Part 7 (1/2)

In another part of the field we saw the engineers learning to make tunnels under the enemy; saw the engineers blowing up enemy trenches--a pleasant and exciting spectacle; saw the engineers making camouflage, and it may interest the gentle reader to know that one of the niftiest bits of camouflage we saw was over a French seventy-five gun. It was set in the field. A rail-road siding ran to it. On a canvas over the gun two rails and the usual number of ties were painted, and the track ran on beyond. Fifty feet in the air one could not tell that the gun was there.

The liveliest part of this martial cloister was the section devoted to the bayonet practice. And as we watched the men trying to rip the vest b.u.t.tons off a dummy and expose its gastric arrangements with a bayonet, while loping along at full speed, we recalled a Civil War story which may well be revived here. A Down-easter from Vermont and a Southerner were going around and around one day at s.h.i.+loh, each trying to get the other with the bayonet, but both were good dodgers. Finally as the Yankee was getting winded he cried between puffs:

”Watch aout--! Mind what yer dewin'! Ye dern smart aleck! Haint yew got no sense! You'll stick the pint of thet thing in my boawels, if you ain't keerful!”

We heard a lot of s.h.i.+very stories around that training camp. They told us that the French cha.s.seurs, the famous blue devils, were more or less careless about the way they forgot to take prisoners.

They are a proud people, from the French Alps, and exceedingly democratic. A German brigadier, caught under their barrage, came up to a troop of cha.s.seurs and when they demanded his surrender asked curtly, ”Where's your superior officer?” They pointed down the hill, and he started down. At a safe distance they threw a hand grenade into him and obliterated him, remarking, ”Well, the world is that much safer for democracy.” It is told of a Canadian who came across a squad of Germans with their hands up that he asked: ”How many are you?” Eleven, they said. He reached in his pocket; found his hand grenade, and threw it at them, remarking, ”I'm sorry I have but the one; but divide it between you!” There is also the story of the Indian Sikhs, who begged to go out on a night raiding party--crawling on their bellies with their knives as their only weapons. Finally two of them returned with new pairs of boots.

Showing them proudly to their amazed Captain, they said humbly, ”Yes, sire! But you would be pained to learn how long we had to hunt for a fit!” There is also the story of the festive Tommy who tried to play a practical joke on his German prisoner by slipping a lighted bomb in the German's pocket. The Tommy then started to run; the German thought he must keep up with his captor and Tommy realized that the joke was on him, just as the bomb went off and killed them both.

Such stories are innumerable. They are probably untrue. But they indicate what men at war think is funny; they reflect a certain impoliteness and lack of courtesy that prevails in war. As it wears on it grows more or less unneighbourly. And yet the upheaval of war is just a pa.s.sing emotional disturbance in the normal life of men. Even in France, even in the war zone, there is no glorifying of war; men in war, at least on our side of the line, hate war more than they hate the Germans. And with the whole heart of the civilized world--if one frankly may call the Turk and the Prussian the savages that they are--set upon maintaining this war to a victory for the allies, civilization may be said to be in the war as a make-s.h.i.+ft. Everywhere one hears that it is a war against war.

Every one is ”longing for the dawn of peace” when it shall come with justice, and in the meantime France is as deeply devoted to healing the wounds of war as it is in promoting the war. Six hundred French societies are devoted to various war works of mercy! Every man and woman in France who is not a soldier or a nurse is working in one of these societies. And yet life goes on with all this maladjustment of its cams and cogs and levers much as in its ordinary routine. There never were more joyous dahlias and phlox and china asters than we saw coming back from that training camp where men were learning the big death game. And when we came to Paris the real business of war seemed remote. Of course, Paris is affected by the war. But Paris is not war-like. One doesn't a.s.sociate Paris with ”grim-visaged war!” For if Paris is not gay, still it remains mighty amiable. At noon the boulevard cafes are filled to the side-walks, and until nine o'clock at night they give a fair imitation of their former happiness. Then they close and the picture shows are crowded, and the theaters are filled. One sees soldiers and their women folk at the opera and at the vaudeville shows more than at the other shows. During the summer and the autumn a strong man put on a show at the Follies with the soldiers that was the talk of the town. His game was a tug of war. He announced that he would give fifty dollars to any soldier who could withstand him. The strong man sat the soldier down on the floor, foot to foot before him.

Both grasped a pole, and it was the strong man's ”act” to throw the soldier over his head, on to a mattress just back of the strong man. It is a simple act; one that soon would tire Broadway, but when one remembers that soldiers bring their local pride with them to Paris from the ends of the earth, from New Zealand, from India, from Canada, from South Africa, from Morocco, from China, from Australia, and then when one remembers that the men of his country are gathered in the theater to back every local athlete, it is easy to see why the strong man holds week after week, month after month, season after season. Every night some proud nation gathers in the show house to get that fifty dollars with its favourite son. And every night some favourite son almost gets it. And if the strong man didn't fudge a little, pinch the favourite son's hands on the pole and make him let go, almost every night the strong man would be worsted. The struggle sets the house yelling. It is the only real drama in Paris. We noticed that the shows of Paris which appealed to the eyes and ears were far below the American standard.

In comedy which appeals to something behind the sense, in the higher grades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better than Broadway shows. But in the choruses, the dancers lack that finish, that top dressing of mechanical unison required by American taste.

Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. The music at the Follies was Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to be in vogue. One heard ”O Johnny” and ”Over There” at every vaudeville house this year. Sometimes they were done in French, sometimes in English. In Genoa, one may say in pa.s.sing that we heard one of the songs from ”Hitchy-Coo” done in Italian. It was eery! American artists are popular in Paris. We saw a girl at three show houses in Paris, under the name of Betty Was.h.i.+ngton, doing a gipsy dance, playing the fiddle. She was barefoot, and Henry, who has a keen eye, noticed that she had her toes rouged! But she always was good for four encores, and she usually got a good start at the fifth from Henry and me; we had just that much national pride! Great throngs of soldiers filled these gay show houses. The French, the English, and the Australians seemed satisfied with them. But the Canadians and Americans sniffed. To them Paris is a poor show town.

One night we fell into a Boulevard show the like of which we had never seen before. It was a political revue! The whole evening was devoted to skits directed at the ministry, at the food administration, at the scandals in the interior department and the deputies, at the high taxes and the profiteering of the munition makers. The skits were done in dialogue, song and dance, and the various forms of burlesque. A good crowd--but not a soldier crowd--sat through it and applauded appreciatively. Imagine an American audience devoting a whole evening to a theatrical performance exclusively concerned with Hoover, Secretary Daniels, Colonel Roosevelt, former Mayor Mitchel, and LaFollette. In America we get little politics out of the theater. In France, where they distrust the newspapers, they get much politics from the theater. The theater is free in France--and apparently not so closely censored as the newspapers. We learned that night at the revue of a coming cabinet crisis, before the newspapers announced it. And in learning of the crisis we had this curious social experience, which we modestly hoped was quite as Parisian as the Revue. During the first act of the show it was Greek to Henry and me. We could understand a vaudeville show, and by following the synopsis could poke along after the pantomime in a comedy. But here in this revue, where the refinements of sarcasm and satire were at play and that without a cue, we were stumped. Henry was for getting out and going somewhere else. But we had a dollar a seat in the show and it seemed to me that patience would bring results.

And it did! A good-looking, middle-aged couple sat down in the seats next to us, and the woman began talking English. She was sitting next to me, so it was my turn, not Henry's to speak. We asked her if it would be too much trouble to interpret the show for two jays from Middle Western America. She replied cordially enough. And she gave us a splendid running interpretation of the show. The man with her seemed friendly. We noticed that he was slyly holding her hand in the dark, and that once he slipped his arm around her when the lights went clear down. But that spelled a newly married middle-aged couple, and we would have bet money that he was a widower and she, late from his office, was at the head of his household. Between acts he and Henry went out to smoke, leaving me with the lady. We exchanged confidences of one sort and another after the manner of strangers in a strange land. When it occurred to me to ask: ”What does your husband do for a living?”

”My--what?” she exclaimed.

”Your husband, there?”

”Who--that man? Why, I never saw him in my life until I picked him up in a cafe an hour ago!”

And she got from me a somewhat gaspy ”Oh.” But we had a good chat just the same and she told me all about the coming fall of the cabinet. Her type in America would not be interested in politics.

But the shows of the boulevards discuss politics and the theaters are free! So her type in France had to know politics. It takes all kinds of people and also all kinds of peoples to make a world.

And the war really is being fought so that they may work out their lives and their national traditions freely and after the call of their own blood. If we are to have only one kind of people, the kind is easy to find. There is kultur!

Still the love affairs of the French did bother us. Henry did not mind them so much; but to me they seemed as unreasonable and as improbable as the ocean and onion soup seemed to Henry. Every man has his aversion, and the French idea of separating love from marriage, and establis.h.i.+ng it beautifully in another relation, is my aversion, and it will have to stand. Henry was patient with me, but we were both genuinely glad when a day or two later we came back to the sprightly little American love affair that we had chaperoned on the Espagne crossing the ocean. That love affair we could understand. It had been following us with a feline tenacity all over France. When we left the Eager Soul with the Gilded Youth in the hospital at--we'll say Landrecourt, because that is not the place--we thought our love affair was gone for ever. The letter she gave us to deliver to the Young Doctor we had to trust to other hands; for he was not at the American hospital where he should have been. He had gone to the British front for a week's experimental work in something with four syllables and a Latin name at that. But the cat came back one day, when we were visiting a hospital four hours out of Paris. The place had that curious French quality of charm about it, which we Americans do not manage to put into our ”places and palaces.” Down a winding village street--a kind of low-walled stone canyon, narrow and grey, but brightened with uniforms like the streets of most French villages these days--we wormed our machine and stopped at an important looking building--an official looking building. It was not official, we learned--just a chateau. A driveway ran under it. That got us. For when a road leads into a house in America, it means a jail, or a courthouse, or a hotel, or a steel magnate's home or a department store. But when we scooted under the house we came into a wide white courtyard, gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard into a garden--the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the corners of the garden were fine old trees--tall, spike-shaped evergreens of some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree and a fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about the walks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phlox and asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers of various gay sorts. And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital--a new modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from the street by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was made of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, built architecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof to represent ”green fields and running brooks.” Board floors and board part.i.tions under the roof were covered as well as they could be; and stoves furnished the heat. The beds--acres and acres of iron beds--were a.s.sembled in the great wards and stretched far down the long rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was American--new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. We were proud of it, and of the business-like young medical students who as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in their brand new uniforms--young crown princes of democracy, twice as handsome and three times as dignified as they would have been if they had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent ”of all the ages” and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the place a tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into a king's palace. When we had finished our errand at the hospital and were returning through the garden, we met our young doctor. He was sitting on an old stone bench, among the asters and dahlias--wounded.

It was not a serious wound from an ordinary man's stand-point; but from the Young Doctor's it was grave indeed. For it was a bullet wound through his hand. He thought it would not affect the muscles permanently--but no one could know. Then he sat there in the mediaeval garden among the flowers under the yew trees and told us how it happened; took us out to the first aid post again, and on out to the first line trenches, and over them into No Man's Land, stumbling over the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with the wounded. In time he came to a wounded German--a Prussian officer with a sh.e.l.l-wound in his leg.

He told us what happened, impersonally, as one who is listening to another man's story in his own mouth. ”I gave him something like a first aid to stop the bleeding,” the young Doctor paused, picked a ravelling from his bandage and went on, still detached from the narrative. ”Then I put my arm around him, to help him back to the ambulance.” Again he hesitated and said quietly, ”That was a half mile back and the sh.e.l.ls were still popping--more or less--around us.” He looked for appreciation of the situation. He got it, smiled and went on without lifting his voice. ”Then he did it”

”Not that fellow?” exclaimed Henry.

”Well, how?” from me.

”Oh, I don't know. He just did it,” droned the Young Doctor. ”We were talking along; and then he seemed to quit talking. I looked up. The pistol was at my head; I knocked it away as he fired. It got my hand!” He stopped, began poking the gravel with his toe, and smiled again as one who has heard an old story and wants to be polite. To Henry and me, it was unbelievable. We sat down on the h.o.a.ry, moss-covered curb of the ancient fountain regardless of our spanking new uniforms and cried: ”Well, my Heavenly home!” He nodded, drew a deep breath and said, ”That's the how of it.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: He told us what happened impersonally as one who is listening to another man's story in his own mouth]

”Well, what do you know about--”

Then Henry checked me with, ”You weren't expecting it? Did he make no warning sign?”

”Not a peep--not a chirrup,” answered the Doctor, still diffidently.

Then he added, as one reflecting over an incident in a rather remote past: ”It was odd, wasn't it. You would think that two men who stood where we were together--I, who had put my hands in his live flesh, and had felt his blood flow through my fingers, and he who was clinging to my body for support--you would think we had come together not as foes, but as friends; for the war was over for him!”