"America is in," wrote an officer at G.H.Q., "and the faces of everybody one sees show a real bit of spring sunshine. People begin to say: "Now we shall be home by Christmas.""
But something else had happened in that fateful month of March. March the 9th saw the strange, uncertain opening of the Russian revolution, followed by a burst of sympathy and rejoicing throughout Europe. Only those intimately acquainted with the structure of Russian society felt the misgivings of those who see the fall of a house built on rotten foundations and have no certainty of any firm ground whereon to build its successor. But the disappointment and exasperation of the Allies at that moment, as to all that had happened in Russia during the preceding months, under the old regime, was so great that the mere change bred hope; and for a long time we hoped against hope. All the more because the entry of America, and the thrilling rapidity of her earlier action put the Russian business into the shade, may, indeed, have dulled the perceptions of the Allies with regard to it. In forty days from the declaration of war the United States had adopted Conscription, which had taken us two years; General Pershing and his small force had sailed for France within eighty days; and by the end of June, or within ninety days, America had adopted the blockade policy of Great Britain, and a.s.sented to the full use of that mighty weapon which was to have so vast an influence on the war. President Wilson"s speech, when he came to Congress for the Declaration of War, revealed him--and America--to England, then sorely brooding over "too proud to fight," in an aspect which revived in us all that was kinship and sympathy, and put to sleep the natural resentments and astonishments of the preceding years. Nay, we envied America a man capable of giving such magnificent expression to the pa.s.sion and determination of all free nations, in face of the German challenge.
Then came the days of disappointment. Troops arrived at a more leisurely pace in France than had been hoped. Ships and aeroplanes, which American enthusiasm in the early weeks of the war had promised in profusion, delayed their coming; there was congestion on the American railways, interfering with supplies of all kinds; and the Weather G.o.d, besides, let loose all his storm and snow battalions upon the Northern States to hamper the work of transport. We in England watched these things, not realising that our own confidence in the military prospects and the resisting power of the Allies, was partly to blame for American leisureliness. It was so natural that American opinion, watching the war, should split into two phases--one that held the war was going to be won quickly by negotiation, before America could seriously come in; the other that the war would go on for another three years, and therefore there would be ample time for America to make all her own independent plans and form her own separate army with purely American equipment. English opinion wavered in the same way. I well remember a gathering in a London house in November, 1917, just after the first successful attack in the Battle of Cambrai. It was a gathering in honour of General Bliss, and other American officers and high officials then in London. General Bliss was the centre of it, and the rugged, most human, most lovable figure of Mr. Page was not far away. The Battle of Cambrai was in progress, and English expectations, terribly depressed, at any rate among those who knew, by the reports which had been coming through of the severe fighting in the Salient, during the preceding weeks, were again rising rapidly. Everybody was full of the success of the initial attack, of the tanks above all, and what they might mean for the future. At last Sir Julian Byng had achieved surprise; at last there had been open fighting; if by happy chance we took Cambrai what might not happen? A flash of optimism ran through us all. Victory and peace drew nearer.
Yet in the background there were always those dim rumours of the appalling losses at Pa.s.schendaele, together with the smarting memory of Caporetto, and of the British divisions sent to Italy.
And in ten days more we knew that the German counter-attack had checked the Cambrai advance, that Bourlon Wood was lost, that Cambrai was still inaccessible, and we retained only a portion of the ground gained by the dash and skill of the first days. The moral was, as always--"more men!" and we settled down again to a stubborn waiting for our own new recruits, then in the training camps, and for the first appearance of the American battalions. Meanwhile the news from Russia grew steadily worse; the Russian Army had melted away under the Kerensky regulations; and the country was rapidly falling into chaos.
Brest-Litovsk was acutely realised for the German triumph that it was; and the heads of the Army were already calculating with some precision the number of German divisions, then on the Eastern front, which must inevitably be transferred to France for the spring offensive of the German Army.
It was natural that those really acquainted with the situation should turn feverishly towards America. When was her Army coming? In the matter of money America had done n.o.bly towards all the Allies. In this field her help had been incalculably great. In the matter of munitions and stores for the Allies she had done all that the state of her railways, the weather of her winter, and the drawbacks of the American Const.i.tution, considered as a military machine, as yet allowed her to do. Meanwhile one saw the President, aided by a score of able and energetic men, constantly at work removing stones in the path, setting up a War Industries Board, reorganising the Shipping Board and the Air Service, and clearing the way for those food supplies from the great American and Canadian wheatfields without which Europe could not endure, and which were constantly endangered by the pressure of the submarine attack. Perhaps in all that anxious winter the phase of American help which touched us English folk most deeply was the voluntary rationing by which hundreds and thousands of American families, all over the vast area of the States, eagerly stinted themselves that they might send food overseas to Great Britain and the Allies--sixty million bushels of wheat by January 1st--ninety millions before the 1918 harvest. We knew that it was only done by personal sacrifice, and we _felt_ it in our hearts.
Meanwhile, on this side of the sea, the anxiety for _men_ grew steadily stronger. Who knew what the coming spring campaign would bring forth? The French Army during 1917 had pa.s.sed through that _depression morale_ of which I have spoken in an earlier letter. Would a country which had borne such a long and terrible ordeal of death and devastation be capable of yet another great effort during the coming year, whatever might be the heroic patriotism of her people? One heard of the enormous preparations that America was making in France--of the new docks, warehouses, and railways, of the vast depots and splendid camps that were being laid out--with a mixture of wonder and irritation. A friend of mine, on coming back from France, described to me his going over a new American dock with two French officers: "Magnificent!" said the Frenchmen, in a kind of despair--"but when are they going to _begin_? Suppose the war is over, and France swallowed up, _before_ they begin?" A large section of American opinion was shaken with the same impatience.
American letters to English friends, including those of Mr. Roosevelt to his many English correspondents, among whom, to some small extent, I was proud to reckon myself, expressed an almost fierce disappointment with the slow progress of things. Ultimately, of course, an independent American Army, under its own Commander-in-Chief, and fully equipped from American factories. But why not begin by sending men in as large numbers as possible to train with the British and French Armies, and to take their places as soon as possible in the fighting line, as integral parts of those armies, allowing the Allies to furnish all equipment till America was really ready? It was pointed out that Canada and Australia, by sending officers and men over at once to train and fight with the British, and leaving everything else to be supplied by the Allies, had in nine months from the outbreak of war already taken part in glorious and decisive battles. Or why not adopt a two-fold policy--of supplying men to the Allies as rapidly as possible, for immediate aid, carrying on preparations the while for an independent American Army with all its own supplies, as the ultimate goal? Time, it was urged, was of the utmost importance. And what object was served by experimenting with new types of munitions, instead of adopting the types of the Allies, which the American factories were already turning out in profusion? And so on.
With such feelings did many of us on this side of the water, and a large section apparently of American friends of the Allies on the other side, watch the gradual unravelling of America"s tangled skeins.
The _North American Review_ asked in December, 1917: "Are we losing the war? No. But we are not winning it." In January, 1918, the editor warned his readers: "The Allied forces are not in condition to withstand the terrific onslaught which Germany is bound to make within six months. America must win the war." In April the _New York Bankers"
Bulletin_ said: "We have not made progress as far as we might or could," while months later, even in its September number (1918), the _North American Review_ still talked of "our inexplicable military sluggishness," and rang with appeals for greater energy. There was of course an element of politics in all this; but up to March last year it is clear that, in spite of many things not only magnificently planned, but magnificently _done_, there was a great deal of sincere anxiety and misgiving in both countries.
But with the outbreak of the German offensive in March, as we all know, everything changed. American troops began to _rush_ over:--366,000 in round numbers, up to the end of March, and 440,000 more, up to the end of June, 70 per cent, of them carried in British ships; a million by the end of July, nearly a million and a half before the Armistice. Wonderful story! n.o.body, I think, can possibly exaggerate the heartening and cheering effect of it upon the Allies in Europe, especially on France--wounded and devastated France--and on Italy, painfully recovering from Caporetto. How well I remember the thrill of those days in London, the rumours of the weekly landings of troops--70,000--80,000 men--and the occasional sight of the lithe, straight-limbed, American boys marching through our streets!
And yet, curiously enough--what _was_ exaggerated all the time, on both sides of the Atlantic, both here and in America, was the extent of the British set-back hi March and April, and its effect on the general situation. That is clear, I think, when we look back on our own Press at home, and still more on American utterances, both in the States and in France. In _August_ of last year Mr. Secretary Baker said: "We are only just beginning"--and he pointed to the millions of men that America would have in France by 1919. On August 7th General March, Chief of the American General Staff, said in the Senate Committee, that America would have four millions of men in France, with one million at home, for the campaign of 1919. "The only way that Germany can be whipped is by America going into this thing with her whole strength. It is up to us to win the war.... We must force the issue and win." The editor of the _North American Review_ wrote in August, and published in his September number, phrases like the following: "But the hand of the enemy cannot be struck down for a long time to come." "Virtually impregnable positions" are still held by him. "No military observer is so sanguine as to antic.i.p.ate anything like conclusive results from the present campaign. The real test will come next year, in the late spring and summer of 1919." By then the Allies must have "a great preponderance of men and guns. These America must supply."
But when General March said in August: "It is up to us to win the war," and the _North American Review_ talked of "virtually impregnable positions," and the impossibility of "anything like conclusive results from the present campaign"--the capture of those "impregnable positions" by the British Army, and thereby the winning of the war, were only a few weeks away! Similar phrases could be quoted from the British Press, and from prominent Englishmen, though not, unless my memory plays me false, from any of our responsible military leaders.
The fact is that the view I represented, in my second article, as the view taken by the heads of the British Army, of the March retreat, had turned out by the summer to be the true one. The German armies _had_ to a large extent beaten themselves out against the British defensive battle of the spring: and while the Americans were making their splendid spurt from April to August, and entering the fighting field in force for the first time, the British Army, having absorbed its recruits, taken huge toll of its enemies, and profited by all there was to be learnt from the German offensive, was getting ready every day to give the final strokes in the war, aided, when the moment came, by the supreme leadership of Marshal Foch, by the successes of Generals Mangin and Degoutte on the Marne, by the masterly campaign of General Gouraud in Champagne, and the gallant push of General Pershing in the Argonne. This position of things was not sufficiently realised by the general public in England, still less by the American public, as is shown by the extracts I have quoted. So that the continuous series of British victories, from August 8th onward, which ended in the Armistice, came as a rather startling surprise to those both here and abroad who, like von Kluck in 1914, had been inclined to make too much of a temporary British retreat.
Moreover, behind the military successes of Great Britain--and not only on the French front, but in the East also--stood always the deadly pressure of the British blockade. When after the capture of the Hindenburg positions, the line indicating "prisoners," on that chart at G.H.Q., a reduced copy of which will be found at the end of this book, leapt up to a height for which the wall in the room of the Director of Operations could hardly find s.p.a.ce, it meant not only victory over Germany in the field, but also the disintegration of German _morale_ at home; owing first and foremost to that deadly watch which the British Navy, supported during the last year of the war by the American embargo, had kept over the seas of the world, to Germany"s undoing, since the opening of the struggle. The final victory of the Allies when it came was thus in a special sense Great Britain"s victory, achieved both by her mastery of the sea, and the military expansion forced upon her by the German attack; conditioned, of course, by the whole earlier history of the war, in which France had led the van and borne the brunt, and immensely facilitated by the "splendid American adventure," to use the phrase of an American.
For to show that, in a strictly military sense, the British and Dominion Armies, backed by the British Navy, brought the war to a successful end--a simple matter of figures and dates--is not all, or nearly all. The American intervention, and especially the marvellous speeding-up of American action, from March to the end of the war, quite apart from the brilliant promise of America"s first appearances in the field, had an effect upon Europe--Great Britain, France, Italy--akin to that which the American climate and atmosphere produces on the visitor from this side of the Atlantic. It breathed new life into everything, and especially into the heart of France, the chief sufferer by three years of atrocious war. As weary and devastated France watched the American stream of eager and high-hearted youth, flowing from Bordeaux eastwards, column after column, regiment after regiment, of men admirable in physique, fearless in danger, and full of a laughing and boundless confidence in America"s power to help, and resolve to win--at last it seemed that the long horror of the war must be indeed coming to an end. "Three thousand miles!" said the French villager or townsman to himself, as he turned out to see them pa.s.s--"they have come three thousand miles to beat the Boche. And America is the richest country in the world--and there are a hundred millions of them." Hope rose into flood, and with it fresh courage to endure.
Nor was the effect less marked on the British nation, which had not known invasion, and on the British Army, for all its faith in itself.
The rapid growth of American strength in France from March onward in response to the call of the Allies, provided indeed a moral support to the two older armies, which was of incalculable value and "influenced the fighting qualities of both; while the knowledge of these mounting reserves enabled the Allied Commanders to take risks which otherwise could hardly have been faced." I am quoting a British military authority of high rank.
It was at Metz that--outside Paris--I first came in contact with this "America in France," which History will mark on her coming page with all the emphasis that belongs to new chapters in the ever-broadening tale of man. It was in the shape of some "Knights of Columbus,"
pausing at Metz for a night on their way to Coblenz. We only exchanged a few words on the steps of the hotel, but I had time to feel the interest and the strangeness of this American Catholicism in Europe, following in the track of war, and looking with its New World eyes at those old, old towns, those ancient churches in which American Catholics were at home, yet not at home. At Strasbourg I saw no Americans that I can remember. But our arrival at Nancy at midnight, very weary after a long day in the car, during which we had missed our way badly at least once, is linked in my recollection with the apparition of two young American officers just as we were being told for the third time that there was no room in the hotel to which we had driven up. Should we really have to sleep in the car? There seemed to be not a single vacant bedroom in Nancy; and there had been snow showers during the day! But these two Americans heard from our French Lieutenant that there were two English ladies in the car, and they came forward at once, offering their rooms. Luckily we found shelter elsewhere; but I shall not soon forget the kind readiness of the two young men, and the thrill of the whole scene. There we stood in the beautiful Place Stanislas, that workmen from Versailles built for the father-in-law of Louis Quinze. A flickering moonlight touched the gilding of the famous _grilles_ that shut in the square; and the only light in the wide s.p.a.ce seemed to come from this one hotel taken by the American authorities for the use of their officers and Red Cross workers pa.s.sing to and from the Rhine. When that square was built, George Washington was a youth of twenty, and after one hundred and seventy years it stood within the war-zone of an American Army, which had crossed the Atlantic to fight in Europe!
Next day we spent entirely in the American sector, between Nancy and Toul, where American road directions and sign-boards, and fine, newly-built camps and depots for the American forces met us in all directions. A military policeman from a coloured regiment put us into the right road for St. Mihiel after leaving Toul--a strongly-built, bronzed fellow, dealing with the stream of military and civil traffic at a cross roads in Eastern France with perfect ease and _sang-froid_.
The astonishment and interest of this American occupation of a country so intensely and ultimately national, so little concerned in ordinary times with any other life than its own as France, provincial France above all, never ceased to hold me as we drove on and on through the American sector; especially when darkness and moonlight returned, and again and again as we pa.s.sed through wrecked villages where a few c.h.i.n.ks of light here and there showed a scattered billet or two, the American military policeman on duty would emerge from the shadows, tall, courteous, self-possessed, to answer a question, or show the way, and we left him behind, apparently the only human being under the French night, in sole possession of the ruins round him.
But before darkness fell, during the central part of the day, we had crossed the southern lines of the convergent American attack on St.
Mihiel. Trenches and wire-fields and artillery positions had all belonged to the French battle-zone before the Americans took them over, and there had been fierce fighting here by the French in 1915.
But for three years the position had changed but little, till the newly-formed First American Army undertook in September the clearing of the Salient.
We left the car near the village of Beaumont, and walked to the brow of the low ridge from which the American attack started. Standing among what had been the _tranckees de depart_, with the ruins of the village of Seichprey below us to the right, we had before us the greater part of the American battle-field--Thiaucourt in the far north-east; the ridge of Vigneulles, which had been the meeting-point of the converging American attacks coming both from the north-west and the south-east; while in the near foreground rose the once heavily fortified Mont Sec. The American troops went over the parapet at five o"clock on the morning of September 12th, and by the morning of the 13th their forces had met at Vigneulles, and the Salient, with its perpetual threat to the French line, had disappeared. In three more days the Heights of the Meuse had been cleared, and the foremost Americans were already under the fire of the fortified zone protecting Metz.
It was a brilliant but happily not a costly victory. Von Gallwitz, the German Commander, had probably already determined on retirement, when the American attack forestalled him. So that the American troops with certain French units supporting them achieved a great result with small losses; and as the first battle of an independent American Army the operation must always remain one of extraordinary interest and importance, even though, in British military opinion, the palm of difficulty and of sacrifice must be given rather to the splendid fighting on the Marne in June and July, when the Americans were still under French direction, or to the admirable performance of the two American divisions, the 27th and the 30th, serving under Sir Henry Rawlinson, a fortnight after St. Mihiel, on the Hindenburg line. "The original attack," at St. Mihiel, says one of the keenest of British military observers--"was carried out with extraordinary dash by very eager and physically magnificent soldiers." Possibly, he adds, a more seasoned army--the American troops had only had six months" experience in the fighting line!--might have turned the effects of a successful action to greater military advantage than was the case at St. Mihiel.
The British or French critic, mindful of the bitter lessons of four years of war, is inclined to make the same criticism of most of the American operations of last year, except the fighting on the Marne in June and July, when French caution and experience found a wonderful complement in the splendid fighting qualities of the American infantry. "But"--adds one of them--"undoubtedly the American Command was learning _very rapidly_." What an army the American Army would have been, if the war had lasted through this year! The qualities of the individual soldier, drawn many of them from districts among the naturally richest in the world, together with the vast resources in men and wealth of the nation behind them, and the mastery of the lessons of modern war which was already promised by the American Command, during the six months" campaign of 1918--above all, the comparative freshness of the American effort--would, no doubt, have made the United States Army the leading force among the Allies, had the war been prolonged. That is one line of speculation, and an interesting one. Another, less profitable, asks: "Could the Allies have won without America?" The answer I have heard most commonly given is: "Probably yes, considering, especially, the disintegration we now know to have been going on in Germany, and the c.u.mulative effects of the British blockade. But it would have taken at least six months more fighting, the loss of thousands more precious and irreplaceable lives, and the squandering of vast additional wealth in the bottomless waste of war."
Thank G.o.d, we did not win without America! The effects, the far-reaching effects, of America"s intervention, of her comradeship in the field of suffering and sacrifice with the free nations of old Europe, are only now beginning to show themselves above the horizon.
They will be actively and, as at least the men and women of faith among us believe, beneficently at work, when this generation has long pa.s.sed away.
CHAPTER VII
AMERICA IN FRANCE (CONTINUED)
It was late when we left Verdun, on the afternoon of the day which saw us at its beginning on the southern edge of the St. Mihiel battle-field, and the winter daylight had pa.s.sed into darkness before we began to run through a corner of the Argonne, on our way to St.
Menehould and Chalons, pa.s.sing by the wholly ruined village of Clermont in Argonne. The forest ran past us, a wintry fairyland, dimly lit by our quickly moving lamps, and apparently impenetrable beyond their range, an optical effect, however, that may be produced in darkness by a mere fringe of trees along the roadside. But I knew while I watched the exquisite effects of brown and silver, produced by the succession of tall, pale trunks rising above the lace-work of the underwood, as scene after scene pressed upon us out of the dark, that we were indeed in a forest country, only some twenty miles away from the scene of General Pershing"s drive at the end of last September, when he achieved on the first day an advance of seven miles through difficult country, while General Gouraud was pushing forward in Champagne; and I found myself speculating in the dark on the many discussions I had heard both among English and Americans of that advance, and of the checks and difficulties which, as I suppose is now generally admitted, followed on the first brilliant operations.
During the last few weeks further information has been forthcoming about the Meuse-Argonne battle, as the American operations between the Argonne and the Meuse from September 26th to November 11th are apparently to be known. But a good deal of obscurity still hangs over the details of the fighting. In the British Army I came across the very general belief that the staff and transport work of the advance had been--in the words of a well-known historian of the war--"as was natural with a new army, scarcely adequate to the fighting qualities of the troops engaged." And I often heard regret expressed that the American Command had not been more willing to avail itself of the staff experience of either or both of the older armies, which might--so the British or French spectator thinks--have lessened the casualty lists among extraordinarily gallant but inexperienced troops.
"Replacements fresh from home were put into exhausted divisions with little time for training," says General Pershing"s report. And "some of the divisions were fighting their first battle." They were faced also at the beginning of the advance by some of the best remaining German troops. When one thinks of all the long and bitter training in the field that went to the perfecting of French or British staff work, and then of the difficult nature of the ground over which the First American Army had to make its way, one can only feel the deepest sympathy for the losses sustained by the fresh and eager troops. The Argonne forest itself had long been recognised as impenetrable to frontal attack, and on the Argonne side of the American twenty-mile front, along the western edge of the valley of the Aire, the ground is still heavily wooded and often very hilly. As one of the ablest military critics, himself a soldier of great distinction, expressed it to me: "Foch had set the Americans an uncommonly hard task!"
But if there was some failure in those matters where neither bravery nor natural intelligence can take the place of long training, and experience in the field, there was no failure in ardour or in spirit.
In spite of heavy losses, General Pershing never failed to push on.
Starting from a line on the northern edge of the great Verdun battle-field, Montfaucon, the German headquarters during the Verdun fighting of 1916, was captured in three days. Then came severe fighting against fierce counter-attacks, and great difficulties with transport over sh.e.l.l-torn ground and broken roads, difficulties increased by bad weather. But on October 4th the gallant attack was renewed, and by October 10th, owing to the combined effects of the British drive in the north and the pressure on both sides of the Argonne, from General Gouraud on the west and the Americans on the east, the enemy fell back and the famous forest was cleared.
The third and last phase of the fighting began on the 23rd of October.
The enemy was now weakening rapidly along the whole of his line. For while the American Army had been stubbornly fighting its way north from Varennes to Grandpre, where it stood on November 1st, the British Armies, in the great Battles of Cambrai-St. Quentin, Ypres, and Courtrai, had not only captured the Hindenburg line and some fifty thousand prisoners, but had brought about--without fighting--the evacuation of Laon and the retreat of the Germans to the line of the Aisne; the German withdrawal, also, to the Scheldt, involving the freeing of Lille and the great industrial district of France; and finally, in concert with Belgian, French, and some American units, the clearing of the Belgian coast, and the recovery of Ostend, Zeebrugge and Bruges. The end, indeed, was rushing on. Co-operation was everywhere maintained, and blow followed blow. "During this period"
(6th to 31st October), says the British Commander-in-Chief, "our Allies had been pushing forward steadily on both sides of the Argonne.
The enemy was held by their attacks on his southern flank, while to the north the British offensive was driving forward rapidly behind his right."
Then, with November, the British Army, in the Battle of the Sambre, "struck at and broke the enemy"s last important lateral communications, divided his forces into two parts on either side of the Ardennes, and initiated a pursuit which only stopped with the Armistice." About one hundred thousand prisoners had been taken by the British Armies since September 26th. "Victory, indeed," in General Gouraud"s phrase, "had changed her camp!" Led by her, the British, French, and American Armies streamed east and north through the few days that remained, pursuing a beaten and demoralised enemy. The final American advance was begun on November 1st, and on November 7th patrols of the 42nd Division reached the Meuse at Wadelincourt, opposite Sedan; while the Fifth Division was in the Forest of Woevre, and the 90th Division had captured Stenay.
Some very interesting figures have lately been given as to the forces under General Pershing"s command. Altogether some 770,000 men seem to have been employed--both east and west of the Meuse--of whom 138,000 were French. Forty-six German divisions, amounting, according to the American estimate, to about 350,000 men, opposed the American advance.
The casualties are given as 115,000--among them 26,000 killed[8]--for the American troops, and 7,000 for the French. The enemy casualties are estimated at 75,000, and 16,000 prisoners were taken.
[8] According to the latest estimate I have seen.
One incident, relatively unimportant, but wonderfully picturesque, is sure to find a place in the American song and story of the future. It was during the rapid advance of the last days, when the far vision of the Rhine was already beckoning forward the victorious Allies, and giving wings to the feet of youth. On the night of November 3rd, after a successful day, the 9th and 23rd Infantry of the Second Division found themselves in column formation on the road leading north to Beaumont, a small town south of Sedan. The way lay open, and they took it. They marched on and on through the night, throwing out the usual advance guard and flank patrols, but otherwise unprotected. By all the rules of war the brigade should have been cut off. But in this twilight-time--this _Gotterdammerung_ of the end, conditions were abnormal, and the two regiments marched on through forest country, right through the enemy lines towards the Meuse, for about eight kilometres, capturing machine-gunners asleep at their guns, and rounding up parties of the enemy on the roads, till in the early dawn they reached a farm where German officers were sitting round tables with lights burning--only to spring to their feet in dismay, as the Americans surrounded them. The cold autumn morning--the young bronzed faces emerging from the darkness--the humbled and astonished foe: surely Old and New, Europe and America, were never brought together in a moment more attractive to the story-teller. A touch of romance amid the tragedy and the glory! But how welcome it is!
The full history, however, of the Argonne fighting will probably not be accurately known for some little time to come. No such obscurity hangs over the glorious fighting on the Marne, through the scenes of which I pa.s.sed both on the railway journey from Paris to Metz, and in motoring from Chalons to Paris on our return. Colonel Frederick Palmer"s book[9] gives an account of these operations, which, it seems to me, ought to be universally read in the Allied countries. The crusading courage of whole-hearted youth, the contempt of death and suffering, the splendid and tireless energy which his pages describe, if they touch other English hearts as deeply as they have touched mine, will go a long way towards that spiritual bond between our nations which alone can make real and lasting things out of Leagues and Treaties.
[9] _America in France_, by Lt.-Col. Frederick Palmer, S.C., U.S.A.
It was on our way from Rheims to Paris after our drive through the Champagne battle-field that we pa.s.sed rapidly through the places and scenes which Colonel Palmer describes.
As we approached Rheims about midday, a thick white fog rolled suddenly and silently over the chalk uplands that saw General Gouraud"s campaign of last September and October. We ran through it, past a turning to Moronvilliers on the left--famous name!--and within a short distance of Nogent l"Abbesse, the fort which did most to wreck Rheims Cathedral, and so down in a dreary semi-darkness into Rheims itself.
Thirty-five years ago I was in Rheims for the first and only time, before this visit. It was in September, not long before the vintage.
The town and the country-side were steeped in sunlight, and in the golden riches of Mother Earth. The air indeed, as it shimmered in the heat above the old town, and the hill slopes where the famous vineyards lie, seemed to "drop fatness." Wealth, wine, the body and its pleasures, the cunning handicraft and inherited lore of hundreds of years and many generations seemed to take visible shape in the fine old town, in its vast wine-cellars, and in the old inn where we stayed with its Gargantuan bill of fare, and its _abonnes_ from the town, ruddy, full-fleshed citizens, whose achievements in the way of eating and drinking we watched with amazement. Even the cathedral seemed to me to breathe the richness and gaiety of this central France; the sculptures of the facade with its famous "laughing angel" expressed rather the joy of living, of fair womanhood, of smiling maternity, and childhood, of the prime of youth and the satisfied dignity of age, than those austerer lessons of Christianity which speak from Beauvais, or Chartres or Rouen. But how beautiful it all was, how full, wherever one looked, of that old spell of _la douce France_! And now! Under the pall of the fog we drove through the silent ruin of the streets, still on their feet, so to speak, as at Verdun, but eyeless, roofless, and dead, scarcely a house habitable, though here and there one saw a few signs of patching up and returning habitation. And in the great square before the Cathedral instead of the old comeliness, the old stir of provincial and commercial life--_ruin!_--only intensified by a group of motors, come to bring distinguished Sunday visitors from Paris and the Conference, to see as much of it as an hour"s wait would enable them to see. There in front of the great portal stood the Prime Minister of England and the Cardinal-Archbishop--heroic Cardinal Lucon, who, under the daily hail of fire, had never left his church or his flock so long as there was a flock in Rheims to shepherd. And above the figure of the Cardinal soared the great West Front, blackened and scarred by fire, the summits of the towers lost in mist, and behind them, the wrecked and roofless church.
The destruction of irreplaceable values, other than human life, caused by the war, is summed up, as far as France is concerned, in this West Front of Rheims; so marred in all its beautiful detail, whether of gla.s.s or sculpture, yet still so grand, so instinct still with the pleading powers of the spirit. The "pity of it!" and at the same time, the tenacious undying life of France--all the long past behind her, the unconquerable future before her--these are the ideas one carries away from Rheims, hot in the heart. Above all, for the moment, the pity of it--the horror of this huge outrage spreading from the North Sea to Switzerland, of what the French call so poignantly _nos mines_--symbolised, once for all, by the brutal fate of this poem in stone, built up by the French generations, which is Rheims Cathedral.
And as we pa.s.sed away from Rheims, through the country roads and the bombarded villages of the Tardenois, another district of old France, which up to May last year was still intact, with all its farms and village and country houses, and is now but little different from Artois and Picardy, I found myself thinking with a pa.s.sionate anxiety, almost, of the Conference sitting in Paris and of its procedure.
"France is right--is _right_," I caught myself saying for the hundredth time. "Before anything else--justice to her!--protection and healing for her! Justice on the criminal nation, that has ravaged and trampled on her, "like a wild beast out of the wood," and healing for wounds and sufferings that no one can realise who has not witnessed for himself the state of her richest provinces. It was she who offered her breast to the first onslaught of the enemy, she who fought for us all when others had still their armies to make, she who has endured most and bled most, heavily as others--Britain, Italy, Belgium, Serbia--have endured. Her claim must come first--and let those in England and America who wish to realise why _come and see_."