The two officers repeated to the senator this news from the watch tower.
Had he not said that the enemy was going to fire? ... Obeying a sane instinct of preservation, and pushed at the same time by his son, he found himself in the refuge of the battery. He certainly did not wish to hide himself in this cave, so he remained near the entrance, with a curiosity which got the best of his disquietude.
He felt the approach of the invisible projectile, in spite of the roar of the neighboring cannon. He perceived with rare sensibility its pa.s.sage through the air, above the other closer and more powerful sounds. It was a squealing howl that was swelling in intensity, that was opening out as it advanced, filling all s.p.a.ce. Soon it ceased to be a shriek, becoming a rude roar formed by divers collisions and frictions, like the descent of an electric tram through a hillside road, or the course of a train which pa.s.ses through a station without stopping.
He saw it approach in the form of a cloud, bulging as though it were going to explode over the battery. Without knowing just how it happened, the senator suddenly found himself in the bottom of the shelter, his hands in cold contact with a heap of steel cylinders lined up like bottles. They were projectiles.
"If a German sh.e.l.l," he thought, "should explode above this burrow ...
what a frightful blowing up!" ...
But he calmed himself by reflecting on the solidity of the arched vault with its beams and sacks of earth several yards thick. Suddenly he was in absolute darkness. Another had sought refuge in the shelter, obstructing the light with his body; perhaps his friend Desnoyers.
A year pa.s.sed by while his watch was registering a single second, then a century at the same rate ... and finally the awaited thunder burst forth, making the refuge vibrate, but with a kind of dull elasticity, as though it were made of rubber. In spite of its thud, the explosion wrought horrible damage. Other minor explosions, playful and whistling, followed behind the first. In his imagination, Lacour saw the cataclysm--a writhing serpent, vomiting sparks and smoke, a species of Wagnerian monster that upon striking the ground was disgorging thousands of fiery little snakes, that were covering the earth with their deadly contortions... . The sh.e.l.l must have burst nearby, perhaps in the very square occupied by this battery.
He came out of the shelter, expecting to encounter a sickening display of dismembered bodies, and he saw his son smiling, smoking a cigar and talking with Desnoyers... . That was a mere nothing! The gunners were tranquilly finishing the charging of a huge piece. They had raised their eyes for a moment as the enemy"s sh.e.l.l went screaming by, and then had continued their work.
"It must have fallen about three hundred yards away," said Rene cheerfully.
The senator, impressionable soul, felt suddenly filled with heroic confidence. It was not worth while to bother about his personal safety when other men--just like him, only differently dressed--were not paying the slightest attention to the danger.
And as the other projectiles soared over his head to lose themselves in the woods with the explosions of a volcano, he remained by his son"s side, with no other sign of tension than a slight trembling of the knees. It seemed to him now that it was only the French missiles--because they were on his side--that were hitting the bull"s eye. The others must be going up in the air and losing themselves in useless noise. Of just such illusions is valor often compounded! ...
"And is that all?" his eyes seemed to be asking.
He now recalled rather shamefacedly his retreat to the shelter; he was beginning to feel that he could live in the open, the same as Rene.
The German missiles were getting considerably more frequent. They were no longer lost in the wood, and their detonations were sounding nearer and nearer. The two officials exchanged glances. They were responsible for the safety of their distinguished charge.
"Now they are warming up," said one of them.
Rene, as though reading their thoughts, prepared to go. "Good-bye, father!" They were needing him in his battery. The senator tried to resist; he wished to prolong the interview, but found that he was. .h.i.tting against something hard and inflexible that repelled all his influence. A senator amounted to very little with people accustomed to discipline. "Farewell, my boy! ... All success to you! ... Remember who you are!"
The father wept as he embraced his son, lamenting the brevity of the interview, and thinking of the dangers awaiting him.
When Rene had disappeared, the captains again recommended their departure. It was getting late; they ought to reach a certain cantonment before nightfall. So they went down the hill in the shelter of a cut in the mountain, seeing the enemy"s sh.e.l.ls flying high above them.
In a hollow, they came upon several groups of the famed seventy-fives spread about through the woods, hidden by piles of underbrush, like snapping dogs, howling and sticking up their gray muzzles. The great cannon were roaring only at intervals, while the steel pack of hounds were yelping incessantly without the slightest break in their noisy wrath--like the endless tearing of a piece of cloth. The pieces were many, the volleys dizzying, and the shots uniting in one prolonged shriek, as a series of dots unite to form a single line.
The chiefs, stimulated by the din, were giving their orders in yells, and waving their arms from behind the pieces. The cannon were sliding over the motionless gun carriages, advancing and receding like automatic pistols. Each charge dropped an empty sh.e.l.l, and introduced a fresh one into the smoking chamber.
Behind the battery, the air was racking in furious waves. With every shot, Lacour and his companion received a blow on the breast, the violent contact with an invisible hand, pushing them backward and forward. They had to adjust their breathing to the rhythm of the concussions. During the hundredth part of a second, between the pa.s.sing of one aerial wave and the advance of the next, their chests felt the agony of vacuum. Desnoyers admired the baying of those gray dogs. He knew well their bite, extending across many kilometres. Now they were fresh and at home in their own kennels.
To Lacour it seemed as though the rows of cannon were chanting a measure, monotonous and fiercely impa.s.sioned that must be the martial hymn of the humanity of prehistoric times. This music of dry, deafening, delirious notes was awakening in the two what is sleeping in the depths of every soul--the savagery of a remote ancestry. The air was hot with acrid odors, pungent and brutishly intoxicating. The perfumes from the explosions were penetrating to the brain through the mouth, the eyes and the ears.
They began to be infected with the same ardor as the directors, shouting and swinging their arms in the midst of the thundering. The empty capsules were mounting up in thick layers behind the cannon. Fire! ...
always, fire!
"We must sprinkle them well," yelled the chiefs. "We must give a good soaking to the groves where the Boches are hidden."
So the mouths of "75 rained without interruption, inundating the remote thickets with their sh.e.l.ls.
Inflamed by this deadly activity, frenzied by the destructive celerity, dominated by the dizzying sway of the ruby leaves, Lacour and Desnoyers found themselves waving their hats, leaping from one side to another as though they were dancing the sacred dance of death, and shouting with mouths dry from the acrid vapor of the powder... . "Hurrah! ...
Hurrah!"
The automobile rode all the afternoon long, stopping only when it met long files of convoys. It traversed uncultivated fields with skeletons of dwellings, and ran through burned towns which were no more than a succession of blackened facades.
"Now it is your turn," said the senator to Desnoyers. "We are going to see your son."
At nightfall, they ran across groups of infantry, soldiers with long beards and blue uniforms discolored by the inclemency of the weather.
They were returning from the intrenchments, carrying over the hump of their knapsacks, spades, picks and other implements for removing the ground, that had acquired the importance of arms of combat. They were covered with mud from head to foot. All looked old in full youth. Their joy at returning to the cantonment after a week in the trenches, made them fill the silence of the plain with songs in time to the tramp of their nailed boots. Through the violet twilight drifted the winged strophes of the Ma.r.s.eillaise, or the heroic affirmations of the Chant du Depart.
"They are the soldiers of the Revolution," exclaimed Lacour with enthusiasm. "France has returned to 1792."
The two captains established their charges for the night in a half-ruined town where one of their divisions had its headquarters, and then took their leave. Others would act as their escort the following morning.
The two friends were lodging in the Hotel de la Siren, an old inn with its front gnawed by sh.e.l.l-fire. The proprietor showed them with pride a window broken in the form of a crater. This window had made the old tavern sign--a woman of iron with the tail of a fish--sink into insignificance. As Desnoyers was occupying the room next to the one that had received the mark of the sh.e.l.l, the inn-keeper was anxious to point it out to them before they went to bed.
Everything was broken--walls, floor, roof. The furniture, a pile of splinters in the corner; the flowered wall paper, a fringe of tatters hanging from the walls. Through an enormous hole they could see the stars and feel the chill of the night. The owner stated that this destruction was not the work of the Germans, but was caused by a projectile from one of the seventy-fives when repelling the invaders from the village. And he beamed on the ruin with patriotic pride, repeating:
"There"s a sample of French marksmanship for you! How do you like the workings of the seventy-fives? ... What do you think of that now? ..."
In spite of the fatigue of the journey, Don Marcelo slept badly, excited by the thought that his son was not far away.
An hour before daybreak, they left the village, in an automobile, guided by another official. On both sides of the road, they saw camps and camps. They left behind the parks of munitions, pa.s.sed the third line of troops, and then the second. Thousands and thousands of men were bivouacking there in the open, improvising as best they could their habitations. These human ant-hills seemed vaguely to recall, with the variety of uniforms and races, some of the mighty invasions of history; but it was not a nation en marche. The exodus of people takes with it the women and children. Here there were nothing but men, men everywhere.
All kinds of housing ever used by humanity were here utilized, these military a.s.semblages beginning with the cave. Caverns and quarries were serving as barracks. Some low huts recalled the American ranch; others, high and conical, were facsimiles of the gurbi of Africa. Many of the soldiers had come from the colonies; some had been living as business men in the new world, and upon having to provide a house more stable than the canvas tent, had recalled the architecture of the tribes with which they had had dealings. In this conglomerate of combatants, there were also Moors, blacks and Asiatics who were accustomed to live outside the cities and had acquired in the open a physical superiority which made them more masterful than the civilized peoples.
Near the river beds was flapping white clothing hung out to dry. Rows of men with bared b.r.e.a.s.t.s were out in the morning freshness, leaning over the streams, washing themselves with noisy ablutions followed by vigorous rubbings... . On a bridge was a soldier writing, utilizing a parapet as a table... . The cooks were moving around their savory kettles, and a warm exhalation of morning soup was mixed with the resinous perfume of the trees and the smell of the damp earth.
Long, low barracks of wood and zinc served the cavalry and artillery for their animals and stores. In the open air, the soldiers were currying and shoeing the glossy, plump horses which the trench-war was maintaining in placid obesity.
"If they had only been like that at the battle of the Marne!" sighed Desnoyers to his friend.
Now the cavalry was leading an existence of interminable rest. The troopers were fighting on foot, and finding it necessary to exercise their steeds to keep them from getting sick with their full mangers.
There were spread over the fields several aeroplanes, like great, gray dragon flies, poised for the flight. Many of the men were grouped around them. The farmers, transformed into soldiers, were watching with great admiration their comrade charged with the management of these machines.
They looked upon him as one of the wizards so venerated and feared in all the countryside.
Don Marcelo was struck by the general transformation in the French uniforms. All were now clad in gray-blue, from head to foot. The trousers of bright scarlet cloth, the red kepis which he had hailed with such joy in the expedition of the Marne, no longer existed. All the men pa.s.sing along the roads were soldiers. All the vehicles, even the ox-carts, were guided by military men.
Suddenly the automobile stopped before some ruined houses blackened by fire.
"Here we are," announced the official. "Now we shall have to walk a little."
The senator and his friend started along the highway.
"Not that way, no!" the guide turned to say grimly. "That road is bad for the health. We must keep out of the currents of air."
He further explained that the Germans had their cannon and intrenchments at the end of this highroad which sloped suddenly and again appeared as a white ribbon on the horizon line between two rows of trees and burned houses. The pale morning light with its hazy mist was sheltering them from the enemy"s fire. On a sunny day, the arrival of their automobile would have been saluted with a sh.e.l.l. "That is war," he concluded. "One is always near to death without seeing it."
The two recalled the warning of the general with whom they had dined the day before: "Be very careful! The war of the trenches is treacherous."