. . . After two weeks here and less than two months from enlistment, we are actually going at last to the firing line. By the time you receive this we shall already perhaps have had our "bapteme de feu".
We have been engaged in the hardest kind of hard work -- two weeks of beautiful autumn weather on the whole, frosty nights and sunny days and beautiful coloring on the spa.r.s.e foliage that breaks here and there the wide rolling expanses of open country.
Every day, from the distance to the north, has come the booming of the cannon around Reims and the lines along the Meuse. . . . But imagine how thrilling it will be tomorrow and the following days, marching toward the front with the noise of battle growing continually louder before us.
I could tell you where we are going, but I do not want to run any risk of having this letter stopped by the censor. The whole regiment is going, four battalions, about 4000 men. You have no idea how beautiful it is to see the troops undulating along the road in front of one, in "colonnes par quatre"
as far as the eye can see, with the captains and lieutenants on horseback at the head of their companies. . . . Tomorrow the real hardship and privations begin. But I go into action with the lightest of light hearts.
The hard work and moments of frightful fatigue have not broken but hardened me, and I am in excellent health and spirits. . . .
I am happy and full of excitement over the wonderful days that are ahead.
It was such a comfort to receive your letter, and know that you approved of my action.
In a post-card of October 20, postmarked "Vertus", he says:
This is the second night"s halt of our march to the front. All our way has been one immense battlefield. It was a magnificent victory for the French that the world does not fully realize. I think we are marching to victory too, but whatever we are going to we are going triumphantly.
On October 23, he writes from "17 kil. south-east of Reims".
Dear Mother. . . . I am sitting on the curbstone of a street at the edge of the town. The houses end abruptly and the yellow vineyards begin here. The view is broad and uninterrupted to the crest ten kilometers or so across the valley. Between this and ourselves are the lines of the two armies. A fierce cannonading is going on continually, and I lift my eyes from the sheet at each report, to see the puffs of smoke two or three miles off. The Germans have been firing salvoes of four shots over a little village where the French batteries are stationed, shrapnel that burst in little puffs of white smoke; the French reply with explosive sh.e.l.ls that raise columns of dust over the German lines.
Half of our regiment have left already for the trenches. We may go tonight.
We have made a march of about 75 kilometers in four days, and are now on the front, ready to be called on at any moment. I am feeling fine, in my element, for I have always thirsted for this kind of thing, to be present always where the pulsations are liveliest. Every minute here is worth weeks of ordinary experience. How beautiful the view is here, over the sunny vineyards! And what a curious anomaly.
On this slope the grape pickers are singing merrily at their work, on the other the batteries are roaring. Boom! Boom!
This will spoil one for any other kind of life. The yellow afternoon sunlight is sloping gloriously across this beautiful valley of Champagne.
Aeroplanes pa.s.s continually overhead on reconnaissance. I must mail this now.
There is too much to be said and too little time to say it.
So glad to get your letter. Love and lots of it to all.
Alan.
Alas! the hopes of swift, decisive action with which the Legion advanced were destined to disappointment. They soon settled down for the winter into the monotonous hardships of trench warfare. Alan described this experience in admirably vivid letters published in the New York "Sun", from which a few extracts must suffice. He writes on December 8, during his fourth period of service in the trenches:
We left our camp in the woods before daybreak this morning, and marched up the hill in single file, under the winter stars. . . .
Through openings in the woods we could see that we were marching along a high ridge, and on either hand vaporous depths and distances expanded, the darkness broken sometimes by a far light or the momentary glow of a magnesium rocket sent up from the German lines.
There is something fascinating if one is stationed on sentry-duty immediately after arrival, in watching the dawn slowly illumine one of these new landscapes, from a position taken up under cover of darkness.
The other section has been relieved and departs. We are given the "consigne", by the preceding sentinel, and are left alone behind a mound of dirt, facing the north and the blank, perilous night. Slowly the mystery that it shrouds resolves as the grey light steals over the eastern hills.
Like a photograph in the washing, its high lights and shadows come gradually forth. The light splash in the foreground becomes a ruined chateau, the grey street a demolished village.
The details come out on the hillside opposite, where the silent trenches of the enemy are hidden a few hundred metres away. We find ourselves in a woody, mountainous country, with broad horizons and streaks of mist in the valleys. Our position is excellent this time, a high crest, with open land sloping down from the trenches and plenty of barbed wire strung along immediately in front. It would be a hard task to carry such a line, and there is not much danger that the enemy will try.
With increasing daylight the sentinel takes a sheltered position, and surveys his new environment through little gaps where the mounds have been crenellated and covered with branches. Suddenly he starts as a metallic bang rings out from the woods immediately behind him.
It is of the unmistakable voice of a French 75 starting the day"s artillery duel. By the time the sentinel is relieved, in broad daylight, the cannonade is general all along the line. He surrenders his post to a comrade, and crawls down into his bombproof dugout almost reluctantly, for the long day of inactive waiting has commenced.
Though he never expresses even a momentary regret for the choice he has made, he freely admits that trench warfare is "anything but romantic".
For the artilleryman it is "doubtless very interesting"
but "the poor common soldier" has a pretty mean time of it:
His rule is simply to dig himself a hole in the ground and to keep hidden in it as tightly as possible. Continually under the fire of the opposing batteries, he is yet never allowed to get a glimpse of the enemy. Exposed to all the dangers of war, but with none of its enthusiasm or splendid elan, he is condemned to sit like an animal in its burrow, and hear the sh.e.l.ls whistle over his head, and take their little daily toll from his comrades.
The winter morning dawns with grey skies and the h.o.a.r frost on the fields.
His feet are numb, his canteen frozen, but he is not allowed to make a fire.
The winter night falls, with its prospect of sentry-duty, and the continual apprehension of the hurried call to arms; he is not even permitted to light a candle, but must fold himself in his blanket and lie down cramped in the dirty straw to sleep as best he may.
How different from the popular notion of the evening campfire, the songs and good cheer.
Of the commissariat arrangements he gives, on the whole, a very good account; but he admits that "to supplement the regular rations with luxuries such as b.u.t.ter, cheese, preserves, & especially chocolate, is a matter that occupies more of the young soldier"s thoughts than the invisible enemy. Our corporal told us the other day that there wasn"t a man in the squad that wouldn"t exchange his rifle for a jar of jam." But "though modern warfare allows us to think more about eating than fighting, still we do not actually forget that we are in a battle line."
Ever over our heads goes on the precise and scientific struggle of the artillery. Packed elbow to elbow in these obscure galleries, one might be content to squat all day long, auditor of the magnificent orchestra of battle, were it not that one becomes so soon habituated to it that it is no longer magnificent. We hear the voices of cannon of all calibres and at all distances. We learn to read the score & distinguish the instruments. Near us are field batteries; far away are siege guns. Over all there is the unmistakable, sharp, metallic tw.a.n.g of the French 75, the whistle of its sh.e.l.l and the lesser report of its explosion.
And every now and then comes the bursting of a sh.e.l.l immediately overhead, and the rattle of its fragments on the roof of the bomb-proof dug-out.
Think what it must have meant to this eager, ardent, pleasure-loving spirit to sit out, day after day, in a chill, sodden, verminous trench, a grand orchestral concert of this music of human madness!
The solitude of sentry-duty evidently comes to him as something of a relief.
"It may," he says, "be all that is melancholy if the night is bad and the winter wind moans through the pines"; but it also "brings moments of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back, if the moonlight breaks over the windless hills, or the heavens blaze with the beauty of the northern stars."
The sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone under the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals itself to him. . . .
He thrills with the sense of filling an appointed, necessary place in the conflict of hosts, and, facing the enemy"s crest, above which the Great Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has never before known, a kind of companionship with the stars.
Six days in the trenches alternated with a three days" interval of rest "either billeted in the stables and haylofts of the village or encamped in the woods and around the chateau." Thus the winter of 1914-15 wore away, with little to break its monotony. The heaviest fighting was all to the northward. One gathers from his poem "The Aisne"
that at Craonne he took part in the repulse of a serious enemy attack; but there is no mention of this in the letters before me.
On March 12, 1915, he writes to his mother in fierce indignation over something that has appeared in an American paper as to life in the Foreign Legion. The writer of the "disgraceful article", he says, "like many others of his type, was long ago eliminated from our ranks, for a person buoyed up by no n.o.ble purpose is the first to succ.u.mb to the hardships of the winter that we have been through. . . .
If his lies did nothing worse than belittle his comrades, who are here for motives that he is unable to conceive, it would be only dishonourable. But when it comes to throwing discredit on the French Government, that in all its treatment of us has been generous beyond anything that one would think possible, it is too shameful for any words to characterize."
With the coming of spring, there was of course some mitigation of the trials of the winter. Here is an almost idyllic pa.s.sage from a letter to his sister, written on the fly-leaves of "Les Confessions de J. J. Rousseau", Geneve, MDCCLx.x.xII: