Chapter XIX: D'artagnan and the Soul of France

I met d'Artagnan in a forest of Lorraine. Perhaps Athos, Porthos and Aramis were there too, somewhere in the shadows. I saw only d'Artagnan and talked with him as long as it takes to tell the story. I had forgotten how he looked to Dumas père, but I knew him at once by his bearing and his spirit. His swashbuckling manners are just as arrogantly gay now in the forest of Lorraine and in the trenches of the Vosges as they were long ago in old Paris and on the highroad. He swaggers just as buoyantly with the "poilus" of the Republic as with the musketeers of the Cardinal.

D'Artagnan is a captain now; when I met him he was attached to the staff of a General of Brigade. He is always your beau ideal of a man. He looks just what he is--a fine French soldier.

My first glimpse of him was from the automobile in which I was riding with an officer from the Great General Staff whose business it was to conduct press correspondents to the front. D'Artagnan was walking towards us on the lonely forest road, and signaled with a long alpenstock for our driver to stop. He wore the regulation blue uniform, with the three gold stripes of a captain on his sleeve. He had no sword. I find that swords are no longer the fashion with the "working officers" at the front. They are in the way.

Our car slid to a stop. D'Artagnan's free hand came to salute. It was an imposing salute--one that only d'Artagnan could have made. His heels snapped together with a gallant click of spurs; his arm swept up in a semi-circle from his body; his rigid fingers touched the visor of his steel helmet--one of the new battle helmets, very light, strong and painted horizon blue to match the uniform. The chin strap was of heavy black leather instead of the brass chain of ante-bellum parade helmets.

D'Artagnan, from the center of the road, roared out his name and mission. His name, in his present reincarnation, is known throughout the French army, in fact throughout France. It is known to the Germans too, but correspondents are not permitted to give the names of their officers until the war is over. Anyway I immediately recognized him as d'Artagnan.

His mission, announced with gusto, was to guide us along the lines held by his brigade. He leaped to our running-board and ordered our chauffeur to advance.

He was an impressive figure, even clinging to the side of the jolting car. His body lithe and powerful; his hands lean and strong; his face, under the visor of the helmet, was d'Artagnan's own. A forehead high and bronzed. Eyes blue and both merry and ferocious. Cheeks high but rounded. His hair, only a little of it showing under the helmet, was black, but just enough grizzled to proclaim him in middle age. His mustache--it was a mustache of dreams and imagination--his mustache stuck out inches beyond the cheeks, and was wondrously twisted and curled.

His medals proved him the survivor of many hard campaigns. Most officers when at the front wear only the ribbons of their decorations, if they have any, and leave the medals at home. But not d'Artagnan. He wore all of his medals, in a blazing row across his chest. And he had all that were possible for any man in his position to win. First came the African Colonial medal, then the medal for service in Indo-China. Next was the Médaille de Maroc. In the center was the Legion of Honor and then the Croix de Guerre, with four stars affixed, indicating the number of times during the present war, d'Artagnan has been mentioned in despatches for courage under fire. Finally came the only foreign medal--the Russian Cross of St. George--given by the Czar during the present war to a very few Frenchmen, and only "for great bravery."

As d'Artagnan again stopped the car and we climbed out into the road, which had narrowed to a forest path, my companion pointed to the medals.

"Our captain is a professional soldier, you see," he said. "He has fought all his life--didn't just come back when his class was called for this war."

But I already knew that. How could d'Artagnan be anything but a soldier--a professional, if you please--but fighting for the love of it, and the glory?

He tramped along in front of us, the spurs of his high boots jingling, and twirling the ends of his fierce mustaches. I glimpsed soldiers through the trees. Some came out to the path and saluted. To all d'Artagnan returned a salute with the same wonderful joy in it, as though it were the first salute of the day, or as if he were passing a general. There was the same swing outward of the arm, the same rigid formality of bringing his hand to the helmet. The pomposity of the salute he may have learned from Porthos, but the dignity, the impressiveness of it, belonged to d'Artagnan.

His soldiers adored him; we could see that as we followed. Their eyes smiled and approved. And the stamp of great admiration was in their faces.

"They would go through hell with him," said my companion. "A good many of them have. He is the favorite of his brigade."

"He ought to be," I replied. "He is d'Artagnan."

"D'Artagnan!" my companion cried. "Why, so he is. I never thought of it. But he _is_ d'Artagnan--alive and fighting."

He was a little distance ahead of us, among the trees. A sergeant approached him to make a report. D'Artagnan leaned back grandly on one leg, his chest forward, his chin tilted up, his hand, as usual, twisting the mustachios.

"He loves it," I said. "He loves everything about it--this war. When peace comes his life will lose its savor."

My officer of the Great General Staff nodded; d'Artagnan returned jauntily, swinging his stick, and in ringing tones told us all that he had arranged for us to see.

We followed him through a program that has been described many times by correspondents since the war began--the encampments, the batteries and the trenches. But never before did a correspondent have such a guide. It was not my first trip to the front; but d'Artagnan led me into advanced trenches, closer to the Germans than I had ever been before. We crawled on hands and knees and spoke in whispers. But I was fascinated because d'Artagnan, just as Dumas might have shown him, crawled ahead, waved his hand in quick, impatient gestures for us to hurry, looked back to laugh and point through a loophole to great rents in the wire entanglements showing where a recent German attack had failed.

Only once, at a point where a road separated two trench sections, and always dangerous because of German snipers, did he order us to pass around behind in the safety of a boyau or communication trench. _He_ leaped across the barrier with a derisive yell of triumph and a catlike quickness too astonishing to draw the German fire.

Otherwise he let us take far bigger chances than usually permitted visitors--and he made us like them. We squinted carelessly through risky loopholes because d'Artagnan did it first. We talked aloud because he did, and at times when ordinary guides would have made us keep silent. He stood up on a trench ledge and looked through a periscope, then jumped down laughing, holding out the periscope to show where a bullet had drilled a hole on the side only a few inches above his head. It was a game of follow the leader, and we followed because the leader was d'Artagnan.

"They will get him some day--he takes such chances," an officer remarked.

"They haven't got him yet and he has had more war than any of us," another replied.

On our way back, behind the line encampments, we met several soldiers carrying tureens of soup. D'Artagnan halted them, solemnly lifted the covers and tasted the contents. Then he passed the spoon to us.

"It is good," he pronounced, and patted the soldiers on the back, as we hurried on.

He now took us to his own quarters, in a dense grove of pines. His house was of pine boughs, half above and half underground, with a bomb-proof cavern at the rear. Its furniture was a deal table and a bed of straw. We sat around on camp stools and an orderly brought in tea.

D'Artagnan then changed the subject for a few minutes from war. He had visited nearly all the world, including America. He turned to me, and to my surprise spoke in English. It was a very peculiar English, but it was not funny coming from the lips of d'Artagnan. He told me about his trip to America--how he did not have much money at the time, so he went as a lecturer to the French Societies in the big cities of the United States. It was hard to picture this big, weather-beaten soldier in such a rôle, until he told me the subject of his lecture. It was "The Soul of France"--always the Soul of France, a soul chivalrous, grand and unconquerable, that would forever make the world remember and expect.

In Boston he had tried to speak in English, at the Boston City Club. He pronounced the letter "i" in city, as in the word "site." He told me the lecture in English was very funny. Perhaps it was; but the Boston City Club had not seen their lecturer in the forest of Lorraine. They did not know that he was d'Artagnan.

After tea he showed us the park made by his soldiers in front of his "villa," as the semi-underground hut was called. A sign painted on a tree announced the "Parc des Braves." Little well-groomed paths wound among the pine needles; rustic seats were built about the trees. A dozen little beds of mountain flowers made gay stars and crescents that would not have disgraced the Tuileries. The "Parc des Braves" had even an aviary, made of wire netting (left over from the barricades) built about a tree. D'Artagnan proudly pointed out a great owl and a cowering cuckoo in different compartments of this unique cage.

But the chef d'œuvre of the Parc was the reconstructed tableau of one of the brigade's heroic episodes. A tiny rustic bridge spanned a miniature brook; beside the brook was built a mill and beyond was an old farm-house and orchard. Seven tiny French chasseurs, of wood and painted blue, were holding the bridge against a horde of wooden Germans painted gray.

On a great tree shading this story of a glorious hour in the history of his "little braves," d'Artagnan had fixed a wooden slab, telling its details in verse.

"Il y avait sept petits chasseurs Qui ne connaissaient pas la peur." (There were seven little chasseurs Who knew no fear.)

That is the way the story began; and each verse began and ended with the same words. I wish I could have copied it all; but d'Artagnan, the author, was impatient to move on.

So we left the Parc and followed into the gloom of the forest and up the steep slope of the mountain. It faced the enemy's trenches. From the top one could look across the frontier of Germany.

D'Artagnan was silent now, plunging along through the deepening twilight. Suddenly we emerged on the edge of a clearing still bright with sunshine: a clearing perhaps several hundred feet square, lying on the steep hillside almost at an angle of about forty-five degrees.

D'Artagnan stopped, took off his helmet, then walked slowly into the open. We took off our hats and followed him.

The clearing was a military cemetery--it held the graves of d'Artagnan's dead. A tall white wooden cross at the top rose almost to the tops of the pines growing above it. On the cross-piece was written:

"To our comrades of the --th Brigade, killed by the enemy."

At the foot of the great cross, stretched in military alignment over the clearing were hundreds of graves headed by little crosses. So abrupt was the slope the dead soldiers stood almost erect--facing Germany. Narrow graveled walks separated them, and on each cross hung festoons of flowers kept always fresh by the comrades who remained.

We followed d'Artagnan across the silent place and stood behind him as he faced, with bared head, the great cross. He made the sign of the cross upon his breast. There was not a bowed head: we all lifted them high to read the words written there.

No one spoke; the wind rustled softly in the tops of the pines that pressed so densely about us. It was dark among the trees, but the clearing was still mellow with the fading sunlight.

"The sun always comes here first in the morning," d'Artagnan said softly, "and this is the last place from which it goes."

He swung around with his back to the great cross and flung out his alpenstock in a gesture that swept the valley before us. His voice rose harshly:

"Over there is the enemy," he thundered. "Those who rest here look at them face to face!"

His arm dropped; his voice sank.

"They didn't get over there. But their souls remain here always to urge us and to point the way which we must go."

He stopped and seemed to listen. The wind had died; even the tree tops were still. The sun had gone; the dark began to sweep up over the graves. D'Artagnan leaned upon his alpenstock; his eyes were closed.

We did not stir, nor hardly breathe. D'Artagnan was in communion with the soul of his beloved France.