Part 29 (1/2)

Not a mile along all that five hundred miles of front was without its battle, and not a mile there but is the grave of young Frenchmen who fought with a martyr's faith and recklessness of life. As far back as the last days of September 1914 I met men of the eastern frontier who had a right already to call themselves veterans because they had been fighting continuously for two months in innumerable engagements--for the most part unrecorded in the public Press.

At the outset they were smart fellows, clean-shaven and even spruce in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers. Now the war had put its dirt upon them and seemed to have aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces. They had stubble beards upon their chins, and their cheeks were sunken and hollow, after short rations in the trenches and sleepless nights on the battlefields, with death as their bedfellow. Their blue coats had changed to a dusty grey. Their scarlet trousers had deep patches of crimson, where the blood of comrades had splashed them. They were tattered and torn and foul with the muck and slime of their frontier work. But they were also hard and tough for the most part-- though here and there a man coughed wheezily with bronchitis or had the pallor of excessive fatigue--and Napoleon would not have wished for better fighting-men.

In the wooded country of the two ”Lost Provinces” there was but little time or chance to bury the dead enc.u.mbering the hills and fields.

Even six weeks after the beginning of the war horror made a camping ground of the regions which lay to the east of the Meurthe, between the villages of Blamont and Badonviller, Cirey les Forges and Arracourt, Chateau Salins and Baudrecourt. The slopes of Hartmansweilerkopf were already washed by waves of blood which surged round it for nine months and more, until its final capture by the French. St. Mihiel and Les Eparges and the triangle which the Germans had wedged between the French lines were a shambles before the leaves had fallen from the autumn trees in the first year of war. In the country of the Argonne men fought like wolves and began a guerilla warfare with smaller bodies of men, fighting from wood to wood, from village to village, the forces on each side being scattered over a wide area in advance of their main lines. Then they dug themselves into trenches from which they came out at night, creeping up to each other's lines, flinging themselves upon each other with bayonets and b.u.t.t-ends, killing each other as beasts kill, without pity and in the mad rage of terror which is the fiercest kind of courage. In Lorraine the tide of war ebbed and flowed over the same tracts of ground, and neither side picked up its dead or its wounded. Men lay there alive for days and nights, bleeding slowly to death. The hot sun glared down upon them and made them mad with thirst, so that they drank their own urine and jabbered in wild delirium. Some of them lay there for as long as three weeks, still alive, with gangrened limbs in which lice crawled, so that they stank abominably.

”I cannot tell you all the things I saw,” said one of the young soldiers who talked to me on his way back from Lorraine. He had a queer look in his eyes when he spoke those words which he tried to hide from me by turning his head away. But he told me how the fields were littered with dead, decomposing and swarmed with flies, lying here in huddled postures, yet some of them so placed that their fixed eyes seemed to be staring at the corpses near them. And he told me how on the night he had his own wound French and German soldiers not yet dead talked together by light of the moon, which shed its pale light upon all those prostrate men, making their faces look very white. He heard the murmurs of voices about him, and the groans of the dying, rising to hideous anguish as men were tortured by ghastly wounds and broken limbs. In that night enmity was forgotten by those who had fought like beasts and now lay together. A French soldier gave his water-bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst.

The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who had been his enemy. ”There will be no war on the other side,” he said.

Another Frenchman--who came from Montmartre--found lying within a yard of him a Luxembourgeois whom he had known as his cha.s.seur in a big hotel in Paris. The young German wept to see his old acquaintance. ”It is stupid,” he said, ”this war. You and I were happy when we were good friends in Paris. Why should we have been made to fight with each other?” He died with his arms round the neck of the soldier who told me the story, unashamed of his own tears.

Round this man's neck also were clasped the arms of a German officer when a week previously the French piou-piou went across the field of a battle--one of the innumerable skirmishes--which had been fought and won four days before another French retirement. The young German had had both legs broken by a sh.e.l.l, and was wounded in other places. He had strength enough to groan piteously, but when my friend lifted him up death was near to him.

”He was all rotten,” said the soldier, ”and there came such a terrible stench from him that I nearly dropped him, and vomited as I carried him along.”

I learnt something of the psychology of the French soldier from this young infantryman with whom I travelled in a train full of wounded soon after that night in Lorraine, when the moon had looked down on the field of the dead and dying in which he lay with a broken leg. He had pa.s.sed through a great ordeal, so that his nerves were still torn and quivering, and I think he was afraid of going mad at the memory of the things he had seen and suffered, because he tried to compel himself to talk of trivial things, such as the beauty of the flowers growing on the railway banks and the different badges on English uniforms. But suddenly he would go back to the tale of his fighting in Lorraine and resume a long and rapid monologue in which little pictures of horror flashed after each other as though his brain were a cinematograph recording some melodrama. Queer bits of philosophy jerked out between this narrative. ”This war is only endurable because it is for a final peace in Europe.” ”Men will refuse to suffer these things again. It is the end of militarism.” ”If I thought that a child of mine would have to go through all that I have suffered during these last weeks, I would strangle him in his cradle to save him from it.”

Sometimes he spoke of France with a kind of religion in his eyes.

”Of course, I am ready to die for France. She can demand my life as a right. I belong to her and she can do with me what she likes. It's my duty to fight in her defence, and although I tell you all the worst of war, monsieur, I do not mean that I am not glad to have done my part. In a few weeks this wound of mine will be healed and I shall go back, for the sake of France, to that h.e.l.l again. It is h.e.l.l, quand meme!”

He a.n.a.lysed his fears with simple candour and confessed that many times he had suffered most from imaginary terrors. After the German retreat from Luneville, he was put on a chain of outposts linked up with the main French lines. It was at night, and as he stood leaning on his rifle he saw black figures moving towards him. He raised his rifle, and his finger trembled on the trigger. At the first shot he would arouse the battalion nearest to him. They were sleeping, but as men sleep who may be suddenly attacked. They would fire without further question, and probably he would be the first to die from their bullets.

Was it the enemy? They were coming at right angles to the French lines. The foremost were even within twenty yards of him now. His nerves were all trembling. He broke out into a hot sweat. His eyes straining through the darkness were shot through with pain. He had almost an irresistible desire to fire and shout out, so as to end the strain of suspense which racked his soul. At last he gave the challenge, restraining himself from firing that first shot. It was well he did so. For the advancing French troops belonged to a French regiment changing their position under cover of darkness. If my little friend had lost his nerve and fired too soon they would have been shot down by their own comrades.

”It's one's imagination that gives one most trouble,” he said, and I thought of the words of an English officer, who told me one day that ”No one with an imagination ought to come out to this war.” It is for that reason--the possession of a highly developed imagination--that so many French soldiers have suffered more acutely than their English allies. They see the risks of war more vividly, though they take them with great valour. They are more sensitive to the sights and sounds of the fighting lines than the average English ”Tommy,” who has a tougher temperament and does not allow his mind to brood over blood and agony. They have the gift, also, of self-a.n.a.lysis and self-expression, so that they are able to translate their emotions into vivid words, whereas our own men are taciturn for the most part about their side of the business and talk objectively, looking outwards, and not inwards.

5

Some of the letters from French soldiers, scrawled in the squalor of the trenches by men caked in filth and mud, are human doc.u.ments in which they reveal themselves with extraordinary intimacy, and in which they put the whole truth, not disguising their terror or their blood-l.u.s.t in the savage madness of a bayonet charge, or the heartache which comes to them when they think of the woman they love, or the queer little emotions and sentiments which come to them in the grim business of war. They watch the dawn, and in a line or two put some of its beauty into their letters home. They describe with a literary skill that comes from strong emotions the gloom and horror of long nights near the enemy's trenches from which at any moment a new attack may come. And yet, though they do not hide their moments of spiritual misery or despair, there is in all these letters the splendid courage of men who are ready for the last sacrifice and eager for their chance of honour.

”I send this letter,” writes a young Zouave, ”as I sit huddled under an earth-heap at twenty yards from a German trench, less to be envied than a rabbit in its burrow, because when the hunter is far away it can come out and feed at pleasure. You who live through the same agonies, old friend, must learn and rejoice that I have been promoted adjutant on the night of November 13 on the banks of the Yser. There were seventy men out of 250--the rest of the company sleep for ever round that ferryman's house which the papers have made famous...

What moral sufferings I have endured! We have now been brought to the south of Ypres and continue this depressing life in advanced trenches. Not a quarter of an hour's respite: sh.e.l.ls, shrapnels, bombs and bullets fall around us continuously. How courage has changed with this modern war! The hero of olden times was of a special type, who put on a fine pose and played up to the gallery because he fought before admiring spectators. Now, apart from our night attacks, always murderous, in which courage is not to be seen, because one can hardly discern one's neighbour in the darkness, our valour consists in a perfect stoicism. Just now I had a fellow killed before a loophole. His comrades dragged him away, and with perfect quietude replaced the man who is eternally out of action. Isn't that courage?

Isn't it courage to get the brains of one's comrade full in the face, and then to stand on guard in the same place while suffering the extremes of cold and dampness? ... On the night of the 13th I commanded a section of corpses which a mitrailleuse had raked. I had the luck to escape, and I shouted to these poor devils to make a last a.s.sault.

Then I saw what had happened and found myself with a broken rifle and a uniform in rags and tatters. My commandant spoke to me that night, and said: 'You had better change those clothes. You can put on an adjutant's stripes.'”

One pa.s.sage in this young Zouave's letter reveals the full misery of the war to a Frenchman's spirit: ”Our courage consists in a perfect stoicism.” It is not the kind of courage which suits his temperament, and to sit in a trench for months, inactive, waiting for death under the rain of sh.e.l.ls, is the worst ordeal to which the soul of the French soldier is asked to submit. Yet he has submitted, and held firm, along lines of trenches, 500 miles from end to end, with a patience in endurance which no critics of France would have believed possible until the proof was given. Above the parapet lie the corpses of comrades and of men who were his enemies until they became poor clay.

”The greater number of the bodies,” writes a soldier, ”still lie between the trenches, and we have been unable to withdraw them. We can see them always, in frightful quant.i.ty, some of them intact, others torn to bits by the sh.e.l.ls which continue to fall upon them. The stench of this corruption floats down upon us with foul odours. Bits of their rotting carcases are flung into our faces and over our heads as new sh.e.l.ls burst and scatter them. It is like living in a charnel house where devils are at play flinging dead men's flesh at living men, with fiendish mockery. The smell of this corruption taints our food, and taints our very souls, so that we are spiritually and physically sick. That is war!”

”This horrible game of war,” writes another man, ”goes on pa.s.sionately in our corner. In seventy-four days we have progressed about 1200 yards. That tells you everything. Ground is gained, so to speak, by the inch, and we all know now how much it costs to get back a bit of free France.”

6