He sat despondently, regaining his breath and blinking the water from his eyes, when something caught to a sleeve b.u.t.ton on his tunic made him stare. It was a short piece of black-and-white striped ribbon--the Order of the Iron Cross--which the German had worn in a breast b.u.t.ton-hole of his uniform.
"Well, w"ot d"ye know about thot," he mused.
Slowly he twisted off the b.u.t.ton, and the ribbon with it, then leaned above the spot where the little nurse"s hair had waved her last farewell, and let them sink.
""Tis me first dicoration, darlin"," he whispered; and it was not the ocean water now that blinded him.
Just as the red sun dipped that night the patrol boat picked up the last piece of human wreckage, and dashed toward the coast of France.
CHAPTER IX
Barrow"s unit had suffered sorely, but its gaps were filled from other sources and fresh supplies received from home. Close upon the middle of August it moved to take the field. This delay had not been without advantages, perhaps the chief of which was a fluency in French that many of his men were able to acquire. It had also given Jeb an opportunity to acquire an entirely new viewpoint regarding the purposes of this war, which had not penetrated to Hillsdale.
As the train now proceeded slowly, switching here and there to let other strings of cars pa.s.s toward the front with more important freight, Jeb felt that he was at last nearing the great adventure. His experience with the submarine left an indelible effect without producing anything like the result Tim would have desired. For Jeb had been involuntarily projected into that crisis before being given time to think; he had gone with the stream, not buoyed by courage but spurred by despair. Once tossed into the hideous vortex, he simply had to get out--which was vastly different from deliberately going into it with eyes ahead, as now when he approached the battle front! Nevertheless, the torture he faced upon the floating box, although unknown to him, left an impress for the good.
As he sat uncomfortably drawn up on the seat of a third-cla.s.s compartment he missed Tim, and wondered dully if the regiment, which that little son of Mars had said was waiting for him--at attention!--could now be in the thick of things. He pictured Tim chasing Germans with the same dogged nerve that he had chased and caught the murderer of the little nurse. As evening fell, battle scenes grew vivid in the twilit compartment, because he was thinking again! Whenever speeding trains pa.s.sed, their approaching rumbles would make him start, and leave him sick in spirit; for each time he would at first mistake them for the growling of distant guns, and he dreaded the hour when these sounds would reach him. He despised the thought of guns, despised the military trains, despised the war, the blood and maiming;--he despised himself. He needed Tim!
"Is there anything on your mind, old fellow?" one of the unit asked him kindly.
"Oh, no," he forced himself to laugh. "Have a cigarette, won"t you?"
Early next morning, after an almost sleepless night, the unit disembarked at a village standing as a solitary outpost on the edge of a great unknown wilderness. Beyond this point the railroad, even civilization, had been paralyzed by the dragon that fed upon humanity.
If Jeb expected the villagers to be out in force to greet Barrow"s unit, he was disappointed; for, with the exception of a crippled man laboriously pushing a cart, a nun who with bowed head came from one doorway and hurried into another, and a bent old woman struggling to take down the night shutters from her shop window, the place might have been deserted. On the far side of his train, however, where he had not looked, a group of soldiers lounged about their wagons waiting to take these pa.s.sengers of mercy forward; unshaven chaps they were, well meriting the nickname of _poilus_--"the hairy ones."
Now that the train had stopped he could hear the far-off growling of guns; deep-voiced monsters which his imagination pictured straining on their leashes while snarling at each other across the s.p.a.ce of miles--truly dogs of war! He drew farther back in the seat, dreading to get out; but the moment had come, the fellows and nurses were moving to the door, the great task was at hand! He tried, while standing, to simulate indifference, but his legs were weak and his teeth chattered, just a little, in spite of his effort to control himself. It seemed as if he were forever wanting to yawn, conscious of the heaviness upon his chest.
With Dr. Barrow and a lieutenant on the first creaking wagon, the others followed, but there was no road. A mora.s.s was there, that formerly had been a road--a ditch sloshy with mud which, in some places, made it necessary for all hands to climb down and put their shoulders to the wheels.
"It is trying, this traveling in limbers," the lieutenant smiled apologetically. "The incessant hauling up of sh.e.l.ls from our bases destroys the best of roads in a few days. But what would you?" he shrugged, smiling again. "If the ammunition dumps are constantly depleted, they must be fed!"
The far-off French artillery, in skillfully emplaced positions to right and left, seeming to enfilade on a point immediately ahead, was so vigorously directed that the German guns must have been dazed, since their counter-battery work sounded spasmodic and--so far as distance permitted Jeb to guess--never effective. Yet he was moving toward that tumult; as inexorably as death, he approached it. With eyes feeding upon this new world and ears startled by fierce rumblings, he felt as though he were living in a nightmare; and when the next minute threatened to snap his reason or strangle his frantically pounding heart, he turned to the driver, asking--but fearful of the answer:
"Who"s winning this battle?"
It was spoken only in Hillsdale French, aided by a two months stop in Paris; but his poilu companion smiled brightly and replied in the average Paris English:
"Oh, Monsieur, there is now for three days what you call _moment decalme_. Tomorrow, if no rain, _oui_!--perhaps a ver" fine battle!"
Then this was a lull!--this cannonading, that to Jeb seemed reaching from skyline to skyline, was only a lull! Merciful G.o.d, he cried in his soul, what might a battle be like!
By midday, after hours of frightful tugging, they were halfway on their journey, being well out on what two weeks ago was the battle field, but now presenting a picture of broadcast desolation. Sh.e.l.l craters, caused by heavier projectiles burrowing and bursting, pockmarked the ground like a telescopic photograph of the moon. Fields, so lately rich with waving grain, were blasted into subsidences and cavities, bisected by crumbled trenches before which the wreckage of barbed-wire entanglements--a fortnight since forming barriers so impregnable as to resemble from a distance walls of red rust--lay snarled and tied into a million knots by the ruthless lyddite fingers.
It was a pastoral landscape distorted by the paralysis of suffering and death, and Jeb realized that not for many years would these tortured fields regain their tranquillity. Where were rises, now lay depressions; the loamy top soil was blown into dust and scattered to the winds, while sterile clay and pebbly strata had been boiled up from below to take its place. Mixed with this ma.s.s of unprofitable earth, strewn over its surface and buried for a depth of thirty feet, were thousands of tons of other wire, iron stakes, and wire stanchions; cartridge cases, rifles, and gas gongs; sand bags, iron sc.r.a.ps, and forge tools; steel helmets, spades, and telephones; pieces of uniforms, water pipes, pick axes, gas masks, binoculars, trench periscopes, blankets, surgical dressings, boots, aye, and human bones--all, all things which the plow shares of coming generations would be turning up to remind man (should man ever forget) that Humanity had once been outraged by a people who, although made in the imitation of Christ, preferred to a.s.sume the habits of beasts.
"How, in the name of G.o.d," Jeb cried, "could any army stand before such a blasting as must have been here!"
"Our army did, Monsieur," the driver said quietly. "It not only stood, but drove the Boche far back."
"Well, I take off my hat to your army!"
"The world does, also, Monsieur," his companion replied; although it was modestly spoken, without a hint of boastfulness. "We do not fight like the Boche, Monsieur," he added simply. "Their methods are more like a mob with a bad conscience; they fight more with a dread of being defeated than with the honesty of soldiers who have an honest cause."
He then explained to Jeb that these fields, after all, represented merely the face to face struggle of man and man, and were therefore less sickening than the devastation they would see farther on, which stood as a monument to the enemy"s vilest cupidity. This became apparent when they began to cross that stretch of country gloatingly described by German newspapers as "the empire of death"--meaning a territory seven or eight miles in width, extending over the entire front, which by order of "the High German Command" was converted absolutely into waste. Forced by the Allies to retreat, this "High German Command" conceived that, by leaving a barrier of desolation and cruelty so terrible, no army would be hardy enough, or have heart enough, to advance across it. Their system was complete, as the results now showed--although their calculations had gone wrong.
"First, Monsieur," he said, "they began by robbing the American Relief Committee"s supplies, immediately following their solemn pledge to permit this food to succor the starving peasantry; therefore those pitiable folk, already tragic human wrecks, continued to starve. Next they killed these peasants" cows to fill their own precious bellies, and then the little babies began, by slow starvation, to die. But the men, women, and boys old enough to till the soil, or work in German factories, were fed and sent away; the girls pretty enough to wait upon German officers--you know what that means, Monsieur--were dressed in stolen finery and, weeping, driven to their new positions--six hundred of them taken from within the s.p.a.ce that you are looking on now, although we have learned that many succeeded in killing themselves. Only the helpless aged and the babes escaped these brutalities; for they, being useless, were left to the mercy of the vultures, unless salvaged by our army. Right on this ground we saved many such, Monsieur; _Mon Dieu!_ but how our army did weep over them!"
Jeb had already seen enough to bring this recital well within the focus of truth, and as the wagons wound slowly forward he further saw to what depth of hatred and cold malice the mind of that "High Command"
descended. Burned villages and hamlets might have been expected, as conflagrations spring from bursting sh.e.l.ls, yet even his inexperienced eye detected a very sharp distinction between ruins wrought by military operations and the vandalism caused by unbridled, b.e.s.t.i.a.l pa.s.sions. For nowhere upon this barren outlook had a house been left standing--all was a ma.s.s of tumbled brick and stone and clay and twisted timbers, licked by flames or crumbled by explosions scientifically placed by German engineers; nay, nor was there even a barn, nor an agricultural implement with which some palsied peasant woman might in time reclaim her land.
Iron of plows, of harrows, of cultivators, lay in piles amidst the ashes of their frames; spokes of wagon and cart wheels had been hacked to splinters, and harness cut into useless bits. Wells had been fouled by chucking in their own dead, or stable refuse. In the orchards every tree stood girdled, the immature fruit wrinkled amidst withered leaves.
Never again, unless French nurserymen sped here hastily to bridge from bark to bark, or graft onto the old stumps,--as they had elsewhere attempted with varying promise--would these slopes of arboriculture put forth buds; neither would the poplars, planes, mulberries, willows--all had been granted citizenship to this newly created German Empire, "the empire of death."
"Where are those whom you did not salvage--I mean the girls? Are they still in the German lines?" Jeb asked.
"Not if they have found a way to die," his comrade answered in a whisper. "The Belshazzar feast of those Prussian swine, Monsieur, is the Calvary of every maid who does not find a swifter way to G.o.d--but the debauched officers know that, and keep them closely guarded. Oh," he cried, "our hearts give thanks that your country is coming to help us avenge these things! All along we have said that if the American spirit of decency and fairness--so well known and loved by us--could but see even the little which you have seen, your armies would be pouring to our aid!--just as your wonderful nurses have come!"
Jeb felt a rush of self-righteous anger that for the moment transcended his horror of going forward. While in Paris he had read official translations from the German press; now with his own eyes he was looking upon the things gloatingly described in the _Berliner Tageblatt_[1] when it told the people of Berlin: "The enemy"s mouth must stay dry, his eyes turn in vain to the wells--they are buried in rubble. No four walls for him to settle down into; all levelled and burnt out, the villages turned into dumps of rubbish, churches and church towers laid out in ruins.
Smouldering fires and smoke and stench; a rumble spreading from village to village--the mine charges still doing their final work, which leaves nothing more to do."
[Footnote 1: _Berliner Tageblatt._ March 26, 1917.]
It was a cry of false triumph that must have stirred the German soul to joy, because the very next day, he now remembered, the _Lokalanzeiger_[2] had boastfully added: "No village or farm was left standing, no road was left pa.s.sable, no railroad track or embankment, nothing, nothing whatever, not a tub, not a bench for those who will succeed them in the abandoned places. _What they could not take with them they have burnt or smashed._ In front of our new positions runs an Empire of Death--a Death which lays the shrivelled hands of destruction upon _all the works of Man and all the bloom of Nature_." This, "by order of the High German Command."
[Footnote 2: _Berlin Lokalanzeiger_, March 27, 1917.]
It was the last word of Barbarity! But what the _Berliner Tageblatt_ and the _Lokalanzeiger_ did not tell their readers, Jeb now realized with a shudder, would have made a chapter of degeneracy and revolting crime unparalleled in history.
Yet, even in the face of this, he turned sick at the thought of going forward to the certain annihilation awaiting him in that ghostly wilderness of mist and wet and wreckage ahead. On the other hand, how in G.o.d"s name could he keep from going, he asked himself, when the blood of innocents was calling on every side! He felt again the "something strong within him which commanded";--but he hated it!
Had Dr. Barrow been sufficiently skillful with the knife, he might have dissected out this better Jeb who insisted on going forward, and let the other crawl into a sh.e.l.l hole to hide for the rest of time; then both Jebs would have been supremely satisfied. But, being first and foremost a courageous man, he did not suspect that any one of his unit could possibly falter. Jeb knew this, and it made him feel all the more alone.
They reached a rise in the rolling landscape and stopped to breathe their beasts which were shaking the heavy limbers by their desperate gasps for air. The ground sloped down and up again, and there, protected from the enemy, a new world came into view--a world wherein American, French and English engineers, commanding an army of construction, worked feverishly, as ants. For an instant the n.o.bler Jeb prevailed, and he raised his eyes in a mute prayer of thankfulness for this trio of forces--the strongest combination the world has ever seen! The rumbling cannon ceased to jar his nerves, while he gazed wistfully at the low clouds sweeping by in companies that seemed to hasten from this theatre of wrath. Occasional gusts of white smoke burst into being just beneath them and hung a moment suspended before racing on; or a distant squirt of lace-like shrapnel, curving ever downward, came to see what went on behind the Allied lines.
Beyond these gusts and squirts of man-made clouds, observation balloons--the "sausages" of the enemy--floated motionless above the horizon, sometimes catching a fleck of sunlight and glistening like dull silver. There were no German fliers in the air that day, but high above, as gray vultures hungrily soaring over one spot, two American, two British and four French airmen glided back and forth, in and out, circling, circling. With such grace and ease did they pirouette through their reconnaisance that Jeb was reminded of an aerial quadrille being danced five thousand feet above the earth; or, seeming to tire of this, one of them would change the play to hide-and-seek, point toward the translucent blue and scoot behind a cloud, with the others following. It was a cordial invitation for the Boche to come up and fight! Jeb did not see them again for several minutes, but he noticed that one of the kite balloons suddenly burst into a little puff of flame and disappeared.
Unconsciously, he grinned.
"_Sacre bleu!_" the _poilu_ cried delightedly. "More honor to our "75"s"!"
"I thought the planes did it!" Jeb turned in surprise.
"Oh, no, Monsieur! That was done by one of our guns six miles away!"
Below the pirouetting airmen there was no poetry of motion. Here men strained and panted and wiped grimy sweat from their eyes. A month ago this ground ahead had been vigorously contested--the very spot on which Jeb now stood had been well within the German lines.
In the thoroughness with which the engineers were making fast their gains, a military observer would have read that not only would the Allied army draw the sting from this "empire of death," but that never again would this part of France be yielded to alien hands. As far as the eye could reach roads were being improved, others made; the buried railways were being excavated, metals straightened, or replaced if too far bent; sh.e.l.l-proof dug-outs were having their finishing touches, some to be used as dressing-stations for the wounded whom to-morrow might bring in, others for storing ammunition. In a nearby wood, where trees had been reduced to little more than gaunt trunks barren of leaf and twig, observation posts were built with many tons of branches hauled from the rear, and so artfully wired in place that the stricken giants seemed almost ready to live again. This work in itself const.i.tuted reason enough for the Allied airmen to sweep the sky of German observers, since only by "putting out the enemy"s eye" could such secrets of camouflage be preserved. Wells were being bored by gas engine power and pipes laid, as spider webs, to bring untainted water to man and beast. Then, of course, shallow trenches had to be dug for telephone wires which otherwise would perish in the first onslaught of artillery fire.