This was the first sh.e.l.l which had stirred him to interest or attention.
Presently there came another bang, and this seemed just as loud. The colonel paused thoughtfully.
"Maybe one of their aeroplanes has seen us and spotted us for the artillery," he said. "Tell the chauffeurs to turn the cars around at once, and we"ll go."
The chauffeurs turned the cars with commendable alacrity and the colonel walked slowly toward them. But his roving glance rested for an instant upon a little ridge across the valley to his left which brought memories to his mind and he stopped in the middle of the road and began: "In the Spring of 1915----" On and on he went in his beautiful French and described some small affair which might have influenced the entire subsequent course of events. It seemed that if the Germans had varied their plan a little the French defensive scheme would have been upset and all sorts of things would have happened. At the end of twenty minutes he had done full justice to the subject and then he recollected.
"We"d better go now," he said, "the Germans may have spotted us."
We messed with the French officers in the citadel that night and found that they were ready to converse on almost any subject but the war.
Literature was their favorite topic. Although the colonel spoke no English, he was familiar with much American literature in translation.
Poe he knew well, and he had read a few things of Mark Twain"s.
Somebody mentioned William James, and a captain quoted at length from an essay called "A Moral Equivalent for War." The lieutenant on my right wanted to know whether Americans still read Walt Whitman, and I wondered whether the same familiarity with French literature would be encountered in any American mess. This little lieutenant had been a professor or instructor some place or other when the war began and had several poetical dramas in verse to his credit. He had written a play called "Dionysius" in rhymed couplets. At the beginning of the war he had enlisted as a private and had seen much hard service, which had brought him two wounds, a medal and a commission. He hoped ardently to survive the war, for he felt that he could write ever so much better because he had been thrown into close relationship with peasants and laborers. He found their talk meaty, and at times rich in poetry. One day, he remembered, his regiment had marched along a country road in a fine spring dawn. His comrade to the right, a Parisian peddler, remarked as they pa.s.sed a gleaming forest: "There is a wood where G.o.d has slept."
The little lieutenant said that if he had the luck to live through the war he was going to write plays without a thought of the Greeks and their mythology. He hoped, if he should live, to write for the many as well as the few. I wondered to myself just what sort of plays one of our American highbrows would write if he served a campaign with the 69th or drove an army mule.
The French army tries to let the men at the front live a little better than elsewhere if it is possible to get the food up to them. In the citadel at Verdun the men dine in style now that the incoming roads are pretty much immune from sh.e.l.l fire. Our luncheon with the officers on the night of the twenty-fifth of September, for instance, consisted of hors d"oeuvres, omelette aux fines herbes, bifsteck, pommes parmentier, confitures, dessert, cafe, champagne and pinard. And for dinner we had potage vermicelli, oefs bechamel, jambon aux epinards, chouxfleur au jus, d.u.c.h.esse chocolat, fruits, dessert, cafe and, of course, champagne and pinard.
We spent the night in the citadel and a little after midnight the German planes came over. They bombed the town and dropped a few missiles on the citadel, but they did no more than dent the roof a bit. Our rooms were almost fifty meters underground and the bombs sounded little louder than heavy rain on the roof. Certainly they did not disturb the Frenchman just down the hall. His snores were ever so much louder than the German bombs.
On the morning of our second day we crossed the Meuse and drove down heavily camouflaged roads to Charny. Five hundred yards away a French battery was under heavy bombardment from big German guns. We could see the earth fly up from hits close to the gun emplacements. Five hundred yards away men were being killed and wounded, but the soldiers in Charny loafed about and smoked and chatted and paid no attention. This bombardment was not in their lives at all. The men of the battery might have been the folk who walk upside down on the other side of the earth.
"The last time I came to Charny," said the Colonel, "I had to get in a dugout and stay five hours because the Germans bombarded it so hard.
"But that was in the afternoon," he rea.s.sured us; "the Germans never bombard Charny in the morning."
We stood and watched the two sheets of fire poured upon the battery until somebody called attention to the fact that it was almost noon and we returned to the citadel. And at two o"clock that afternoon we stood on a hilltop overlooking the valley and sure enough the Germans were giving Charny its daily strafe. Sh.e.l.ls were bursting all around the peaceful road we had traveled in the morning. Probably by now the men in the battery were idling about and taking their ease. After all there is something to be said for a foe who plays a system.
CHAPTER XVI
WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY
He was twenty-six and a major, but he was three years old in the big war, and that is the only age which counts today in the British army.
The little major was the first man I ever met who professed a genuine enthusiasm for war. It had found him a black sheep in the most remote region of a big British colony and had tossed him into command of himself and of others. Utterly useless in the pursuit of peace, war had proved a sufficiently compelling schoolmaster to induce the study of many complicated mechanical problems, of subtler ones of psychology, not to mention two languages. It is true that his German was limited to "Throw up your hands" and "Come out or we"ll bomb you," but he could carry on a friendly and fairly extensive conversation in French. The tuition fee was two wounds.
He was a fine, fair sample of the slashing, sw.a.n.king British army which backs its boasts with battalions and makes its light words good with heavy guns. We rode together in a train for several hours on the way to the British front and when I told him I was a newspaper man he was eager to tell me something of what the British army had done, was doing and would do.
"If they"d cut out wire and trenches and machine guns and general staffs," said the little major, "we"d win in two months." Without these concessions he did not expect to see the end for at least a year.
However, he was concerned for the most part with more concrete things than predictions, and I"d best let him wander on as he did that afternoon with no interruption save an occasional question. He was returning to the front after being wounded. There had been boating and swimming and tennis and "a deuced pretty girl" down there at the resort where he had been recuperating, and yet he was glad to be back.
"You see," the little major explained, "I have been in all the shows from the beginning and I"d feel pretty rotten if they were to pull anything off without me. The C.O. wants me back. I have a letter here from him. He tells me to take all the time I need, but to get back as soon as I can. The C.O. and I have been together from the beginning. It isn"t that the new fellow isn"t all right. Quite likely he"s a better officer than I am, but the C.O. wants the old fellows that he"s seen in other shows and knows all about. That"s why I want to get back. I want to see what the new fellow"s doing with my men."
He limped a little still, and I pressed him to tell me about his wound.
It seemed he got it in "the April show."
"There was a bit of luck about that," he said. "I happened to take my Webley with me when we went over, as well as my cane. They"ve got a silly rule now that officers mustn"t carry canes in an attack and that they must wear Tommies" tunics, so the Fritzies can"t spot them. They say we lose too many officers because they expose themselves. n.o.body pays much attention to that rule. You won"t find many officers in Tommies" tunics, but you will find "em out in front with their canes.
"And there"s sense to it. I"ve always said that I wouldn"t ask my men to go any place I wasn"t willing to go and to go first. "Come on," that"s what we say in the British army. The Germans drive their men from behind. Some of their officers are very brave, you know, but that"s the system. I remember in one show we were stuck at the third line of barbed wire. The guns hadn"t touched it, but it wasn"t their fault. There was a German officer there, and he stood up on the parapet, and directed the machine gun fire. He"d point every place we were a little thick and then they"d let us have it. We got him, though. I got a machine gunner on him. Just peppered him. He was a mighty brave officer."
I reminded the little major that I wanted to hear about his wound.
"We were coming through a German trench that had been pretty well cleaned out, but close up against the back there was a soldier hiding.
When I came by he cut at me with his bayonet. He only got me in the fleshy part of my leg, and I turned and let him have it with my Webley.
Blew the top of his head right off. Silly a.s.s, wasn"t he? Must have known he"d be killed."
I asked him if his wound hurt, and he said no, and that he was able to walk back, and felt quite chipper until the last mile.
"The first thing a wounded man wants to do," he explained, "is to get away. If he"s been hit he gets a sudden crazy fear that he"s going to get it again. Most wounds don"t hurt much, and as soon as a man"s out of fire and puts a cigarette in his mouth he cheers up. He"s at his best if it"s a blighty hit."
Here I was forced to interrupt for information.
"A blighty hit! Don"t you know what that is? It"s from the song they sing now, "Carry Me Back to Blighty." Blighty"s England. I think it"s a Hindustani word that means home, but I won"t be sure about that. Anyhow, a blighty hit"s not bad enough to keep you in France, but bad enough to send you to England. Those are the slow injuries that aren"t so very dangerous.
"Next to getting to Blighty a fellow wants a cigarette. I never saw a man hit so bad he couldn"t smoke. I saw a British "plane coming down one day and the tail of it was red. The Germans fix up their machines like that, but I knew this wasn"t paint on a British plane. He made a tiptop landing, and when he got out we saw part of his shoulder was shot away and he had a hole in the top of his head. "That was a close call," he said, and he took out a cigarette, lighted it and took two puffs. Then he keeled over."
The little major and I got out to stretch our legs at a station platform, and I noticed that salutes were punctiliously given and returned. "I suppose," I said, quoting a bit of misinformation somebody had supplied, "that out at the front all this saluting is cut out."
"No, sir," said the little major sternly. "Somebody told that to the last batch of recruits that was sent over, but we taught "em better soon. They don"t get the lay of it quite. It isn"t me they salute; it"s the King"s uniform. Of course, I don"t expect a man to salute if I pa.s.s him in a trench; but if he"s smoking a cigarette I expect him to throw it away and I expect him to straighten up.
"You"ve got to let up on some things, of course. There"s shaving now. I expect my men to shave every day when they"re not in the line, but you can"t expect that in the trenches. Naturally, I shave myself every day anyhow, but I"m lenient with the men. I don"t insist on their shaving more than every other day."
When I got to the chateau where the visiting correspondents stay I found the officers at mess. There were four British officers, a Roumanian general, a member of Parliament, a Dutch painter and an American newspaperman. As at Verdun the conversation had swung around to literature. It all began because somebody said something about Shaw having put up at the chateau when he visited the front.
"Awful a.s.s," said an English officer who had met the playwright out there. "He was no end of nuisance for us. Why, when he got out here we found he was a vegetarian, and we had to chase around and have omelettes fixed up for him every day."
"I censored his stuff," said another. "I didn"t think much of it, but I made almost no changes. Some of it was a little subtle, but I let it get by."
"I heard him out here," said a third officer, "and he talked no end of rot. He said the Germans had made a botch of destroying towns. He said he could have done more damage to Arras with a hammer than the Germans did with their sh.e.l.ls. Of course, he couldn"t begin to do it with a hammer, and, anyway, he wouldn"t be let. I suppose he never thought of that. Then he said that the Germans were doing us a great favor by their air raids. He said they were smashing up things that were ugly and unsanitary. That"s silly. We could pull them down ourselves, you know, and, anyhow, in the last raid they hit the postoffice."
"The old boy"s got nerve, though," interrupted another officer. "I was out at the front with him near Arras and there was some pretty lively sh.e.l.ling going on around us. I told him to put on his tin hat, but he wouldn"t do it. I said, "Those German sh.e.l.l splinters may get you," and he laughed and said if the Germans did anything to him they"d be mighty ungrateful, after all he"d done for them. He don"t know the Boche."
"He told me," added a British journalist, ""when I want to know about war I talk to soldiers." I asked him: "Do you mean officers or Tommies?"
He said that he meant Tommies.
"Now you know how much reliance you can put in what a Tommy says. He"ll either say what he thinks you want him to say or what he thinks you don"t want him to say. I told Shaw that, but he paid no attention."
Here the first officer chimed in again. "Well, I stick to what I"ve said right along. I don"t see where Shaw"s funny. I think he"s silly."
The major who sat at the head of the table deftly turned the conversation away from literary controversy. "What did you think of Conan Doyle?" he said.
Bright and early next morning we started out to follow in the footsteps of Shaw. We went through country which had been shocked and shaken by both sides in their battles and then dynamited in addition by the retreating Germans. I stood in Peronne which the Germans had dynamited with the greatest care. They left the town for dead, but against a shattered wall was a sign which read, "Regimental cinema tonight at the Splinters--CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN SHANGHAIED." This was first aid. A frozen man is rubbed with snow and a town which has suffered German frightfulness is regaled with Charlie Chaplin.
Life will come back to that town in time and to others. After all life is a rubber band and it will be just as it was only an instant after they let go. We turned down the road to Arras and drove between fields which had been burned to cinders and trodden into mud by men and guns only a few weeks ago. Now the poppies were sweeping all before them.
Into the trenches they went and over. First line, second line, third line, each fell in turn to the redcoats. They were so thick that the earth seemed to bleed for its wounds.