Chapter III: Part 3

It was also beginning to take shape. From the foot of the inclined plane out into the black esplanade, streamed two long files of light, purposeful, with the sharp, forward-piercing line of the arrow. The procession was beginning to form.

The murmur rose into a chant as the crowd, hearing the first notes, took it up, singing as they fell into line. The first of the lights advanced up the ascent toward the top, which was blazing with light from the illuminated front of the lofty church. Far, far behind, stretching twice around the immense esplanade and disappearing into the distant blackness of the endless avenue, the flickering lights were now in two lines, moving forward steadily.

The sound of voices grew louder, the advancing files were visible now, masses intensely black against the night.

The wind roared, the rain beat down. The voices suddenly rang out clear and vibrant, high above the confused roar of the singing multitudes below.

Then the glimmering blur of the faces in the reflected light of the candles shone through the rain; each dim figure, in a momentary transfiguration, was resplendent in the flare of light from the church, the voices shouted loud and strong, drowning out in their instant’s glory of individual life the hoarse chant of the vast crowd below. Then each figure passed forward out of the light and began to descend the inclined plane on the other side, going singing down into the blackness.

There were so many singing now that, although they all sang the same chant over and over, a chant in which recurs constantly the acclaiming shout of “Hail! Hail!” they were not singing in tune together nor even in time, nor even often the same words at the same time.

As the groups passed, each one was singing in its own fashion on a different key from those gone before and those following them. When this was too apparent, they sometimes stopped, listened, caught the note from the pilgrims nearest to them, and burst out again, this time in harmony. But for the most part they listened only to their own voices and to those of their friends, and sang lustily in a hearty discordance.--and so vast was the throng and so simple the joyful air they chanted, that from that monstrous discordance rose a strange and wonderful harmony like no other music in the world, with a deep pulsation longer than that of any other music, beating time, beating true.

They passed, shouting out loudly the confident words of their song; the young faces often laughing gaily in the shaking light of their candles, stopping to light the blown-out flames at the candles of their friends; the older people tramping forward resolutely, singing, often not noting that their one light had been blown out and that they were walking in darkness--no, not walking in darkness, because of the infinite number of lights about them, carried by their fellows; the young girls’ eyes glistening through the rain as they gazed upward toward the circle of white light at the top of the ascent; the old men’s eyes turned downward on the darkness to which they would descend; the occasional priest-leader beating time, marshaling the lines; the occasional children holding to their parents’ hands, their eyes blank and trustful, fixed on their candles, their pure lips incessantly shaping the joyful acclaiming shout of “Hail! Hail!”

Sometimes a group lagged behind, either because of the carelessness of the young people in it, or the fatigue of the old people, and there was almost a break in the line of lights. But always as they approached the moment of transfiguration, the ones who were behind hurried forward shufflingly to keep the line intact. The line was always intact.

The rain beat down on them, but they sang loudly and joyously, rejoicing in singing together; the wind tore at their garments and puffed at their frail, unprotected lights. Many went out. But there were always enough lights left in each group to light those of the others--if they wished.

Last of all I saw a strong young man whose light had been extinguished, holding out his lifeless candle to that of an old, poor, bent woman who, patiently, patiently, offered him her tiny, living flame.

SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS

(_Near Château-Thierry, July, 1918_)

They were detraining in dense brown crowds at what had been the station before German guns had knocked it into a shapeless heap of tumbled bricks; they were pouring in on foot along the road from the west; and when I made my way along the main street to the river, I found another khaki-clad line leaving the little town, marching heavily, unrhythmically and strongly out across the narrow, temporary wooden bridge, laid hastily across the massive stone pillars which were all that remained of the old bridge.

An old, white-capped woman, who had been one of my neighbors in the days before the little town had known German guns or American soldiers, called out to me: “Oh, Madame! See them! Isn’t it wonderful! Just look at them! All day like that, all night like that. Are there any people left in America? And are all your people so big, so fine?”

“Where are they going?” I asked her, taking refuge for a moment in her doorway.

“To the front directly, the poor boys. They’ll be fighting in two hours--do you hear the big guns off there banging away? And they so good, like nice big boys! Their poor mothers!”

I addressed myself in English to a soldier loitering near, watching the troops pass, “So they are going to the front, these boys?” After a stare of intense surprise, a broad smile broke over his face. He came closer. “No, ma’am,” he said, looking at me hard. “No, these are the Alabama boys just coming back from the front. They’ve been fighting steady for five days.” He added: “My, it seems good to talk to an American woman. I haven’t seen one for four months!”

“Where are you from?” I asked him.

“Just from the Champagne front, with the Third Division. Two of our regiments out there were--” He began pouring out exact, detailed military information which I would not have dreamed of asking him. The simple-hearted open confidence of the American soldier was startling and alarming to one who had for long breathed the thick air of universal suspicion. I stopped his fluent statement of which was his regiment, where they had been, what their losses had been, where they were going. “No, no, I mean where are you from in the States?” I raised my voice to make myself heard above the sudden thunder of a convoy of munition-camions passing by and filling the narrow street from side to side.

“Oh, from Kansas City, Missouri. It’s just eight months and seven days since I last saw the old town.” (Thus does a mother count the very days of the little new life of her child.)

“And how do you like France?”

“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. The climate’s not so bad. And the towns would be well enough if they’d clean up their manure-piles better.”

“And the people, how do you get on with them?”

The camions had passed and the street was again filled with American infantry, trudging forward with an air of resolute endurance.

“Well enough, they don’t cheat you. I forgot and left a fifty-franc bill lying on the table of a house where I’d bought some eggs, and the next morning the woman sent her little girl over to camp to give it back. Real poor-appearing folk they were, too. But I’ve had enough. I want to get home. Uncle Sam’s good enough for me. I want to hurry up and win the war and beat it back to God’s country.”

He fell away before the sudden assault on me of an old, old man and his old wife, with the dirt, the hunted look, the crumpled clothes, the desperate eyes of refugees: “Madame, Madame, help us! We cannot make them understand, the Americans! We want to go back to Villers-le-Petit. We want to see what is left of our house and garden. We want to start in to repair the house--and our potatoes must be dug.”

I had passed that morning through what was left of their village. For a moment I saw their old, tired, anxious faces dimly as though across the long stretch of shattered heaps of masonry. I answered evasively, “But you know they are not allowing civilian population to go back as yet. All this region is still shelled. It’s far too dangerous.”

They gave together an exclamation of impatience as though over the futilities of children’s talk. “But, Madame, if _we_ do not care about the danger. We never cared! We would not have left, ever, if the soldiers had not taken us away in camions--our garden and vineyard just at the time when they needed attention every hour. Well, we will not wait for permission; we will go back anyhow. The American soldiers are not bad, are they, Madame? They would surely not fire on an old man and his wife going back to their homes? If Madame would only write on a piece of paper that we only want to go back to our home to take care of it--”

Their quavering old voices came to me indistinctly through the steady thudding advance of all those feet, come from so far, on so great, so high, so perilous a mission; come so far, many of them, to meet death more than half-way--the poor, old, cramped people before me, blind and deaf to the immensity of the earthquake, seeing nothing but that the comfort of their own lives was in danger. I had a nervous revulsion of feeling and broke the news to them more abruptly than I would have thought possible a moment before. “There is nothing left to Villers-de-Petit. There is nothing left to go back to.”

Well, they were not so cramped, so blind, so small, my poor old people. They took the news standing, and after the first clutch at each other’s wrinkled hands, after the first paling of their already ashy faces, they did not flinch.

“But the crops, Madame. The vineyards. Are they all gone, too?”

“No, very little damage done there. Everything was kept, of course, intact for camouflage, and the retreat was so rapid there was not enough time for destruction.”

“Then we will still go back, Madame. We have brought the things for spraying the vineyards as far as here. Surely we can get them to Villers-de-Petit, it is so near now. We can sleep on the ground, anywhere. In another week, you see, Madame, it will be too late to spray. We have enough for ours and our neighbors, too. We can save them if we go _now_. If Madame would only write on a piece of paper in their language that--”

So I did it. I tore a fly-leaf out of a book lying in the heap of rubbish before the ruins of a bombarded house (it was a treatise on Bach’s chorales by the French organist Widor!) and wrote, “These are two brave old people, inhabitants of Villers-de-Petit, who wish to go back there to work under shell-fire to save what they can of their own and their neighbors’ crops. Theirs is the spirit that is keeping France alive.”

“It probably won’t do you a bit of good,” I said, “but there it is for what it is worth.”

“Oh, once the American soldiers know what we want, they will let us pass, we know.” They went off trustfully, holding my foolish “pass” in their hands.

I turned from them to find another young American soldier standing near me. “How do you do?” I said, smiling at him.

He gave a great start of amazement at the sound of my American accent. “Well, how do you like being in France?” I asked him.

“Gee! Are you really an American woman?” he said incredulously, his young face lighting up as though he saw a member of his own family. “I haven’t talked to one in so _long_! Why yes, I like France fine. It’s the loveliest country to look at, isn’t it? I didn’t know any country could be kept up so, like a garden. How do they _do_ it without any men left? They must be awfully fine people. I wish I could talk to them some.”

“Who are these soldiers going through to-day?” I asked. “Are they going out to the front line trenches, or coming back? I’ve been told both things.”

He answered with perfect certainty and precision: “Neither. They are Second Division troops, from Ohio mostly, just out of their French training-camp, going up to hold the reserve line. They never have been in action yet.”

Our attention was distracted to the inside of a fruit-shop across the street, a group of American soldiers struggling with the sign-language, a flushed, tired, distracted woman shopkeeper volubly unable to conceive that men with all their senses could not understand her native tongue. I went across to interpret. One of the soldiers in a strong Southern accent said, “Oh golly, yes, if you _would_ do the talkin’ fo’ us. We cyan’t make out whetheh we’ve paid heh or not, and we wondeh if she’d ’low us to sit heah and eat ouh fruit.”

From the Frenchwoman, “Oh, Madame, please what _is_ it they want now? I have shown them everything in sight. How strange that they can’t understand the simplest language!”

The little misunderstanding was soon cleared away. I lingered by the counter. “How do you like our American troops, Madame?” I asked. “Very well, very much indeed, if only they could talk. They don’t do any harm. They are good to the children. They are certainly as brave as men can be. But there is one thing about them I don’t understand. They overpay you, often, more than you ask--won’t take change--and yet if you leave things open, as we always do, in front of the shop, they just put their hands in and steal as they go by. I have lost a great deal in that way. If they have so much money, why do they steal?”

I contemplated making, and gave it up as too difficult, a short disquisition on the peculiarities of the American orchard-robbing tradition with its ramifications, and instead sat down at the table with the Americans, who gave me the greeting always repeated, “Great Scott! its good to talk to an American woman!”

A fresh-faced, splendidly built lad, looked up from the first bite of his melon, crying: “Yes suh, a cantaloupe, a’ honest-to-the-Lawd cantaloupe! I neveh thought they’d _heahd_ of such a thing in France.”

They explained to me, all talking at once, pouring out unasked military information till my hair rose up scandalized, that this was their first experience with semi-normal civilian life in France because they belonged to the troops from Georgia, volunteers, that they had been in the front-line trenches at exactly such a place for precisely so many weeks where such and such things happened, and before that at such another place, where they were so many strong, etc., etc.

“So we neveh saw real sto’s to buy things till we struck this town. And when I saw a cantaloupe I mighty nigh dropped daid! I don’t reckon I’m likely to run into a watermelon, am I? I suahly would have to be ca’ied back to camp on a stretcheh if I did!” He laughed out, a boy’s cloudless laughter. “But say, what do you-all think? I paid fo’ty-five cents for this slice, yes, ma’am, fo’ty-five cents for a _slice_, and back home in Geo’gia you pay a nickel for the biggest one in the sto’!” He buried his face in the yellow fruit.

The house began to shake to the ponderous passage of artillery. The boys in khaki turned their stag-like heads toward the street, glanced at the motley-colored, mule-drawn guns and pronounced expertly, “The 43rd, Heavy Artillery, going out to Nolepieds, the fellows from Illinois. They’ve just been up in the Verdun sector and are coming down to reinforce the 102nd.”

For the first time the idea crossed my head that possibly their mania for pouring out military information to the first comer might not be so fatal to necessary secrecy as it seemed. I rather pitied the spy who might attempt to make coherent profit out of their candor. “How do you like being in France?” I asked the boy who was devouring the melon.

He looked up, his eyes kindling, “Well, I was plumb crazy to get heah and now I’m heah I like it mo’ even than I ’lowed I would.” I looked at his fresh, unlined boy’s cheeks, his clear, bright boy’s eyes, and felt a great wave of pity. “You haven’t been in active service yet,” I surmised.

Unconsciously, gayly, he flung my pity back in my face, “You bet yo’ life I have. We’ve just come from the Champagne front, and the sehvice we saw theah was suah active, how about it, boys?”

They all burst out again in rapid, high-keyed, excited voices, longing above everything else for a listener, leaning forward over the table toward me, their healthy faces flushed with their ardor, talking hurriedly because there was so much to say, their tense young voices a staccato clatter of words which brought to me in jerks, horribly familiar war-pictures, barrage-fires meeting, advancing over dead comrades, hideous hand-to-hand combats--all chanted in those eager young voices.

I felt the heavy pain at the back of the head which presages a wave of mortal war-sickness.

In a pause, I asked, perhaps rather faintly, “And you like it? You are not ever homesick?”

The boy with the melon spoke for them all. He stretched out his long arms, his hands clenched to knotty masses of muscles; he set his jaw, his blue eyes were like steel, his beautiful young face was all aflame. “Oh, you just get to _love_ it!” he cried, shaking with the intensity of his feeling. “You just _love_ it! Why, I _neveh_ want to go home! I want to stay over heah and go right on killin’ _Boches_ all my life!”

At this I felt sicker, stricken with the collective remorse over the war which belongs to the older generation. I said good-by to them and left them to their child-like ecstasy over their peaches and melons.

The artillery had passed. The street was again solidly filled with dusty, heavily laden young men in khaki, tramping silently and resolutely forward, their brown steel casques, shaped like antique Greek shepherd hats, giving to their rounded young faces a curious air of classic rusticity.

An older man, with a stern, rough, plain face stood near me. “How do you do?” I asked. “Can you tell me which troops these are and where they are going?” I wondered what confident and uninformed answer I would receive this time.

Showing no surprise at my speech, he answered, “I don’t know who they be. You don’t never know anything but your own regiment. The kids always think they do. They’ll tell you this and they’ll tell you that, but the truth is we don’t know no more than Ann--not even where we are ourselves, nor where we’re going, most of the time.”

His accent made me say: “I wonder if you are not from my part of the country. I live in Vermont, when I’m at home.”

“I’m from Maine,” he said soberly, “a farmer, over draft age of course. But it looked to me like a kind o’ mean trick to make the boys do it all for us, so I come along, too.” He added, as if in partial explanation, “One of my uncles was with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”

“How do you like it, now you’re here?” I asked.

He looked at me heavily. “Like it? It’s hell!” he said.

“Have you been in active service?” I used my usual cowardly evasive phrase.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve killed some of ’em,” he answered me with brutal, courageous directness. He looked down at his hands as he spoke, big, calloused farmer’s hands, crooked by holding the plough-handles. As plainly as he saw it there, I saw the blood on them, too. His stern, dark, middle-aged face glowered down solemnly on those strong farmer’s hands. “It’s dirty work, but it’s got to be done,” he said, gravely, “and I ain’t a-going to dodge my share of it.”

A very dark-eyed, gracefully-built young soldier came loitering by now, and stopped near us, ostensibly to look at the passing troops, but evidently in order to share in the phenomenon of a talk in English with an American woman. I took him into the conversation with the usual query, “How do you do, and how do you like being in France?”

He answered with a strong Italian accent, and I dived into a dusty mental corner to bring out my half-forgotten Italian. In a moment we were talking like old friends. He had been born in Italy, yes, but brought up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His grandfather had been one of Garibaldi’s Thousand, so of course he had joined the American army and come to France among the first.

“Well, there are more than a Thousand of you this time,” I said, looking at the endless procession defiling before us.

“_Si, signora_, but it is a part of the same war. We are here to go on with what the Thousand began.”

Yes, that was true, John Brown’s soul and Garibaldi’s, and those of how many other fierce old fighting lovers of freedom were marching on there before my eyes, carried like invisible banners by all those strong young arms.

An elderly woman in well-brushed dowdy black came down the street toward us, an expression of care on her face. When she saw me she said, “Well, I’ve found you. They said you were in town to-day. Won’t you come back to the house with me? Something important. I’m terribly troubled with some American officers--oh, the war!”

I went, apprehensive of trouble, and found her house (save for a total absence of window-glass) in its customary speckless and shining order. She took me upstairs to what had been a bedroom and was now an office in the Quartermaster’s department. It was filled with packing-case improvised desks and with serious-faced, youngish American officers who, in their astonishment at seeing me, forgot to take their long black cigars out of their mouths.

“There!” said the woman-with-a-grievance, pointing to the floor. “Just look at that. Just _look_! I tell them and I _tell_ them, not to put their horrid boxes on the floor but to keep them on the linoleum, but they are so stupid, they can’t understand language that any child could take in! And they drag those boxes just full of nails all over the floor. I’m _sick_ of them and their scratches!”

A big gun boomed solemnly off on the horizon as accompaniment to this speech.

I explained in a neutral tone to the officers looking expectantly at me, what was at issue. I made no comment. None was needed evidently, for they said with a gravity which I found lovable that they would endeavor to be more careful about the floor, that indeed they had not understood what their landlady had been trying to tell them. I gave her their assurance and she went away satisfied.

As the door closed on her, they broke into broad grins and pungent exclamations. “Well, how about that! Wouldn’t that get you? With the town bombarded every night, to think the old lady was working herself up to a froth about her floor-varnish! And we thinking that every French person is breaking his heart over the invaded regions!”

One of them said, “I never thought of it before, but I bet you my Aunt Selina would do just that! I just bet if her town was bombarded she’d go right on shooing the flies out of her kitchen and mopping up her pantry floor with skim-milk. Why, the French are just like anybody, aren’t they? Just like our own folks!”

“They are,” I assured him, “so exactly like our own folks, like everybody’s own folks that it’s quite impossible to tell the difference.”

When I went away, the owner of the house was sweeping the garden-path clear of broken-glass. “This bombardment is such a nuisance!” she said disapprovingly. “I’d like to know what the place would be like if I didn’t stay to look after it.”

I looked at her enviously, securely shut away as she was by the rigid littleness of her outlook from any blighting comprehension of what was going on about her. But then, I reflected, there are instants when the comprehension of what is going on is not blighting. No, on the whole I did not envy her.

Outside the gate I fell in at once with a group of American soldiers. It was impossible to take a step in any direction in the town without doing this. After the invariable expressions of surprise and pleasure over seeing an American woman, came the invariable burst of eager narration of where they had been and what had been happening to them. They seemed to me touchingly like children, who have had an absorbing, exciting adventure and must tumble it all out to the first person they meet. Their haste, their speaking all at once, gave me only an incoherent idea of what they wished to say. I caught odd phrases, disconnected sentences, glimpses through pin-holes.

“One of the fellows, a conscript, that came to fill a vacant place in our lines, he was only over in France two weeks, and it was his first time in a trench. He landed there at six o’clock in the evening, and just like I’m telling you, at a quarter past six a shell up and exploded and buried him right where he stood. Yes, ma’am, you certainly do see some very peculiar things in this war.”

From another, “We took the whole lot of ’em prisoners, and passed ’em back to the rear, but out of the fifteen we took, eight died of sudden heart-disease before they got back to the prisoners’ camp.” (I tried not to believe this, but the fact that it was told with a laugh and received with a laugh reminded me gruesomely that we are the nation that permits lynching of helpless men by the mob.)

From another, “Some of the fellows say they think about the _Lusitania_ when they go after the _Boche_. I don’t have to come down as far as that. Belgium’s plenty good enough a whetstone for _my_ bayonet.” (This reminded me with a thrill that we are the nation that has always ultimately risen in defense of the defenseless.)

From another, “One of our own darkies went up to one of these here Senegalese and began talking United States to him. Of course the other darkey talked back in French, and ours said, ‘Why, you pore thing! You be’n over heah so long you dun forgot yo’ motheh-tongue!’”

From another, “Oh, I can’t stand the French! They make me tired! And their jabber! I seen some of ’em talk it so fast they couldn’t even understand each other! Honest, I did.”

From another, “There’s something that sort of _takes_ me about the life over here. I’m not going to be in any hurry to go back to the States and hustle my head off, after the war’s over.”

From another, “Not for mine. Me for Chicago the day after the _Boches_ are licked.”

They were swept away by a counter-current somewhere in the khaki ebb and flow about us, and I found myself with a start next to a _poilu_, yes a real _poilu_ with a faded horizon-blue uniform and a domed, battered, blue French casque, such a _poilu_ as had filled the town when I had lived there.

“Well,” I said to him, “things have changed here. The town’s khaki now.” He looked at me out of bright brown eyes, smiled, and entered into conversation. We talked, of course, of the American soldier, one of whom came up and stood at my elbow. When I stopped to speak to him, “Gee!” he said, “I wish I could rip it off like that. I can say ‘combien’ and ‘trop cher,’ but there I stick. Say, what does the Frenchman say about us? Now, since that little Belleau-wood business I guess they see we know a thing or two ourselves about how to run a war! They’re all right, of course; mighty fine soldiers, but Lord! you’d know by the way any one of them does business, as if he’s all day for it, that they couldn’t run a war _fast_, the way it ought to be run, the way we’re going to run it, now we’re here.”

I did not think it necessary to translate all of this to the bright-eyed little Frenchman on my other side, who began to talk as the American stopped. “You asked my opinion of the American troops, Madame. I will give it to you frankly. The first who came over, your regular army, the mercenaries, made a very bad impression indeed. All who have come since have made the best possible impression. They are really astonishingly courageous, and there could be no better, or more cordial comrades in the world. But oh! Madame, as far as they really know how to make modern war, they are children, just children! They make the mistakes we made four years ago. They have so much to learn of the technique of war, and they will lose so many men in learning it! It is sad to think of!”

I did not think it necessary to translate all this to the American who now shook hands with both of us and turned away. The Frenchman, too, after a look at the clock in the church-tower, made his compliments, saluted, and disappeared.

I walked forward and, coming to the church door, stepped inside. It was as though I had stepped into another world. I had found the only place in town where there were no soldiers. The great, gray, dim, vaulted interior was empty.

After the beat of the marching feet outside, after the shuffling to and fro of the innumerable men quartered in town, after the noisy shops crowded with khaki uniforms, after the incessant thunderous passage of the artillery and munitions-camions--the long, hushed quiet of the empty church rang loud in my ears. I wondered for just an instant if there could be any military regulation, forbidding our soldiers to enter the church; and even as I wondered, the door opened and a boy in khaki stepped in--one out of all those hordes. He crossed himself, took a rosary out of his pocket, knelt, and began his prayers.

Thirty-thousand soldiers were in that town that day. Whatever else we are, I reflected, we are not a people of mystics.

But then I remembered the American soldier who had said that Belgium was a good enough whetstone for his bayonet. I remembered the rough, gloomy farmer who did not want to shirk his share of the world’s dirty work. Perhaps there are various kinds of mystics.

Once outside the church I turned to look up Madame Larconneur, the valiant market-gardener who had been one of my neighbors, a tired young war-widow, with two little children, whom I had watched toiling early and late, day and night, to keep intact the little property left her by her dead soldier husband. I had watched her, drawing from the soil of her big garden, wet quite literally by her sweat, the livelihood for her fatherless little girls. I wondered what the bombardment of the town had done to her and her small, priceless home.

I found the street, I found the other houses there, but where her little, painfully, well-kept house had stood was a heap of stones and rubble, and in the place of her long, carefully tended rows of beans and cabbages and potatoes, were shell-holes where the chalky barren subsoil streaked the surface, and where the fertile black earth, fruit of years of labor, was irrevocably buried out of sight. Before all this, in her poor, neat black, stood the war-widow with her children.

I sprang forward, horrified, the tears on my cheeks. “Oh, Madame Larconneur, how awful! How awful!” I cried, putting out both hands to her.

She turned a white, quiet face on me and smiled, a smile that made me feel infinitely humble. “My little girls are not hurt,” she said, drawing them to her, “and as for all this--why, if it is a part of getting other people’s homes restored to them”--her gesture said that the price was not too high.

The look in her sunken eyes took me for an instant up into a very high place of courage and steadfastness. For the first time that day, the knot in my throat stopped aching. I was proud to have her put her work-deformed hands in mine and to feel on my cheeks her sister’s kiss.

It steadied me somewhat during the difficult next hour, when in the falling twilight I walked up and down between the long rows of raw earth, with the innumerable crosses, each with its new, bright American flag, fluttering in the sweet country air. I needed to recall that selfless courage, for my heart was breaking with sorrow, with guilt-consciousness, with protest, as I stood there, thinking of our own little son, of the mothers of the boys who lay there.

A squad of soldiers were preparing graves for the next day. As they dug in the old, old soil of the cemetery to make a place for the new flesh come from so far to lie there forever, a strong odor of corruption and decay came up in puffs and drifted away down toward the little town lying below us, in its lovely green setting, still shaking rhythmically to the ponderous passage of the guns, of the troops, of the camions.

At one side were a few recent German graves, marked with black crosses and others, marked with stones, dating from the war of 1870, that other nightmare when all this smiling countryside was blood-soaked--and how many times before that!

Above me, dominating the cemetery, stood a great monument of white marble, holding up to all those graves the ironic inscription, “Love ye one another.”

The twilight fell more and more deeply, and became darkness. The dull, steady surge of the advancing troops grew louder. Night had come, night no longer used for rest after labor in the sunlight, night which must be used to hurry troops and more troops forward over roads shelled by day.

They passed by hundreds, by thousands, an endless, endless procession--horses, mules, camions, artillery, infantry, cavalry; obscure shadowy forms no longer in uniform, no longer from Illinois, or Georgia or Vermont, no longer even American; only human--young men, crowned with the splendor of their strength, going out gloriously through the darkness to sacrifice.

“IT IS RATHER FOR US TO BE HERE DEDICATED”

“_It is rather for us to be here dedicated...._”

Out in the wheat-field, golden under a golden sun, I came suddenly on the young American soldier, lying dead, his face turned toward the _Bois de Belleau_. He was the stillest thing in all the silent countryside, ghostly quiet after the four-days’ din of battle, now gone forward and thundering on the horizon. Compared to his stillness, the wheat-stalks, broken and trampled as they were, seemed quivering conscious life; the trees, although half-shattered by the shell-fire, fluttered their bright leaves, vividly alive; the weeds by the roadside vibrated in triumph. They were wounded, mutilated, disfigured, but they had survived. They were alive. Only the soldier had not survived.

All men go a long journey to meet their death, through many days and months and years. But he and his comrades had gone a longer than any man before them. They had passed through all those days and months and years; and more than that, across unending miles of those other wheat-fields in a far country and across the unending miles of the ocean they saw for the first time; but far more than that, they had crossed incalculable gulfs of traditions, of prejudice, of the tyranny of old, fixed ideas.

He had come a long journey, he had trod a new road, he was fighting a new fight, this soldier who had turned his back on the limitations of the past, who was making forward into the future with all the strength and faith of his young manhood, when he met his sudden destiny and lay down forever in a wheat-field of France.

There he lay in a blessed, blessed stillness, having done his best.

Being still alive, and so not permitted to lie down by him to rest, I left him, and returned to a great city, any great city--all great cities everywhere in the world being the same.

I stood before the door of a shop. I saw an old, thin, work-deformed woman cowering before a well-fed man with a brutal voice who stood over her, angrily shouting at her that she had not sufficiently burnished the brass hinges of the great glass doors. With the rich abundance of the wheat-fields still golden before my eyes, I saw her cowering before him, all her sacred human dignity stripped from her by her need for food, by the fear of more hunger than even she could endure.

I saw a woman with a bloated, flabby body, strained together into a cohesion by steel bands, with a bloated, flabby face covered with red and white. Small glass-like pieces of white stone were thrust into the pierced flesh of her ears, gleamed on her protuberant bosom, on her puffed, useless fingers. With the roar of the distant battle still in my ears, I heard her saying, “The war is lasting too long! Lucette tells me that it’s impossible for her to get the right shade of silk for my corset; the only coiffeur who understands my hair has been sent to the front; and I have not had a bonbon in ten days.”

I saw a wretched, disinherited son of man, shaking with alcoholism, rotten with disease, livid with hunger, undone with hopelessness, flung on a bench like a ragged sack of old bones. Only the palsied trembling of his dirty hands showed that he lived. But with the awful odor of real death still in my nostrils, I perceived that he was alive, while the strong young soldier was dead.

I saw a man with a gross, pale countenance, with white fine linen and smooth black broad-cloth, who stepped confidently forward, not deigning to lift his eyes to the crowd about him, sure that they would give way before the costliness of his ring and pin.

In his soft, white hands he held a newly printed newspaper which, open at the news from the stock exchange, he read with an expression of eager rapacity. On his way stood a woman in all the fleshly radiance of her youth, with some of the holiness of youth still left on her painted mouth. She, looking at him hungrily, desperately, forced his eyes up to meet hers. With the glory of the dead soldier still in my soul, I saw the rapacity in his eyes change to lust, I saw an instant’s sickness in hers go out, quenched by the bravado of despair.

Oh, American soldier, lying still in the wheat-field of France, did you come so far a journey to meet your death in order that all this might continue?

“_Let us here highly resolve that all these dead shall not have died
in vain...._”

THE DAY OF GLORY

_... if the armistice is signed, a salvo of cannon from the Invalides at eleven o’clock will announce the end of the war._

The clock hands crept slowly past ten and lagged intolerably thereafter. The rapid beating of your heart, telling off the minutes, brought eleven finally very near. Then the clock, your heart, all the world, seemed to stand still. The great moment was there. Would the announcing cannon speak? Such a terrible silence as the world kept during that supreme moment of suspense! It was the quintessence of all the moral torture of four nightmare years.

And then ... like a shock within your own body it came, the first solemn proclamation of the cannon, shaking the windows, the houses, the very sky, with its news. The war was over. The accursed guns had ceased tearing to pieces our husbands and our sons and our fathers.

Of all the hundreds of thousands of women who heard those guns, I think there was not one who did not feel instantly, scalding on her cheeks, the blessed tears--tears of joy! She had forgotten that there could be tears of joy. The horrible weight on the soul that had grown to be a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging flood; the horrible constriction around the heart loosened. We wept with all our might; we poured out once for all the old bitterness, the old horror. We felt sanity coming back, and faith and even hope, that forgotten possession of the old days.

When the first tears of deliverance had passed, and your knees had stopped shaking, and your heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your throat, why, then every one felt one common imperious desire, to leave the little cramping prison of his own walls, to escape out of the selfish circle of his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving with that of all his fellows, to make himself physically, as he felt spiritually, at one with rejoicing humanity.

And we all rushed out into the streets.

I think there never can have been such a day before, such a day of pure thanksgiving and joy for every one. For the emotion was so intense that, during the priceless hours of that first day, it admitted no other. Human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. The dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. We lived and drew our breath only in the knowledge that “firing had ceased at eleven o’clock that morning,” and that those who had fought as best they could for the Right had conquered. You saw everywhere supreme testimony to the nobility of the moment, women in black, with bits of bright-colored tricolor pinned on their long black veils, with at last a smile, the most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed eyes. They were marching with the others in the streets; every one was marching with every one else, arm in arm, singing:

_Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_

The houses echoed to those words, repeated and repeated by every band of jubilant men and women and children who swept by, waving flags and shouting:

_Come, children of our country,
The Day of Glory is here!_

Every group had at its head a permissionnaire or two in field uniform who had been pounced upon as the visible emblem of victory, kissed, embraced, covered with flowers, and set in the front rank to carry the largest flag. Sometimes there walked beside these soldiers working women with sleeping babies in their arms, sometimes old men in frock coats with ribbons in their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted, laughing little munition workers still in their black aprons, but with tricolored ribbons twisted in their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed ladies, sometimes women in long mourning veils, sometimes ragged old beggars, sometimes a cab filled with crippled soldiers waving their crutches--but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing jubilee. During those few blessed hours there was no bitterness, no evil arrogance, no revengeful fury. Any one who saw all that afternoon those thousands and thousands of human faces all shining with the same exaltation can never entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing them to be capable of that pure joy.

_The Day of Glory has come._

The crowd seemed to be merely washing back and forth in surging waves of thanksgiving, up and down the streets aimlessly, carrying flowers to no purpose but to celebrate their happiness. But once you were in it, singing and marching with the others, you felt an invisible current bearing you steadily, irresistibly, in one direction; and soon, as you marched, and grew nearer the unknown goal, you heard another shorter, more peremptory, rhythm mingling with the longer shout, repeated over and over:

_Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_

Now people were beginning to shout: “To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!” Then you knew that you were being swept along to the Place de la Concorde, to salute the statue of Strasbourg, freed from her forty years of mourning and slavery.

The crowd grew denser and denser as it approached that heart of Paris; and the denser it grew the higher flamed the great fire of rejoicing, mounting up almost visibly to the quiet gray skies:

_Come, children of our country,
The Day of Glory is here!_

“To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!”

No evil epithets hurled at the defeated enemy, not one, not one in all those long hours of shouting out what was in the heart; no ugly effigies, no taunting cries, no mention even of the enemy--instead a fresh outburst of rejoicing at the encounter with a long procession of Belgians, marching arm in arm, carrying Belgian flags and pealing out like trumpets the noble Brabançonne! We made way for them with respectful admiration, we stopped our song to listen to theirs, we let them pass, waving our hats, our handkerchiefs, cheering them, pressing flowers upon them, snatching at their hands for a clasp as they went by, blessing them for their constancy and courage, sharing their relief till our hearts were like to burst!

We fell in behind them and at once had to separate again to allow the passage of a huge camion, bristling with American soldiers, heaped up in a great pyramid of brown. How every one cheered them, a different shout, with none of the poignant undercurrent of sympathy for pain that had greeted the Belgian exiles. These brave, lovable, boyish crusaders come from across the sea for a great ideal, who had been ready to give all, but who had been blessedly spared the last sacrifice--it was a rollicking shout which greeted them! They represented the youth, the sunshine; they were loved and laughed at and acclaimed by the crowd as they passed, waving their caps, leaning over the side to shake the myriad hands stretched up to them, catching at the flowers flung at them, shouting out some song, perhaps a college cheer, judging by the professionally frantic gestures of a cheer leader, grinding his teeth and waving his arms wildly to exhort them to more volume of sound. Whatever it was, it was quite inaudible in the general uproar, the only coherent accent of which was the swelling cry repeated till it was like an elemental sound of nature.

_The Day of Glory has arrived._

Now a group of English soldiers overtook us, carrying a great, red, glorious English flag, adding some hearty, inaudible marching song to the tumult. As they passed, a _poilu_ in our band sprang forward, seized one of the Anglo-Saxons in his arms, and kissed him resoundingly on both cheeks. Then there was laughter, and shouts and handshakings and more embracing, and they too vanished away in the waves of the great river of humanity flowing steadily, rapidly toward the statue of the lost city whose loss had meant the triumph of unscrupulous force, whose restitution meant the righting of an old wrong in the name of justice. We were almost there now; the huge open _Place_ opened out before us.

Now we had come into it, and our songs for an instant were cut short by one great cry of astonishment. As far as the eye could reach, the vast public square was black with the crowd, and brilliant with waving flags. A band up on the terrace of the Tuileries, stationed between the captured German airplanes, flashed in the air the yellow sheen of their innumerable brass instruments, evidently playing with all their souls, but not a sound of their music reached our ears, so deafening was the burst of shouting and singing as the crowd saw its goal, the high statue of the lost city, buried in heaped-up flowers and palms, a triumphant wreath of gold shadowing the eyes which so long had looked back to France from exile.

Ah, what an ovation we gave her! Then we shouted as we had not done before, the great primitive, inarticulate cry of rejoicing that bursts from the heart too full. We shook out our flags high over our heads, as we passed, we cast our flowers up on the pedestal, we were swept along by the current--we were the current ourselves!

At the base of the statue a group of white-haired Alsatians stood, men and women, with quivering lips and trembling hands. Theirs was the honor to arrange the flowers which, tossed too hastily by the eager bearers, fell to the ground.

As they stooped for them, and reached high to find yet one more corner not covered with blooms, a splendid, fair-haired lad, sturdy and tall, with the field outfit of the French soldier heavy on his back, pushed his way through the crowd.

He had in his hand a little bouquet--white and red roses, and forget-me-nots. His eyes were fixed on the statue. He did not see the old men and women there to receive the flowers. He pressed past them and with his own young hands laid his humble offering at the feet of the recovered city. He looked up at the statue and his lips moved. He could not have been more unconscious if he had been entirely alone in an Alsatian forest. The expression of his beautiful young face was such that a hush of awe fell on those who saw him.

An old woman in black took his hand in hers and said: “You are from Alsace?”

“I escaped from Strasbourg to join the French army,” he said, “and all my family are there.” His eyes brimmed, his chin quivered.

The old woman had a noble gesture of self-forgetting humanity. She took him in her arms and kissed him on both cheeks. “You are my son,” she said.

They all crowded around him, taking his hand. “And my brother!” “And mine!” “And mine!”

The tears ran down their cheeks.

BY DOROTHY CANFIELD

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LITTLE JOURNEYS TOWARDS PARIS (1914-1918)