With the French in France and Salonika Part 2

But, perhaps, what was of greatest interest was the remarkable adjustment of these surroundings, royal and imperial, to the simple and dignified needs of a republic.

France is a military nation and at war, but the evidences of militarism were entirely absent. Our own White House is not more empty of uniforms.

One got the impression that he was entering the house of a private gentleman--a gentleman of great wealth and taste.

We pa.s.sed at last through four rooms, in which were the secretaries of the President, and as we pa.s.sed, the majordomo spoke our names, and the different gentlemen half rose and bowed. It was all so quiet, so calm, so free from telephones and typewriters, that you felt that, by mistake, you had been ushered into the library of a student or a Cabinet minister.

Then in the fourth room was the President. Outside this room we were presented to M. Sainsere, the personal secretary of the President, and without further ceremony M. Benazet opened the door, and in the smallest room of all, introduced me to M. Poincare. His portraits have rendered his features familiar, but they do not give sufficiently the impression I received of kindness, firmness, and dignity.

He returned to his desk and spoke in a low voice of peculiar charm. As though the better to have the stranger understand, he spoke slowly, selecting his words.

"I have a great admiration," he said, "for the effectiveness with which Americans have shown their sympathy with France. They have sent doctors, nurses, and volunteers to drive the ambulances to carry the wounded. I have visited the hospitals at Neuilly and other places; they are admirable.

"The one at Juilly was formerly a college, but with ingenuity they have converted it into a hospital, most complete and most valuable. The American colony in Paris has shown a friends.h.i.+p we greatly appreciate.

Your amba.s.sador I have met several times. Our relations are most pleasant, most sympathetic."

I asked if I might repeat what he had said. The President gave his a.s.sent, and, after a pause, as though, now that he knew he would be quoted, he wished to emphasize what he had said, continued:

"My wife, who distributes articles of comfort, sent to the wounded and to families in need, tells me that Americans are among the most generous contributors. Many articles come anonymously--money, clothing, and comforts for the soldiers, and layettes for their babies. We recognize and appreciate the manner in which, while preserving a strict neutrality, your country men and women have shown their sympathy."

The President rose and on leaving I presented a letter from ex-President Roosevelt. It was explained that this was the second letter for him I had had from Colonel Roosevelt, but that when I was a prisoner with the Germans, I had judged it wise to swallow the first one, and that I had requested Colonel Roosevelt to write the second one on thin paper. The President smiled and pa.s.sed the letter critically between his thumb and forefinger.

"This one," he said, "is quite digestible."

I carried away the impression of a kind and distinguished gentleman, who, in the midst of the greatest crisis in history, could find time to dictate a message of thanks to those he knew were neutrals only in name.

CHAPTER II

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

AMIENS, October, 1915.

In England it is "business as usual"; in France it is "war as usual."

The English tradesman can a.s.sure his customers that with such an "old-established" firm as his not even war can interfere; but France, with war actually on her soil, has gone further and has accepted war as part of her daily life. She has not merely swallowed, but digested it.

It is like the line in Pinero's play, where one woman says she cannot go to the opera because of her neuralgia. Her friend replies: "You can have neuralgia in my box as well as anywhere else." In that spirit France has accepted the war. The neuralgia may hurt, but she does not take to her bed and groan. Instead, she smiles cheerfully and goes about her duties--even sits in her box at the opera.

As we approached the front this was even more evident than in Paris, where signs of war are all but invisible. Outside of Amiens we met a regiment of Scots with the pipes playing and the cold rain splas.h.i.+ng their bare legs. To watch them we leaned from the car window. That we should be interested seemed to surprise them; no one else was interested. A year ago when they pa.s.sed it was "Roses, roses, all the way"--or at least cigarettes, chocolate, and red wine. Now, in spite of the skirling bagpipes, no one turned his head; to the French they had become a part of the landscape.

A year ago the roads at every two hundred yards were barricaded. It was a continual hurdle-race. Now, except at distances of four or five miles, the barricades have disappeared. One side of the road is reserved for troops, the other for vehicles. The vehicles we met--for the most part two-wheeled hooded carts--no longer contained peasants flying from dismantled villages. Instead, they were on the way to market with garden-truck, pigs, and calves. On the drivers' seat the peasant whistled cheerily and cracked his whip. The long lines of London buses, that last year advertised soap, mustard, milk, and music-halls, and which now are a decorous gray; the ambulances; the great guns drawn by motor-trucks with caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him.

The English ally has ceased to be a stranger, and in the towns and villages of Artois is a "paying guest." It is for him the shop-windows are dressed. The names of the towns are Flemish; the names of the streets are Flemish; the names over the shops are Flemish; but the goods for sale are marmalade, tinned kippers, _The Daily Mail_, and the _Pink 'Un_.

"Is it your people who are selling these things?" I asked an English officer.

The question amused him.

"Our people won't think of it until the war is over," he said, "but the French are different.

"They are capable, adaptable, and obliging. If one of our men asks these shopkeepers for anything they haven't got they don't say, 'We don't keep it'; they get him to write down what it is he wants, and send for it."

It is the better way. The Frenchman does not say, "War is ruining me"; he makes the war help to support him, and at the same time gives comfort to his ally.

A year ago in the villages the old men stood in disconsolate groups with their hands in their pockets. Now they are briskly at work. They are working in the fields, in the vegetable-gardens, helping the Territorials mend the roads. On every side of them were the evidences of war--in the fields abandoned trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, shelters for fodder and ammunition, hangars for repairing aeroplanes, vast slaughter-houses, parks of artillery; and on the roads endless lines of lorries, hooded ambulances, marching soldiers.

To us those were of vivid interest, but to the French peasant they are in the routine of his existence. After a year of it war neither greatly distresses nor greatly interests him. With one hand he fights; with the other he ploughs.

We had made a bet as to which would see the first sign of real war, and the sign of it that won and that gave general satisfaction, even to the man who lost, was a group of German soldiers sweeping the streets of St.

Pol. They were guarded only by one of their own number, and they looked fat, sleek, and contented. When, on our return from the trenches, we saw them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied. Between standing waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes a sinecure.

The next sign of war was more thrilling. It was a race between a French aeroplane and German shrapnel. To us the bursting sh.e.l.ls looked like five little cotton b.a.l.l.s. Since this war began shrapnel, when it bursts, has invariably been compared to b.a.l.l.s of cotton, and as that is exactly what it looks like, it is again so described. The b.a.l.l.s of cotton did not seem to rise from the earth, but to pop suddenly out of the sky.

A moment later five more cotton b.a.l.l.s popped out of the sky. They were much nearer the aeroplane. Others followed, leaping after it like the spray of succeeding waves. But the aeroplane steadily and swiftly conveyed itself out of range and out of sight.

To say where the trenches began and where they ended is difficult. We were pa.s.sing through land that had been retrieved from the enemy. It has been fought for inch by inch, foot by foot. To win it back thousands of lives had been thrown like dice upon a table. There were vast stretches of mud, of fields once cultivated, but now scarred with pits, trenches, rusty barbed-wires. The roads were rivers of clay. They were lined with dugouts, cellars, and caves. These burrows in the earth were supported by beams, and suggested a shaft in a disused mine. They looked like the tunnels to coal-pits. They were inhabited by a race of French unknown to the boulevards--men, bearded, deeply tanned, and caked with clay. Their uniforms were like those of football players on a rainy day at the end of the first half. We were entering what had been the village of Ablain, and before us rose the famous heights of Mont de Lorette. To scale these heights seemed a feat as incredible as scaling our Palisades or the sheer cliff of Gibraltar. But they had been scaled, and the side toward us was crawling with French soldiers, climbing to the trenches, descending from the trenches, carrying to the trenches food, ammunition, and fuel for the fires.

A cold rain was falling and had turned the streets of Ablain and all the roads to it into swamps. In these were islands of bricks and lakes of water of the solidity and color of melted chocolate. Whatever you touched clung to you. It was a land of mud, clay, liquid earth. A cold wind whipped the rain against your face and chilled you to the bone. All you saw depressed and chilled your spirit.

To the "poilus," who, in the face of such desolation, joked and laughed with the civilians, you felt you owed an apology, for your automobile was waiting to whisk you back to a warm dinner, electric lights, red wine, and a dry bed. The men we met were cavemen. When night came they would sleep in a hole in the hill fit for a mud-turtle or a muskrat.

They moved in streets of clay two feet across. They were as far removed from civilization, as in the past they have known it, as though they had been cast adrift upon an island of liquid mud. Wherever they looked was desolation, ruins, and broken walls, jumbles of bricks, tunnels in mud, caves in mud, graves in mud.

In other wars the "front" was something almost human. It advanced, wavered, and withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was electrified. It remained in no fixed place, but, like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with galloping horses and cheering men overwhelmed a valley. In comparison, this trench work did not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of a mining-camp during the spring freshet, and for all the attention the cavemen paid to them, the reports of their "seventy-fives" and the "Jack Johnsons" of the enemy bursting on Mont de Lorette might have come from miners blasting rock.

What we saw of these cave-dwellers was only a few feet of a moat that for three hundred miles like a miniature ca.n.a.l is cut across France.

Where we stood we could see of the three hundred miles only mud walls, so close that we brushed one with each elbow. By looking up we could see the black, leaden sky. Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an arrow pointed to a first-aid dressing-station. Behind us was the winding entrance to a shelter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement and corrugated iron, and lit by a candle.

From a trench that was all we could see of the war, and that is all millions of fighting men see of it--wet walls of clay as narrow as a grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital, earthen steps leading to a shelter from sudden death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky and perhaps a great bird at which the enemy is shooting s...o...b..a.l.l.s.

In northern France there are many buried towns and villages. They are buried in their own cellars. Arras is still uninterred. She is the corpse of a city that waits for burial, and day by day the German sh.e.l.ls are trying to dig her grave. They were at it yesterday when we visited Arras, and this morning they will be hammering her again.

Seven centuries before this war Arras was famous for her tapestries, so famous that in England a piece of tapestry was called an arras. Now she has given her name to a battle--to different battles--that began with the great bombardment of October a year ago, and each day since then have continued. On one single day, June 26, the Germans threw into the city sh.e.l.ls in all sizes, from three to sixteen inches, and to the number of ten thousand. That was about one for each house.

This bombardment drove 2,700 inhabitants into exile, of whom 1,200 have now returned. The army feeds them, and in response they have opened shops that the sh.e.l.ls have not already opened, and supply the soldiers with tobacco, post-cards, and from those gardens not hidden under bricks and cement, fruit and vegetables. In the deserted city these civilians form an inconspicuous element. You can walk for great distances and see none of them. When they do appear in the empty streets they are like ghosts. Every day the sh.e.l.ls change one or two of them into real ghosts.

But the others still stay on. With the dogs nosing among the fallen bricks, and the pigeons on the ruins of the cathedral, they know no other home.

As we entered Arras the silence fell like a sudden change of temperature. It was actual and menacing. Every corner seemed to threaten an ambush. Our voices echoed so loudly that unconsciously we spoke in lower tones. The tap of the captain's walking-stick resounded like the blow of a hammer. The emptiness and stillness was like that of a vast cemetery, and the gra.s.s that had grown through the paving-stones deadened the sound of our steps. This silence was broken only by the barking of the French seventy-fives, in parts of the city hidden to us, the boom of the German guns in answer, and from overhead by the aeroplanes. In the absolute stillness the whirl of their engines came to us with the steady vibrations of a loom.

In the streets were sh.e.l.l holes that had been recently filled and covered over with bricks and fresh earth. It was like walking upon newly made graves. On either side of us were gaping cellars into which the houses had dumped themselves or, still balancing above them, were walls prettily papered, hung with engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact. These walls were roofless and defenseless against the rain and snow. Other houses were like those toy ones built for children, with the front open. They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, and a reading-lamp.

In one house four stories had been torn away, leaving only the attic sheltered by the peaked roof. To that height no one could climb, and exposed to view were the collection of trunks and boxes familiar to all attics. As a warning against rough handling, one of these, a woman's hat-box, had been marked "Fragile." Secure and serene, it smiled down sixty feet upon the ma.s.s of iron and bricks it had survived.

Of another house the roof only remained; from under it the rest of the building had been shot away. It was as though after a soldier had been blown to pieces, his helmet still hung suspended in mid-air.

In other streets it was the front that was intact, but when our captain opened the street door we faced a cellar. Nothing beside remained. Or else we stepped upon creaky floors that sagged, through rooms swept by the iron brooms into vast dust heaps. From these protruded wounded furniture--the leg of a table, the broken arm of a chair, a headless statue.