Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
"Albaire!" ... and a boy of about six went to the door of the
compartment to receive his father's embrace. "Don't let the Germans get
you!" cried the father, with a great air of gayety, and kissed the boy
again and again. He returned to his corner, rubbed his fists into his
eyes, and the tears rolled out under them. Then the two little girls--
twins, it seemed, about four years old, in little mushroom hats--took
their turns, and they put their fists into their eyes and cried, and
then the two mothers began to cry, and the men, dabbing their eyes and
puffing vigorously at their cigars, cried good-by over and over, and so
at last we moved out of the station.
The long train crept, stopped, backed, crept on again. Through the open
windows one caught glimpses of rows of poplar-trees and the countryside
lying cool and white in the moonlight. Then came stations with
sentries, stray soldiers hunting for a place to squeeze in, and now and
then empty troop-trains jolted by, smelling of horses. In the confusion
at Dieppe we had had no time to get anything to eat, and several hours
went by before, at a station lunchroom, already supposed to be closed, I
got part of a loaf of bread. One of the young mothers brought out a bit
of chocolate, the other a bottle of wine, and so we had supper--a souper
de luxe, as one of them laughed--all, by this time, old friends.
Eleven o'clock--midnight--the gas, intended for a short journey, grew
dimmer and dimmer, presently flickered out. We were in darkness--all
the train was in darkness--we were alone in France, wrapped in war and
moonlight, half real beings who had been adventuring together, not for
hours, but for years. The dim figure on the left sighed, tried one
position and another uneasily, and suddenly said that if it would not
derange monsieur too much, she would try to sleep on his shoulder. It
would not derange monsieur in the least. On the contrary...
"You must make yourself at home in France," laughed the mother of the
two little girls. But the other was even more polite.
"Nous sommes en Amerique!" she murmured. The train jolted slowly on. An
hour or two after midnight it stopped and a strange figure in turban and
white robe peered in. "Complet! Complet!" cried the lady with the
little girls. But the figure kept staring in, and, turning, chattered
to others like him. There was a crowd of them, men from France's
African colonies, from Algeria or Morocco, who had been working in the
French mines and were now going back to take the places of trained
soldiers--the daredevil "Turcos"--sent north to fight the Germans.
They did not get into our compartment, but into the one next to it, and
as there was no place to sit down, stood in patient Arab fashion, and
after a time gradually edged into ours, where they squatted on the
floor. They talked broken French or Italian or their native speech and
now and then broke into snatches of a wild sort of song. In Paris girls
ran into the street and threw their arms about the brave "Marocs" as
they marched by, but the lady with the little girls felt that they were
a trifle smelly, and, fishing out a bottle of scent, she wet a
handkerchief with it and passed it round.
The young Frenchman lit a match--three-twenty. The little boy, rousing
from his corner, suddenly announced, apropos of nothing, that the
Germans ought to be dropped into kettles of boiling water; at once came
the voice of one of the little girls, sound asleep apparently before
this, warning him that he must not talk like that or the Germans might
hear and shoot them. We jolted on, backed, and suddenly one became
aware that the gray light was not that of the moon. The lady at my left
sat upright. "The day comes!" she said briskly. It grew lighter. We
passed sentries, rifles stacked on station platforms, woods--the forest
of St. Germain. These woods were misty blue in the cool autumn morning,
there were bivouac fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside
these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy blue coats with
the flaps pinned back. Just such soldiers and scenes you have seen in
the war pictures of Detaille and De Neuville. Bridges, more houses, the
rectangular grass-covered faces of forts at last; just as Paris was
getting up for breakfast, into St. Lazare station, heaped with trunks
and boiling with people, Parisians, belated American tourists, refugees
from northeast villages, going somewhere, anywhere, to get away. It was
September 2.
There were miles of closed shops with placards on the shutters:
"Proprietor and personnel have been called to the colors"; no buses or
trams, the few 'cabs piled with the luggage of those trying to get away,
almost no way to traverse the splendid distances but to walk. Papers
could not be cried aloud on the streets, and the only news was the
official communique and a word about some Servian or Russian victory in
some un-pronounceable region of the East.
"France is a history, a life, an idea which has taken its place in the
world, and the bit of earth from which that history, that life, that
thought, has radiated, we cannot sacrifice without sealing the stone of
the tomb over ourselves and our children and the generations to follow
us." Thus George Clemenceau was writing in L'Homme Libre, and people
knew that this was true. And yet in that ghastly silence of Paris,
broken only by the constant flight of military automobiles, screaming
through the streets on missions nobody understood, those left behind did
not even know where the enemy was, where the defenders were, or what was
being done to save Paris. And it gradually, and not unnaturally, seemed
to the more nervous that nothing had been done--the forts were paper,
the government faithless, revolution imminent--one heard the wildest
things.
Late that afternoon I walked down from the Madeleine toward the river.
It was the "hour of the aperitif"--there were still enough people to
fill cafe tables--and since Sunday it had been the hour of the German
aeroplane. It had come that afternoon, dropped a few bombs--"quelques
ordures"--and sailed away to return next day at the same hour. "You
have remarked," explained one of the papers, "that people who are
without wit always repeat their jokes." And just as I came into the
Place de la Concorde, "Mr. Taube" came up out of the north.
You must imagine that vast open space, with the bridge and river and
Invalides behind it, and beyond the light tracery of the Eiffel Tower,
covered with little specks of people, all looking upward. Back along
the boulevards, on roofs on both banks, all Paris, in fact, was
similarly staring--"Le nez en l'air." And straight overhead, so far up
that even the murmur of the motor was unheard, no more than a bird,
indeed, against the pale sky, "Mr. Taube," circling indolently about,
picking his moment, plotting our death.
I thought of the shudder of outraged horror that ran over Antwerp when
the first Zeppelin came. It seemed the last unnecessary blow to a
heroic people who had already stood so much. Very different was "Mr.
Taube's" reception here. He might have been a holiday balloon or some
particularly fancy piece of fireworks. Everywhere people were staring
upward, looking through their closed fists, through opera-glasses. Out
of the arcades of the Hotel de Crillon one man in a bath-robe and
another in a suit of purple underclothes came running, to gaze calmly
into the zenith until the "von" had gone.
As the little speck drew straight overhead, these human specks scattered
over the Place de la Concorde suddenly realized that they were in the
line of fire, and scattered just as people run from a sudden shower.
This was the most interesting thing--these helpless little humans
scrambling away like ants or beetles to shelter, and that tiny insolent
bird sailing slowly far overhead. This was a bit of the modern war one
reads about--it was a picture from some fanciful story of Mr. H. G.
Wells. They scattered for the arcades, and some, quaintly enough, ran
under the trees in the near-by Champs-Elysees. There was a "Bang!" at
which everybody shouted "There!" but it was not a bomb, only part of the
absurd fusillade that now began. They were firing from the Eiffel
Tower, whence they might possibly have hit something, and from roofs
with ordinary guns and revolvers which could not possibly have hit
anything at all. In the gray haze that hung over Paris the next
morning, I wandered through empty streets and finally, with some vague
notion of looking out, up the hill of Montmartre. All Paris lay below,
mysterious in the mist, with that strange, poignant beauty of something
trembling on the verge. One could follow the line of the Seine and see
the dome of the Invalides, but nothing beyond. I went down a little way
from the summit and, still on the hill, turned into the Rue des
Abbesses, crowded with vegetable carts and thrifty housewives. The gray
air was filled with their bargaining, with the smell of vegetables and
fruit, and there, in front of two men playing violins, a girl in black,
with a white handkerchief loosely knotted about her throat, was singing
of the little Alsatian boy, shot by the Prussians because he cried "Vive
la France!" and threatened them with his wooden gun.
True or not, it was one of those things that get believed. Verses were
written about it and pictures made of it all over Paris--presently it
would be history. And this girl, true child of the asphalt, was
flinging it at them, holding the hearts of these broad-faced mothers in
the hollow of her hand. She would sing one verse, pause, and sell
copies of the song, then put a hand to her hoarse throat and sing again.
The music was not sold with the song, and it was rather difficult--a
mournful sort of recitative with sudden shifts into marching rhythm--and
so the people sang the words over and over with her until they had
almost learned the tune. You can imagine how a Frenchman--he was a young
fellow, who lived in a rear tenement over on the other side of
Montmartre--would write that song. The little boy, who was going to
"free his brothers back there in Alsace" when he grew up, playing
soldier--"Joyeux, il murmurait: Je suis petit, en somme, Mais viendra
bien le jour, ou je serai un homme, Ardeat! Vaillanti..."--the
Prussians--monstres odieux--smashing into the village, the cry "Maman!
Maman!"--and after each verse a pause, and slowly and lower down, with
the crowd joining in, "Petit--enfant" ("Little boy, close your big blue
eyes, for the bandits are hideous and cruel, and they will kill you if
they read your brave thoughts") "ferme tes grands yeux bleus."
The violins mixed with the voices of the market-women, crying their
artichokes and haricots, and above them rang--"Ardent! Vaillant! ..."
Audit might have been the voice of Paris itself, lying down there in her
mist, Paris of lost Alsace and hopeless revanche, of ardor and charm
crushed once, as they might be again, as the voice of that pale girl in
black, with her air of coming from lights and cigarette smoke, and of
these simple mothers rose above the noise of the street, half dirge,
half battle-cry, while out beyond somewhere the little soldiers in red
breeches were fighting, and the fate of France hung in the balance, that
morning.
Chapter III
After The Marne
At the end of the village the road climbed again from the ravine and
emerged on open fields. A wall of timber, dark and impenetrable as the
woods round an old chateau, rose at the farther end of these fields--the
road cutting through it like a tunnel--and on the brow of the ravine,
commanding the road and the little plain, was a line of trenches. Here
evidently they had fought.
We walked on down the road. Below the northern horizon, where they were
fighting now along the Aisne, rolled the sullen thunder of artillery, as
it had been rolling since daylight. And the autumn wind, cold with the
week of equinoctial rain, puffing out of thickets and across ravines,
brought, every now and then, the horrible odor of death.
Ahead, to the right, one caught the glint of a French infantry's red
trousers. A man was lying there, face downward, on the field. Then
across the open space appeared another--and another--they were scattered
all over that field, bright as the red poppies which were growing in the
stubble and as still. They were in various positions. One lay on his
back, with one knee raised like a man day-dreaming and looking up at the
sky. Another was stretched stiff, with both hands clinched over his
chest. One lay in the ditch close beside us, his head jammed into the
muddy bank just as he had dived there in falling; another gripped a cup
in one hand and a spoon in the other, as if, perhaps, he might have
tried to feed himself in the long hours after the battle rolled on and
left them there.
All these were French, but just at the edge of the thick timber was a
heap--one could scarcely say of Germans, so utterly did the gray, sodden
faces and sodden, gray uniforms merge into anonymity. A squad of French
soldiers appeared at a turn in the road. Two officers rode beside them,
and they were just moving off across the fields carrying shovels instead
of rifles. Looking after them, beyond the belt of timber, one could see
other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to the left, and here
and there smoke. Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a
wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms. With the boyish good nature
which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue, they
stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges. They were
burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans. The dead had
been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while the battle line rolled
northward, clear across France.
We turned back toward Crepy, passing again through the shattered village
of Betz. For three days it had been the centre of a battle, the two
forces lying outside it and shelling each other across the town. The
main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on
the edge of the ravine smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood
about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over and over again
what they had seen.
Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked and thrashed,
past the carcasses of horses sprawled stiff-legged in the ditch or in
the stubble, we tramped on to Crepy-en-Valois. The country was empty,
scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled back again, and
now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon
to the north. The little hotel across from the railroad station in
Crepy had kept open through it all. It was the typical Hotel de la Gare
of these little old towns--a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a
few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets
and under a feather bed. They were used to change, and the mere coming
of armies could not be permitted to derange them.
Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs had been crowded
with English soldiers in retreat; then with Germans--stern, on edge,
sure of being in Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans falling
back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing French.
And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that kept
pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could hobble
over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down.
Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive
unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go galloping away,
leaving a laugh and a few sous behind. Madame would come in from the
kitchen, raise her arms and sigh something about closing their doors,
but, after all, they knew they should keep right on giving as long as
they had anything to give. One of their daughters, a strapping,
light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things they had seen
as she paused in the hall after preparing our rooms. Her sister stood
beside her, and together they declaimed in an inimitable sort of
recitative.
How the English soldiers had come in, all laughing, and the young
officers so handsome; but the German soldiers were all like this--and
the young woman gave a quick gesture as of one taking nose and mouth in
her hand and pulling it stiffly down a bit. The French officers and
their men were like fathers and sons, but the Germans had a discipline
you would not believe--she had seen one officer strike a man with his
whip, she said, because he was not marching fast enough, and another,
when a soldier had come too near, had kicked him. And they all thought
surely they were going into Paris--"Two days more," they had laughed as
they drank down-stairs, "Paris, and then--kaput!"
You can imagine that gray horde rolling through the streets--narrow,
cobblestoned streets, with steep-roofed stone houses and queer little
courts, and the air over all of having been lived in for generations on
generations. There is the remnant in Crepy of one of the houses that
used to belong to the Dukes of Valois, and at the end of one winding
street you find yourself unexpectedly looking through a grilled iron
gateway into the ordered stateliness of an old-time chateau. On the
outward side the walls of the chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or
forty feet to the edge of the ravine. What a place to wait for an
approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; and the Germans
evidently thought so too, for from this part of town they carefully kept
away. They burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate as to
live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, they pillaged the
houses whose owners had run away, and they ordered the town to pay them
one hundred thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the fortitude
to stay behind were not molested. The enemy were even polite, one woman
told us--"Pas peur!" said the officer who visited her house, taking off
his hat. On the gate of another house was scrawled in German script,
"Sick Woman--keep away!" and as we passed the open windows, sure enough
there was the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just as she had
been when the Germans came.
On another door we read, also in German script, "Good people--they give
everything!" and on several were orders to leave those within alone. And
there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute--
Schoenen!" chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their lives
to the north of us and likely never to see their fatherland again.
Crepy-en-Valois, more fortunate than some of the towns, whose mayors
were dismissed for revealing "a lamentable absence of sang-froid," had a
mayor who stuck to his post. He was there when three-fourths of the
village had fled and, getting up from a sick-bed to receive the German
commander, he saw that the latter's orders were carried out, and signed
the order for the town's ransom while his daughter held smelling-salts
under his nose.
Whether the mayor of the old town of Senlis, a few miles west of Crepy,
was in any way tactless is scarcely of importance now, in so far as it
concerns him for he and the other hostages were shot, and, however
little good it may have done anybody, he at least gave France his life.
It is said that his order to the townspeople to turn in their arms was
not completely obeyed. It was also said--and this several people of
Senlis told us--that a few Senegalese, lagging behind as the French
left, fired on the Germans as they approached, and that it was possible
that one or two excited civilians had joined in.
Granting that civilians did fire after hostages had been given, there
remains the question of reprisal. It was the German commander's idea
that Senlis should be taught a lesson, and this consisted of shooting
the mayor and the hostages, and sacking and burning the main street--a
half mile, perhaps--from end to end. The idea was carried out with
thoroughness, and men ran along from house to house feeding the flames
with petroleum and even burning a handsome new country house which stood
apart at one end.
A nice-looking, elderly gentleman whom we met in front of the ruined
Hotel du Nord said that the Germans came there and, finding champagne in
the cellar after the maitre d'hotel had told them there wasn't any, set
fire to the hotel, and, as I recall it, shot him. How true such stories
are I cannot say, but there was no doubt that Senlis had been punished.
At least half of the old city on the banks of the wistful Nonette--it is
a much larger place than Crepy, with a cathedral of some consequence--
was smashed as utterly as it might have been by a cyclone or an
earthquake. The systematic manner in which this was done was suggested
by the fact that, in the long street running parallel to the one picked
for destruction, nearly every door still carried its chalked order to
"Schoenen." One house spared was that of a town fireman. "I've got five
little children," he told the German soldiers. "They're one, two,
three, four, five years old, and I'm expecting another." And they went
on.
These were common sights and sounds of that gracious country north of
Paris--deserted, perhaps demolished, villages; the silent countryside,
with dead horses, bits of broken shell, smashed bicycles or artillery
wagons along the road; and the tainted autumn wind. Along the level
French roads, under their arches of elms or poplars, covered carts on
tall wheels, drawn by two big farm horses harnessed one behind another,
and loaded with women, children, and household goods, were beginning to
move northward as they had moved south three weeks before. Trains,
similarly packed, were creeping up to within ear-shot of the constant
cannonading, and it was on one of these trains that we had come.
In Paris, recovered now from the dismay of three weeks before, keen
French imaginations were daily turning the war into terms of heroism and
sacrifice and military glory. Even editors and play-writers fighting at
the front were able to send back impressions now and then, and these,
stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as
impersonal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting comfortably at some cafe
table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming
up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the
heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth
time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one
brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over again,
without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still
city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of
unreality. Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words
that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard
dies but never surrenders.
A man could leave the Cafe de la Paix and in two hours be under fire,
where killing was as matter of fact as driving tacks. And in between
these two zones--the zone where war was at once a highly organized
business and a splendid, terrible game, and that in which its
disjointed, horrible surfaces were being turned into abstractions, into
ideas, poetry, rhetoric--was this middle ground through which we were
now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation.
We returned to Crepy. All that night the trains went clanking through
the station, pouring more men--Frenchmen, Englishmen--into the sodden
trenches along the Aisne. For a week it had rained, cold shower
following cold shower. In Paris shivering concierges closed their doors
in the middle of the day in mournful attempts to keep warm--autumn's
quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the armies had fought
across this same country a fortnight before. It was into trenches half
filled with water that the new men were going--Frenchmen trundling over
to the bar in big overcoats, with their air of good little boy, to go
galloping back with a bottle of red wine and a long loaf of bread;
Englishmen, noisy, laughing, trying to talk French with their fingers
and wanting a nip of brandy or hot water for their tea.
There were Highlanders among them, men with necks like towers and
straight, flat backs and a swing of the shoulders--like band music going
past. One watched them stride back to their cars with a sort of pang.
What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was
man's normal business might have fought their way through, must now,
with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering the earth, be cut
off by a mere wad of unthinking lead!
All that night it rained, and, through the rain and dark, trains kept
pouring on up into the terrible north. Once I heard cattle lowing as
their cars clanked past, and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night,
saw the faces on the field at Betz, beaten on by the rain that had
beaten them for days. And just before a feeble daylight returned again,
the steady rumble of artillery.