"But there is no wood," replied the Captain. "I must have wood for the fires. It is past noon and my men have not eaten."
"Ah, but I am telling you there is wood," replied the Major. "I saw your supply officer pay for the wood. By now I believe it has been delivered for you in the Place de la Republique."
"But it hasn"t," remonstrated the Captain, "and the fires have not yet been started, and----"
"But it is on the way, probably," said the Major. "Maybe it will be there soon. Maybe it is there now."
The Captain took another tack.
"Where was the wood bought?" he asked.
"From the wood merchant beyond the river," replied the Major. "But it is already on the way, and----"
"How do you go to the wood merchant?" insisted the Captain. "We have got to have the wood toot sweet."
"Ah! _tout de suite_--_tout de suite_--_tout de suite_," repeated the Major in tones of exasperation. "With you Americans it is always _tout de suite_. Here----"
He took my notebook and drew a plan of streets indicating the way to the place of the wood merchant. In spite of his remark and the undesired intrusion of business upon his _dejeuner_, the Major"s manner was as friendly as could be expected from a Town Major. We left on the run.
The wood merchant was a big man, elderly and fat. His face was red and he had bushy grey eyebrows. He wore a smock of blue cloth that came to his knees. He remonstrated that it was useless for us to buy wood from him because wood had already been bought for us. He spoke only French.
The Captain dismissed all further argument by a direct frontal attack on the subject.
"_Avez-vous de bois?_" asked the Captain.
"_Oui_," the merchant nodded.
"_Avez-vous de chevaux?_" the Captain asked.
"_Oui_," the merchant nodded again.
"_Avez-vous de voiture?_" the Captain asked.
"_Oui_,"--another nod.
"All right then," continued the Captain, and then emphasising each word by the sudden production of another stiff finger on his extended hand, he said, "_Du bois--des chevaux--une voiture_--de whole d.a.m.n business--and toot sweet."
In some remarkable fashion the kindly wood merchant gathered that the Captain wanted wood piled in a wagon, drawn by a horse and wanted it in a hurry. _Tout de suite_, p.r.o.nounced "toot sweet" by our soldiers, was a term calling for speed, that was among the first acquired by our men in France.
The old man shrugged his shoulders, elevated his hand, palm outward, and signified with an expression of his face that it was useless to argue further for the benefit of these Americans. He turned and gave the necessary loading orders to his working force.
That working force consisted of two French girls, each about eighteen years of age. They wore long baggy bloomers of brown corduroy, tight at the ankles where they flopped about in folds over clumsy wooden shoes.
They wore blouses of the same material and tam o"shanter hats to match, called _berets_.
Each one of them had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.
One stood on the ground and tossed up the thirty or forty-pound logs to her sister who stood above on top of the wagon. The latter caught them in her extended arms and placed them in a pile. To the best of my recollection, neither one of the girls missed a puff.
While the loading proceeded, the wood merchant, speaking slowly in French, made us understand the following:
"Many peculiar things happen in the war, Monsieur," he said. "Your country, the America, is the land of wonders. Listen, my name is Helois.
Ten days ago there came to me one of the washerwomen who clean the clothes on the banks of the Meurthe, and she said to me:
""Ah, Monsieur, the wood merchant. You are the sly fox. I have your secret." And I say to her that I know not of what she speaks.
""You boast in the town that your two sons are at the front," she said, "but I know that one at least of them is not." And I was dumbfounded. I say to her, "Woman, it is a lie you tell me. Both of my boys are with their regiments, in the trenches even now, if by the grace of the good G.o.d they still live."
""No," she say to me, "one of your sons hides in the hotel of Madame Larue. How do I know this secret, Monsieur the wood merchant? I know because this day have I washed the shirt, with his name on it, at the river bank. His name, Helois,--the Lieutenant Helois--was stamped on the collar and the shirt came from the hotel, La Fontaine."
"I tell her that it is a mistake--that it is the great injustice to me she speaks, and that night I dressed in my best clothes to penetrate this mystery--to meet this man who disgracefully used the name of my son--to expose this impostor who would bring shame to the name of Helois, the wood merchant, whose two sons have been fighting for France these three long years.
"And so, Monsieur, I meet this man at the hotel. She was right. His name was Helois. Here is his card. The Lieutenant Louis F. Helois, and he is a lieutenant in the United States Army."
"So it was a mistake," replied the Captain, handing the card back to the wood merchant, whose lobster red features bore an enigmatical smile.
"No,--not the mistake, the truth," replied the wood merchant. "Not my son--but my grandson--the son of my son--the son of my third son who went to America years ago. And now he comes back in the uniform of liberty to fight again for France. Ah, _Messieurs les Officiers_--the sons of France return from the ends of the world to fight her cause."
While the wood merchant was telling us that the American grandson had only stopped three days in the town and then had moved up to service at the front, the air was shattered by a loud report. It was the snap of the whip in the hands of the young French amazon, standing high on the load of wood. We escorted the fuel proudly to the Place de la Republique. Soon the fires were burning briskly and the smell of onions and coffee and hot chow was on the air.
The stoves were pitched at the bottom of a stone monument in the centre of the square. Bags of potatoes and onions and burlap covered quarters of beef and other pieces of mess sergeants paraphernalia were piled on the steps of the monument, which was covered with the green and black scars from dampness and age.
The plinth supported a stone shaft fifteen feet in height, which touched the lower branches of the trees. The monument was topped with a huge cross of stone on which was the sculptured figure of the Christ.
Little Sykoff, the battery mess sergeant, stood over the stove at the bottom of the monument. He held in his hand a frying pan, which he shook back and forth over the fire to prevent the sizzling chips in the pan from burning. His eyes lowered from an inspection of the monument and met mine. He smiled.
"Mr. Gibbons," he said, "if that brother of mine, who runs the photograph gallery out on Paulina and Madison Streets in Chicago, could only see me now, he sure would tell the Rabbi. Can you beat it--a Jew here frying ham in the shadow of the Cross."
It was rather hard to beat--and so was the ham. We made this concession as we sat on the plinth of the monument and polished our mess kits with bread. And such bread--it was the regulation United States army issue bread--white, firm and chuck full of nourishment--bread that seemed like cake to the French youngsters who tasted it and who returned with open mouths and outstretched hands for more of the "good white bread."
After the meal, those members of Battery A not detailed for immediate duty denied themselves none of the joys that a new town, in a strange land, holds for a soldier.
Saint-Nicolas-du-Port boasts a remarkable cathedral of mediaeval architecture, of enormous dimensions. It was crumbling with age, but still housed the holy. Time and the elements had left the traces of their rough usage upon the edifice.
Half of the statues on the broad facade of the cathedral had been broken, and now the niches afforded domiciles for families of pigeons.
On the ground, in a careless pile, to one side of the frontal arch, was an ignominious pile of miscellaneous arms and legs and heads of sculptured figures, resting there in anything but saintly dignity. Two of our young artillerymen were standing in front of the cathedral surveying it.
"Certainly is in need of repairs," said one of them. "I"ll bet they haven"t done no bricklaying or plumbing on this place since before the Civil War."
"That ain"t hardly the right way to treat old Saints," replied his companion, referring to the pile of broken statuary. "Seems like they ought to cement the arms and legs and heads back on those old boys and old girls and put them back on their pedestals. I guess, though, there ain"t n.o.body living to identify the pieces, so they could get the right arms and heads on the right bodies."
Our battery had among its drivers an old timer who might have been called a historian. His opinion held weight in the organisation. He professed to be able to read American ball scores and war news out of French newspapers, a number of which he always carried. Later that day, I heard him lecturing the cathedral critics on their lack of appreciation of art and history.
"New things ain"t art," he told them; "things has got to be old before they are artistic. n.o.body"d look at the Venus dee Milo if she had all her arms on. You never hear n.o.body admiring a modern up-to-date castle with electric lighting and bath tubs in it. It simply ain"t art.
"Now, this cathedral is art. This country around here is just full of history. Here"s where whole book stores of it was written. Why, say, there was batteries of artillery rolling through this country a million years ago. It was right around here that Napoleon joined forces with Julius Caesar to fight the Crusaders. This here is sacred ground."
In the evening, a number of the battery, located the _buvette_ that carried across its curtained front the gold lettered sign _bar Parisian_. It was a find. Some thirty American artillerymen crowded around the tables.
Cigarette smoke filled the low-ceilinged room with blue layers, through which the lamp light shone. In one corner stood a mechanical piano which swallowed big copper sous and gave out discord"s metallic melody. It was of an American make and the best number on its printed programme was "Aren"t you Coming Back to Old Virginia, Molly?" Sous followed sous into this howitzer of harmony and it knew no rest that night. Everybody joined in and helped it out on the choruses.