The Glory of the Coming

CHAPTER XIX. WAR AS IT ISN’T

THREE of us, correspondents, had gone up with a division of ours that was taking over one of the Picardy sectors. The French, moved out by degrees as we by degrees moved in. On the night when we actually came into the front lines two of us slept – or tried to – in a house of a village perhaps a mile and a half behind the forward trenches. The third man went on perhaps a half mile nearer the trouble zone with a battalion of an infantry regiment that on the morrow would relieve some sorely battered poilus in the trenches. It is with an experience of this third man I now mean to deal.

He found lodgment in a château on the outskirts of a village the name of which does not matter – and probably never will matter again, seeing that it fairly was blasted out of the earth by its foundations the next time the Germans attempted to resume their advance toward the Channel. As for the château, which likewise must be quite gone by now, it was more of a château than some of the buildings that go by this high-sounding title in the edges of Normandy.

A château may mean a veritable castle of a place, with towers upon it and a moat and gardens and terraces and trout ponds round about it. Then again on the other hand it may mean merely a sizable private residence, standing somewhat aloof in its own plot from the close-huddled clustering of lesser folks’ cottages that make up the town proper. The term is almost as elastic in its classifications as the word estate is in America. In this instance, though, the château was a structure of some pretensions and much consequence. Rather, it had been when its owner fled before the great spring advance, leaving behind him all that he owned except a few portable belongings. The neighbours had run away, too, and for months now the only tenants of the vicinity had been troops.

French officers and a few American officers were occupying the château. Every room and every hallway was crowded already, but space for the correspondent to spread down his bedding roll was provided in an inner chamber on the second floor. At two o’clock in the morning, by consent of the divisional commander, he was going out into the debatable land between the trenches with a wire-mending party. There is always a chance that a wire party will bump into a squad of enemies on the prowl or surprise a raiding outfit from Fritzie’s trenches, and then there are doings to ensue.

Two o’clock was four hours off and the special guest hoped to get a little sleep in the ‘tween times. It was a vain hope, because, to judge by their behaviour, the Germans had found out a relief division was on its way in. Since nightfall they had been shelling the back areas of the sector, and particularly the lines of communication, with might and main – and six-inch guns. For the most part the shells were passing entirely over and far beyond the château, but they made quite as much noise as though they had been dropping in the courtyard outside – more noise, as a matter of seeming, because the screech of a big shell in its flight overhead racks the eardrums as the crash of the explosion rarely does unless the explosion occurs within a few rods of one.

So for four hours or thereabouts our correspondent lay on his pallet, wide-eyed, and with every nerve in his body standing on end and wriggling. When the French liaison officer who had volunteered to escort him on the adventure rapped upon his door he was quite ready to start. He had taken off nothing except his trench helmet and his gas mask before turning in, anyhow.

“Walk very quietly, if you please,” bade the Frenchman, leading the way out, with a pocket flashlight in his hand.

Obeying the request the correspondent tiptoed along behind his guide. To get outdoors they passed through two other rooms and down a flight of stairs and along a hallway opening into the wrecked garden. In the beds that were in the rooms and upon blankets on the floors of the rooms and also in the hallway French officers were stretched, exhaling the heavy breaths of men who have worked hard and who need the rest they are taking. Only one man stirred, and that was downstairs as the pair who were departing picked their way between the double rows of sleepers. A loose plank creaked sharply under the weight of the American, and a man stirred in his coverlids and opened his eyes for a moment; and then, turning over, was off again almost instantly.

At that, understanding came to the correspondent – he knew now why the thoughtful liaison officer had cautioned him to step lightly. To these men lying here about him the infernal clamour of the shells had become a customary part of their lives, whether waking or sleeping. To their natures, accustomed as they were to it, this hideous din was a lullaby song. But any small unusual sound, such as the noise of a booted foot falling upon a squeaky board, might rouse them, and two men clumping carelessly past them would have brought every one of them out of his slumbers, sitting up.

Paradoxes such as this are forever cropping up in one’s wartime experiences. Indeed, war may be said to be made up of countless paradoxes, overlapping and piled one upon another. To me the most striking of the outstanding manifestations of war on its paradoxical side is the fact that in this war nothing, or almost nothing, actually turns out in accordance with what one’s idea of it had been beforehand. Looking backward on what I myself have viewed of its physical and metaphysical aspects I can think of scarcely an element or a phase which accorded with my preconceived brain image of the thing. I do not mean by this that as a spectacle it has been disappointing, but that almost invariably it has been different from what I was expecting it would be. I found this to be true in 1914, back at the very beginning.

Take for example the fashion after which men bear themselves as they go into battle; and, for a more striking illustration than that, their customary deportment after they actually are in the battle. I figure that beforehand my own notion of what these two demonstrations would be like was based probably in part upon conceptions derived from old-time pictures of Civil War engagements, highly coloured, highly imaginative representations such as used to hang upon the parlour walls of every orthodox rural home in our country; and in part upon fiction stories with war for a background which I had read; and finally perhaps in some lesser part upon the moving-picture man’s ideas as worked out with more or less artistic license in the pre-war films. I rather think the average stay-at-home’s notions in these regards must be pretty much what mine were, because he probably derived them from the same sources. The utter dissimilarity of the actual thing as I have repeatedly viewed it in three countries of Europe astonished me at first, and in lessening degree continued to astonish me until the real picture of it had supplanted the conjured one in my mind.

If the reader’s ideas are still fundamentally organised as mine formerly were he thinks men on the edge of the fight, with the prospect before them of very shortly being at grips with the enemy, maintain a sober and a serious front, wearing upon them the look of men who are upborne and inspired by a purpose to acquit themselves steadfastly and well. By the same process of reasoning I take it that the reader, conceding he or she has never been brought face to face with war, pictures men on the march in periods of comparative immunity from immediate peril as singing their way along, with jokes and catchwords flitting back and forth and a general holidaying air pervading the scene presented by the swinging column. Now my observation has been that the exact opposite is commonly the case.

Men on the casual march, say, from one billeting place to another, are apt to push ahead stolidly and for the most part in silence. It is hard work, marching under heavy equipment is, and after a few hours of it the strongest individual in the ranks feels the pangs of weariness in his scissoring legs and along his burdened back. So he bends forward from the hips and he hunches his shoulders and wastes mighty little of his breath in idle persiflage. Only toward the end of the journey, when rest and food are in impending prospect, do his spirits revive to a point where he feels like singing and guying his mates. The thud-thud-thud of the feet upon the highroad, the grunted commands of the officers, and the occasional clatter of metal striking against metal as a man shifts his piece are likely to be the only accompaniments of the hike for miles on end; and there isn’t much music really in such sounds as these.

But suppose the same men are moving into action and know whither they are bound. The preliminary nervousness that possesses every normally constituted man at the prospect of facing the deadliest forms of danger now moves these men to hide their true emotions under a masking of gaiety. This gaiety, which largely is assumed at the outset, presently becomes their real mood. Nine men out of ten who pass are indulging in quips and catches. Nine in ten are ready to laugh at trivialities that ordinarily would go unnoticed. One standing by to watch them must diagnose the average expression on the average face as betokening exultation rather than exaltation. The tenth man is quiet and of a thoughtful port. He is forcing himself to appraise the situation before him in its right proportions, and so the infection that fills his comrades passes him by. Yet it is safe to bet on it that the sober one-tenth, in the high hour of the grapple, will contend with just as much gallantry as the nine-tenths can hope to show.

Particularly is the mental slant that I have here sought to describe true in its application to raw troops who have yet to taste of close-up fighting. Seasoned veterans who have weathered the experience before now and who know what it means, and know, too, that they may count upon themselves and their fellows to acquit themselves valorously, are upborne by a certain all-pervading cheerfulness – perhaps as a rule confidence would be a better word than cheerfulness – but they are not quite so noisy, not quite so enthusiastic as the greener hands. At this moment they are not doing very much in the cheering line, though they will yell just as loudly as any when the order is to fix bayonets and charge.

Paradoxically the reaction upon men who have come whole out of the inferno of battling at close quarters affects these two compared classes of soldier-men differently – at least that has been my observation. The unseasoned men, to whom the hell from which they have just emerged has been for them a new kind of hell, are as likely as not almost downcast in their outward demeanour, irritable and peevish in their language. For one thing, they are dog-tired; for another, I would say, a true appreciation of the ordeal through which they have passed is now coming home to them; for still another, the shock of having seen their mates wiped out all about them surely affects the general consciousness of the survivors; and finally, as I appraise their sensations, the calm following the tumult and the struggle leaves them well-nigh numbed. Certainly it frequently leaves them inarticulate almost to dumbness. Give them twenty-four hours for rest and mental adjustment, and the coltishness of youth returns to them in ample measure, especially if there is a victory to their credit.

On the contrasting hand, if you want to witness an exhibition of good cheer at the end of a day of fighting seek for it among the veterans. On a certain day in May when the second of the great German drives was in progress I chanced to be at a spot where a brigade of French infantry – a brigade with a magnificent record made earlier in the war – was thrown into action to reenforce a hard-pressed and decimated British command. Almost without exception the little dusty, rusty poilus went to the fighting in a sort of matter-of-fact methodical silence more impressive to me than loud outbursts could possibly have been. Quietly, swiftly, without lost motion or vain exclamations, but moving all like men intent upon the performance of a difficult and an unpleasant but a highly necessary task, they took up their guns, adjusted their packs of ammunition, set their helmets over their foreheads, and walked with no undue haste but only with an assured and briskened serenity into the awfulness that was beyond the clouds of smoke and dust, just yonder.

That same evening, by a streak of luck, I returned to approximately the same spot at the moment when those who were left of the Frenchmen prepared to bivouac on the edges of the same terrain where all the afternoon they had fought. With the help of some skeleton formations of British companies they had withstood the German onslaught; more than that, they had broken two advancing waves of the gray coats and finally had swept the ripped and riddled legions of the enemy back for a good mile, so that now they held the field as victors. Elsewhere along that fifty-mile front there might be a different story to tell, but here in this small corner of the great canvas of the mighty battle a localised success that was worth while had been achieved by these heroes. Under them now their legs quivered from stark weariness. Some were black like negroes; the stale sweat and the dried dirt and the powder grit had caked them over. Some were red like Indians, where the crusted blood from small unconsidered wounds dyed the skin on their faces and their hands.

Now with the fog of fighting turning grey upon their unwashed bodies they sprawled on the stained and trodden meadow grass alongside the road, looking, with their figures foreshortened by lying, most absurdly like exceedingly dirty small boys who had been playing at soldiering. Yet spent and worn as they were they gibed us as we passed, and with uplifted canteens they toasted us – presumably in the thin Pinard; and they sang songs without number and they uttered spicy Gallic jokes at the expense of the mess cooks for their tardiness in making ready the supper stews. The job of the day was done with and ended; it was a fit time for being merry, and these little men were most exceedingly merry.

Such was the excess of their jollifying that had one not known better one might have suspected that they had been drinking something stronger than the thin wine ration upon which no Frenchman ever gets drunk. I recall one stunted chap who reeled and staggered as he made his way toward our halted car to ask us for news from the eastward. He had stuck into the sooted muzzle of his rifle a sheaf of wild flowers; and reeling and rocking on his heels he sought to embrace us when we offered him cigarettes. He was tipsy all right; but not with liquor – with emotion; the sort of emotion that temporarily befuddles a fighting man who has fought well and who is glad to have finished fighting for the time being, at least. As we left him he was propped upon his short unsteady legs at the roadside singing the song that your poilu always by preference sings when his mood inclines to the blithesome; he sang the Madelon.

Right here, I think, is a good enough time for me to say that in these times the place to hear the Marseillaise hymn played or sung is not France but America. In America one hears it everywhere – the hand organs play it, the theatre orchestras play it, the military bands play it, pretty ladies sing it at patriotic concerts. In France in seven months I have heard it just twice – once in the outskirts of the great battle on March twenty-sixth, just outside of Soissons, when a handful of French soldiers hurrying up to the fight were moved by some passing fancy, which we who heard them could not fathom, to chant a verse or two of the song; and again on Memorial Day, when an American band played it in a French burying ground at a coast town where the graves of three hundred of our own soldiers were decorated.

It may be that the Frenchman has grown wearied of the sound of his national air, or it may be – and this, I think, is the proper explanation – that in this time of stress and suffering for his land the Marseillaise hymn has for him become a thing so high and so holy that he holds it for sacred moments, to be rendered then as the accompaniment for a sacrificial rite of the spirit and of the soul. At any rate it is true that except on the one occasion I have just mentioned I have yet to hear the French soldier in the field sing the Marseillaise hymn. He much prefers his cheerful chansons, and when an American band plays for him it is a jazz tune that most surely may be counted upon to make him cry “Encore! ”

As illustrative of the difference in temperament between the veteran and the beginner at war I should like to describe what many times I have witnessed as an incident in the streets of Paris. All through the past spring and the early part of the summer the members of the class of 1919 were holding celebrations in commemoration of the fact that they were about to be called to the service. Their emblematic colour for this year is red, and their chosen flower is the poppy, so the youngsters call themselves Coquelicots, which is the French name for the crimson wild poppy that grows everywhere in France. The class of 1918, who went out last year, were Pâquerettes – white daisies; and those of 1917 were Bluets, or cornflowers. Every three years the fancy repeats itself in the same sequence and the same cycle, so that the trinity of the national colours may be preserved.

Almost any hour, day or night, one might see troops of those about to be mobilised – schoolboys of eighteen, apprentice lads, peasant youths, cadets of military academies – parading the avenues. They wore all manner of fantastic garbings, with enormous red neckties and red sashes, and battered high hats banded with red, and with poppies stuck in their buttonholes or festooned in garlands about their necks. And always they were singing and skylarking, marching with fantastic jig steps in grotesque queue formations, and playing pranks upon the pedestrians who got in their way. The sight made an American think of college fraternities conducting outdoor initiations. The scene gave colour and the sparkle of youthful exuberance to a city where the sad sights are commoner than the happy ones.

It was inevitable that in every few rods of their progress the youngsters would encounter soldiers on leave, and then the boys, dropping for a moment their joyousness, would gravely salute the veterans, and the veterans as gravely would return the salute. Then the roisterers would whirl off down the sidewalk waving their exaggerated walking sticks and kicking up their heels as is the way with youth the world over, and the soldiers in their stained patched tunics, and their worn leather housings, and with their worn resolute faces – how often I have seen this little byplay repeated! – would exchange swift expressive glances with one another and smile meaning, sad little smiles, and shake their heads in a sort of passive resignation to the inevitable, before they went trudging on in their heavy, run-down, shabby boots. They knew – these war-worn elders did – what the chosen man children of the generation just emerging from the first stages of its adolescence would very shortly be called upon to face; and so they shook their heads in silent but regretful affirmation of the certain prospect of an added burden of woefulness and suffering for the flowered youth of their stricken land. For these men who had trod the paths of glory that are so flinty and so hard could understand what must lie ahead so much better than those stripling lads to whom the road to war was as yet a shining and a golden highway!

Have you ever seen at the movies a film purporting to show an actual scene in the trenches under hostile fire, wherein the men on guard there all faced, with squinted eyes and scowling brows, across the parapets, fingering their weapons nervously, and rarely or never glanced toward the camera, but seemingly were so absorbed in their ambitions to pot the foeman across the way they had no thought for anything except the tragic undertaking in hand? Then again, have you ever seen another so-called war reel with a similar setting, which brought before you the figures of soldiers who from behind the shelter of the piled-up sandbags grinned self-consciously in the direction of the machine that was recording their forms and their movements for back-home consumption, and who between intervals of loading and firing deported themselves pretty much as any group of sheepishly pleased young men might while under the eye of a photographing machine and who for the moment appeared to be more inspired by a perfectly normal human impulse to show off than by any other thought?

Now I have seen both these varieties of pictures and assuming that the reader has, too, I put to him or her this question: Granting that one of these films was the genuine article, namely, a view of a section of a front-line trench taken at risk of the operator’s life; and that the other was a manufactured thing, with carefully rehearsed supers made up as soldiers posing in obedience to a hired director’s orders, which one, in the reader’s opinion, was the authentic thing and which the bogus?

If I have figured the probable answer aright the probable answer is wrong. The picture in which the soldiers behaved in conformity with the average civilian’s notion of the way a soldier does behave under fire – to wit, by being all intent upon the job of shooting, with no regard for any lesser diversions – was the imitation; and the film in which you saw the soldiers crowding forward in the narrow trench way in order to be sure of getting into the focus area – the one where you saw the soldiers grinning toward you and winking and nudging their fellows and generally behaving like curious and embarrassed children – well, that was the genuine article.

For the fact of the matter is that once the novelty of his new environment has worn off – and it does wear off with marvellous speed – the soldier in the front-line trench carries on after identically the same patterns that would govern him under ordinary circumstances. The detail that he is in a place of imminent danger becomes to him of secondary importance. Except for the chance that any moment he may stop a bullet his mode of habit resolves itself back to its familiar elements. He is bored or he is interested by exactly the same things that would bore him or excite him anywhere else. To him the shooting back and forth across the top very soon becomes a more or less tedious part of the daily routine of the trench life, but the intrusion into his corner of a moving-picture man with a camera is a novelty, an event very much out of the ordinary; therefore he pays much more attention to the taking of the picture than to what goes on pretty steadily during practically all of his waking hours.

For added qualities of seeming indifference to externals in the midst of great and stirring exertions, see the artillerymen who serve with the heavies. Generally things are fairly lively among those dainty, darling, death-dealing pets that are called the 75’s. Under their camouflaging they look like speckled pups when they do not look like spotted circus ponies. It is a brisksome and a heartening thing to see how fast a crew of Frenchmen can serve a battery of these little pintos, feeding the three-inch shells into the pieces with such celerity that at a distance the reports merge together so one might almost imagine he heard the voice of an overgrown machine gun speaking, instead of the intermingled voices of five separate trouble makers. Near Compiègne one day I watched a battery of 75’s at work on the Germans advancing in mass formation, I keeping count of the reports; and the average number of shots per minute per gun was twelve.