.
Its existence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty
thousand Frenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled
Americans; it had dominated and ended the lives of the dead; it
would dominate the imagination of the future. Yet, looking across
the brown walls and claret roofs of the hamlet of MaidiŠres, there
was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope, open fields, a reddish
ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a fire shell, and a
wood. The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees, seemingly
without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost all lights the
trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate. Such was the forest
which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any other
point along the line. The wood had been contested trench by
trench, literally foot by foot. It was at once the key to the
Saint-Mihiel salient and the city of Metz.

The Saint-Mihiel salient --- "the hernia," as the French call it
---begins at the Bois-le-Prˆtre. Pivoting on The Wood, the lines
turn sharply inland, cross the desolate plateau of La Woevre, attain
the Meuse at Saint-Mihiel, turn again, and ascend the river to the
Verdunois. The salient, as dangerous for the Germans as it is
troublesome for the French, represents the limit of a German
offensive directed against Toul in October, 1914. That the French
retreated was due to the fact that the plateau was insufficiently
protected, many of the regiments having been rushed north to the
great battle then raging on the Aisne.

Only one railroad center lies in the territory of the salient,
Thiaucourt in Woevre. This pleasant little moorland town, locally
famous for its wine, is connected with Metz by two single-track
railroad lines, one coming via Conflans, and the other by Arnaville
on the Moselle. At Vilcey-sur-Mad, these lines unite, and follow to
Thiaucourt the only practicable railroad route, the valley of the
Rupt (brook) de Mad.

Thus the domination of Thiaucourt, or the valley of the Rupt de
Mad, by French artillery would break the railroad communications
between the troops keeping the salient and their base of supplies,
Metz. And the fate of Metz itself hangs on the control of the
Bois-le-Prˆtre.

Metz is the heart of the German organization on the western front:
the railroad center, the supply station, the troop d‚p“t. A blow at
Metz would affect the security of every German soldier between
Alsace and the Belgian frontier. But if the French can drive the
Germans out of the Bois-le-Prˆtre and establish big howitzers on
the crest the Germans are still holding, there will soon be no more
Metz. The French guns will destroy the city as the German cannon
destroyed Verdun.

When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the
battles of September and October, 1914, they took to the ground
on the heights of the Bois-le-Prˆtre, a terrain far enough ahead of
Thiaucourt and Metz to preserve these centers from the danger of
being shelled. On the crest of the highest ridge along the valley,
admirably ambushed in a thick forest, they waited for the coming
of the French. And the French came.

They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country
schoolmaster, rich young noble and Corsican peasant, to the
storming of the wood, upheld by one vision, the unbroken, grassy
slope that stretched from behind the German lines to the town of
Thiaucourt. In the trenches behind the slaty trunks of the great ash
trees, Bavarian peasants, Saxons, and round-headed
W�rttemburgers, the olive-green, jack-booted Boches, awaited
their coming, determined to hold the wood, the salient, and the
city.

A year later the Bois-le-Prˆtre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume
of ecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in
an old church, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of
Death).

The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer
residence of a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the
beginning of the war. If there is an architectural style of German
origin known as the "Neo-Classic," which affects large,
windowless spaces framed in pilasters of tile, and decorations and
insets of omelet-yellow and bottle-green glazed brick, "Wisteria
Villa" is of that school. It stood behind a high wall of iron spikes
on the road leading from MaidiŠres to the trenches, a high,
Germano-Pompeian country house, topped by a roof rich in angles,
absurd windows, and unexpected gables. There are huge, square,
French-roofed houses in New England villages built by local
richessimes of Grant's time, and still called by neighbors the Jinks
place" or the "Levi Oates place"; Wisteria Villa had something of
the same social relation to the commune of MaidiŠres. Grotesque
and ugly, it was not to be despised; it had character in its way.

Our social center was the dining-room of the villa. Exclusive of
the kitchen range, it boasted the only stove in the house, a queerly
shaped "Salamandre," a kind of Franklin stove with mica doors.
The walls were papered an ugly chocolate brown with a good deal
of red in it, and the borders, doors, and fireplace frame were
stained a color trembling between mission green and oak brown.
The room was rectangular and too high for its width. There were
pictures. On each side of the fireplace, profiles toward the
chimney, hung concave plaques of Dutch girls. To the left of the
door was a yellowed etching of the tower of the chƒteau of
Heidelberg, and to the right a very small oil painting, in an ornate
gilt frame three inches deep, of a beach by moonlight. About two
or three hundred books, bound in boards and red leather, stood
behind the cracked glass of a bookcase in the corner; they were
very "jeune fille," and only the romances of Georges Ohnet
appeared to have been read. The thousand cupboards of the house
were full of dusty knickknacks, old umbrellas, hats,
account-books, and huge boxes holding the d‚bris of sets of
checkers, dominoes, and ivory chessmen. An enlarged photograph
of the family hung on the walls of a bedroom; it had been taken at
somebody's marriage, and showed the group standing on the front
steps, the same steps that were later to be blown to pieces by a
shell. One saw the bride, the groom, and about twenty relatives,
including a boy in short trousers, a wide, white collar, and an
old-fashioned, fluffy bow tie. Anxious to be included in the
picture, the driver of the bridal barouche has craned his neck
forward. On the evidence of the costumes, the picture had been
taken about 1902.

Our bureau in the cellar of Wisteria Villa was connected directly
with the trenches. When a man had been wounded, he was carried
to the poste de secours in the rear lines, and it was our duty to go
to this trench post and carry the patient to the hospital at the
nearest rail-head. The bureau of the Section was in charge of two
Frenchmen who shared the labor of attending to the telephone and
keeping the books.

A hundred yards beyond Wisteria Villa, at a certain corner, the
principal road to the trenches divided into three branches, and in
order to interfere as much as possible with communications, the
Germans daily shelled this strategic point. A comrade and I had the
curiosity to keep an exact record of a week's shelling. It must be
remembered that the corner was screened from the Germans, who
fired casually in the hope of hitting something and annoying the
French. The cannons shelling the corner were usually
"seventy-sevens," the German quick-firing pieces that correspond
to the French "seventy-fives."

Monday, ten shells at 6.30, two at 7-10, five at 11.28, twenty at
intervals between 2.15 and 2.45, a swift rafale of some sixteen at
4.12, another rafale of twenty at 8, and occasional shells between 9
and midnight.

Tuesday, two big shells at mid-day.

Wednesday, rafales at 9.14, 11; 2.18, 4.30, and 6.20.

Thursday --- no shells.

Friday, twelve at intervals between 10.16 and 12.20. Solitary big
shell at 1.05. Another big shell at 3. Some fifteen stray shells
between 5 and midnight.

Saturday --- no shells.

Sunday --- About five shells an hour between 4 in the afternoon
and midnight.

I give the number of shells falling at this corner as a concrete
instance of what was happening at a dozen other points along the
road. The fire of the German batteries was as capricious as the
play of a search-light; one week, the corner and three or four other
points would catch it, the next week the corner and another set of
localities. And there were periods, sometimes ten days to two
weeks long, when hardly a shell was fired at any road. Then, after
a certain sense of security had begun to take form, a rafale would
come screaming over, blow a horse and wagon to pieces, and leave
one or two blue figures huddled in the mud. But the French replied
to each shell and every rafale, in addition to firing at random all
the day and a good deal of the night. There was hardly a night that
Wisteria Villa did not rock to the sound of French guns fired at 2
and 3 in the morning. But the average day at Pont-…-Mousson was
a day of random silences. The war had all the capriciousness of the
sea --- of uncertain weather. There were hours of calm in the day,
during which the desolate silence of the front flooded swiftly over
the landscape; there were interruptions of great violence,
sometimes desultory, sometimes beginning, in obedience to a
human will, at a certain hour. The outbreak would commence with
the orderliness of a clock striking, and continue the greater part of
the day, rocking the deserted town with its clamor. Hearing it, the
soldiers en repos would say, talking of The Wood, "It sings (‡a
chante)," or, "It knocks (‡a tape) up there to day." The smoke of
the bursting shells hung over The Wood in a darkish, gray-blue
fog. But since The Wood had a personality for us, many would say
simply, "Listen to The Wood."

The shell expresses one idea --- energy. The cylinder of iron,
piercing the air at a terrific speed, sings a song of swift, appalling
energy, of which the final explosion is the only fitting culmination.
One gets, too, an idea of an unbending volition in the thing. After a
certain time at the front the ear learns to distinguish the sound of a
big shell from a small shell, and to know roughly whether or not
one is in the danger zone. It was a grim jest with us that it took ten
days to qualify as a shell expert, and at the end of two weeks all
those who qualified attended the funeral of those who had failed.
Life at The Wood had an interesting uncertainty.

A quarter of a mile beyond the corner, on the slope of Puvenelle
opposite The Wood, stood Montauville, the last habitable village
of the region. To the south of it rose the wooded slopes of
Puvenelle; to the north, seen across a marshy meadow, were the
slope and the ridge of the Bois-le-Prˆtre. The dirty, mud-spattered
village was caught between the leathery sweeps of two wooded
ridges. Three winding roads, tramped into a pie of mire, crossed
the grassy slope of The Wood, and disappeared into the trees at the
top. Though less than a mile from the first German line, the
village, because of its protection from shells by a spur of the
Bois-le-Prˆtre, was in remarkably good condition; the only
building to show conspicuous damage being the, church, whose
steeple had been twice struck. It was curious to see pigeons flying
in and out of the belfry through the shell rents in the roof. Here and
there, among the uncultivated fields of those who had fled, were
the green fields of some one who had stayed. A woman of seventy
still kept open her grocery shop; it was extraordinarily dirty, full of
buzzing flies, and smelled of spilled wine.

"Why did you stay? " I asked her.

"Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course my
daughter wanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I,
who have been to Nancy only once! A fine figure I should make in
Dijon in my sabots!"

"And you are not afraid of the shells?"

"Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But
I never leave my shop."

And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front,
Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate.
But Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a
man killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of
twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of
weariness. He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished
heartily that the whole affaire --- meaning the war in general ---
was finished. He was very anxious to know if the Americans
thought the Boches were going to win. Some vague idea of
winning the war just to get even with the Boches seemed to be in
his mind. I assured him that American opinion was optimistic in
regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away. Hardly had I
gone ten feet, when a "seventy-seven" shell, arriving without
warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, I saw
the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he were a rubber
effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly
ripped the envelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from
the waist, leaned face down into the mud. I was the first to get to
him. The young, discontented face was full of the gray street mud,
there was mud in the hollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the
fluffy mustache. A chunk of the shell had ripped open the left
breast to the heart. Down his sleeve, as down a pipe, flowed a
hasty drop, drop, drop of blood that mixed with the mire.

Several times a day, at stated hours, the numbers of German
missiles that had fallen into the trenches of the Bois-le-Prˆtre,
together with French answers to them, would be telephoned to
headquarters. The soldier in charge of the telephone was an
instructor in Latin in a French provincial university, a tall,
stoop-shouldered man, with an indefinite, benevolent smile
curiously framed on thin lips. Probably very much of a scholar by
training and feeling, he had accepted his military destiny, and was
as much a poilu as anybody. During his leisure hours he was busy
writing a "Comparison of the Campaign on the Marne and the
Aisne with Caesar's battles against the Belgian Confederacy." He
had a paper edition of the Gallic Wars which he carried round with
him. One day he explained his thesis to me. He drew a plan with a
green pencil on a piece of paper.

"See, mon ami," he exclaimed, "here is the Aisne, Caesar's Axona;
here is Berry-au-Bac; here was Caesar, here were the invaders,
here was General French, here Foch, here Von Kluck. Curious,
isn't it---two thousand years afterward? " His eyes for an instant
filled with dreamy perplexity. A little while later I would hear him
mechanically telephoning. "Poste A --- five ' seventy-seven' shells,
six mines, twelve trench shells; answer --- ten 'seventy-five' shells,
eight mines, eighteen trench shells; Poste B --- two 'seventy-seven'
shells, one mine, six grenades; answer ---fifteen 'seventy-five'
shells; Poste C---- one 'two hundred and ten' shell, fifty mines;
answer --- sixty mines; Poste D --- "

At Dieulouard I had entered the shell zone; at Pont-…-Mousson, I
crossed the borders of the zone of quiet; at Montauville began the
last zone --- the zone of invisibility and violence. Civilian life
ended at the western end of the village street with the abruptness
of a man brought face to face with a high wall. Beyond the village
a road was seen climbing the grassy slope of Puvenelle, to
disappear as it neared the summit of the ridge in a brown wood. It
was just an ordinary hill road of Lorraine, but the fact that it was
the direct road to the trenches invested this climbing, winding,
silent length with extraordinary character. The gate of the zone of
violence, every foot of it bore some scar of the war, now trivial,
now gigantic --- always awesome in the power and volition it
revealed. One passed from the sight of a brown puddle, scooped in
the surface of the street by an exploding shell, to a view of a
magnificent ash tree splintered by some projectile. It is a very rare
thing to see a sinister landscape, but this whole road was sinister. I
used to discuss this sinister quality with a distinguished French
artist who as a poilu was the infirmier, or medical service man,
attached to a squad of engineers working in a quarry frequently
shelled. In this frightful place we discussed la qualit‚ du sinistre
dans l'art (the sinister in art) as calmly as if we were two Parisian
critics sitting on the benches of the Luxembourg Gardens. As the
road advanced into the wood, there was hardly a wayside tree that
had not been struck by a shell. Branches hung dead from trees,
twigs had been lopped off by stray fragments, great trunks were
split apart as if by lightning. "Nature as Nature is never sinister,"
said the artist; "it is when there is a disturbance of the relations
between Nature and human life that you have the sinister. Have
you ever seen the villages beyond Ravenna overwhelmed by the
bogs? There you see the sinister. Here Man is making Nature
unlivable for Man." He stroked his fine silky beard meditatively ---
" This will all end when the peasants plant again." As we talked, a
shell, intended for the batteries behind, burst high above us.

Skirting the ravine, now wooded, between Puvenelle and the
Bois-le-Prˆtre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon
the high plateau of La Woevre; the last kilomŠtre being in full
view of the Germans entrenched on the ridge across the rapidly
narrowing, rising ravine. Along this visible space the trees and
bushes by the roadside were matted by shell fire into an
inextricable confusion of destruction, and through the wisps and
splinters of this ruin was seen the ridge of the Bois-le-Prˆtre
rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At length the forest of
Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Prˆtre ended together in a
rolling sweep of furzy fields cut off to the west and north by a vast
billow of the moor which, like the rim of a saucer, closed the wide
horizon. Continuing straight ahead, the Puvenelle road mounted
this rise, dipped and disappeared. Halfway between the edge of the
forest of Puvenelle and this crest stood an abandoned inn, a
commonplace building made of buff-brown moorland stone
trimmed with red brick. Close by this inn, at right angles to the
Puvenelle road, another road turned to the north and likewise
disappeared over the lift in the moor. At the corner stood a
government signpost of iron slightly bent back, bearing in
gray-white letters on its clay-blue plaque the legend --



Thiaucourt

12





Metz

25 kilomŠtres



There was not a soul anywhere in sight; I was surrounded with
evidences of terrific violence --- the shattered trees, the shell holes
in the road, the brown-lipped craters in the earth of the fields, the
battered inn; but there was not a sign of the creators of this
devastation. A northwest wind blew in great salvos across the
mournful, lonely plateau, rippling the furze, and brought to my
ears the pounding of shells from behind the rise. When I got to this
rim a soldier, a big, blond fellow of the true Gaulois type with
drooping yellow mustaches, climbed slowly out of a hole in the
ground. The effect was startling. I had arrived at the line where the
earth of France completely swallows up the army. This
disappearance of life in a d‚cor of intense action is one of the most
striking things of the war. All about in the surface of the earth
were little, square, sooty holes that served as chimneys, and here
and there rectangular, gravelike openings in the soil showing three
or four big steps descending to a subterranean hut. Fifty feet away
not a sign of human life could be distinguished. Six feet under the
ground, framed in the doorway of a hut, a young, black-haired
fellow in a dark-brown jersey stood smiling pleasantly up at us; it
was he who was to be my guide to the various postes and trenches
that I had need to know. He came up to greet me.

"Better bring him down here," growled a voice from somewhere in
the earth. "There have been bullets crossing the road all
afternoon."

" I am going to show him the Quart-en-R‚serve first."

The Quart-en-R‚serve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of the
Bois-le-Prˆtre which, because of its situation on the crest of the
great ridge, had been the most fiercely contested. We crept up on
the edge of the ridge and looked over. An open, level field some
three hundred yards wide swept from the Thiaucourt road to the
edges of the Bois-le-Prˆtre; across this field ran in the most
confused manner a strange pattern of brown lines that disappeared
among the stumps and poles of the haggard wood to the east. To
the northwest of this plateau, on the road ahead of us, stood a
ruined village caught in the torment of the lines. Here and there, in
some twenty or thirty places scattered over the scarred plateau, the
smoke of trench shells rose in little curling puffs of gray-black that
quickly dissolved in the wind.

........

Fig. 4. The Quart-en-R‚serve............Fig. 5. Ready for gas---a
brazier and a 

.............................................................bottle of gasolene. Hot air
causes the 

.............................................................gas to ascend.

"The Quart is never quiet," said my guide. " It is now half ours,
half theirs."

Close to the ground, a blot of light flashed swifter than a stroke of
lightning, and a heavier, thicker smoke rolled away.

"That is one of ours. We are answering their trench shells with an
occasional 'one hundred and twenty.'"

"How on earth is it that everybody is not killed?"

"Because the regiment has occupied the Quart so long that we
know every foot, every turn, every shelter of it. When we see a
trench shell coming, we know just where to go. It is only the
newcomers who get killed. Two months past, when a new
regiment occupied the Quart during our absence en repos, it lost
twenty-five men in one day."

The first trench that I entered was a simple trench about seven feet
deep, with no trimmings whatsoever, just such a trench as might
have been dug for the accommodation of a large water conduit.
We walked on a narrow board walk very slippery with cheesy,
red-brown mire. From time to time the hammer crash of a shell
sounded uncomfortably near, and bits of dirt and pebbles,
dislodged by the concussion, fell from the wall of the passage. The
only vista was the curving wall of the long communication trench
and the soft sky of Lorraine, lit with the pleasant sunlight of
middle afternoon, and islanded with great golden-white cloud
masses. My guide and I might have been the last persons left in a
world of strange and terrible noises. The boyau (communication
trench) began to turn and wind about in the most perplexing
manner, and we entered a veritable labyrinth. This extraordinary,
baffling complexity is due primarily to the fact that the trenches
advance and retreat, rise and fall, in order to take advantage of the
opportunities for defense afforded by every change in the
topography of the region. I remember one area along the front
consisting of two round, grassy hills divided by a small, grassy
valley whose floor rose gently to a low ridge connecting the two
heights. In this terrain the defensive line began on the first hill as a
semicircle edging the grassy slopes presented to the enemy, then
retreated, sinking some forty feet, to take advantage of the
connecting link of upland at the head of the ravine, and took
semicircular form again on the flat, broad summit of the second
hill. In the meadows at the base of these hills a brook flowing from
the ravine had created a great swamp, somewhat in the shape of a
wedge pointing outward from the mouth of the valley. The lines of
the enemy, edging this tract of mire, were consequently in the
shape of an open V. Thus the military situation at this particular
point may be pictorially represented by a salient semicircle, a dash,
and another salient semicircle faced by a wide, open V. Imagine
such a situation complicated by offensive and counter-offensive,
during which the French have seized part of the hills and the
German part of the plain, till the whole region is a madman's maze
of barbed wire, earthy lines, trenches, --- some of them untenable
by either side and still full of the dead who fell in the last combat,
--- shell holes, and fortified craters. Such was something of the
situation in that wind-swept plain at the edge of the Bois-le-Prˆtre.
I leave for other chapters the account of an average day in the
trenches and the story of the great German attack, preferring to tell
here of the general impressions made by the appearance of the
trenches themselves. Two pictures stand out, particularly, the dead
on the barbed wire, and the village called "Fey aux Rats" at night.

"The next line is the first line. Speak in whispers now, for if the
Boches hear us we shall get a shower of hand-grenades."

I turned into a deep, wide trench whose floor had been trodden
into a slop of cheesy, brown mire which clung to the big hobnailed
boots of the soldiers. Every foot or so along the parapet there was a
rifle slit, made by the insertion of a wedge-shaped wooden box
into the wall of brownish sandbags, and the sentries stood about
six feet apart. The trench had the hushed quiet of a sickroom.

"Do you want to see the Boches? Here; come, put your eye to this
rifle slit."

A horizontal tangle of barbed wire lay before me, the shapeless
gully of an empty trench, and, thirty-five feet away, another
blue-gray tangle of barbed wire and a low ripple of the brownish
earth. As I looked, one of the random silences of the front stole
swiftly into the air. French trench and German trench were
perfectly silent; you could have heard the ticking of a watch.

"You never see them?"

"Only when we attack them or they attack us."

An old poilu, with a friendly smile revealing a jagged reef of
yellow teeth, whispered to me amiably: --

"See them? Good Lord, it's bad enough to smell them. You ought
to thank the good God, young man, that the wind is carrying it over
our heads."

"Any wounded to-day?

"Yes; a corporal had his leg ripped up about half an hour ago."

At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of
a rifle box. No Man's Land had widened to some three hundred
feet of waving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind passed as
over the surface of the sea. About fifty feet from the German
trenches was a swathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five
stout, wooden posts. So thickly was the wire strung that the eye
failed to distinguish the individual filaments and saw only the rows
of brown-black posts filled with a steely purple mist. Upon this
mist hung masses of weather-beaten blue rags whose edges waved
in the wind.

"Des camarades" (comrades), said my guide very quietly.

A month later I saw the ruined village of Fey-en-Haye by the light
of the full golden shield of the Hunters' Moon. The village had
been taken from the Germans in the spring, and was now in the
French lines, which crossed the village street and continued right
on through the houses. "The first village on the road to Metz" had
tumbled, in piles and mounds of rubbish, out on a street grown
high with grass. Moonlight poured into the roofless cottages,
escaping by shattered walls and jagged rents, and the mounds of
d‚bris took on fantastic outlines and cast strange shadows. In the
middle of the village street stood two wooden crosses marking the
graves of soldiers. It was the Biblical "Abomination of
Desolation."

Looking at Fey from the end of the village street, I slowly realized
that it was not without inhabitants. Wandering through the grass,
scurrying over the rubbish heaps, running in and out of the
crumbling thresholds were thousands and thousands of rats.

Across the bright sky came a whirring hum, the sound of the
motors of aeroplanes on the way to bombard the railroad station at
Metz. I looked up, but there was nothing to be seen. The humming
died away. The bent signpost at the corner of the deserted
moorland road, with its arrow and its directions, somehow seemed
a strange, shadowy symbol of the impossibility of the attainment
of many human aspirations.

CHAPTER V THE TRENCHES IN THE "WOOD OF DEATH"

So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the
struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the
supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy,
physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and
relentlessly tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find
the war more interesting, when considered as the supreme
achievement of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, than as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of
European political strife. There is something awe-inspiring in the
spectacle of all the continuous and multitudinous activity of a
great nation feeding, by a thousand channels, a thousand rills, to
the embattled furrows of the zone of violence.

By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being,
admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties,
organizations, and inventions --- trench warfare. The principal
element of this modern warfare is lack of mobility.

The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since the
establishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of either
combatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities.
The fierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions,
averaging a mile each way behind No Man's Land. This stationary
character has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all
its ancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun,
and has turned it into the national business. I dislike to use the
word "business," with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I
intend rather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds
--- the idea of a great intricate organization with a corporate
volition. The war of to-day is a business, the people are the
stockholders, and the object of the organization is the wisest
application of violence to the enemy.

To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, special
narrow-gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the
railroad station at the edge of the shell zone to the artillery
positions. To this end the trenches have been gathered into a
special telephone system so that General Joffre at Chantilly can
talk to any officers or soldiers anywhere along the great swathe.
The food, supplies, clothing, and ammunition are delivered every
day at the gate of the swathe, and calmly redistributed to the
trenches by a sort of military express system.

Only one thing ever disturbs the vast, orderly system. The bony
fingers of Death will persist in getting into the cogs of the
machine.

The front is divided, according to military exigencies, into a
number of roughly equal lengths called secteurs. Each secteur is an
administrative unit with its own government and its own system
adapted to the local situation. The heart of this unit is the railroad
station at which the supplies arrive for the shell zone; in a normal
secteur, one military train arrives every day bringing the needed
supplies, and one hospital train departs, carrying the sick and
wounded to the hospitals. The station at the front is always a scene
of considerable activity, especially when the train arrives; there are
pictures of old poilus in red trousers pitching out yellow hay for
the horses, commissary officers getting their rations, and artilleurs
stacking shells.

The train not being able to continue into the shell zone, the
supplies are carried to the distributing station at the trenches in a
convoy of wagons, called the ravitaillement. Every single night,
somewhere along the road, each side tries to smash up the other's
ravitaillement. To avoid this, the ravitaillement wagons start at
different hours after dark, now at dusk, now at midnight.
Sometimes, close by the trenches on a clear, still night, the
plashing and creaking of the enemy's wagons can be heard through
the massacred trees. I remember being shelled along one bleak
stretch of moorland road just after a drenching December rain. The
trench lights rising over The Wood, three miles away, made the
wet road glow with a tarnished glimmer, and burnished the muddy
pools into mirrors of pale light. The ravitaillement creaked along
in the darkness. Suddenly a shell fell about a hundred yards away,
and the wagons brought up jerkily, the harnesses rattling. For ten
minutes the Germans shelled the length of road just ahead of us,
but no shell came closer to us than the first one. About thirty
"seventy-seven" shells burst, some on the road, some on the edges
of the fields; we saw them as flashes of reddish-violet light close
to the ground. In the middle of the mˆl‚e a trench light rose,
showing the line of halted gray wagons, the motionless horses, and
the helmeted drivers. The whole affair passed in silence. When it
was judged that the last shell had fallen, whips cracked like pistol
shots, and the line lumbered on again.

The food came to us fresh every day in a freight car fitted up like a
butcher's shop, in charge of a poilu who was a butcher in civilian
life. "So many men --- so many grammes," and he would cut you
off a slice. There was a daily potato ration, and a daily extra, this
last from a list ten articles long which began again every ten days,
and included beans, macaroni, lentils, rice, and cheese. The French
army is very well and plenteously fed. Coffee, sugar, wine, and
even tea are ungrudgingly furnished. These foods are taken
directly to the rear of the trenches where the regimental cooks
have their traveling kitchens. Once the food is prepared, the cooks
--- the beloved cuist“ts --- take it to the trenches in great, steaming
kettles and distribute it to the men individually. As for clothing,
every regiment has a regimental tailor shop and supply of uniforms
in the village where they go to repos. I have often seen the soldier
tailor of one of the regiments, a little Alsatian Jew, sewing up the
shell rents in a comrade's greatcoat. He had his shop in a pleasant
kitchen, and used to sit beside the fire sewing as calmly as an old
woman.

The sanitary arrangements of the trenches are the usual army
latrines, and very severe punishments are inflicted for any fouling.

If a man is wounded, the medical service man of his squad
(infirmier), or one of the stretcher-bearers (brancardiers), takes
him as quickly as possible to the regimental medical post in the
rear lines. If the trench is getting heavily shelled, and the wound is
slight, the attendant takes the man to a shelter and applies first aid
until a time comes when he and his patient can proceed to the rear
with reasonable safety. At this rear post the regimental surgeon
cleans the wound, stops the bleeding, and sends for the ambulance,
which, at the Bois-le-Prˆtre, came right into the heart of the
trenches by sunken roads that were in reality broad trenches. The
man is then taken to the hospital that his condition requires, the
slightly wounded to one hospital, and those requiring an operation
to another. The French surgical hospitals all along the front are
marvels of cleanliness and order. The heart of each hospital is the
power plant, which sterilizes the water, runs the electric lights, and
works the X-ray generator. Mounted on an automobile body, it is
always ready to decamp in case the locality gets too dangerous.
You find these great, lumbering affairs, half steamroller, half
donkey-engine, in the courtyards of old castles, schools, and great
private houses close by the front.

The first-line trenches, in a position at all contested, are very apt
still to preserve the hurried arrangement of their first plan, which
is sometimes hardly any p