Chapter VI: Part 6

How that commandant enjoyed making that score! As for the burgomaster, he was proscribed in a way that will brand him among his fellow-citizens for life. When German soldiers took bread from families where they were billeted, the German Government turned over an amount of flour equivalent to the bread consumed.

A certain percentage of Belgians saw the invasion only as a visitation of disaster, like an earthquake. A flat country of gardens limits one’s horizon. They fell in line with the sentiment of the mass. But as time wore on into the summer and autumn of the second year, some of them began to think, What was the use? German propaganda was active. All that the Allies had cared for Belgium was to use her to check the German tide to Paris and the Channel ports! Perfidious England had betrayed Belgium! German business and banking influences, which had been considerable in Belgium before the war, and the numerous German residents who had returned, formed a busy circle of appeal to Belgian business men, who were told that the British navy stood between them and a return to prosperity. Germany was only too willing that they should resume their trade with the rest of the world.

Why should not Belgium come into the German customs union? Why should not Belgium make the best of her unfortunate situation, as became a practical and thrifty people? But be it a customs union or annexation that Germany plans, the steel had entered the hearts of all Belgians with red corpuscles; and King Albert and his _shipperkes_ were still fighting the Germans at Dixmude. A British army appearing before Brussels would end casuistry; and pessimism would pass, and the German residents, too, with the huzzas of all Belgium as the gallant King once more ascended the steps of his palace.

Worthy of England at her best was her consent to allow the Commission’s food to pass, which she accompanied by generous giving. She might be slow in making ready her army, but give she could and give she did. It was a grave question if her consent was in keeping with the military policy which believes that any concession to sentiment in the grim business of war is unwise. Certainly, the _Krieg ist Krieg_ of Germany would not have permitted it.

There is the very point of the war that makes a neutral take sides. If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world, then Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them from starving or faced the desperation of a people who fight for food with such weapons as they had. This must have meant a holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain comparatively unimportant. However much the Germans hampered the Commission with red tape and worse than red tape through the activities of German residents in Belgium, Germany did not want the Commission to withdraw. It was helping her to economise her food supplies. And England answered a human appeal at the cost of hard and fast military policy. She was still true to the ideals which have set their stamp on half the world.

XII

WINTER IN LORRAINE

Paris resuming normality--Regular train service--Nancy under fire--
By automobile to the front--Panorama of the contested lines--
View of the German wedge--French veterans--Ancient Lorraine--
A vision of battle--Résumé of the struggle--The first German
advance--“The face of the earth sown with shells”--The Kaiser
silenced--The German Lorraine campaign lost--Visit to a French
heavy battery--Underground quarters--A policed army--Military
simplicity.

Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualise the whole as you see it in your morning paper, or to realise the labour it represents in its course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages and thick forests and across open fields.

Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and broken hopes; of as brave charges as men ever made; a symbol of skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against striving foe.

From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry le François eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of Rheims cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print to one word for the defence of the Plateau d’Amance or the struggle around Lunéville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine and the Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine in winter, when the war was six months old.

But first, on our way, a word about Paris, which I had not seen since September. At the outset of the war, Parisians who had not gone to the front were in a trance of suspense; they were magnetised by the tragic possibilities of the hour. The fear of disaster was in their hearts, though they might deny it to themselves. They could think of nothing but France. Now they realised that the best way to help France was by going on with their work at home. Paris was trying to be normal, but no Parisian was making the bluff that Paris was normal. The Gallic lucidity of mind prevented such self-deception.

Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute? This attitude seems human; it seems logical. One liked the French for it. He liked them for boasting so little. In their effort at normality they had accomplished more than they realised. After all, only one-thirtieth of the area of France was in German hands. A line of steel made the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the routine of peace.

When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about railroad connections anywhere. You went to the station and took your chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other conditions. This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I might have done to Marseilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen. The sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new uniform of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red. But for them and the number of women in mourning and one other circumstance, the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy only a stop on the way.

The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule who said: “_Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s’il vous plaît!_” If you had a _laisser-passer_, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must have something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must have a military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks eastward. To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by the war of ’70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This gave our journey interest.

Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to Nancy in the opera season. “They are not running this winter,” say the wits of Nancy. “For one reason, we have no opera--and there are other reasons.”

An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; Zeppelins are within easy commuting distance. But here was Nancy as brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home. Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the darkness of London, and after English trains with every window shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.

It was a threat, an anticipation, that has darkened London, while Nancy knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb dropping were nothing new to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business in the town whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt the throb of the army’s life.

“Don’t you ever worry about aerial raids?” I asked madame behind the counter at the hotel.

“Do the men in the trenches worry about them?” she answered. “We have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn’t we share some of their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire.”

“Are all the population here as usual?”

“Certainly, monsieur!” she said. “The Germans can never take Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!”

The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of her _poulet en casserole_ as any commander of a _soixante-quinze_ battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave an American a homelike feeling.

In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.

With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went about its business of throwing shells at the Germans. On the dead walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel’s speech in the Chamber of Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class of recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all France beside that of the order of mobilisation in August, now weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of German influence. When you walked through the old Place Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very French population which made them unconscious of danger while their flag was flying over this very French city.

No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the French and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of the frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of war.

At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have ridden through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car why explain that seeing the Vosges front in an automobile may be a joy ride to an Eskimo, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect; as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New York to Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her roads in perfect repair even in war time.

Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding the army’s secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village, at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry was a reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days without official sanction.

The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I made. No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an _élan_, a martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.

Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine starts to a fire.

Now, imagine your view of a ball game limited to the batter and the pitcher: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are clear.

A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of Ste. Geneviève. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry or a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a dozen of his comrades come out of their “home” dug in the hillside. Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-à-Mousson, to Château-Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad crests of the famous Grand Couronné of Nancy, and faintly in the distance we could see Metz, that strong fortress town in German Lorraine.

“Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?” I asked. For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.

“No, they are near Pont-à-Mousson.”

To the north the little town of Pont-à-Mousson lay in the lap of the river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le Prêtre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire. This was well to the rear of our position--marking the boundaries of the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point at St. Mihiel--in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul. Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If not, why don’t the Germans widen it?

Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many miles of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because they would have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were. They have their own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the Bois le Prêtre.

At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of trenches; whose barbed wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.

“Our front is in those woods,” explained the colonel who was in command of the point.

“A major when the war began and an officer of reserves,” _mon capitaine_, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy. There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.

“They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves-- here are some of them--_mes poilus_!”

He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had come out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a family party.

It was all very simple to _mes poilus_, that first fight. They had been told to hold. If Ste. Geneviève were lost, the Amance plateau was in danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy. Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too much. In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the Germans swarmed out of the woods.

“And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn’t very far to go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest travelling when you are trying to take a trench.”

They knew, these _poilus_, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans, and found the shoe on the other foot.

Now the fields in the foreground down to the wood’s edge were bare of any living thing. You had to take _mon capitaine’s_ word for it that there were any soldiers in front of us.

“The _Boches_ are a good distance away at this point,” he said. “They are in the next woods.”

A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the intervening space. At the first movement by either French or Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with cannonading. So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the Arctic winter, they watched each other. But if one force or the other napped, and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a brigade commander’s ambition. Three days later in this region the French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a welcome item for the daily French official bulletin.

“We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,” said the colonel. “Men can’t lie out all night in the advance in weather like this. In that direction--” He indicated a part of the line where the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.

There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before we left the hill of Ste. Geneviève. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment, this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that “Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German barbarians 366 A.D.”

“We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his,” remarked the colonel.

The church of Ste. Geneviève was badly smashed by shell. So was the church in the village on the Plateau d’Amance. Most churches in this district of Lorraine are. Framed through a great gap in the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of _débris_ at its feet. After seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.

Any one who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought visualises another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that Plateau d’Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far as the eye may see from a steamer’s mast.

An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like peanut shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements of a battery of French _soixante-quinze_ within a circle of holes torn by its adversaries’ replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not located.

“So that was it!” The struggle on the immense landscape, where at least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as simple as some Brobdignagian football match. Before the war began the French would not move a man within five miles of the frontier lest it be provocative: but once the issue was joined they sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetised by the thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs, mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were concentrated for the purpose.

I recalled a remark I had heard: “What a pitiful little offensive that was!” It was made by one of those armchair “military experts,” who look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had taken Château-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of their efforts as pitiful.

The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the slowly mobilising Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the French twelve hundred thousand. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of von Kluck and the British retreat from Mons; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine.

From the Plateau d’Amance you may see how far the Germans came and what was their object. Between the fortresses of Épinal and of Toul lies the Troueé de Mirecourt--the Gap of Mirecourt. It is said that the French had purposely left it open when they were thinking of fighting the Germans on their own frontier and not on that of Belgium. They wanted the Germans to make their trial here--and wisely, for with all the desperate and courageous efforts of the Bavarian and Saxon armies they never got near the gap.

If they had forced it, however, with von Kluck swinging on the other flank, they might have got around the French army. Such was the dream of German strategy, whose realisation was so boldly and skilfully undertaken. The Germans counted on their immense force of artillery, built for this war in the last two years and outranging the French, to demoralise the French infantry. But the French infantry called the big shells “_marmites_” (saucepans), and made a joke of them and the death they spread as they tore up the fields in clouds of earth.

Ah, it took more than artillery to beat back the best troops of France in a country like this--a country of rolling hills and fenceless fields cut by many streams and set among thick woods, where infantry on a bank or at a forest’s edge with rifles and rapid-firers and guns kept their barrels cool until the charge developed in the open. Some of these forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of acres. In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from our position on the Plateau d’Amance.

“Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here,” said an officer, who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. “All the splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was intoxication. We could see the lines of troops in their retreat and advance, batteries and charges shrouded in shrapnel smoke. What hosts of guns the Germans had! They seemed to be sowing the whole face of the earth with shells. The roar of the thing was like that of chaos itself. It was the exhilaration of the spectacle that kept us from dropping from fatigue. Two weeks of this business! Two weeks with every unit of artillery and infantry always ready, if not actually engaged!”

The general in command was directing not one but many battles, each with a general of its own; manœuvring troops across the streams and open places, seeking the cover of forests, with the aeroplanes unable to learn how many of the enemy were hidden in the forests on his front, while he tried to keep his men out of angles and make his movements correspond with those of the divisions on his right and left. Skill this requires; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill which you cannot organise in a month after calling for a million volunteers, but which grows through years of organisation.

Shall I call the general in chief command General X? This is according to the custom of anonymity. A great modern army like the French is a machine; any man, high or low, only a unit of the machine. In this case the real name of X is Castelnau. If it lacks the fame which may seem its due, that may be because he was not operating near a transatlantic cable end. Fame is not the business of French generals nowadays. It is war. What counted for France was that he never let the Germans get near the gap at Mirecourt.

Having failed to reach the gap, the Germans, with that stubbornness of the offensive which characterises them, tried to take Nancy. They got a battery of heavy guns within range of the city. From a high hill it is said that the Kaiser watched the bombardment. But here is a story. As the German infantry advanced toward their new objective they passed a French artillery officer in a tree. He was able to locate that heavy battery and able to signal its position back to his own side. The French concentrated sufficient fire to silence it after it had thrown forty shells into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded his cloak around him and walked down in silence from his eminence, where the sun blazed on his helmet. It was not the Germans’ fault that they failed to take Nancy. It was due to the French.

Some time a tablet will be put up to denote the high-water mark of the German invasion of Lorraine. It will be between the edge of the forest of Champenoux and the heights. When the Germans charged from the cover of the forest to get possession of the road to Nancy, the French guns and mitrailleuses which had held their fire turned loose. The rest of the story is how the French infantry, impatient at being held back, swept down in a counter-attack, and the Germans had to give up their campaign in Lorraine as they gave up their campaign against Paris in the early part of September. Saddest of all lost opportunities to the correspondent in this war is this fighting in Lorraine. One had only to climb a hill in order to see it all!

In half an hour, as the officer outlined the positions, we had lived through the two weeks’ fighting; and, thanks to the fairness of his story--that of a professional soldier without illusions--we felt that we had been hearing history while it was very fresh.

“They are very brave and skilful, the Germans,” he said. “We still have a battery of heavy guns on the plateau. Let us go and see it.”

We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell pits. At one point we crossed a communicating trench, where soldiers could go and come to the guns and the infantry positions without being exposed to shell fire. I noticed that it carried a telephone wire.

“Yes,” said the officer; “we had no ditch during the fight with the Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had to carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty warm kind of messenger service when the German _marmites_ were falling their thickest.”

At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau. I did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun position before aeroplanes played a part in war.

“_Entrez, monsieur!_”

And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle pointed out of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth.

“It’s very cosy!” I remarked.

“Oh, this is the shop! The living-room is below--here!”

I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry straw.

“You are not doing much firing these days?” I suggested.

“Oh, we gave the _Boches_ a couple this morning so they wouldn’t get cocky thinking they were safe. It’s necessary to keep your hand in even in the winter.”

“Don’t you get lonesome?”

“No, we shift on and off. We’re not here all the while. It is quite warm in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It is for France. What would you?”

Four other gun positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands of gun positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of destruction and man finds a way of escaping them.

As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were we and what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had been no officer along and I had not had a _laisser-passer_ on my person, the American Ambassador to France would probably have had to get another countryman out of trouble.

The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how surely. Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the front line catching bullets, please take notice.

It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where we had left our car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of chatting soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in command, and found him and his staff around a table covered with oilcloth in the main living-room of a villager’s house. He spoke of his men, of their loyalty and cheerfulness, as the other commanders had, as if this were his only boast. These French officers have little “side”; none of that toe-the-mark, strutting militarism which some soldiers think necessary to efficiency. They live very simply on campaign, though if they do get to town for a few hours they enjoy a good meal. If they did not, madame at the restaurant would feel that she was not doing her duty to France.

XIII

SMILES AMONG RUINS

Elation in the cause--From Nancy southward--A giant Frenchman--
Personnel of the French machine--_Déjeuner_--Father Joffre’s
boarding establishment--A thrifty army--Responsibility in
a democracy--Determination for final peace--“Rural free
delivery” at the front--A card-indexed army--Their families--
Battlefields that saved Paris--Souvenirs aplenty--Ruthless
“military advantage”--A shattered farmhouse--Helping the
farmers--Construction of trenches--In the front line
trench--Watchful waiting--The Lorraine country--Widespread
destruction--Another “Louvain”--A brave and great Sister--
Thrilling attacks--“It was for France!”--His Honour, the
Mayor--The tricolour in Lorraine.

Scorched piles of brick and mortar where a home has been ought to make about the same impression anywhere. When you have gone from Belgium to French Lorraine, however, you will know quite the contrary. In Belgium I suffered all the depression which a nightmare of war’s misery can bring; in French Lorraine I found myself sharing something of the elation of a man who looks at a bruised knuckle with the consciousness that it broke a burglar’s jaw.

A Belgian repairing the wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes. The difference was this: The Germans were still in Belgium; they were out of French Lorraine for good.

“What matters a shell-hole through my walls and my torn roof!” said a Lorraine farmer. “Work will make my house whole. But nothing could ever have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans remained. I saw them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is ours!”

I had thought it a pretty good thing to see something of the Eastern French front; but a better thing was the happiness I found there. _Mon capitaine_ had come out from the Ministry of War in Paris; but when we set out from Nancy southward, we had a different local guide, a major belonging to the command in charge of the region which we were to visit. He was another example which upsets certain popular notions of Frenchmen as gesticulating, excitable little men. Some six feet two in height, he had an eye that looked straight into yours, a very square chin, and a fine forehead. You had only to look at him and size him up on points to conclude that he was all there; that he knew his work.

“Well, we’ve got good weather for it to-day, monsieur,” said a voice out of a goatskin coat, and I found we had the same chauffeur as before. These French privates talk to you and you talk to them. They are not simply moulds of flesh in military form who salute and salute and salute. They take an interest in your affairs and you take an interest in theirs; they make you feel like home folks.

The sun was shining--a warm winter sun like that of a February thaw in our Northern States--glistening on the snowy fields and slopes among the forests and tree-clad hills of the mountainous country. Faces ambushed in whiskers thought it was a good day for trimming beards and washing clothes. The sentries along the roads had their scarfs around their necks instead of over their ears. A French soldier makes ear muffs, chest protector, nightcap, and a blanket out of the scarf which wife or sister knits for him. If any woman who reads this knits one to send to France she may be sure that the fellow who received it will get every stitch’s worth out of it.

To-day, then, it was war without mittens. You did not have to sound the bugle to get soldiers out of their burrows or their houses. Our first stop was at our own request, in a village where groups of soldiers were taking a sun bath. More came out of the doors as we alighted. They were all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve regiment. Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers, some employers, when the war began. Then they were _piou-pious_, in French slang; then all France prayed god-speed to its beloved _piou-pious_. Then you knew the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard hands; the employer by his manner of command. Now they were _poilus_--bearded, hard-eyed veterans; you could not tell the clerk from the labourer or the employer from the peasant.

Any one who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan gold field in ’97-’98 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had happened to these men. The puny had put on muscle; the city dweller had blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose; social differences of habit had disappeared. That gentleman used to his bath and linen sheets and the hard living farmer or labourer--all had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they were lodged and in the dugouts of the trenches when it was their turn to occupy them through the winter. Any “snob” had his edges trimmed by the banter of his comrades. Their beards accentuated the likeness of type. A cheery lot of faces and intelligent, these, which greeted us with curious interest.

“Perhaps President Wilson will make peace,” one said.

“When?” I asked.

A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was:

“When we have Alsace-Lorraine back.”

Under a shed their _déjeuner_ was cooking. This meal at noon is the meal of the day to the average Frenchman, who has only bread and coffee in the morning. They say he objects to fighting at luncheon time. That is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work and laugh and talk and enjoy his eating. The Germans found this out and tried to take his trenches at the noon hour. This interference with his gastronomic habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and fork for the bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious counter-attack. He would teach those “_Boches_” to leave him to eat his _déjeuner_ in peace.

That appetising stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved that Frenchmen know how to cook. I didn’t blame them for objecting to being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it. The average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more meat, for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier. It is a very simple problem with France’s fine roads to feed that long line when it is stationary. It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance of four hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day for each man and a known number of men to feed. From the railroad head trucks and autobusses take the supplies up to the distributing points. At one place I saw ten Paris autobusses, their signs painted out in a steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had broken down through the war. The French take good care of their equipment and their clothes; they waste no food. As a people is, so is their army, and the French are thrifty by nature.

Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Czar. And he has a happy family. It seemed to me that life ought to have been utterly dull for this characteristic group of _poilus_, living crowded together all winter in a remote village. Civilians sequestered in this fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.

One of the officers in speaking of this said that early in the autumn the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a soldier. Commanders were worried. But as the winter wore on the spirit changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the one thought that they were there for France. The fellowship of a cause taught them patience, brought them cheer. And another thing was the increasing sense of team play, of confidence in victory, which holds a ball team, a business enterprise, or an army together. Every day the organisation of the army was improving; every day that indescribable and subtle element of satisfaction that the Germans were securely held was growing.

Every Frenchman saves something of his income; madame sees to it that he does. He knows that if he dies he will not leave wife and children penniless. His son, not yet old enough to fight, will come on to take his place. Men at home who are twenty-two or three and unmarried, men who are twenty-eight or thirty and not long married, and men of forty with some money put by, will, in turn, understand how their own class feels.

In ten minutes you had entered into the hearts of this single company in a way that made you feel that you had got into the heart of the whole French army. When you asked them if they would like to go home they didn’t say “No!” all in a chorus, as if that were what the colonel had told them to say. They obey the colonel, but their thoughts are their own. Otherwise, these ruddy, healthy men, representing the people of France and not the cafés of Paris, would not keep France a republic.

Yes, they did want to go home. They did want to go home. They wanted their wives and babies; they wanted to sit down to morning coffee at their own tables. Lumps rose in their throats at the suggestion. But they were not going until the German peril was over forever. Why stop now, only to have another terrible war in thirty or forty years? A peace that would endure must be won. They had thought that out for themselves. They would not stick to their determination if they had not. This is the way of democracies. Thus every one was conscious that he was fighting not merely to win, but for future generations.

“It happened that this great struggle which we had long feared came in our day, and to us is the duty,” said one. You caught the spirit of comradeship passing the time with jests at one another’s expense. One of the men who was not a full thirty-third degree _poilu_ had compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his shock of hair.

“I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way for the Zeppelins,” said a comrade.

“Envy! Sheer envy!” was the retort. “Look at him!” and he pointed at some scraggly bunches on chin and cheeks which resembled a young grass plat that had come up badly.

“I don’t believe in air-tight beards,” was the response.

When I produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is with soldiers at the front. They all wanted to be in the photograph, on the chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or father looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this: “Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry, 18th Company, 5th Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121,” by which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army knows the sector and the number of the regiment in that sector. By the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on any one of his millions, each a human being with all a human being’s individual emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of the vast multitude of obedient chessmen.

“We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word,” all agreed. Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means the enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy’s intelligence.

“If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot here,” said _mon capitaine_.

These were the men who had not been long married. They were not yet past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home; perhaps they had become fathers since they went to war. The younger men of the first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of youth which makes comradeship easy.

But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late thirties and early forties, have settled down in life. Their families are established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may enjoy a vacation from the wife, for you know madame, in France, with all her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this is not a proper tonic for her lord. So the old boys seem the most content in the fellowship of winter quarters. What they cannot stand are repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of rifle and pack. But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one very practical reason why they will fight well--and they have fought better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in their blood.

“_Allons, messieurs!_” said the tall major, who wanted us to see battle-fields. It required no escort to tell us where the battle-field was. We knew it when we came to it as you know the point reached by high tide on the sands--this field where many Gettysburgs were fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in the balance--as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a decisive victory over the French army. Where destruction ended there the German invasion reached its limit.

Forests and streams and ditches and railroad culverts played their part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery walls, too. In all my battle-field visits in Europe I have not seen a single cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen to the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.

We stopped at a crossroads where charges met and wrestled back and forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of shells appeared as steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his end, and near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over. Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him out in this fighting across these fields and through the forests, in a tug of war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder breaking forth into hell when the war was only a month old and passion was at a white heat.

Hasty shelter trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that they carry on their backs, to give them a little cover. And there is the trench that stopped the Germans--the trench which they charged but could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German courage could not endure. Thus far and no farther the invasion came in that wheat-field which will be ever memorable.

We went up a hill once crowned by one of those clusters of farm buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and granaries are close together. All around were bare fields. Those farm buildings stood up like a mountain peak. The French had the hill and lost it and recovered it. Whichever side had it, the other was bound to bathe it in shells because it commanded the country around. The value of property meant nothing. All that counted was military advantage. Because churches are often on hilltops, because they are bound to be used for lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces. When two men are fighting for life they don’t bother about upsetting a table with a vase, or notice any “Keep off the grass” signs; no, not even if the family Bible be underfoot.

None of the roof, none of the superstructure of these farm buildings was left; only the lower walls, which were eighteen inches thick and in places penetrated by the shells. For when a Frenchman builds a farmhouse he builds it to last a few hundred years. The farm windmill was as twisted as a birdcage that has been rolled under a trolley car, but a large hayrake was unharmed. Such is the luck of war. I made up my mind that if I ever got under shell-fire I’d make for the hayrake and avoid the windmill.

Our tall major pointed out all the fluctuating positions during the battle. It was like hearing a chess match explained from memory by an expert. Words to him were something precious. He made each one count as he would the shots from his cannon. His narrative had the lucidity of a terse judge reviewing evidence. The battle-field was etched on his mind in every important phase of its action.

Not once did he speak in abuse of the enemy. The staff officer who directs steel ringing on steel is too busy thrusting and keeping guard to indulge in diatribes. To him the enemy is a powerful impersonal devil who must be beaten. When I asked about the conduct of the Germans in the towns they occupied, his lip tightened and his eyes grew hard.

“I’m afraid it was pretty bad!” he said; as if he felt, besides the wrong to his own people, the shame that men who had fought so bravely should act so ill. I think his attitude toward war was this: “We will die for France, but calling the Germans names will not help us to win. It only takes breath.”

“_Allons, messieurs!_”