"Attention, Marcelo!" he said to himself with grim humor. "Keep cool now! ... You must avoid Friend Tchernoff"s four hors.e.m.e.n, you know!"
He spent an afternoon in the studio going over the war news in the papers. The French had begun an offensive in Champagne with great advances and many prisoners.
Desnoyers could not but think of the loss of life that this must represent. Julio"s fate, however, gave him no uneasiness, for his son was not in that part of the front. But yesterday he had received a letter from him, dated the week before; they all took about that length of time to reach him. Sub-lieutenant Desnoyers was as blithe and reckless as ever. They were going to promote him again--he was among those proposed for the Legion d"Honneur. These facts intensified Don Marcelo"s vision of himself as the father of a general as young as those of the revolution; and as he contemplated the daubs and sketches around him, he marvelled at the extraordinary way in which the war had twisted his son"s career.
On his way home, he pa.s.sed Marguerite Laurier dressed in mourning.
The senator had told him a few days before that her brother, the artilleryman, had just been killed at Verdun.
"How many are falling!" he said mournfully to himself. "How hard it will be for his poor mother!"
But he smiled immediately after at the thought of those to be born.
Never before had the people been so occupied in accelerating their reproduction. Even Madame Laurier now showed with pride the very visible curves of her approaching maternity, and Desnoyers noted sympathetically the vital volume apparent beneath her long mourning veil. Again he thought of Julio, without taking into account the flight of time. He felt as interested in the little newcomer as though he were in some way related to it, and he promised himself to aid generously the Laurier baby if he ever had the opportunity.
On entering his house, he was met in the hall by Dona Luisa, who told him that Lacour was waiting for him.
"Very good!" he responded gaily. "Let us see what our ill.u.s.trious father-in-law has to say."
His good wife was uneasy. She had felt alarmed without knowing exactly why at the senator"s solemn appearance; with that feminine instinct which perforates all masculine precautions, she surmised some hidden mission. She had noticed, too, that Rene and his father were talking together in a low tone, with repressed emotion.
Moved by an irresistible impulse, she hovered near the closed door, hoping to hear something definite. Her wait was not long.
Suddenly a cry ... a groan ... the groan that can come only from a body from which all vitality is escaping.
And Dona Luisa rushed in just in time to support her husband as he was falling to the floor.
The senator was excusing himself confusedly to the walls, the furniture, and turning his back in his agitation on the dismayed Rene, the only one who could have listened to him.
"He did not let me finish... . He guessed from the very first word... ."
Hearing the outcry, Chichi hastened in in time to see her father slipping from his wife"s arms to the sofa, and from there to the floor, with gla.s.sy, staring eyes, and foaming at the mouth.
From the luxurious rooms came forth the world-old cry, always the same from the humblest home to the highest and loneliest:--
"Oh, Julio! ... Oh, my son, my son! ..."
CHAPTER V
THE BURIAL FIELDS
The automobile was going slowly forward under the colorless sky of a winter morning.
In the distance, the earth"s surface seemed trembling with white, fluttering things resembling a band of b.u.t.terflies poised on the furrows. On one of the fields the swarm was of great size, on others, it was broken into small groups.
As the machine approached these white b.u.t.terflies, they seemed to be taking on other colors. One wing was turning blue, another flesh-colored... . They were little flags, by the hundreds, by the thousands which palpitated night and day, in the mild, sunny, morning breeze, in the damp drip of the dull mornings, in the biting cold of the interminable nights. The rains had washed and re-washed them, stealing away the most of their color. Some of the borders of the restless little strips were mildewed by the dampness while others were scorched by the sun, like insects which have just grazed the flames.
In the midst of the fluttering flags could be seen the black crosses of wood. On these were hanging dark kepis, red caps, and helmets topped with tufts of horsehair, slowly disintegrating and weeping atmospheric tears at every point.
"How many are dead!" sighed Don Marcelo"s voice from the automobile.
And Rene, who was seated in front of him, sadly nodded his head. Dona Luisa was looking at the mournful plain while her lips trembled slightly in constant prayer. Chichi turned her great eyes in astonishment from one side to the other. She appeared larger, more capable in spite of the pallor which blanched her olive skin.
The two ladies were dressed in deepest mourning. The father, too, was in mourning, huddled down in the seat in a crushed att.i.tude, his legs carefully covered with the great fur rugs. Rene was wearing his campaign uniform under his storm coat. In spite of his injuries, he had not wished to retire from the army. He had been transferred to a technical office till the termination of the war.
The Desnoyers family were on the way to carry out their long-cherished hope.
Upon recovering consciousness after the fatal news, the father had concentrated all his will power in one pet.i.tion.
"I must see him... . Oh, my son! ... My son!"
Vain were the senator"s efforts to show him the impossibility of such a journey. The fighting was still going on in the zone where Julio had fallen. Later on, perhaps, it might be possible to visit it. "I want to see it!" persisted the broken-hearted old man. It was necessary for him to see his son"s grave before dying himself, and Lacour had to requisition all his powers, for four long months formulating requests and overcoming much opposition, in order that Don Marcelo might be permitted to make the trip.
Finally a military automobile came one morning for the entire Desnoyers family. The senator could not accompany them. Rumors of an approaching change in the cabinet were floating about, and he felt obliged to show himself in the senate in case the Republic should again wish to avail itself of his unappreciated services.
They pa.s.sed the night in a provincial city where there was a military post, and Rene collected considerable information from officers who had witnessed the great combat. With his map before him, he followed the explanations until he thought he could recognize the very plot of ground which Julio"s regiment had occupied.
The following morning they renewed their expedition. A soldier who had taken part in the battle acted as their guide, seated beside the chauffeur. From time to time, Rene consulted the map spread out on his knees, and asked questions of the soldier whose regiment had fought very close to that of Desnoyers", but he could not remember exactly the ground which they had gone over so many months before. The landscape had undergone many transformations and had presented a very different appearance when covered with men. Its deserted aspect bewildered him ... and the motor had to go very slowly, veering to the north of the line of graves, following the central highway, level and white, entering crossroads and winding through ditches muddied with deep pools through which they splashed with great bounds and jar on the springs. At times, they drove across fields from one plot of crosses to another, their pneumatic tires crushing flat from the furrows opened by the plowman.
Tombs ... tombs on all sides! The white locusts of death were swarming over the entire countryside. There was no corner free from their quivering wings. The recently plowed earth, the yellowing roads, the dark woodland, everything was pulsating in weariless undulation. The soil seemed to be clamoring, and its words were the vibrations of the restless little flags. And the thousands of cries, endlessly repeated across the days and nights, were intoning in rhythmic chant the terrible onslaught which this earth had witnessed and from which it still felt tragic shudderings.
"Dead ... dead," murmured Chichi, following the rows of crosses incessantly slipping past the sides of the automobile.
"O Lord, for them! ... for their mothers," moaned Dona Luisa, renewing her prayers.
Here had taken place the fiercest part of the battle--the fight in the old way, man to man outside of the trenches, with bayonets, with guns, with fists, with teeth.
The guide who was beginning to get his bearings was pointing out the various points on the desolate horizon. There were the African sharpshooters; further on, the cha.s.seurs. The very large groups of graves were where the light infantry had charged with their bayonets on the sides of the road.
The automobile came to a stop. Rene climbed out after the soldier in order to examine the inscriptions on a few of the crosses. Perhaps these might have belonged to the regiment they were seeking. Chichi also alighted mechanically with the irresistible desire of aiding her husband.
Each grave contained several men. The number of bodies within could be told by the mouldering kepis or rusting helmets hanging on the arms of the cross; the number of the regiments could still be deciphered between the rows of ants crawling over the caps. The wreaths with which affection had adorned some of the sepulchres were blackened and stripped of their leaves. On some of the crucifixes, the names of the dead were still clear, but others were beginning to fade out and soon would be entirely illegible.
"What a horrible death! ... What glory!" thought Chichi sadly.
Not even the names of the greater part of these vigorous men cut down in the strength of their youth were going to survive! Nothing would remain but the memory which would from time to time overwhelm some old countrywoman driving her cow along the French highway, murmuring between her sobs. "My little one! ... I wonder where they buried my little one!" Or, perhaps, it would live in the heart of the village woman clad in mourning who did not know how to solve the problem of existence; or in the minds of the children going to school in black blouses and saying with ferocious energy--"When I grow up I am going to kill the Boches to avenge my father"s death!"
And Dona Luisa, motionless in her seat, followed with her eyes Chichi"s course among the graves, while returning to her interrupted prayer--"Lord, for the mothers without sons ... for the little ones without fathers! ... May thy wrath not be turned against us, and may thy smile shine upon us once more!"
Her husband, shrunken in his seat, was also looking over the funereal fields, but his eyes were fixed most tenaciously on some mounds without wreaths or flags, simple crosses with a little board bearing the briefest inscription. These were the German bodies which seemed to have a page to themselves in the Book of Death. On one side, the innumerable French tombs with inscriptions as small as possible, simple numbers--one, two, three dead. On the other, in each of the s.p.a.cious, unadorned sepulchres, great quant.i.ties of soldiers, with a number of terrifying terseness. Fences of wooden strips, narrow and wide, surrounded these latter ditches filled to the top with bodies. The earth was as bleached as though covered with snow or saltpetre. This was the lime returning to mix with the land. The crosses raised above these huge mounds bore each an inscription stating that it contained Germans, and then a number--200 ... 300 ... 400.
Such appalling figures obliged Desnoyers to exert his imagination.
It was not easy to evoke with exact.i.tude the vision of three hundred carca.s.ses in helmets, boots and cloaks, in all the revolting aspects of death, piled in rows as though they were bricks, locked forever in the depths of a great trench... . And this funereal alignment was repeated at intervals all over the great immensity of the plain!
The mere sight of them filled Don Marcelo with a kind of savage joy, as his mourning fatherhood tasted the fleeting consolation of vengeance.
Julio had died, and he was going to die, too, not having strength to survive his bitter woe; but how many hundreds of the enemy wasting in these awful trenches were also leaving in the world loved beings who would remember them as he was remembering his son! ...
He imagined them as they must have been before the death call sounded, as he had seen them in the advance around his castle.