"b.u.t.terfly" (in London), and "Aida" (in Milan), and always the musical accompaniment to the social vagaries of these ladies who are no better than they should be, was music from old heads and old hearts. The "other lips and other hearts whose tales of love"
should have been told ardently through fiddle and clarinet are toying with the great harp of a thousand strings that plays the dance of death. That is the music the young men are playing in Europe today. But in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the music that should be made from the soul of youth, crying into reeds and strings and bra.s.s is an echo, an echo altogether lovely but pa.s.sionless!
Finally our season of waiting ended. We came home to the Ritz at midnight from a dinner with Major Murphy, where we had been notified that we were to start for the front the next morning. We told him that the new uniforms were not yet ready and confessed to him that we had the cheap uniforms; he looked resigned. He had been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade of Red Cross commissioners from America, and he probably felt that he had seen the worst and that this was just another cross. But when we reached our rooms that midnight, Henry lifted his voice, not in pleading, but in command. For we were to start at seven the next morning, and it was orders. So each went to his bedroom and began unwrapping his bundles. In ten minutes Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolate divinity! With me there was trouble. Someone had blundered. The shirt went on easily; the tunic went on cosily, but the trousers--someone had shuffled those trousers on me. Even a shoe spoon and foots-case wouldn"t get them to rise to their necessary height. Inspection proved that they were 36; now 36 doesn"t do me much good as a waist line! There is a net deficit of eight tragic inches, and eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe. Yet there we were.
It was half past twelve. In six hours more we must be on our way to the front--to the great adventure. Uniforms were imperative.
And there was the hiatus! Whereupon Henry rose. He rang for the valet; no response. He rang for the tailor; he was in bed. He rang for the waiter; he was off duty. There was just one name left on the call card; so Henry hustled me into an overcoat and rang for the chambermaid! And she appeared as innocent of English as we were of French. It was an awful moment! But Henry slowly began making gestures and talking in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones. The gestures were the well-known gestures of his valedictory to the Republican party at the Chicago Auditorium in 1912--beautiful gestures and impressive. The maid became interested. Then he took the recalcitrant trousers, placed them gently but firmly against his friend"s heart--or such a matter, showing how far from the ideal they came. Then he laid on the bed a brown woollen shirt, and in the tail of it marked out dramatically a "V" slice about the shape of an old-fashioned slice of pumpkin pie--a segment ten or a dozen inches wide that would require two hands in feeding. Then he pointed from the shirt to the trousers and then to the ample bosom of his friend, indicating with emotion that the huge pie-slice was to go into the rear corsage of the breeches. It was wonderful to see intelligence dawn in the face of that chambermaid. The gestures of that Bull Moose speech had touched her heart. Suddenly she knew the truth, and it made her free, so she cried, "Wee wee!" And oratory had again risen to its proper place in our midst! At two o"clock she returned with the pumpkin pie slice from the tail of the brown shirt, neatly, but hardly gaudily inserted into the rear waist line of the riding trousers, and we lay down to pleasant dreams; for we found that by standing stiffly erect, by keeping one"s tunic pulled down, and by carefully avoiding a stooping posture, it was possible to conceal the facts of one"s double life. So we went forth with Major Murphy the next morning as care-free as "Eden"s garden birds."
We looked like birds, too--scarecrows!
[Ill.u.s.tration: Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe]
Our business took us to the American Ambulance men who were with the French army. Generally when they were at work they were quartered near a big base hospital; and their work took them from the large hospital to the first aid stations near the front line trenches.
Our way from Paris to these men led across the devastated area of France. As the chief activity of the French at the time of our visit was in the Verdun sector, we spent most of our first week at the front near Verdun. And one evening at twilight we walked through the ruined city. The Germans had just finished their evening strafe; two hundred big sh.e.l.ls had been thrown over from their field guns into the ruins. After the two hundredth sh.e.l.l had dropped it was as safe in Verdun as in Emporia until the next day. For the Germans are methodical in all things, and they spend just so many sh.e.l.ls on each enemy point, and no more. The German work of destruction is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains intact upon its walls; not a wall remains uncracked; not a soul lives in the town; now and then a sentinel may be met patrolling the wagon road that winds through the streets. This wagon road, by the way, is the object of the German artillery"s attention. Upon this road they think the revitalment trains pa.s.s up to the front. But the sentinels come and go. The only living inhabitants we saw in the place were two black cats. It must have been a beautiful city before the war--a town of sixty thousand and more. It contained some old and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings--a cloister, a bishop"s residence, a school--or what not--that, even crumbled and shattered by the sh.e.l.ls, still show in ruins grace and charm and dignity. And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellous that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping of men"s hearts toward G.o.d, their most unutterable longing. And the broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops and stores--places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling wreck--where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts, pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris and left to petrify as the sh.e.l.l wrecked it--a thousand little details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town, leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron--this was the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished their evening strafe.
From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruined villages to a big base hospital. We came there in the dark before moonrise, and met our ambulance men--mostly young college boys joyously flirting with death under the German guns. They were stationed in a tent well outside the big hospital building. They gave us a dinner worth while--onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots, some sort of pasta--perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omelet soused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese and coffee--and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on five minutes" notice, an hour after the regular dinner. The ambulance men were under the direct command of a French lieutenant--a Frenchman of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully, played host graciously and told us many interesting things about the work of the army around him; and told it so simply--yet withal so sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long after we had left him. Three or four times a day we were meeting French lieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front. But this one was different. He was so gentle and so serious without being at all solemn. He had been in the war for three years, and said quite incidentally, that under the law of averages his time was long past due and he expected to go soon. It didn"t seem to bother him. He pa.s.sed the rum omelet with a steady hand. But his serious mien had attracted the ambulance boys and upon the room of his office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled in chalk, "Defense absolutement de rire!" "It"s absolutely forbidden to laugh." Evidently American humour got on his nerves. As we dined in the tent, the boys outside sang trench songs, and college songs with trench words, and gave other demonstrations of their youth.
So we ate and listened to the singing, while the moon rose, and with it came a fog--more than a fog--a cloud of heavy mist that hid the moon. We moved our baggage from the tent to a vacant room in a vacant ward in the big hospital. We saw in the misty moonlight a great brick structure running around a compound. The compound was over 200 feet square, and in the centre of the compound was a big Red Cross made of canvas, painted red, on a background of whitewashed stones. It was 100 feet square. On each side of the compound a Red Cross blazed from the roof of the buildings, under the Geneva lights--lights which the Germans had agreed should mark our hospitals and protect them from air raids.
At midnight we left the hospital to visit those ambulance men who were stationed at the first aid posts, up near the battle line.
It was an eery sort of night ride in the ambulance, going without lights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle front of Verdun.
The white clay of the road was sloppy and the car wobbled and skidded along and we pa.s.sed scores of other vehicles going up and coming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The Red Cross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything but ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalment time. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions, food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an army going, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When we reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In the dugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandaged before starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital, and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing inside out of the misty rain.
As we had been climbing the hill in the ambulance, the roar of the big guns grew louder and louder. We believed it was French cannon.
But when we got out of the car we heard an angry whistle and a roar which told us that German sh.e.l.ls were coming in near us. As we stood before the dugout shivering in the mist we saw beyond us, over the hill, the glare of the French trench rockets lighting up the clouds above us weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over the white muddy road before us. On the road skirting the very door of the dugout pa.s.sed a line of motor trucks and carts--the revitalment train. The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out of the mist came a huge grey truck or a lumbering two-wheeled cart; and then, creaking heavily past the dugout door, plunged into the mist again.
Never did the procession stop. At regular intervals the German sh.e.l.ls crashed into the woods farther up the hill beyond us. But the silent procession before us--looming out of the mist, pa.s.sing us, and fading into the mist, kept constantly moving. In the ghostly light of the misty moonshine, the procession seemed to be spectral--like a line of pa.s.sing souls. A doctor came out of the dugout and started up the hill. He, too, was swallowed in the mist.
Ahead of us up the road were noises that told us the Germans were landing bombs there, not half a mile--perhaps not much more than a quarter of a mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that the Germans were sh.e.l.ling a cross-road. They sh.e.l.led it every night at midnight to smash the revitalment train. The sh.e.l.ls were landing right in the road whereon all these trucks and horse carts were pa.s.sing. The doctor who left us returned in a few minutes in an ambulance--wounded. Another ambulance came up with four or five wounded. A sh.e.l.l had crashed in and wiped out a truck load of men.
But the procession under the misty moon never stopped--never even hesitated. No driver spoke. No teams or trucks cluttered up the road. As fast as a bomb shattered the road out there behind the mist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers hurried up, cleared the way, removed the debris and the ceaseless procession in the ghostly moonlight moved on. Another ambulance brought in two more wounded.
After one o"clock the bombing stopped. Some other cross-road was taking its turn. Five men were buried that night in the little cemetery there by the dugout. We stood or sat about for a while!
no one had much to say. The grey mist thickened and enveloped us.
And we became as very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in the mist up the hill, near where the rocket"s red glare flushed on the dim horizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais." It fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling together. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one another whistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the ship--the Gilded Youth whose many millions had made him shimmer. He was not shimmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field service man, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talked music--music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midst of death, and the spirit that was moving men in the moonlight to forget death for something more real than death. And so it came about that the crescendo of our talk ran thus:
And courage--that thing which the Germans thought was their special gift from Heaven, bred of military discipline, rising out of German kultur--we know now is the commonest heritage of men. It is the divine fire burning in the souls of us that proves the case for democracy. For at base and underneath we are all equals. In crises the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, the preacher, the teacher, the labourer, the ignorant, the wise, all go to death for something that defies death, something immortal in the human heart. Those truck-drivers, those mule whackers, those common soldiers, that doctor, these college men on the ambulances are brothers tonight in the democracy of courage. Upon that democracy is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a wider and deeper kinship of men.
So then we knew that under the gilding of the Gilded Youth was fine gold. He was called for a wounded man. As he cranked up his car he asked rather too casually, "Have you seen our friend from the boat--the pretty nurse?" We started to answer; the stretcher bearer called again and in an instant he went buzzing away and we returned to the hospital.
We slept that night in a hospital bed. The week before three thousand men had pa.s.sed through that hospital--some upon the long journey, so we rose early the next morning. For some way to Henry and me there seemed a curious disquietude about those hospital beds.
In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out the dead from the hospital. The stretcher bearers moved as quickly as they could with their burden through the yard. A dozen soldiers and orderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a head toward the bearers and their burden. There were indeed, in sad deed, "a dearth of woman"s nursing and a lack of woman"s tears." No one knew who the dead man was. He wore his identification tag about him. No one cared except that it should be registered. If he was an officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outside the fence; if he was a private he went inside. It was a lonely, heart-breaking sight. And it occurred to Henry and me--we had been among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept uneasily with the ghosts in the hospital--that we should give one poor fellow a funeral. So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followed the stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to his tomb. It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows.
Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English on us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, "Have you heard the news from the big base hospital?" We had not. Then he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the hospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs--incendiary bombs. An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives.
They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraft guns near by--the allies until those August and September German raids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided--they came again swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctors and the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out of the burning building. Then toward morning they came and dropped handbills which declared, "If you don"t want your hospitals bombed, move them back further from the front!"
The Germans were not acting in the heat of pa.s.sion. They were fighting scientifically, even if barbarously. For every mile a hospital is moved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrene in the wounded. And by checking gangrene we are saving a great majority of our wounded to return to battle.
Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many wounded were killed that night at Vlaincourt. "And the French officer de liason between the French army and the American ambulance, what of him?" we asked.
"He slept in the hospital and was killed by a bomb," answered the Frenchman.
So our serious faced French lieutenant knew all too well why "It is absolutely forbidden to laugh" in war!
CHAPTER III
IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR
There is something, though Heaven knows not much, to be said for war as war. And the little to be said is said when one declares that it refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts. Routine kills men and nations and races; it is stagnation. But war shakes up society, puts men into strange environments, gives them new diversions, new aims, changed ideals. In the faint breath of war that came to Henry and me, as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitals and first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, there was a tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives that really get into war as soldiers. Even we were for ever pinching ourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strange land, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively to the science of slaughter. By rights we should have been sitting in our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers, wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year was a trifle, d.i.c.kering with foreign advertisers who desired to spread before Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum or talking machines, or discussing the ever changing Situation with the local statesmen. At five o"clock Henry should be on his way to the Wichita golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roar of the m.u.f.fler cut-out on the family car should be warning me that we were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in the sunset, where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid sugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of my figure.
But instead, here we were puffing up a hill in France, through underbrush, across sh.e.l.l holes to a hidden trench choked with telephone cables that should lead underground to an observation post where a part of the staff of the French army sat overlooking the battle of the Champagne. As we puffed and huffed up the hill, we recalled to each other that we had been in our offices but a few weeks before when the a.s.sociated Press report had brought us the news of the Champagne drive for hill 208. Among other things the report had declared "a number of French soldiers were ordered into their own barrage, and several were shot for refusing to go into action thereafter!" And now here we were looking through a peep-hole in the camouflage at the battlefield! We were half way up the hill; below us lay a weedy piece of bottom land, all kneaded and pock-marked by sh.e.l.ls, stretching away to another range of hills perhaps five miles, perhaps ten miles away, as the valley widened or narrowed. The white clay of the soil erupting under sh.e.l.l fire glimmered nakedly and indecently through the weeds. It was hard to realize that three years before the valley before us had been one of the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little grey towns with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be "that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" There it all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk," with its head chopped off; "the dock"s harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope of greenness." "As for the gra.s.s, it grew scantier than hair in leprosy; thin dry leaves p.r.i.c.ked the mud, which underneath looked kneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same field that Roland crossed! In the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines--two white gashes in the soil, with a scab of horrible brown rust scratched between them--the French and German trenches and the barbed wire entanglements. At some places the trenches ran close together, a few hundred feet or a few hundred yards marked their distance apart.
At other times they backed fearfully away from one another with the gashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping between them. We paused to rest in our climb at a little shrine by the wayside. A communication trench slipped deviously up to it, and through this trench were brought the wounded; for the shrine, a dugout in the hillside, had been converted into a first aid station. A doctor and two stretcher bearers and two ambulance men were waiting there. Yet the little shrine, rather than the trenches that crept up to it, dominated the scene and the war seemed far away. Occasionally we heard a distant boom and saw a tan cone of dirt rise in the bottom land among the trenches, and we felt that some poor creature might be in his death agony. But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his gla.s.ses toward the German lines. Then the trenches about us suddenly grew alive. The Frenchmen were waving their hands and running about excitedly. Major Murphy was a Major--a regular United States Army major in a regular United States army uniform so grand that compared with our cheap cotton khaki it looked like a five thousand dollar outfit. The highest officer near us was a French second-lieutenant, who had no right to boss a Major! But something had to be done.
So the second lieutenant did it. He called down the Major; showed him that he was in direct range of the German guns, and made it clear that a big six-foot American in uniform standing silhouetted against the sky-line would bring down a whole wagon-load of German hardware on our part of the line. The fact that the German trenches were two miles away did not make the situation any less dangerous.
Afterwards we left the shrine and the trenches and went on up the hill.
[Ill.u.s.tration: One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his gla.s.ses toward the German lines]
The view from the observation trench on the hill-top, when we finally got there, was a wonderful view, sweeping the whole Champagne battle field. Hill 208 lay in the distance, still in German hands, and before it, wallowing in the white earth were a number of English tanks abandoned by the French. Lying out there in No Man"s Land between the trenches, the tanks looked to our Kansas eyes like worn out threshing machines and spelled more clearly than anything else in the landscape the extent of the French failure in the Champagne drive of the spring of 1917. It may be profitable to know just how far the pendulum of war had swung toward failure in France last spring, before America declared war. To begin: The French morale went bad! We heard here in America that France was bled white. The French commission told us how sorely France needed the American war declaration. But to say that the morale of a nation has gone bad means so much. It is always a struggle even in peace, even in prosperity, for the honest, courageous leadership of a nation to keep any Nation honest. But when hope begins to sag, when the forces of disorder and darkness that lie subdued and dormant in every nation, and in every human heart are bidden by evil times to rise--they rise. Leadership fails in its battle against them.
For a year after the morale of the French began to come back strong, the French newspapers and French government were busy exposing and punishing the creatures who shamed France in the spring of 1917.
German money has been traced to persons high in authority. A network of German spies was uncovered, working with the mistresses of men high in government--the kaiser is not above using the thief and the harlot for his aims; money literally by the cartload was poured into certain departments to hinder the work of the army, and the tragic disaster of the Champagne drive was the result partly of intrigue in Paris in the government, partly of poverty, partly the result of three winters of terrible suffering in the nation, and partly the weakening under the strain of all these things, of this "too too solid flesh and blood." During the winter of 1916-17 soldiers at the front received letters from home telling of starvation and freezing and sickness in their families. And trench conditions in the long hard winter were all but unbearable. When a soldier finally got a leave of absence and started home, he found the railroad system breaking down and he had long waits at junction points with no sleeping quarters, no food, no shelter. French soldiers going home on leave would lie all night and all day out in the open, drenched by the rain and stained by the mud, and would reach home bringing to their families trench vermin and trench fever and trench misery untold, to add to the woe that the winter had brought to the home while the soldier was away. Then when he went back to fight, he found that a bureaucratic clash had left the soldiers without supplies, or food or ammunition in sufficient quant.i.ties to supply the battle needs. In the bureaucratic clash some one lost his head in the army and ordered the men into their own barrage. Hundreds were slaughtered. Thousands were verging on mutiny. A regiment refused to fight, and another threatened to disobey. The American ambulance boys told us that the most horrible task they did was when they hauled eighty poor French boys out to be shot for mutiny!
Spies in Paris, working through the mistresses of the department heads, the sad strain of war upon the French economic resources, and the withering hand of winter upon the heart of France had achieved all but a victory for the forces of evil in this earth.
And there we were that summer day, when time and events had changed the face of fate, looking out across the blighted field of Champagne at what might have been the wreck of France.
All is changed now. At every railroad junction the American Red Cross has built cantonments, where beds and food and baths and disinfecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for the homeward bound soldiers of France. The American Red Cross has the name of every French soldier"s family that is in need, and that family"s needs are being supplied by the American Red Cross. And the sure hope of victory has given the leadership of France a mastery of the forces of evil in the lower levels of the Nation"s political consciousness that will make it impossible for the kaiser"s friends, the courtesans, to accomplish anything next winter.
We gazed across the field that afternoon and seeing the blotched acres, weed blasted, sh.e.l.l-pocked, blistered with white trenches and scarred with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and miles, and we thought how perfectly does the spirit of man mark the picture of his soul"s agony upon his daily work.
It was late in the afternoon when we left that sector of the line.
We pa.s.sed a bombed hospital where two doctors and three nurses had been killed a night or two before. It was a disquieting sight, and the big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the German airmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. Gradually as we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter and fainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into a wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. It was bombed to death--but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate, all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here and there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to their homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle of commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral and found its outlines there--a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and--if stone and iron can be conscious--vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet square has been gouged in the pavement by a German sh.e.l.l, and the hole uncovers a hidden pa.s.sage to the Cathedral of which no one in this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about, gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place cast upon us, at the details of the devastation. The roof, of course, is but a film of wood and iron rent with big holes. The walls are intact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spires and gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, and the windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of the church gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of gla.s.s as art treasures.
That evening at supper in Chalons, we met some American boys who said the French were selling this gla.s.s from the windows of Rheims made from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and green bitters bottles, and still later we saw an English Colonel who had bought a job lot of it and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in a piece!
We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the back of the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalk with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to Henry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the stone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole in the pavement, and then to a broken iron sh.e.l.l. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but a few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock up on post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talk French, learned that another sh.e.l.l would be due in three or four minutes, we left town.
The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hidden only, and at that rather poorly, by camouflage--straw woven into mats, and burlap, badly torn. We were between the German guns five miles away, and the sunset. Great holes in the ground beside the road indicated where they had been dropping sh.e.l.ls, so our driver tramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hour and we skedaddled.
From the road out of Rheims we dropped into the valley of the Marne, a most beautiful vine-clad valley, where the road turns sharply from the German lines and soon pa.s.ses out of the German range and the sh.e.l.l holes at the side of the road disappear. But even sh.e.l.l holes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley as we wound down into it from the hill. Vines were everywhere. Rows and rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in the earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and they gave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It glowed with colour. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted the checkered fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Tall dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in our faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and gold on their uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills, all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of colours. And when we pa.s.sed a town where no soldiers were quartered, there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias--even the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the German bombardment--villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan, from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the Germans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, running pell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers.
As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after division of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far away," but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful, and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover, the emotions of France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope lash the home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village, in the street, in the home. Five millions of men during the last three years and a half have pa.s.sed and re-pa.s.sed, through those fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous and gentle and as kind.
For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded with soldiers--kindly French soldiers who were clearly living happily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henry burst forth, "My good Heavens, man--what if this were in Wichita or Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were there alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting about here were just little children three years ago when their daddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but rest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia--or back East in Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awful thing--what a h.e.l.l in the earth, war is!"
And yet we know that young hearts will express themselves as they were meant to express themselves even in the wrack and ruin and waste of war. And this strange picture of love and death sitting together some way reminded us of the phlox and the dahlias blooming in the dreary dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle line.
And then our hearts turned to the youth on the boat--that precious load of mounting young blood that came over with us on the Espagne where we were the oldest people in the ship"s company. And we began talking of the Eager Soul and her Young Doctor and the Gilded Youth.
If the war could lash our old hearts as it was lashing them, so that even our emotions were raw and more or less a-quiver in the storm of the mingled pa.s.sions of the world that overwhelmed us, how much--how fearfully much more must their younger hearts be stirred?
How could youth come out of it all unscarred! And she was such a sweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, so fine and brave and wise--yet her heart was a girl"s heart, after all. And the Young Doctor, his keen sensitive face showed how near to the surface was the quick in him. As for the Gilded Youth, we had seen there on the hill in the misty night the great hammer of the guns pound the dross out of him! And here they were all three alone, in the fury of this awful storm that was testing the stoutest souls in the world, and they were so young and so untried!
The roads over which we had been travelling for two days in our car were military roads. And we could tell instantly when we were inside the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking at the road menders. If they were German prisoners we were outside the thirty kilo strip. For when the Germans discovered last spring that the Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the Germans demanded a rule for the treatment of prisoners, which should keep them thirty kilos from danger. It was a rule that the Allies had been observing; but the Germans were not observing it, until they found that they might suffer by non-observance. So when we left the German prisoners and came to French road menders--generally French Chinamen or Anamites, or negroes from Dahomey or other oriental peoples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of the big guns.
These road menders always were at work. Beside every road a few yards apart, always were little neatly stacked cones of road metal.