The Glory of the Coming

CHAPTER XX. THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

SEEKING for the thrills that experience had taught me would nevertheless probably not be forthcoming anywhere in this so-called quiet sector, I went that same day with a young American officer to a forward post of command, which was another name for a screened pit dug in the scalp of a fair-sized hillock, immediately behind our foremost rifle pits. Sitting here upon the tops of our steel helmets, which the same make fairly good perches to sit on when the ground is muddied, we could look through periscope glasses right into the courtyard of a wrecked château held by the enemy. Upon this spot some of the guns behind us were playing industriously. We could see where the shells struck – now in the garden, now near the shattered outbuildings, now ripping away a slice of the front walls or a segment of the roof of the château itself; and we could see too, after the dust of each hit had somewhat lifted, the small gray figures of Germans scurrying about like startled ants.

A mile away, about, were those Germans, and yet to all intents and purposes they might have been twenty miles away; for as things stood, and with the forces that they had at this point, it would have taken them days or perhaps weeks to bridge the gap between their lines and ours, and it would have taken us as long to get to where they were. For you see both forces had abundance of artillery, but each was holding its front lines with small groups of infantry. To sit there and peer into their defences was like looking into a distant planet peopled by men thinking different thoughts from ours, and swayed by different ambitions and moved by impulses all running counter to those of our breed.

Nevertheless, I must confess that the sensation of crouching in that hole in the ground, spying upon the movements of those dwellers of that other small world, while high above us the shells passed over, shrieking their war-whoops as they travelled from or toward our back lines, very soon lost for me the savour of interest, just as it had lost it a month before when I did the same thing in front of Noyon, or two weeks before near Verdun, or as afterward it was to do when I repeated the experience near Rheims.

So after a bit my companion and I fell to enjoying the beauties of the day. In front of us lay a strip of gentle pasture slope not badly marred by shell craters, and all green except where lovely wide slashes of a bright yellow flower cut across it like rifts of fallen sunshine. The lower reaches of air were filled with the humming of bees, and every minute the skylarks went singing up into the soft skies as though filled with a curiosity to find out what those wailing demons that sped crisscrossing through the heavens might be. Presently from a thicket behind us sounded a bell-like bird note with a sort of melodious cluck in it. I had never heard that note before except when uttered by wooden clocks of presumably Swiss manufacture, but I recognised it for what it was.

“Listen,” said my companion: “that’s the second time within a week I’ve heard it. A French liaison officer was with me then, and he said that for three years now the cuckoo had been silent, and he said that the French country people believed that since the cuckoo had begun calling again it was a sign the war would soon be over – that the cuckoo was calling for peace on earth.”

“I wonder if he was right,” I said.

“Well, he was right so far as he personally was concerned. This war for him was nearly over. Night before last he was riding back to division headquarters in a side car, and a shell dropped on him at a crossroads and he and the driver were killed.”

We sat a minute or two longer and nothing was said.

“Well,” he said at length, “if you’ve had enough of this we’ll be getting back. It isn’t very much of a show, once a fellow gets used to it, and I guess the major will have supper ready for us pretty soon. Ready to go?”

We got up cautiously and put our helmets on the proper ends of us and started back through the shallow communication trench leading to the village.

“Being where you can look right across and down into the German lines makes a fellow wonder,” I suggested. “It makes a fellow wonder what those men over yonder are thinking about and what their feelings toward us are, and whether they hate us as deeply as they hate the British’.”

“I guess I can figure out what one of them thinks anyhow,” he said with a quizzical side-wise glance at me. He flirted over his shoulder with his thumb. “I’ve got a brother somewhere over yonder ways – if he’s alive.” He smiled at the look that must have come across my face. “Oh, you needn’t suspect me,” he went on. “I judge I’m as good an American as you are or any man alive is, even if I do wear a German name. You see I’m a youngest son. I was born in the good old U. S. A. all right enough, but two of my brothers, older than I am, were born in Germany, and they didn’t come to America when the rest of the family migrated. And one of them, last time I heard from him before we got into the mess, was a lieutenant in a Bavarian field battery. Being a German subject I suppose he figures he’s only doing his duty, but how he can go on fighting for that swine of a Kaiser beats me. But then, I don’t suppose I can understand; I’m an American citizen. Funny world, isn’t it?

“Say, listen! That cuckoo is calling again. I wonder if there is anything in the superstition of the French peasants that peace will come this year. Well, so far as I am concerned I don’t want it to come until Uncle Sam has finished up this job in the right way. I only hope the next time I hear the cuckoo sing it’ll be in the outskirts of Berlin – that is, providing a cuckoo can stand for the outskirts of Berlin.”

I reminded him that the cuckoo was a bird that stole other bird’s nests – or tried to.

“That being so, I guess Berlin must be full of ‘em,” said he.

The major’s headquarters – he was a major of artillery – was in the chief house of the little town. Curiously enough this was almost the only house in the town that had not been hit, and two days later it was hit, and in the ruins of it a friend of mine, another major, was crushed; but that is a different story, not to be detailed here. It stood – the house, I mean – in a little square courtyard of its own, as most village houses in this part of France do, being flanked on one side by its stable and on the other side by its cow barn and by its chicken houses. There was a high wall to inclose it along the side nearest the street, with rabbit hutches and pigeon cots tucked up under the wall. In the centre of the court was a midden for manure. It had been a cosy little place once. The dwelling was of red brick with a gay tiled roof, and the lesser buildings and the wall were built of stones, as is the French way. Even the rabbit hutches were stone, and the dovecot and the cuddy for the fowls. Now, except for American artillerymen, it was all empty of life. The paved yard was littered with wreckage; the doors of the empty cubicles stood open.

I sat with the major and his adjutant on the doorstep of the cottage waiting for the orderlies to call us in to eat our suppers. Through the lolled gate in the wall an old man, a civilian, entered. He was tall and lean like one of the lombard trees growing in the spoiled vegetable garden at the back of the house, and he was dressed in a long frock coat that was all powdered with a white dust of the roads. He had a grave long face, and we saw that he limped a little as he came across the close toward us. Nearing us he took off his hat and bowed.

“Pardon, ‘sieurs,” he said in Norman French, “but could I look through this house?”

“No civilians are permitted here now,” said the major. “How did you get here?”

“I was given a pass to return,” he explained. “Your pardon again, m’sieurs, but I am – I was – the mayor of this town, and this is my house. I mean, it was my house. The Germans came upon us so rapidly we had to leave on but two hours’ notice, taking with us very little. Not until to-day could I secure leave to come back. I wished to see what was left of my home – I always had lived here before, you know – and to gather up some of my belongings, if I might.”

“Where did you come from?” asked the major.

“From – .” He named a town twenty-two miles away.

“And how did you get here?”

“I walked.” He lifted his shoulders in an expressive gesture. “There was no other way. And I must walk back to-night. There is no shelter nearer except for soldiers.”

He looked past us into the main room of the house. Its floor of tiles was littered with dried mud. A table and three broken chairs that had given way beneath the weight of heavy and careless men were its only furniture now. The window panes had been shattered. It was hard to picture that this once had been a cozy, comfortable room, clean and tidy, smartened with pictures and ornaments upon the walls and with curtains at the casement openings, which now gaped so emptily.

“Not much is left, eh?” said the old man, his face twitching. “Well c’est la guerre!”

“I’m afraid your home is rather badly wrecked,” said the major. “Since I came here my men have tried to do no more damage to it than they could help, but Algerians were here before us; and the Algerians, as you know, are rough in their habits and sometimes they loot houses. Do you wish to enter? If so, go ahead. And if you are hungry I would be glad to have you stay and eat with us.”

The stranger hesitated a moment.

“No, no,” he said; “of what use to go in? I have seen enough. And thank you, m’sieur but I do not wish any food.”

He bowed once more and turned away from us; but he did not go away directly. He went across the court to his barn and tugged at a door that was half ajar. From within came the grumbled protest of a Yankee gunner lying just inside on a pile of straw, and indignant at being roused from a nap.

The man who owned the barn backed away, making his apologies. He picked up a hay fork that lay upon the dungpile, and near the gate, under the shadow of the wall, he stooped again and picked up a broken clock that some one had tossed out of the house. Then, after one more glance all about the place as though he strove to fix in his mind a picture of it, not as now it was but as once it had been, he stepped through the gate, and with his pitiable salvage tucked under his bony arms he vanished up the road.

When that night I summed up my experiences the memories of the day that stood out clearest in my mind were not of the guns nor the aëroplanes nor the bursting shells nor yet the sight in the German lines, but of the mistreated dog that howled and of the cuckoo that fluted in the thicket and of the old man who had trudged so far, over perilous roads, to look with his eyes for the last time, surely, upon the sorry ruination of his home. And I felt that I, a man whose business it is to see interesting things and afterward to put them down in black and white, was acquiring in some degree the perspective of the soldier, whose mental viewpoint is so foreshortened by the imminent presence of the greater phases of war that he comes after a while to regard the inconsequential, and so looks on the incidental phases of it as of more account than the complexities of its vast, hurrying, overdriven mechanism.

For the point I have been trying, perhaps clumsily, to make clear all along is just this: As a general thing it may be set down that except for those infrequent occasions when there is a charge to be made or a charge to be repelled, or except when some freak of war, new to the trooper’s experience, is occurring or has just occurred, he in all essential outer regards is exactly the same person that he was before he went a-soldiering, with nothing about him to distinguish him from what he was then, barring the fact that now he wears a uniform.

Spiritually he may have been transformed; indeed he must have been, but it is a shading of spirituality that but rarely betrays itself in his fashion of speech or in his physical expression or in his behaviour. Doing the most heroic things he nevertheless does them without indulging in any of the heroics with which the fiction of books and the fiction of stagecraft love to invest the display of the finer and the higher emotions of mankind.

Living where death in various guises is ever upon the stalk for him he learns to regard it no more than in civil life he regards the commoner manifestations of a code of civilised procedure that ethically is based upon a plan to safeguard his life and his limb from mischance and ill health. The habit of death becomes to him as commonplace as the habit of life once was. He gets used to the incredible and it turns commonplace. He gets used to the extraordinary, which after it has happened a few times becomes most ordinary. He gets used to being bombed and is bored thereby; gets used to gas alarms and bombardments; to high explosives, spewing shrapnel, and purring bullets; gets used to eating his meals standing up and taking his rest in broken bits. He gets used to all of war’s programme – its impossibilities and its contradictions, its splendours, its horrors and its miseries. In short he gets used to living in a world that is turned entirely upside down, with every normal aspect in it capsised and every regular and ordained phase of it standing upon its head.

For a fact it seems to me that in its final analysis the essence of war is merely the knack of getting used to war. And the instantaneous response of the average human being to its monstrous and preposterous aspects is a lesson to prove the elasticity and the infinite adaptability of the human mind. Because people can and do get used to it is the reason why they do not all go mad in the midst of it. Getting used to it – that’s the answer. After a while one even gets used to the phenomenon that war rarely or never looks as you would think war should look – and that brings me by a roundabout way back again to the main text of my article.

Troops travelling in numbers across country do not present the majestic panoramic effect that one might expect. This in part, though, is due to the common topography of France. Generally speaking, a given district is so cut up with roads threading the fields that the forces, for convenience in handling, are divided into short columns that move by routes that are practically parallel, toward a common destination. The sight of troops going into camp at night also is disappointing. In France, thickly settled as it is, with villages tucked into every convenient dip between the hills, the men are so rapidly swallowed up in the billeting spaces under house and bam roots that an hour or even half an hour after the march has ended you might traverse a district where, let us say, twenty thousand soldiers are quartered, and unless you know the correct figures the evidence offered to your eyes might deceive you into assuming that not one-tenth of that number were anywhere in the vicinity.

It is this failure of war, when considered as a physical thing, to measure up to its traditional Impressiveness, that fills with despair the soul of the writing man, who craves to put down on paper an adequate conception of it in its entirety. Finally he comes to this: That either he must throw away the delusions he himself nourished and content himself by building together little mosaics with scraps gleaned from the big, untellable, untranslatable enigma that it is, or for the reader’s sake must try to conjure up a counterfeit conception, which will correspond with what he knows the average reader’s mental vision of the thing to be. In one event he is honest – but disappointing. In the other he is guilty of a willful deceit, but probably turns out copy that is satisfying to his audience. In either event, in his heart he is bound to realise the utter impossibility of depicting war as it is.

It is one of the cumulating paradoxes of the entire paradoxical procedure that the best place to get a reasonably clear and intelligible idea of the swing and scope of a battle is not upon the site of the battle itself, but in a place anywhere from ten to twenty miles behind the battle. Directly at the front the onlooker observes only those small segments of the prevalent hostilities that lie directly under his eyes. He is hedged in and hampered by obstacles; his vision is circumscribed and confined to what may be presented in his immediate vicinity.

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. I am speaking not of every case but of the average case.

A fairish distance back, though, he may to an extent grasp the immensity of the operation. He sees the hammered troops coming out and the fresh troops going in; beholds the movements of munitions and supplies and reserves; observes the handling of the wounded; notes the provisions that are made for a possible advance and the preparations that have been made for a possible retreat. Even so, to the uninitiated eye the scheme appears jumbled, haphazard and altogether confused. It requires a mind acquainted with more than the rudiments of military science to discern purpose in what primarily appears to be so absolutely purposeless. There is nothing of the checkerboard about it; the orderliness of a chess game is lacking. The suggestion is more that of a whirlpool. So it follows that the novice watches only the maelstrom on the surface and rarely can he fathom out the guiding influences that ordain that each twistiwise current moves in its proper channel without impairment or impediment lor any one of the myriad of related activities.

Being a novice he is astonished to note that only infrequently do wounded men act as his fictional reading has led him to believe they would act. To me the most astounding thing about this has been not that wounded men shriek and moan, but that nearly always they are so terribly silent. At the moment of receiving his hurt a man may cry out; often he does. But oftener than not he comes, mute and composed, to the dressing station. The example of certain men who lock their lips and refuse to murmur, no matter how great is their pain, inspires the rest to do likewise. A man who in civil life would make a great pother over a trivial mishap, in service will endure an infinitely worse one without complaint. If war brings out all the vices in some nations it most surely brings out the virtues in others. I hate to think back on the number of freshly wounded men I have seen, but when I do think back on it I am struck by the fact that barring a few who were delirious and some few more who were just emerging into agonised consciousness following the coma shock of a bad injury, I can count upon the fingers of my two hands the total of those who screamed or loudly groaned. Men well along the road to recovery frequently make more troublesome patients than those who have just been brought to the field hospitals; and a man who perhaps has lain for hours with a great hole in his flesh, stoically awaiting his turn under the surgeon’s hands, will sometimes, as a convalescent, worry and fret over the prospect of having his hurts redressed.