Part 31 (1/2)

Imagine the life of one of these cavalrymen, as I heard it described by many of them in the beginning of the war.

They were sent forward on a reconnaissance--a patrol of six or eight.

The enemy was known to be in the neighbourhood. It was necessary to get into touch with him, to discover his strength, to kill some of his outposts, and then to fall back to the division of cavalry and report the facts. Not an easy task! It quite often happened that only one man out of six came back to tell the tale, surprised at his own luck. The German scouts had clever tricks.

One day near Bethune they played one of them--a favourite one. A friend of mine led six of his dragoons towards a village where Uhlans had been seen. They became visible at a turn of the road, and after firing a few shots with their carbines turned tail and fled. The French dragoons gave chase, across some fields and round the edge of a quiet wood. Suddenly at this point the Uhlans reined in their horses and out of the wood came the sudden shattering fire of a German quickfirer. Fortunately it was badly aimed, and my friend with his six dragoons was able to gallop away from that infernal machine which had so cleverly ambushed them.

There was no rest for the cavalry in those first days of the war. The infantry had its bivouac every day, there was rest sometimes in the trenches, but the cavalry had to push on always upon new adventures to check the enemy in his advance.

A young Russian officer in the French dragoons told me that he had been fighting since the beginning of the war with never more than three hours sleep a night and often no sleep at all. On many nights those brief hours of rest were in beetroot fields in which the German shrapnel had been searching for victims, and he awakened now and then to listen to the well-known sound of that singing death before dozing off again.

It was ”Boot and saddle” at four o'clock in the morning, before the dawn. It was cold then--a cold which made men tremble as with an ague. A cup of black coffee was served, and a piece of bread.

The Russian officer of French dragoons, who has lived in British Colonies, saw a vision then--a false mirage--of a British breakfast. It was the thought of grilled bloaters, followed by ham and eggs, which unmanned him for a moment. Ten minutes later the cavalry was moving away. A detachment was sent forward on a mission of peril, to guard a bridge. There was a bridge near Bethune one night guarded by a little patrol. It was only when the last man had been killed that the Germans made their way across.

Through the darkness these mounted men leaned forward over their saddles, peering for the enemy, listening for any jangle of stirrup or clink of bit. On that night there came a whisper from the cavalry leader.

”They are coming! ... Quiet there!”

A file of dark shadows moved forward. The dragoons swung their carbines forward. There was a volley of shots before a cry rang out.

”Cessez feu! Cessez feu!”

The cry had been heard before from German officers speaking excellent French, but this time there was no treachery in it. The shadows who moved forward through the night were Frenchmen changing from one trench to another.

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The infantryman had a hard time, too. It was true that theoretically he might sometimes s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours of sleep in a trench or out in an open field, but actually the coldness of the night was often an acute agony, which kept him awake. The food question was a difficult one.

When there was heavy fighting to be done, and rapid marching, the provisions became as theoretical as the hours of sleep.

I heard the graphic recital of a sergeant of infantry, which was typical of many others in those early days.

His section awakened one morning near Armentieres with a famis.h.i.+ng hunger, to find an old peasant woman coming up with a great barrow-load of potatoes.

”These are for your breakfast, my little ones,” she said. ”See, I have some f.a.ggots here. If you care to make a fire there will be roast potatoes for you in twenty minutes.”

”Madame, you are too kind,” said my sergeant. He helped to make the fire, to pack it with potatoes. He added his eloquence to that of his comrades when the fragrant smell made his nostrils quiver. And just as the potatoes were nearly done up came a motor cyclist with orders that the section was to move on immediately to a place fifteen kilometres away. It was a tragedy! There were tearful farewells to those potatoes. Fifteen kilometres away there was a chateau, and a friendly lady, and a good cook who prepared a dinner of excellent roast beef and most admirable fried potatqes. And just as the lady came to say ”Mes amis, le diner est servi,” up panted a Belgian cyclist with the news that German cavalry was advancing in strong force accompanied by 500 motor-cars with mitrailleuses and many motor-cycles, and a battery of horse artillery. It was another tragedy!

And the third took place sixteen hours later, when this section of infantry which had been marching most of that time lay down on an open field to sleep without a supper.

Yet--”Nothing matters except the rain,” said a friend of mine in the French artillery. He shrugged his shoulders as he spoke, and an expression of disgust came upon his bearded face. He was thinking, perhaps, of his beloved guns which lose their mobility in the quagmires of the fields. But the rain is bad also for men and beasts. It takes eight days for a French overcoat to get thoroughly dry after a bad wetting. Even the cavalryman's cloak is a poor s.h.i.+eld against the driving rain, and at night wet straw or a water pool in a trench is not a pleasant kind of bed.

”War,” said one of the French officers with whom I have chatted, ”is not only fighting, as some people seem to think. The physical discomforts are more dangerous to one's health than shrapnel. And it is--par exemple--the impossibility of changing one's linen for weeks and weeks which saps one's moral fibre more than the risk of losing one's head.”

The risk of death is taken lightly by all these men. It is curious, indeed, that almost every French soldier has a conviction that he will die in battle sooner or later. In moments of imagination he sees his own corpse lying out in the field, and is full of pity for his wife and children. But it does not destroy his courage or his gift of gaiety or his desire to fight for France or his sublime endurance of pain.

The wounded men who pour down from the battlefields are incredibly patient. I have seen them stand on a wounded leg to give their places in a railway-carriage to peasant women with their babies. They have used their bandaged hands to lift up the baskets of refugees. They forget their wounds in remembering their adventures, and the simple soldier describes his combats with a vivid eloquence not to be attained by the British Tommy, who has no gift of words.

The French soldier has something in his blood and strain which uplifts him as a fighting man, and gives him the quality of chivalry. Peasant or bourgeois or of patrician stock he has always the fine manners of a gentleman, and to know him in the field is to love the humour and temper of the man.

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