France at war; on the frontier of civilization

FRANCE
AT WAR

RUDYARD KIPLING

Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliive

in 2008 witli funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/franceatwaronfroOOkipl

^

FRANCE AT WAR

ON THE FRONTIER OF CIVILIZATION

(FRANCE AT
WAR

On the Frontier of Civilization

BY

RUDYARD KIPLING

Garden City New York

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1915

IvN^

Copyright, 1915, by
RuDYARD Kipling

All rights reserved, including that of

translation into foreign languages,

including the Scandinavian

CONTENTS

Poem: France

PAGE

3

I. On the Frontier of Civili-
zation

9

II. The Nation's Spirit and a
New Inheritance

31

III. Battle Spectacle and a
Review

50

IV. The Spirit of the People .

72

V. Life in Trenches on the
Mountain Side . . .

91

VI. The Common Task of a
Great People . . .

111

FRANCE AT WAR

ON THE FRONTIER OF CIVILIZATION

FRANCE*

BY RUDYAED KIPLING

Broke to every known mischance, lifted over

all
By the light sane joy of life, the buckler of

the Gaul,
Furious in luxury, merciless in toil.
Terrible with strength that draws from her

tireless soil.
Strictest judge of her own worth, gentlest of

men's mind,
First to follotv truth and last to leave old

truths behind —
France beloved of every soul that loves its

fellow-kind.

*First published June 24, 1913. Copyright, 1913,
by Rudyard Kipling.

3

4 FRANCE

Ere our birth (reraemberest thou?) side

by side we lay
Fretting in the womb of Rome to begin

the fray.
Ere men knew our tongues apart, our one

taste was known —
Each must mould the other's fate as he

wrought his own.
To this end we stirred mankind till all

earth was ours,
Till our world-end strifes began wayside

thrones and powers,
Puppets that we made or broke to bar

the other's path —
Necessary, outpost folk, hirelings of our

wrath.
To this end we stormed the seas, tack for

tack, and burst
Through the doorways of new worlds,

doubtful which was first.
Hand on hilt (rememberest thou?), ready

for the blow.

FRANCE o

Sure whatever else we met we should

meet our foe.
Spurred or baulked at ev'ry stride by the

other's strength,
So we rode the ages down and every ocean's

length;
Where did you refrain from us or we re-
frain from you?
Ask the wave that has not watched war

between us two.
Others held us for a while, but with

weaker charms.
These we quitted at the call for each

other's arms.
Eager toward the known delight, equally

we strove.
Each the other's mystery, terror, need,

and love.
To each other's open court with our

proofs we came.
Where could we find honoiu* else or men

to test the claim?

6 FKANCE

From each other's throat we wrenched

valour's last reward,
That extorted word of praise gasped

'twixt lunge and guard.
In each other's cup we poured mingled

blood and tears,
Brutal joys, unmeasured hopes, intoler-
able fears.
All that soiled or salted life for a thousand

years.
Proved beyond the need of proof, matched

in every clime,
O companion, we have lived greatly

through all time:
Yoked in knowledge and remorse now we

come to rest.
Laughing at old villainies that time has

turned to jest.
Pardoning old necessity no pardon can

efface —
That undying sin we shared in Rouen

market-place.

FRANCE 7

Now we watch the new years shape, won-
dering if they hold
Fiercer hghting in their hearts than we

launched of old.
Now we hear new voices rise, question,

boast or gird,
As we raged (rememberest thou?) when

our crowds were stirred.
Now we count new keels afloat, and new

hosts on land.
Massed liked ours (rememberest thou?)

when our strokes were planned.
We were schooled for dear life sake, to

know each other's blade:
What can blood and iron make more than

we have made?
We have learned by keenest use to know

each other's mind:
What shall blood and iron loose that we

cannot bind?
We who swept each other's coast, sacked

each other's home.

8 FRANCE

Since the sword of Brennus clashed on

the scales at Rome,
Listen, court and close again, wheeling

girth to girth,
In the strained and bloodless guard set

for peace on earth.

Broke to every known mischance, lifted over
all

By the light sane joy of life, the buckler of
the Gaul,

Furious in luxury, merciless in toil.

Terrible vnth strength renewed from a tire-
less soil.

Strictest judge of her own worth, gentlest of
Tnens mind.

First to face the truth and last to leave old
truths behind,

France beloved of every soul that loves or
serves its kind.

ON THE FRONTIER OF
CIVILIZATION

"It's a pretty park," said the French
artillery officer. "We've done a lot
for it since the owner left. I hope
he'll appreciate it when he comes
back."

The car traversed a winding drive
through woods, between banks em-
bellished with little chalets of a rustic
nature. At first, the chalets stood
their full height above ground, sug-
gesting tea-gardens in England. Fur-
ther on they sank into the earth till,
at the top of the ascent, only their
9

10 FRANCE AT WAR

solid brown roofs showed. Torn
branches drooping across the drive-
way, with here and there a scorched
patch of undergrowth, explained the
reason of their modesty.

The chateau that commanded these
glories of forest and park sat boldly on
a terrace. There was nothing wrong
with it except, if one looked closely, a
few scratches or dints on its white
stone walls, or a neatly drilled hole
under a flight of steps. One such
hole ended in an unexploded shell.
"Yes," said the officer. "They ar-
rive here occasionally."

Something bellowed across the folds
of the wooded hills; something grunted
in reply. Something passed overhead,
querulously but not without dignity.
Two clear fresh barks joined the

FRANCE AT WAR 11

chorus, and a man moved lazily in the
direction of the guns.

"Well. Suppose we come and look
at things a little," said the command-
ing oflBcer.

AN OBSERVATION POST

There was a specimen tree — a tree
worthy of such a park — the sort of
tree visitors are always taken to ad-
mire. A ladder ran up it to a plat-
form. What little wind there was
swayed the tall top, and the ladder
creaked like a ship's gangway. A
telephone bell tinkled 50 foot over-
head. Two invisible guns spoke fer-
vently for half a minute, and broke off
like terriers choked on a leash. We
climbed till the topmost platform
swayed sicklily beneath us. Here one

12 FRANCE AT WAR

found a rustic shelter, always of the
tea-garden pattern, a table, a map,
and a little window wreathed with
living branches that gave one the
first view of the Devil and all his
works. It was a stretch of open
country, with a few sticks like old
tooth-brushes which had once been
trees round a farm. The rest was
yellow grass, barren to all appearance
as the veldt.

"The grass is yellow because they
have used gas here," said an oflficer.

"Their trenches are . You can

see for yourself."

The guns in the woods began again.
They seemed to have no relation to
the regularly spaced bursts of smoke
along a little smear in the desert earth
two thousand yards away — no con-

FRANCE AT WAR 13

nection at all with the strong voices
overhead coming and going. It was
as impersonal as the drive of the sea
along a breakwater.

Thus it went: a pause — a gather-
ing of sound like the race of an incom-
ing wave; then the high-flung heads
of breakers spouting white up the face
of a groyne. Suddenly, a seventh
wave broke and spread the shape of
its foam like a plume overtopping all
the others.

"That's one of our torpilleurs —
what you call trench-sweepers," said
the observer among the whispering
leaves.

Some one crossed the platform to
consult the map with its ranges. A
blistering outbreak of white smokes
rose a little beyond the large plume.

14 FRANCE AT WAR

It was as though the tide had struck
a reef out yonder.

Then a new voice of tremendous
volume lifted itself out of a lull that
followed. Somebody laughed. Evi-
dently the voice was known.

"That is not for us," a gunner said.

" They are being waked up from "

he named a distant French position.
"So and so is attending to them there.
We go on with our usual work. Look !
Another torpilleur."

"the barbarian"

Again a big plume rose; and again
the lighter shells broke at their ap-
pointed distance beyond it. The
smoke died away on that stretch of
trench, as the foam of a swell dies
in the angle of a harbour wall, and

FRANCE AT WAR 15

broke out afresh half a mile lower
down. In its apparent laziness, in its
awful deliberation, and its quick
spasms of wrath, it was more like the
work of waves than of men; and our
high platform's gentle sway and glide
was exactly the motion of a ship drift-
ing with us toward that shore.

"The usual work. Only the usual
work," the officer explained. "Some-
times it is here. Sometimes above or
below us. I have been here since
May."

A httle sunshine flooded the stricken
landscape and made its chemical yel-
low look more foul. A detachment
of men moved out on a road which ran
toward the French trenches, and
then vanished at the foot of a little
rise. Other men appeared moving

16 FRANCE AT WAR

toward us with that concentration
of purpose and bearing shown in
both Armies when — dinner is at hand.
They looked Hke people who had been
digging hard.

"The same work. Always the
same work!" the oflScer said. "And
you could walk from here to the sea
or to Switzerland in that ditch — and
you'll find the same work going on
everywhere. It isn't war."

"It's better than that," said an-
other. " It's the eating-up of a people.
They come and they fill the trenches
and they die, and they die; and they
send more and those die. We do the
same, of course, but — look!"

He pointed to the large deliberate
smoke-heads renewing themselves
along that yellowed beach. "That is

FRANCE AT WAR 17

the frontier of civilization. They
have all civilization against them —
those brutes yonder. It's not the
local victories of the old wars that
we're after. It's the barbarian — all
the barbarian. Now, you've seen
the whole thing in little. Come and
look at our children."

SOLDIERS IN CAVES

We left that tall tree whose fruits
are death ripened and distributed at
the tingle of small bells. The ob-
server returned to his maps and calcu-
lations; the telephone-boy stiffened
up beside his exchange as the ama-
teurs went out of his life. Some one
called down through the branches to
ask who was attending to — Belial,
let us say, for I could not catch the

18 FRANCE AT WAR

gun's name. It seemed to belong to
that terrific new voice which had
lifted itself for the second or third
time. It appeared from the reply
that if Belial talked too long he would
be dealt with from another point
miles away.

The troops we came down to see
were at rest in a chain of caves which
had begun life as quarries and had
been fitted up by the army for its own
uses. There were underground cor-
ridors, ante-chambers, rotundas, and
ventilating shafts with a bewildering
play of cross lights, so that wherever
you looked you saw Goya's pictures
of men-at-arms.

Every soldier has some of the old
maid in him, and rejoices in all the
gadgets and devices of his own in-

FRANCE AT WAR 19

vention. Death and wounding come
by nature, but to lie dry, sleep soft,
and keep yourself clean by fore-
thought and contrivance is art, and
in all things the Frenchman is glo-
riously an artist.

Moreover, the French officers
seem as mother-keen on their men
as their men are brother-fond of
them. Maybe the possessive form
of address: "Mon general," "mon
capitaine," helps the idea, which our
men cloke in other and curter phrases.
And those soldiers, like ours, had
been welded for months in one fur-
nace. As an oflScer said: "Half our
orders now need not be given. Ex-
perience makes us think together."
I believe, too, that if a French private
has an idea — and they are full of

20 FRANCE AT WAR

ideas — it reaches his C. O. quicker
than it does with us.

THE SENTINEL HOUNDS

The overwhelming impression was
the brilHant health and vitality of
these men and the quality of their
breeding. They bore themselves
with swing and rampant delight in
life, while their voices as they talked
in the side-caverns among the stands
of arms were the controlled voices of
civilization. Yet, as the lights
pierced the gloom they looked like
bandits dividing the spoil. One pic-
ture, though far from war, stays
with me. A perfectly built, dark-
skinned young giant had peeled him-
self out of his blue coat and had
brought it down with a swish upon

FRANCE AT WAR 21

the shoulder of a half-stripped com-
rade who was kneeling at his feet
busy with some footgear. They
stood against a background of semi-
luminous blue haze, through which
glimmered a pile of coppery straw
half covered by a red blanket. By
divine accident of light and pose it
was St. Martin giving his cloak to the
beggar. There were scores of pic-
tures in these galleries — notably a
rock-hewn chapel where the red of
the cross on the rough canvas altar-
cloth glowed like a ruby. Further
inside the caves we found a row of
little rock-cut kennels, each inhabited
by one wise, silent dog. Their duties
begin at night with the sentinels and
listening-posts. "And believe me,"
said a proud instructor, "my fellow

22 FRANCE AT WAR

here knows the difference between
the noise of our shells and the Boche
shells."

When we came out into the open
again there were good opportunities
for this study. Voices and wings
met and passed in the air, and, per-
haps, one strong young tree had not
been bending quite so far across the
picturesque park-drive when we first
went that way.

"Oh, yes," said an officer, "shells
have to fall somewhere, and," he
added with fine toleration, "it is,
after all, against us that the Boche
directs them. But come you and
look at my dug-out. It's the most
superior of all possible dug-outs."

"No. Come and look at our mess.
It's the Ritz of these parts." And

FRANCE AT WAR 23

they joyously told how they had got,
or procured, the various fittings and
the elegancies, while hands stretched
out of the gloom to shake, and men
nodded welcome and greeting all
through that cheery brotherhood in
the woods.

WORK IN THE FIELDS

The voices and the wings were still
busy after lunch, when the car
slipped past the tea-houses in the
drive, and came into a country where
women and children worked among
the crops. There were large raw
shell holes by the wayside or in
the midst of fields, and often a
cottage or a villa had been smashed
as a bonnet-box is smashed by an
umbrella. That must be part of

24 FRANCE AT WAR

Belial's work when he bellows so
truculently among the hills to the
north.

We were looking for a town that
lives under shell-fire. The regular
road to it was reported unhealthy
— not that the women and children
seemed to care. We took byways
of which certain exposed heights
and corners were lightly blinded by
wind-brakes of dried tree-tops. Here
the shell holes were rather thick on
the ground. But the women and the
children and the old men went on
with their work with the cattle and
the crops; and where a house had
been broken by shells the rubbish
was collected in a neat pile, and where
a room or two still remained usable,
it was inhabited, and the tattered

FRANCE AT WAR 25

window-curtains fluttered as proudly
as any flag. And time was when I
used to denounce young France be-
cause it tried to kill itself beneath my
car wheels; and the fat old women
who crossed roads without warning;
and the specially deaf old men who
slept in carts on the wrong side of
the road! Now, I could take off
my hat to every single soul of them,
but that one cannot traverse a whole
land bareheaded. The nearer we
came to our town the fewer were the
people, till at last we halted in a
well-built suburb of paved streets
where there was no Hfe at all. . .

A WRECKED TOWN

The stillness was as terrible as
the spread of the quick busy weeds

26 FRANCE AT WAR

between the paving-stones; the air
smelt of pounded mortar and crushed
stone; the sound of a footfall echoed
like the drop of a pebble in a well.
At first the horror of wrecked apart-
ment-houses and big shops laid open
makes one waste energy in anger.
It is not seemly that rooms should
be torn out of the sides of buildings
as one tears the soft heart out of
English bread; that villa roofs should
lie across iron gates of private ga-
rages, or that drawing-room doors
should flap alone and disconnected
between two emptinesses of twisted
girders. The eye wearies of the re-
peated pattern that burst shells make
on stone walls, as the mouth sickens
of the taste of mortar and charred
timber. One quarter of the place

FRANCE AT WAR 27

had been shelled nearly level; the
fagades of the houses stood doorless,
roofless, and windowless like stage
scenery. This was near the cathe-
dral, which is always a favourite
mark for the heathen. They had
gashed and ripped the sides of the
cathedral itself, so that the birds flew
in and out at will; they had smashed
holes in the roof; knocked huge
cantles out of the buttresses, and
pitted and starred the paved square
outside. They were at work, too,
that very afternoon, though I do
not think the cathedral was their
objective for the moment. We walked
to and fro in the silence of the streets
and beneath the whirring wings over-
head. Presently, a young woman,
keeping to the wall, crossed a corner.

28 FRANCE AT WAR

An old woman opened a shutter
(how it jarred!) , and spoke to her.
The silence closed again, but it
seemed to me that I heard a sound
of singing— the sort of chant one
hears in nightmare-cities of voices
crying from underground.

IN THE CATHEDRAL

"Nonsense," said an ojQBcer. "Who
should be singing here?" We cir-
cled the cathedral again, and saw
what pavement-stones can do against
their own city, when the shell jerks
them upward. But there tvas sing-
ing after all — on the other side of a
little door in the flank of the cathe-
dral. We looked in, doubting, and
saw at least a hundred folk, mostly
women, who knelt before the altar

FRANCE AT WAR 29

of an un wrecked chapel. We with-
drew quietly from that holy ground,
and it was not only the eyes of the
French oflScers that filled with tears.
Then there came an old, old thing
with a prayer-book in her hand, pat-
tering across the square, evidently
late for service.

"And who are those women .f*" I
asked.

"Some are caretakers; people who
have still little shops here. (There is
one quarter where you can buy things.)
There are many old people, too, who
will not go away. They are of the
place, you see."

"And this bombardment happens
often.'*" I said.

"It happens always. Would you
like to look at the railway station?

30 FRANCE AT WAR

Of course, it has not been so bom-
barded as the cathedral."

We went through the gross naked-
ness of streets without people, till we
reached the railway station, which
was very fairly knocked about, but, as
my friends said, nothing like as much
as the cathedral. Then we had to
cross the end of a long street down
which the Boche could see clearly.
As one glanced up it, one perceived
how the weeds, to whom men's war
is the truce of God, had come back
and were well established the whole
length of it, watched by the long per-
spective of open, empty windows.

II

THE NATION'S SPIRIT
AND A NEW INHERITANCE

We left that stricken but unde-
feated town, dodged a few miles down
the roads beside which the women
tended their cows, and dropped into
a place on a hill where a Moroccan
regiment of many experiences was in
billets.

They were Mohammedans baf-
flingly like half a dozen of our Indian
frontier types, though they spoke
no accessible tongue. They had, of
course, turned the farm buildings
where they lay into a little bit of

31

32 FRANCE AT WAR

Africa in colour and smell. They had
been gassed in the north; shot over
and shot down, and set up to be
shelled again; and their officers talked
of North African wars that we had
never heard of — sultry days against
long odds in the desert years ago.
"Afterward — is it not so with you
also? — we get our best recruits from
the tribes we have fought. These
men are children. They make no
trouble. They only want to go where
cartridges are burnt. They are of
the few races to whom fighting is
pleasure."

"And how long have you dealt
with them?"

"A long time — a long time. I
helped to organize the corps. I am
one of those whose heart is in Africa."

FRANCE AT WAR 33

He spoke slowly, almost feeling for his
French words, and gave some order. I
shall not forget his eyes as he turned to
a huge, brown, Afreedee-like Mussul-
man hunkering down beside his accou-
trements. He had two sides to his head,
that bearded, burned, slow-spoken
officer, met and parted with in an
hour.

The day closed — (after an amazing
interlude in the chateau of a dream,
which was all glassy ponds, stately
trees, and vistas of white and gold
saloons. The proprietor was some-
body's chauffeur at the front, and we
drank to his excellent health) — at a
little village in a twilight full of the
petrol of many cars and the wholesome
flavour of healthy troops. There
is no better guide to camp than one's

34 FRANCE AT WAR

own thoughtful nose; and though I
poked mine everywhere, in no place
then or later did it strike that vile
betraying taint of underfed, unclean
men. And the same with the horses.

THE LINE THAT NEVER SLEEPS

It is difficult to keep an edge after
hours of fresh air and experiences;
so one does not get the most from the
most interesting part of the day — the
dinner with the local headquarters.
Here the professionals meet — the
Line, the Gunners, the Intelligence
with stupefying photo-plans of the
enemy's trenches; the Supply; the
Staff, who collect and note all things,
and are very properly chaffed; and,
be sure, the Interpreter, who, by force
of questioning prisoners, naturally

FRANCE AT WAR 35

develops into a Sadducee. It is their
little asides to each other, the slang,
and the half-words which, if one under-
stood, instead of blinking drowsily
at one's plate, would give the day's
history in little. But tire and the
difficulties of a sister (not a foreign)
tongue cloud everything, and one goes
to billets amid a murmur of voices, the
rush of single cars through the night,
the passage of battalions, and behind
it all, the echo of the deep voices
calling one to the other, along the line
that never sleeps.

The ridge with the scattered pines
might have hidden children at play.
Certainly a horse would have been
quite visible, but there was no hint
of guns, except a semaphore which

36 FRANCE AT WAR

announced it was forbidden to pass
that way, as the battery was firing.
The Boches must have looked for
that battery, too. The ground was
pitted with shell holes of all cali-
bres— some of them as fresh as mole-
casts in the misty damp morning;
others where the poppies had grown
from seed to flower all through the
summer.

"And where are the guns?" I de-
manded at last.

They were almost under one's
hand, their ammunition in cellars
and dug-outs beside them. As far
as one can make out, the 75 gun has
no pet name. The bayonet is Rosalie
the virgin of Bayonne, but the 75, the
watchful nurse of the trenches and
little sister of the Line, seems to be

FRANCE AT WAR 37

always " soixante-quinze." Even those
who love her best do not insist that she
i s beau tif ul . Her merits are French — ■
logic, directness, simplicity, and the
supreme gift of "occasionality." She
is equal to everything on the spur of
the moment. One sees and studies
the few appliances which make her
do what she does, and one feels that
any one could have invented her.

FAMOUS FRENCH 75 's

"As a matter of fact," says a
commandant, "anybody — or, rather,
everybody did. The general idea is
after such-and-such system, the patent
of which had expired, and we improved
it; the breech action, with slight mod-
ification, is somebody else's ; the sight-
ing is perhaps a little special; and so is
the traversing, but, at bottom, it is

38 FRANCE AT WAR

only an assembly of variations and ar-
rangements."

That, of course, is all that Shakes-
peare ever got out of the alphabet.
The French Artillery make their own
guns as he made his plays. It is just
as simple as that.

"There is nothing going on for
the moment; it's too misty," said
the Commandant. (I fancy that
the Boche, being, as a rule methodical,
amateurs are introduced to batteries
in the Boche's intervals. At least,
there are hours healthy and unhealthy
which vary with each position.) "But,"
the Commandant reflected a moment,
"there is a place — and a distance.
Let us say ..." He gave a
range.

The gun-servers stood back with

FRANCE AT WAR 39

the bored contempt of the profes-
sional for the layman who intrudes
on his mysteries. Other civilians
had come that way before — had seen,
and grinned, and complimented and
gone their way, leaving the gunners
high up on the bleak hillside to grill
or mildew or freeze for weeks and
months. Then she spoke. Her voice
was higher pitched, it seemed, than
ours — with a more shrewish tang to
the speeding shell. Her recoil was as
swift and as graceful as the shrug of a
French-woman's shoulders; the empty
case leaped forth and clanged against
the trail; the tops of two or three
pines fifty yards away nodded know-
ingly to each other, though there was
no wind.

"They'll be bothered down below

40 FRANCE AT WAR

to know the meaning of our single
shot. We don't give them one dose
at a time as a rule," somebody laughed.

We waited in the fragrant silence.
Nothing came back from the mist
that clogged the lower grounds, though
no shell of this war was ever launched
with more earnest prayers that it
might do hurt.

Then they talked about the lives
of guns; what number of rounds some
will stand and others will not; how
soon one can make two good guns out
of three spoilt ones, and what crazy
luck sometimes goes with a single
shot or a blind salvo.

LESSON FROM THE " BOCHE "

A shell must fall somewhere, and
by the law of averages occasionally

FRANCE AT WAR 41

lights straight as a homing pigeon
on the one spot where it can wreck
most. Then earth opens for yards
around, and men must be dug out, —
some merely breathless, who shake
their ears, swear, and carry on, and
others whose souls have gone loose
among terrors. These have to be
dealt with as their psychology de-
mands, and the French officer is a
good psychologist. One of them said :
"Our national psychology has changed.
I do not recognize it myself."

"What made the change?"

"The Boche. If he had been quiet
for another twenty years the world
must have been his — rotten, but all
his. Now he is saving the world."

"How?"

"Because he has shown us what

42 FRANCE AT WAR

Evil is. We — you and I, England and
the rest — had begun to doubt the exist-
ence of Evil . The Boche is saving us. "
Then we had another look at the
animal in its trench — a little nearer this
time than before, and quieter on ac-
count of the mist. Pick up the chain
anywhere you please, you shall find
the same observation-post, table, map,
observer, and telephonist; the same
always-hidden, always-ready guns;
and same vexed foreshore of trenches,
smoking and shaking from Switzerland
to the sea. The handling of the war
varies with the nature of the country,
but the tools are unaltered. One
looks upon them at last with the same
weariness of wonder as the eye re-
ceives from endless repetitions of
Egyptian hieroglyphics. A long, low

FRANCE AT WAR 43

profile, with a lump to one side, means
the field-gun and its attendant am-
munition-case; a circle and slot
stand for an observation-post; the
trench is a bent line, studded with
vertical plumes of explosion; the great
guns of position, coming and going
on their motors, repeat themselves
as scarabs; and man himself is a
small blue smudge, no larger than a
foresight, crawling and creeping or
watching and running among all these
terrific symbols.

TRAGEDY OF RHEIMS

But there is no hieroglyphic for
Rheims, no blunting of the mind at
the abominations committed on the
cathedral there. The thing peers
upward, maimed and blinded, from

44 FBANCX AT WjLR

oat of the utter wreckage of the Arch-
bishop's palace on the one side and
dust -heaps of crumbled houses on the
otho". They shelled, as they stiU
shell it, with high explosives and with
incendiary shells, so that the statues
and the stonework in places are burned
the ocdour of raw flesh. The gai^yles
are smashed: statues, crockets, and
spires tumbled: walls split and torn;
wiiidows thrust out and tracery oblit-
erated. Wherever one lodks at the
tortured pile there is mutilation and
defilement, and yet it had never more
of a soul thfiTi it has to-day.

Inside — ^" Cover yourselves, gen-
tlemen,*' said the sacristan, "this
place is no longer consecrated") —
everytlung is swept dear or burned
out from end to end, except two can-

dksticks in front ol the niche wto^
Joan of Arc's image used to stand.
Thoe is a French flag liiere now.
[And the last time I saw Khpfma
Cathedral was ia a spring twil^ht,
when the great west window glowed,
and the onlv lights within were those
of candles which seme penitent
English had Ht iQ Joan's homoor on
those same candlesticks.] The h^i
altar was covered with flocw-carpets;
the pavement tiles were oracked and
jarred ont by the mbbish that had
fallen from above, the floor was grittv
with dust of ^ass and powd«ed stone,
little twists of leading from the wiq-
dows, and iron fragmoits. Two great
doors had been blown inwards bv the
blast of a shell in the Archbishop's
garden, till thev had beit grotesquely

46 FRANCE AT WAR

to the curve of a cask. There they
had jammed. The windows — but the
record has been made, and will be kept
by better hands than mine. It will
last through the generation in which
the Teuton is cut off from the fellow-
ship of mankind — all the long, still
years when this war of the body is
at an end, and the real war begins.
Rheims is but one of the altars which
the heathen have put up to commem-
orate their own death throughout all
the world. It will serve. There is a
mark, well known by now, which
they have left for a visible seal of
'their doom. When they first set
the place alight some hundreds of their
wounded were being tended in the
Cathedral . The French saved as many
as they could, but some had to be left.

FRANCE AT WAR 47

Among them was a major, who lay
with his back against a pillar. It
has been ordained that the signs of
his torments should remain — an out-
line of both legs and half a body,
printed in greasy black upon the
stones. There are very many peo-
ple who hope and pray that the sign
will be respected at least by our chil-
dren's children.

IRON NERVE AND FAITH

And, in the meantime, Rheims goes
about what business it may have
with that iron nerve and endurance
and faith which is the new inheri-
tance of France. There is agony
enough when the big shells come in;
there is pain and terror among the
people; and always fresh desecration

48 FRANCE AT WAR

to watch and suffer. The old men
and the women and the children
drink of that cup daily, and yet the bit-
terness does not enter into their
souls. Mere words of admiration
are impertinent, but the exquisite
quality of the French soul has been
the marvel to me throughout. They
say themselves, when they talk: "We
did not know what our nation was.
Frankly, we did not expect it our-
selves . B ut the thing came, and — you
see, we go on,"

Or as a woman put it more logi-
cally, "What else can we do.'^ Re-
member, we knew the Boche in '70
when you did not. We know what
he has done in the last year. This is
not war. It is against wild beasts
that we fight. There is no arrange-

FRANCE AT WAR 49

ment possible with wild beasts."
This is the one vital point which we
in England must realize. We are
dealing with animals who have scien-
tifically and philosophically removed
themselves inconceivably outside civ-
ilization. When you have heard a
few — only a few — tales of their doings,
you begin to understand a little.
When you have seen Rheims, you
understand a little more. When you
have looked long enough at the faces
of the women, you are inclined to
think that the women will have a
large say in the final judgment. They
have earned it a thousand times.

Ill

BATTLE SPECTACLE AND
A REVIEW

Travelling with two chauffeurs is
not the luxury it looks; since there
is only one of you and there is always
another of those iron men to relieve
the wheel. Nor can I decide whether
an ex-professor of the German tongue,
or an ex-roadracer who has lived six
years abroad, or a Marechal des Logis,
or a Brigadier makes the most thrust-
ing driver through three-mile stretches
of military traflSc repeated at half -hour
intervals. Sometimes it was motor-
ambulances strung all along a level; or

50

FRANCE AT WAR 51

supply ; or those eternal big guns com-
ing round corners with trees chained on
their long backs to puzzle aeroplanes,
and their leafy, big-shell limbers snort-
ing behind them. In the rare breath-
ing-spaces men with rollers and road
metal attacked the road. In peace the
roads of France, thanks to the motor,
were none too good. In war they
stand the incessant traffic far better
than they did with the tourist. My
impression — after some seven hundred
miles printed off on me at between 60
and 70 kilometres — was of uniform ex-
cellence. Nor did I come upon any
smashes or breakdowns in that dis-
tance, and they were certainly trying
them hard. Nor, which is the greater
marvel, did we kill anybody; though we
did miracles down the streets to avoid

52 FRANCE AT WAR

babes, kittens, and chickens. The
land is used to every detail of war,
and to its grime and horror and make-
shifts, but also to war's unbounded
courtesy, kindness, and long-suffering,
and the gaiety that comes, thank
God, to balance overwhelming ma-
terial loss.

FARM LIFE AlVODST WAR

There was a village that had been
stamped flat, till it looked older than
Pompeii. There were not three roofs
left, nor one whole house. In most
places you saw straight into the
cellars. The hops were ripe in
the grave-dotted fields round about.
They had been brought in and piled
in the nearest outline of a dwelling.
Women sat on chairs on the pave-

FRANCE AT WAR 53

ment, picking the good-smelling bun-
dles. When they had finished one,
they reached back and pulled out
another through the window-hole be-
hind them, talking and laughing the
while. A cart had to be manoeuvred
out of what had been a farmyard,
to take the hops to market. A thick,
broad, fair-haired wench, of the sort
that Millet drew, flung all her weight
on a spoke and brought the cart
forward into the street. Then she
shook herself, and, hands on hips,
danced a little defiant jig in her sa-
bots as she went back to get the horse.
Another girl came across a bridge.
She was precisely of the opposite type,
slender, creamy-skinned, and deli-
cate-featured. She carried a brand-
new broom over her shoulder through

54 PRANCE AT WAR

that desolation, and bore herself with
the pride and grace of Queen Iseult.

The farm-girl came out leading the
horse, and as the two young things
passed they nodded and smiled at each
other, with the delicate tangle of the
hop-vines at their feet.

The guns spoke earnestly in the
north. That was the Argonne, where
the Crown Prince was busily getting
rid of a few thousands of his father's
faithful subjects in order to secure
himself the reversion of his father s
throne. No man likes losing his
job, and when at long last the inner
history of this war comes to be
written, we may find that the people
we mistook for principals and prime
agents were only average incompe-
tents moving all Hell to avoid dis-

FRANCE AT WAR 55

missal. (For it is absolutely true
that when a man sells his soul to
the devil he does it for the price of
half nothing.)

WATCHING THE GUN-FIRE

It must have been a hot fight. A
village, wrecked as is usual along this
line, opened on it from a hillside that
overlooked an Italian landscape of
carefully drawn hills studded with
small villages — a plain with a
road and a river in the foreground,
and an all-revealing afternoon light
upon everything. The hills smoked
and shook and bellowed. An ob-
servation-balloon climbed up to see;
while an aeroplane which had nothing
to do with the strife, but was merely
training a beginner, ducked and

56 FRANCE AT WAR

swooped on the edge of the plain.
Two rose-pink pillars of crumbled
masonry, guarding some carefully
trimmed evergreens on a lawn half bur-
ied in rubbish, represented an hotel
where the Crown Prince had once
stayed. All up the hillside to our right
the foundations of houses lay out, like a
bit of tripe, with the sunshine in their
square hollows. Suddenly a band be-
gan to play up the hill among some
trees ; and an officer of local Guards in
the new steel anti-shrapnel helmet,
which is like the seventeenth century
sallet, suggested that we should climb
and get a better view. He was a kindly
man, and in speaking English had
discovered (as I do when speaking
French) that it is simpler to stick
to one gender. His choice was the

FRANCE AT WAR 57

feminine, and the Boche described
as "she" throughout made me think
better of myself, which is the essence
of friendship. We climbed a flight
of old stone steps, for generations
the playground of little children, and
found a ruined church, and a bat-
talion in billets, recreating them-
selves with excellent music and a
little horseplay on the outer edge of
the crowd. The trouble in the hills
was none of their business for that
day.

Still higher up, on a narrow path
among the trees, stood a priest and
three or four officers. They watched
the battle and claimed the great
bursts of smoke for one side or the
other, at the same time as they kept
an eye on the flickering aeroplane.

58 FRANCE AT WAR

"Ours," they said, half under their
breath. "Theirs." "No, not ours
that one — theirs! . . . That fool
is banking too steep . . . That's
Boche shrapnel. They always burst
it high. That's our big gun behind
that outer hill . . . He'll drop
his machine in the street if he doesn't
take care. . . . There goes a
trench-sweeper. Those last two were
theirs, but thaf — it was a full roar —
"was ours."

BEHIND THE GERMAN LINES

The valley held and increased the
sounds till they seemed to hit our
hillside like a sea.

A change of light showed a village,
exquisitely pencilled atop of a hill,
with reddish haze at its feet.

FRANCE AT WAR 59

"What is that place?" I asked.

The priest replied in a voice as

deep as an organ: "That is Saint

It is in the Boche lines. Its con-
dition is pitiable."

The thunders and the smokes rolled
up and diminished and renewed them-
selves, but the small children romped
up and down the old stone steps;
the beginner's aeroplane unsteadily
chased its own shadow over the fields;
and the soldiers in billet asked the
band for their favourite tunes.

Said the lieutenant of local Guards
as the cars went on: "She — play —
Tipperary,"

And she did — to an accompani-
ment of heavy pieces in the hills,
which followed us into a town all
ringed with enormous searchlights.

60 FRANCE AT WAR

French and Boche together, scowling
at each other beneath the stars.

It happened about that time that
Lord Kitchener with General Joffre
reviewed a French Army Corps.

We came on it in a vast dip of
ground under grey clouds, as one
comes suddenly on water; for it lay
out in misty blue lakes of men mixed
with darker patches, like osiers and
undergrowth, of guns, horses, and
wagons. A straight road cut the
landscape in two along its murmur-
ing front.

VETERANS OF THE WAR

It was as though Cadmus had sown
the dragon's teeth, not in orderly
furrows but broadcast, till, horrified

FRANCE AT WAR 61

by what arose, he had emptied out
the whole bag and fled. But these
were no new warriors. The record
of their mere pitched battles would
have satiated a Napoleon. Their
regiments and batteries had learnt
to achieve the impossible as a matter
of routine, and in twelve months they
had scarcely for a week lost direct
contact with death. We went down
the line and looked into the eyes of
those men with the used bayonets
and rifles ; the packs that could almost
stow themselves on the shoulders
that would be strange without them;
at the splashed guns on their repaired
wheels, and the easy- working lim-
bers. One could feel the strength
and power of the mass as one feels
the flush of heat from off a sunbaked

62 FRANCE AT WAR

wall. When the Generals' cars ar-
rived there, there was no loud word
or galloping about. The lakes of
men gathered into straight-edged bat-
talions; the batteries aligned a little;
a squadron reined back or spurred
up; but it was all as swiftly smooth
as the certainty with which a man
used to the pistol draws and levels
it at the required moment. A few
peasant women saw the Generals
alight. The aeroplanes, which had
been skimming low as swallows along
the front of the line (theirs must have
been a superb view) ascended lei-
surely, and "waited on" like hawks.
Then followed the inspection, and
one saw the two figures, tall and short,
growing smaller side by side along
the white road, till far off among the

FRANCE AT WAR 63

cavalry they entered their cars again,
and moved along the horizon to an-
other rise of grey-green plain.

"The army will move across where
you are standing. Get to a flank,"
some one said.

AN ARMY IN MOTION

We were no more than well clear of
that immobile host when it all surged
forward, headed by massed bands
playing a tune that sounded like the
very pulse of France.

The two Generals, with their Staff,
and the French Minister for War,
were on foot near a patch of very
green lucerne. They made about
twenty figures in all. The cars were
little grey blocks against the grey
skyline. There was nothing else in

64 FRANCE AT WAR

all that great plain except the army;
no sound but the changing notes of
the aeroplanes and the blunted im-
pression, rather than noise, of feet
of men on soft ground. They came
over a slight ridge, so that one saw
the curve of it first furred, then
grassed, with the tips of bayonets,
which immediately grew to full height,
and then, beneath them, poured the
wonderful infantry. The speed, the
thrust, the drive of that broad blue
mass was like a tide-race up an arm
of the sea; and how such speed could
go with such weight, and how such
weight could be in itself so absolutely
under control, filled one with terror.
All the while, the band, on a far
headland, was telling them and telling
them (as if they did not know!) of

FRANCE AT WAR 65

the passion and gaiety and high heart
of their own land in the speech that
only they could fully understand.
(To hear the music of a country is
like hearing a woman think aloud.)

"What is the tune?" I asked of an
oflScer beside me.

"My faith, I can't recall for the
moment. I've marched to it often
enough, though. 'Sambre-et-Meuse,'
perhaps. Look! There goes my bat-
talion! Those Chasseurs yonder."

He knew, of course ; but what could
a stranger identify in that earth-
shaking passage of thirty thousand.'*

ARTILLERY AND CAVALRY

The note behind the ridge changed
to something deeper.

"Ah! Our guns," said an artillery

66 FRANCE AT WAR

officer, and smiled tolerantly on the
last blue waves of the Line already
beating toward the horizon.

They came twelve abreast — one
hundred and fifty guns free for the
moment to take the air in company,
behind their teams. And next week
would see them, hidden singly or in
lurking confederacies, by mountain
and marsh and forest, or the wrecked
habitations of men — where?

The big guns followed them, with
that long-nosed air of detachment
peculiar to the breed. The Gunner
at my side made no comment. He
was content to let his Arm speak for
itself, but when one big gun in a
sticky place fell out of alignment
for an instant I saw his eyebrows
contract. The artillery passed on

FRANCE AT WAR 67

with the same inhuman speed and
silence as the Line; and the Cavalry's
shattering trumpets closed it all.

They are like our Cavalry in that
their horses are m high condition,
and they talk hopefully of getting
past the barbed wire one of these
days and coming into their own.
Meantime, they are employed on
"various work as requisite," and
they all sympathize with our rough-
rider of Dragoons who flatly refused
to take off his spurs in the trenches.
If he had to die as a damned infantry-
man, he wasn't going to be buried
as such. A troop-horse of a flanking
squadron decided that he had had
enough of war, and jibbed like Lot's
wife. His rider (we all watched him)
ranged about till he found a stick,

68 FRANCE AT WAR

which he used, but without effect.
Then he got off and led the horse,
which was evidently what the brute
wanted, for when the man remounted
the jibbing began again. The last
we saw of him was one immensely
lonely figure leading one bad but
happy horse across an absolutely
empty world. Think of his reception
— the sole man of 40,000 who had
fallen out!

THE BOCHE AS MR. SMITH

The Commander of that Army
Corps came up to salute. The cars
went away with the Generals and the
Minister for War; the Army passed
out of sight over the ridges to the
north; the peasant women stooped
again to their work in the fields.

FRANCE AT WAR 69

and wet mist shut down on all the
plain; but one tingled with the
electricity that had passed. Now
one knows what the solidarity of
civilization means. Later on the civ-
ilized nations will know more, and
will wonder and laugh together at
their old blindness. When Lord Kit-
chener went down the line, before
the march past, they say that he
stopped to speak to a General who
had been Marchand's Chief of Staff
at the time of Fashoda. And Fa-
shoda was one of several cases when
civilization was very nearly manoeu-
vred into fighting with itself "for
the King of Prussia," as the saying
goes. The all-embracing vileness of
the Boche is best realized from French
soil, where they have had large expe-

70 FRANCE AT WAR

rience of it. "And yet," as some one
observed, "we ought to have known
that a race who have brought anony-
mous letter-writing to its highest
pitch in their own dirty Court affairs
would certainly use the same methods
in their foreign politics. Why didn't
we realize.''"

"For the same reason," another
responded, "that society did not
realize that the late Mr. Smith, of
your England, who married three
wives, bought baths in advance for
each of them, and, when they had
left him all their money, drowned
them one by one."

"And were the baths by any chance
called Denmark, Austria, and France
in 1870?" a third asked.

"No, they were respectable British

FRANCE AT WAR 71

tubs. But until Mr. Smith had
drowned his third wife people didn't
get suspicious. They argued that
'men don't do such things.' That
sentiment is the criminal's best pro-
tection."

IV

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE

We passed into the zone of another
army and a hillier country, where the
border villages lay more sheltered.
Here and there a town and the fields
round it gave us a glimpse of the furi-
ous industry with which France makes
and handles material and troops.
With her, as with us, the wounded
officer of experience goes back to the
drill-ground to train the new levies.
But it was always the little crowded,
defiant villages, and the civil popu-
lation waiting unweariedly and cheer-
fully on the unwearied, cheerful army,

72

FRANCE AT WAR 73

that went closest to the heart. Take
these pictures, caught almost any-
where during a journey: A knot of
little children in difficulties with the
village water-tap or high-handled
pump. A soldier, bearded and fa-
therly, or young and slim and there-
fore rather shy of the big girls' chaff,
comes forward and lifts the pail or
swings the handle. His reward, from
the smallest babe swung high in air,
or, if he is an older man, pressed
against his knees, is a kiss. Then
nobody laughs.

Or a fat old lady making oration
against some wicked young soldiers
who, she says, know what has hap-
pened to a certain bottle of wine.
"And I meant it for all — yes, for all
of you — this evening, instead of the

74 FRANCE AT WAR

thieves who stole it. Yes, I tell you
— stole it!" The whole street hears
her; so does the officer, who pretends
not to, and the amused half-battalion
up the road. The young men express
penitence; she growls like a thunder-
storm, but, softening at last, cuffs
and drives them affectionately before
her. They are all one family.

Or a girl at work with horses in a
ploughed field that is dotted with
graves. The machine must avoid
each sacred plot. So, hands on the
plough-stilts, her hair flying forward,
she shouts and wrenches till her little
brother runs up and swings the team
out of the furrow. Every aspect
and detail of life in France seems
overlaid with a smooth patina of
long-continued war — everything ex-

FRANCE AT WAR 75

cept the spirit of the people, and that
is as fresh and glorious as the sight
of their own land in sunshine.

A CITY AND WOMAN

We found a city among hills which
knew itself to be a prize greatly
coveted by the Kaiser. For, truly,
it was a pleasant, a desirable, and
an insolent city. Its streets were
full of life; it boasted an establish-
ment almost as big as Harrod's and
full of buyers, and its women dressed
and shod themselves with care and
grace, as befits ladies who, at any
time, may be ripped into rags by
bombs from aeroplanes. And there
was another city whose population
seemed to be all soldiers in training;
and yet another given up to big guns

76 FRANCE AT WAR

and ammunition — an extraordinary
sight.

After that, we came to a little town
of pale stone which an Army had
made its headquarters. It looked
like a plain woman who had fainted
in public. It had rejoiced in many
public institutions that were turned
into hospitals and offices; the
wounded limped its wide, dusty
streets, detachments of Infantry went
through it swiftly; and utterly bored
motor-lorries cruised up and down
roaring, I suppose, for something to
look at or to talk to. In the centre of
it I found one Janny, or rather his
marble bust, brooding over a minute
iron-railed garden of half-dried asters
opposite a shut-up school, which it
appeared from the inscription Janny

FRANCE AT WAR 77

had founded somewhere in the arid
Thirties. It was precisely the sort
of school that Janny, by the look of
him, would have invented. Not even
French adaptability could make any-
thing of it. So Janny had his school,
with a faint perfume of varnish, all
to himself in a hot stillness of used-up
air and little whirls of dust. And
because that town seemed so barren,
I met there a French General whom
I would have gone very far to have
encountered. He, like the others,
had created and tempered an army
for certain work in a certain place,
and its hand had been heavy on the
Boche. We talked of what the
French woman was, and had done,
and was doing, and extolled her for
her goodness and her faith and her

78 FRANCE AT WAR

splendid courage. When we parted,
I went back and made my profound-
est apologies to Janny, who must
have had a mother. The pale, over-
whelmed town did not now any
longer resemble a woman who had
fainted, but one who must endure in
public all manner of private woe and
still, with hands that never cease
working, keeps her soul and is cleanly
strong for herself and for her men.

FRENCH OFFICERS

The guns began to speak again
among the hills that we dived into;
the air grew chillier as we climbed;
forest and wet rocks closed round us
in the mist, to the sound of waters
trickling alongside; there was a tang
of wet fern, cut pine, and the first

FRANCE AT WAR 79

breath of autumn when the road
entered a tunnel and a new world —
Alsace.

Said the Governor of those parts
thoughtfully: "The main thing was to
get those factory chimneys smoking
again." (They were doing so in little
flats and villages all along.) "You
won't see any girls, because they're at
work in the textile factories. Yes, it
isn't a bad country for summer hotels,
but I'm afraid it won't do for winter
sports. We've only a metre of snow,
and it doesn't lie, except when you
are hauling guns up mountains. Then,
of course, it drifts and freezes like
Davos. That's our new railway be-
low there. Pity it's too misty to see
the view."

But for his medals, there was

80 FRANCE AT WAR

nothing in the Governor to show that
he was not EngHsh. He might have
come straight from an Indian frontier
command.

One notices this approximation of
type in the higher ranks, and many of
the juniors are cut out of the very same
cloth as ours. They get whatever
fun may be going: their perform-
ances are as incredible and outrage-
ous as the language in which they
describe them afterward is bald, but
convincing, and — I overheard the
tail-end of a yarn told by a child
of twenty to some other babes. It
was veiled in the obscurity of the
French tongue, and the points were
lost in shouts of laughter — but I
imagine the subaltern among his
equals displays just as much rever-

FRANCE AT WAR 81

ence for his elders and betters as our
own boys do. The epilogue, at least,
was as old as both Armies :

"And what did he say then?"
"Oh, the usual thing. He held his
breath till I thought he'd burst.
Then he damned me in heaps, and I
took good care to keep out of his
sight till next day."

But officially and in the high social
atmosphere of Headquarters their
manners and their meekness are of
the most admirable. There they at-
tend devoutly on the wisdom of their
seniors, who treat them, so it seemed,
with affectionate confidence.

FRONT THAT NEVER SLEEPS

When the day's reports are in, all
along the front, there is a man, expert

82 FRANCE AT WAR

in the meaning of things, who boils
them down for that cold official di-
gest which tells us that "There was

the usual grenade fighting at .

We made appreciable advance at

," &c. The original material

comes in sheaves and sheaves, where
individual character and tempera-
ment have full and amusing play.
It is reduced for domestic consump-
tion like an overwhelming electric
current. Otherwise we could not
take it in. But at closer range one
realizes that the Front never sleeps;
never ceases from trying new ideas
and weapons which, so soon as the
Boche thinks he has mastered them,
are discarded for newer annoyances
and bewilderments.

"The Boche is above all things ob-

FRANCE AT WAR 83

servant and imitative," said one who
counted quite a few Boches dead on
the front of his sector. "When you
present him with a new idea, he
thinks it over for a day or two.
Then he presents his riposte."

"Yes, my General. That was ex-
actly what he did to me when I —
did so and so. He was quite silent
for a day. Then — he stole my pat-
ent."

"And you.?"

"I had a notion that he'd do that,
so I had changed the specification."

Thus spoke the Staff, and so it is
among the junior commands, down to
the semi-isolated posts where boy-
Napoleons live on their own, through
unbelievable adventures. They are
inventive young devils, these veterans

84 FRANCE AT WAR

of 21, possessed of the single ideal —
to kill — which they follow with men
as single-minded as themselves. Bat-
tlefield tactics do not exist; when
a whole nation goes to ground there
can be none of the "victories" of the
old bookish days. But there is al-
ways the killing — the well-schemed
smashing of a full trench, the rushing
out and the mowing down of its
occupants; the unsuspicious battalion
far in the rear, located after two
nights' extreme risk alone among rub-
bish of masonry, and wiped out as it
eats or washes itself; and, more rarely,
the body to body encounter with
animals removed from the protection
of their machinery, when the bayonets
get their chance. The Boche does
not at all like meeting men whose

FRANCE AT WAR 85

womenfolk he has dishonoured or
mutilated, or used as a protection
against bullets. It is not that these
men are angry or violent. They do
not waste time in that way. They
kill him.

THE BUSINESS OF WAR

The French are less reticent than
we about atrocities committed by the
Boche, because those atrocities form
part of their lives. They are not
tucked away in reports of Commis-
sions, and vaguely referred to as "too
awful." Later on, perhaps, we shall
be unreserved in our turn. But they
do not talk of them with any bab-
bling heat or bleat or make funny
little appeals to a "public opinion"
that, like the Boche, has gone under-

86 FRANCE AT WAR

ground. It occurs to me that this
must be because every Frenchman
has his place and his chance, direct
or indirect, to diminish the number
of Boches still alive. Whether he lies
out in a sandwich of damp earth,
or sweats the big guns up the crests
behind the trees, or brings the fat,
loaded barges into the very heart of
the city, where the shell-wagons wait,
or spends his last crippled years at the
harvest, he is doing his work to that
end.

If he is a civilian he may — as he
does — say things about his Govern-
ment, which, after all, is very like
other popular governments. (A life-
time spent in watching how the cat
jumps does not make lion-tamers.)
But there is very little human rub-

FRANCE AT WAR 87

bish knocking about France to hinder
work or darken counsel. Above all,
there is a thing called the Honour
of Civilization, to which France is
attached. The meanest man feels
that he, in his place, is permitted
to help uphold it, and, I think, bears
himself, therefore, with new dignity.

A CONTRAST IN TYPES

This is written in a garden of
smooth turf, under a copper beech,
beside a glassy mill-stream, where sol-
diers of Alpine regiments are writing
letters home, while the guns shout up
and down the narrow valleys.

A great wolf-hound, who considers
himself in charge of the old-fashioned
farmhouse, cannot understand why
his master, aged six, should be sitting

88 FRANCE AT WAR

on the knees of the Mareehal des
Logis, the iron man who drives the
big car.

"But you are French, httle one?"
says the giant, with a yearning arm
round the child.

"Yes," very slowly mouthing the
French words; "I — can't — speak —
French — but — I — am — French."

The small face disappears in the
big beard.

Somehow, I can't imagine the
Mareehal des Logis killing babies —
even if his superior oflScer, now sketch-
ing the scene, were to order him!

The great building must once have
been a monastery. Twilight soft-
ened its gaunt wings, in an angle of
which were collected fifty prisoners.

FRANCE AT WAR 89

picked up among the hills behind
the mists.

They stood in some sort of mili-
tary formation preparatory to being
marched off. They were dressed in
khaki, the colour of gassed grass,
that might have belonged to any
army. Two wore spectacles, and I
counted eight faces of the fifty which
were asymmetrical — out of drawing
on one side.

"Some of their later drafts give us
that type," said the Interpreter.
One of them had been wounded in the
head and roughly bandaged. The
others seemed all sound. Most of
them looked at nothing, but several
were vividly alive with terror that
cannot keep the eyelids still, and a few
wavered on the grey edge of collapse.

90 FRANCE AT WAR

They were the breed which, at the
word of command, had stolen out to
drown women and children; had
raped women in the streets at the
word of command; and, always at
the word of command, had sprayed
petrol, or squirted flame; or defiled
the property and persons of their
captives. They stood there outside
all humanity. Yet they were made
in the likeness of humanity. One
realized it with a shock when the band-
aged creature began to shiver, and
they shuffled off in response to the
orders of civilized men.

LIFE IN TRENCHES ON THE
MOUNTAIN SIDE

Very early in the morning I met
Alan Breck, with a half-healed bullet-
scrape across the bridge of his nose,
and an Alpine cap over one ear.
His people a few hundred years ago
had been Scotch. He bore a Scotch
name, and still recognized the head
of his clan, but his French occasion-
ally ran into German words, for he
was an Alsatian on one side.

"This," he explained, "is the very
best country in the world to fight in.
It's picturesque and full of cover. I'm

91

92 FRANCE AT WAR

a gunner. I've been here for months.
It's lovely."

It might have been the hills under
Mussoorie, and what our cars ex-
pected to do in it I could not under-
stand. But the demon-driver who
had been a road-racer took the 70
h. p. Mercedes and threaded the nar-
row valleys, as well as occasional half-
Swiss villages full of Alpine troops,
at a restrained thirty miles an
hour. He shot up a new-made road,
more like Mussoorie than ever, and
did not fall down the hillside even
once. An ammunition-mule of a
mountain-battery met him at a tight
corner, and began to climb a
tree.

"See! There isn't another place
in France where that could happen,"

FRANCE AT WAR 93

said Alan. "I tell you, this is a
magnificent country."

The mule was hauled down by his
tail before he had reached the lower
branches, and went on through the
woods, his ammunition-boxes jinking
on his back, for all the world as
though he were rejoining his battery
at Jutogh. One expected to meet the
little Hill people bent under their loads
under the forest gloom. The light, the
colour, the smell of wood smoke, pine-
needles, wet earth, and warm mule were
all Himalayan. Only the Mercedes
was violently and loudly a stranger.

"Halt!" said Alan at last, when
she had done everything except imi-
tate the mule.

"The road continues," said the
demon-driver seductively.

94 FRANCE AT WAR

"Yes, but they will hear you if you
go on. Stop and wait. We've a
mountain battery to look at."

They were not at work for the
moment, and the Commandant, a
grim and forceful man, showed me
some details of their construction.
When we left them in their bower —
it looked like a Hill priest's wayside
shrine — we heard them singing
through the steep-descending pines.
They, too, like the 75 's, seem to have
no pet name in the service.

It was a poisonously blind country.
The woods blocked all sense of direc-
tion above and around. The ground
was at any angle you please, and all
sounds were split up and muddied
by the tree-trunks, which acted as
silencers. High above us the re-

FRANCE AT WAR 95

spectable, all-concealing forest had
turned into sparse, ghastly blue sticks
of timber — ^an assembly of leper-
trees round a bald mountain top.
"That's where we're going," said
Alan. "Isn't it an adorable coun-
try?"

TRENCHES

A machine-gun loosed a few shots in
the fumbling style of her kind when
they feel for an opening. A couple
of rifle shots answered. They might
have been half a mile away or a hun-
dred yards below. An adorable coun-
try! We climbed up till we found
once again a complete tea-garden of
little sunk houses, almost invisible
in the brown-pink recesses of the
thick forest. Here the trenches be-
gan, and with them for the next few

96 FRANCE AT WAR

hours life in two dimensions — length
and breadth. You could have eaten
your dinner almost anywhere off the
swept dry ground, for the steep slopes
favoured draining, there was no lack
of timber, and there was unlimited
labour. It had made neat double-
length dug-outs where the wounded
could be laid in during their pas-
sage down the mountain side; well-
tended occasional latrines properly
limed; dug-outs for sleeping and
eating; overhead protections and tool-
sheds where needed, and, as one came
nearer the working face, very clever
cellars against trench-sweepers. Men
passed on their business ; a squad with
a captured machine-gun which they
tested in a sheltered dip; armourers
at their benches busy with sick rifles;

FRANCE AT WAR 97

fatigue-parties for straw, rations, and
ammunition; long processions of sin-
gle blue figures turned sideways be-
tween the brown sunless walls. One
understood after a while the night-
mare that lays hold of trench-stale
men, when the dreamer wanders for
ever in those blind mazes till, after
centuries of agonizing flight, he finds
himself stumbling out again into the
white blaze and horror of the mined
front — he who thought he had al-
most reached home !

IN THE FRONT LINE.

There were no trees above us now.
Their trunks lay along the edge of the
trench, built in with stones, where
necessary, or sometimes overhanging
it in ragged splinters or bushy tops.

98 FRANCE AT WAR

Bits of cloth, not French, showed, too,
in the uneven Hnes of debris at the
trench lip, and some thoughtful soul
had marked an unexploded Boche
trench-sweeper as *' not to be touched."
It was a young lawyer from Paris who
pointed that out to me.

We met the Colonel at the head of
an indescribable pit of ruin, full of
sunshine, whose steps ran down a
very steep hillside under the lee of
an almost vertically plunging para-
pet. To the left of that parapet the
whole hillside was one gruel of
smashed trees, split stones, and pow-
dered soil. It might have been a rag-
picker's dump-heap on a colossal scale.

Alan looked at it critically. I
think he had helped to make it not
long before.

FRANCE AT WAR 99

"We're on the top of the hill now, and
the Boches are below us," said he. " We
gave them a very fair sickener lately."

"This," said the Colonel, "is the
front line."

There were overhead guards against
hand-bombs which disposed me to be-
lieve him, but what convinced me
most was a corporal urging us in
whispers not to talk so loud. The
men were at dinner, and a good smell
of food filled the trench. This was
the first smell I had encountered in
my long travels uphill — a mixed, en-
tirely wholesome flavour of stew,
leather, earth, and rifle-oil.

FRONT LINE PROFESSIONALS

A proportion of men were standing
to arms while others ate; but dinner-

100 FRANCE AT WAR

time is slack time, even among ani-
mals, and it was close on noon.

"The Bodies got their soup a few
days ago," some one whispered. I
thought of the pulverized hillside,
and hoped it had been hot enough.

We edged along the still trench,
where the soldiers stared, with justi-
fied contempt, I thought, upon the
civilian who scuttled through their
life for a few emotional minutes in
order to make words out of their
blood. Somehow it reminded me of
coming in late to a play and incom-
moding a long line of packed stalls.
The whispered dialogue was much
the same: "Pardon!" "I beg your
pardon, monsieur." "To the right,
monsieur." "If monsieur will lower
his head." "One sees best from here.

FRANCE AT WAR 101

monsieur," and so on. It was their
day and night-long business, carried
through without display or heat, or
doubt or indecision. Those who
worked, worked; those off duty, not
five feet behind them in the dug-outs,
were deep in their papers, or theirmeals
or their letters; while death stood ready
at every minute to drop down into the
narrow cut from out of the narrow strip
of unconcerned sky. And for the bet-
ter part of a week one had skirted
hundreds of miles of such a frieze!

The loopholes not in use were
plugged rather like old-fashioned
hives. Said the Colonel, removing
a plug: "Here are the Boches. Look,
and you'll see their sandbags."
Through the jumble of riven trees
and stones one saw what might have

102 FRANCE AT WAR

been a bit of green sacking. "They're
about seven metres distant just here,"
the Colonel went on. That was
true, too. We entered a little forta-
lice with a cannon in it, in an em-
brasure which at that moment struck
me as unnecessarily vast, even though
it was partly closed by a frail pack-
ing-case lid. The Colonel sat him
down in front of it, and explained the
theory of this sort of redoubt. "By
the way," he said to the gunner at
last, "can't you find something bet-
ter than that?'' He twitched the
lid aside. "I think it's too light.
Get a log of wood or something."

HANDY TRENCH-SWEEPERS

I loved that Colonel ! He knew his
men and he knew the Boches — had

FRANCE AT WAR 103

them marked down like birds. When
he said they were beside dead trees
or behind boulders, sure enough there
they were! But, as I have said, the
dinner-hour is always slack, and even
when we came to a place where a sec-
tion of trench had been bashed open
by trench-sweepers, and it was re-
commended to duck and hurry, noth-
ing much happened. The uncanny
thing was the absence of movement
in the Boche trenches. Sometimes
one imagined that one smelt strange
tobacco, or heard a rifle-bolt working
after a shot. Otherwise they were
as still as pig at noonday.

We held on through the maze, past
trench-sweepers of a handy light pat-
tern, with their screw-tailed charge
all ready; and a grave or so; and when

104 FRANCE AT WAR

I came on men who merely stood
within easy reach of their rifles, I
knew I was in the second line. When
they lay frankly at ease in their dug-
outs, I knew it was the third. A shot-
gun would have sprinkled all three.

"No flat plains," said Alan. "No
hunting for gun positions — the hills
are full of them — and the trenches
close together and commanding each
other. You see what a beautiful
country it is."

The Colonel confirmed this, but
from another point of view. War
was his business, as the still woods
could testify — but his hobby was
his trenches. He had tapped the
mountain streams and dug out a
laundry where a man could wash his
shirt and go up and be killed in it,

FEANCE AT WAR 105

all in a morning; had drained the
trenches till a muddy stretch in them
was an offence; and at the bottom of
the hill (it looked like a hydropathic
establishment on the stage) he had
created baths where half a battalion
at a time could wash. He never told
me how all that country had been
fought over as fiercely as Ypres in
the West; nor what blood had gone
down the valleys before his trenches
pushed over the scalped mountain
top. No. He sketched out new en-
deavours in earth and stones and
trees for the comfort of his men on
that populous mountain.

And there came a priest, who was a
sub-lieutenant, out of a wood of snuff-
brown shadows and half -veiled trunks.
Would it please me to look at a chapel?

106 FRANCE AT WAR

It was all open to the hillside, most
tenderly and devoutly done in rustic
work with reedings of peeled branches
and panels of moss and thatch — St.
Hubert's own shrine. I saw the
hunters who passed before it, going
to the chase on the far side of the
mountain where their game lay.

A BOMBARDED TOWN

Alan carried me off to tea the same
evening in a town where he seemed
to know everybody. He had spent
the afternoon on another mountain
top, inspecting gun positions ; whereby
he had been shelled a little — mar-
mite is the slang for it. There had
been no serious marmitage, and he
had spotted a Boche position which
was marmitahle.

FRANCE AT WAR 107

"And we may get shelled now,"
he added, hopefully. "They shell
this town whenever they think of it.
Perhaps they'll shell us at tea."

It was a quaintly beautiful little
place, with its mixture of French and
German ideas; its old bridge and
gentle-minded river, between the cul-
tivated hills. The sand-bagged cellar
doors, the ruined houses, and the holes
in the pavement looked as unreal as
the violences of a cinema against
that soft and simple setting. The
people were abroad in the streets,
and the little children were playing.
A big shell gives notice enough for
one to get to shelter, if the shelter is
near enough. That appears to be as
much as any one expects in the world
where one is shelled, and that world

108 FRANCE AT WAR

has settled down to it. People's lips
are a little firmer, the modelling of
the brows is a little more pronounced,
and, maybe, there is a change in the
expression of the eyes; but nothing
that a casual afternoon caller need
particularly notice.

CASES FOR HOSPITAL

The house where we took tea was
the "big house" of the place, old
and massive, a treasure house of
ancient furniture. It had everything
that the moderate heart of man could
desire — gardens, garages, outbuild-
ings, and the air of peace that goes
with beauty in age. It stood over a
high cellarage, and opposite the cellar
door was a brand-new blindage of
earth packed between timbers. The

FRANCE AT WAR 109

cellar was a hospital, with its beds and
stores, and under the electric light the
orderly waited ready for the cases to
be carried down out of the streets.
"Yes, they are all civil cases," said

he.

They come without much warning
— a woman gashed by falling timber;
a child with its temple crushed by a
flying stone; an urgent amputation
case, and so on. One never knows.
Bombardment, the Boche text-books
say, "is designed to terrify the civil
population so that they may put
pressure on their politicians to con-
clude peace." In real life, men are
very rarely soothed by the sight of
their women being tortured.

We took tea in the hall upstairs,
with a propriety and an interchange

110 FRANCE AT WAR

of compliments that suited the little
occasion. There was no attempt to
disguise the existence of a bombard-
ment, but it was not allowed to over-
weigh talk of lighter matters. I
know one guest who sat through it
as near as might be inarticulate with
wonder. But he was English, and
when Alan asked him whether he
had enjoyed himself, he said: "Oh,
yes. Thank you very much."

"Nice people, aren't they?" Alan
went on.

"Oh, very nice. And — and such
good tea."

He managed to convey a few of his
sentiments to Alan after dinner.

"But what else could the people
have done.''" said he. "They are
French."

VI

THE COMMON TASK OF A
GREAT PEOPLE

"This is the end of the line," said
the Staff OflBcer, kindest and most
patient of chaperons. It buttressed
itself on a fortress among hills. Be-
yond that, the silence was more aw-
ful than the mixed noise of business
to the westward. In mileage on the
map the line must be between four
and five hundred miles; in actual
trench-work many times that dis-
tance. It is too much to see at full
length; the mind does not readily
break away from the obsession of its
111

112 FRANCE AT WAR

entirety or the grip of its detail. One
visualizes the thing afterwards as a
white-hot gash, worming all across
France between intolerable sounds
and lights, under ceaseless blasts of
whirled dirt. Nor is it any relief to
lose oneself among wildernesses of
piling, stoning, timbering, concreting,
and wire-work, or incalculable quan-
tities of soil thrown up raw to the
light and cloaked by the changing
seasons — as the unburied dead are
cloaked.

Yet there are no words to give the
essential simplicity of it. It is the
rampart put up by Man against the
Beast, precisely as in the Stone Age.
If it goes, all that keeps us from the
Beast goes with it. One sees this at
the front as clearly as one sees the

FRANCE AT WAR 113

French villages behind the German
lines. Sometimes people steal away
from them and bring word of what
they endure.

Where the rifle and the bayonet
serve, men use those tools along the
front. Where the knife gives better
results, they go in behind the hand-
grenades with the naked twelve-inch
knife. Each race is supposed to
fight in its own way, but this war
has passed beyond all the known
ways. They say that the Belgians
in the north settle accounts with a
certain dry passion which has varied
very little since their agony began.
Some sections of the English line have
produced a soft-voiced, rather re-
served type, which does its work with
its mouth shut. The French carry

114 FRANCE AT WAR

an edge to their fighting, a precision,
and a dreadful knowledge coupled
with an insensibility to shock, unlike
anything one has imagined of man-
kind. To be sure, there has never
been like provocation, for never since
the iEsir went about to bind the
Fenris Wolf has all the world united
to bind the Beast.

The last I saw of the front was
Alan Breck speeding back to his gun-
positions among the mountains; and
I wondered what delight of what
household the lad must have been
in the old days.

SUPPORTS AND RESERVES

Then we had to work our way, de-
partment by department, against the
tides of men behind the line — sup-

FRANCE AT WAR 115

ports and their supports, reserves and
reserves of reserves, as well as the
masses in training. They flooded
towns and villages, and when we tried
short-cuts we found them in every
by-lane. Have you seen mounted
men reading their home letters with
the reins thrown on the horses' necks,
moving in absorbed silence through
a street which almost said "Hush!"
to its dogs; or met, in a forest, a pro-
cession of perfectly new big guns,
apparently taking themselves from
the foundry to the front .^^

In spite of their love of drama, there
is not much "window-dressing" in
the French character. The Boche,
who is the priest of the Higher
Counter- jumpery, would have had
half the neutral Press out in cars to

116 FRANCE AT WAR

advertise these vast spectacles of
men and material. But the same
instinct as makes their rich farmers
keep to their smocks makes the
French keep quiet.

"This is our affair," they argue.
"Everybody concerned is taking part
in it. Like the review you saw the
other day, there are no spectators."

"But it might be of advantage if
the world knew."

Mine was a foolish remark. There
is only one world to-day, the world of
the Allies. Each of them knows
what the others are doing and — the
rest doesn't matter. This is a curious
but delightful fact to realize at first
hand. And think what it will be
later, when we shall all circulate
among each other and open our hearts

FRANCE AT WAR 117

and talk it over in a brotherhood
more intimate than the ties of blood!
I lay that night at a little French
town, and was kept awake by a man,
somewhere in the hot, still darkness,
howling aloud from the pain of his
wounds. I was glad that he was
alone, for when one man gives way
the others sometimes follow. Yet
the single note of misery was worse
than the baying and gulping of a
whole ward. I wished that a dele-
gation of strikers could have heard it.

That a civilian should be in the
war zone at all is a fair guarantee of
his good faith. It is when he is
outside the zone unchaperoned that
questions begin, and the permits are
looked into. If these are irregular —

118 FRANCE AT WAR

but one doesn't care to contemplate
it. If regular, there are still a few
counter-checks. As the sergeant at
the railway station said when he
helped us out of an impasse: "You
will realize that it is the most undesir-
able persons whose papers are of the
most regular. It is their business
you see. The Commissary of Police
is at the Hotel de Ville, if you will
come along for the little formality.
Myself, I used to keep a shop in Paris.
My God, these provincial towns are
desolating!"

PARIS — AND NO FOREIGNERS

He would have loved his Paris as
we found it. Life was renewing it-
self in the streets, whose drawing and
proportion one could never notice

FRANCE AT WAR 119

before. People's eyes, and the wo-
men's especially, seemed to be set to a
longer range, a more comprehensive
gaze. One would have said they
came from the sea or the mountains,
where things are few and simple,
rather than from houses. Best of
all, there were no foreigners — the be-
loved city for the first time was French
throughout from end to end. It felt
like coming back to an old friend's
house for a quiet talk after he had
got rid of a houseful of visitors. The
functionaries and police had dropped
their masks of oflBcial politeness, and
were just friendly. At the hotels, so
like school two days before the term
begins, the impersonal valet, the
chambermaid of the set two-franc
smile, and the unbending head- waiter

120 FRANCE AT WAR

had given place to one's own brothers
and sisters, full of one's own anxieties.
"My son is an aviator, monsieur.
I could have claimed Italian nation-
ality for him at the beginning, but
he would not have it." . . .
"Both my brothers, monsieur, are
at the war. One is dead already.
And my fiance, I have not heard from
him since March. He is cook in a
battalion." . . . "Here is the
wine-list, monsieur. Yes, both my
sons and a nephew, and — I have no
news of them, not a word of news.
My God, we all suffer these days."
And so, too, among the shops — the
mere statement of the loss or the grief
at the heart, but never a word of
doubt, never a whimper of despair.
"Now why," asked a shopkeeper,

FRANCE AT WAR 121

"does not our Government, or your
Government, or both our Govern-
ments, send some of the British
Army to Paris? I assure you we
should make them welcome."

"Perhaps," I began, "you might
make them too welcome."

He laughed. "We should make
them as welcome as our own army.
They would enjoy themselves." I
had a vision of British officers, each
^dth ninety days' pay to his credit,
and a damsel or two at home, shop-
ping consumedly.

"And also," said the shopkeeper,
"the moral effect on Paris to see more
of your troops would be very good."

But I saw a quite English Pro-
vost-Marshal losing himself in chase
of defaulters of the New Army who

122 FEANCE AT WAR

knew their Paris! Still, there is
something to be said for the idea —
to the extent of a virtuous brigade or
so. At present, the English officer
in Paris is a scarce bird, and he ex-
plains at once why he is and what he
is doing there. He must have good
reasons. I suggested teeth to an
acquaintance. "No good," he grum-
bled. "They've thought of that,
too. Behind our lines is simply
crawling with dentists now!"

A PEOPLE TRANSFIGURED

If one asked after the people that
gave dinners and dances last year,
where every one talked so brilliantly
of such vital things, one got in return
the addresses of hospitals. Those
pleasant hostesses and maidens seemed

FRANCE AT WAR 123

to be in charge of departments
or on duty in wards, or kitchens, or
sculleries. Some of the hospitals were
in Paris. (Their staffs might have
one hour a day in which to see visi-
tors.) Others were up the line, and
liable to be shelled or bombed.

I recalled one Frenchwoman in
particular, because she had once ex-
plained to me the necessities of civil-
ized life. These included a masseuse,
a manicurist, and a maid to look
after the lapdogs. She is employed
now, and has been for months past,
on the disinfection and repair of sol-
diers' clothes. There was no need
to ask after the men one had known.
Still, there was no sense of desolation.
They had gone on; the others were
getting ready.

124 FRANCE AT WAR

All France works outward to the
Front — precisely as an endless chain
of fire-buckets works toward the
conflagration. Leave the fire behind
you and go back till you reach the
source of supplies. You will find
no break, no pause, no apparent
haste, but never any slackening.
Everybody has his or her bucket,
little or big, and nobody disputes
how they should be used. It is a
people possessed of the precedent and
tradition of war for existence, accus-
tomed to hard living and hard labour,
sanely economical by temperament,
logical by training, and illumined
and transfigured by their resolve and
endurance.

You know, when supreme trial
overtakes an acquaintance whom till

FRANCE AT WAR 125

tlien we conceived we knew, how the
man's nature sometimes changes past
knowledge or beHef. He who was
altogether such an one as ourselves
goes forward simply, even lightly,
to heights we thought unattainable.
Though he is the very same comrade
that lived our small life with us, yet
in all things he has become great.
So it is with France to-day. She has
discovered the measure of her soul.

THE NEW WAR

One sees this not alone in the — it is
more than contempt of death — in the
godlike preoccupation of her people
under arms which makes them put
death out of the account, but in the
equal passion and fervour with which
her people throughout give them-

126 FRANCE AT WAR

selves to the smallest as well as the
greatest tasks that may in any way
serve their sword. I might tell you
something that I saw of the cleaning
out of certain latrines; of the educa-
tion and antecedents of the cleaners;
what they said in the matter and how
perfectly the work was done. There
was a little Rabelais in it, naturally,
but the rest was pure devotion, re-
joicing to be of use.

Similarly with stables, barricades,
and barbed-wire work, the clearing
and piling away of wrecked house-
rubbish, the serving of meals till the
service rocks on its poor tired feet,
but keeps its temper; and all the un-
lovely, monotonous details that go
with war.

The women, as I have tried to show,

FRANCE AT WAR 127

work stride for stride with the men,
with hearts as resolute and a spirit
that has httle mercy for short-
comings. A woman takes her place
wherever she can relieve a man —
in the shop, at the posts, on the
tramways, the hotels, and a thousand
other businesses. She is inured to
field-work, and half the harvest of
France this year lies in her lap. One
feels at every turn how her men trust
her. She knows, for she shares
everything with her world, what has
befallen her sisters who are now in Ger-
man hands, and her soul is the undy-
ing flame behind the men's steel.
Neither men nor women have any
illusion as to miracles presently to be
performed which shall "sweep out"
or "drive back" the Boche. Since

128 FRANCE AT WAR

the Army is the Nation, they know
much, though they are officially told
little. They all recognize that the
old-fashioned "victory" of the past
is almost as obsolete as a rifle in a
front-line trench. They all accept
the new war, which means grinding
down and wearing out the enemy by
every means and plan and device that
can be compassed. It is slow and ex-
pensive, but as deadly sure as the logic
that leads them to make it their one
work, their sole thought, their single
preoccupation.

A nation's confidence

The same logic saves them a vast
amount of energy. They knew Ger-
many in '70, when the world would
not believe in their knowledge; they

FRANCE AT WAR 129

knew the German mind before the
war; they know what she has done
(they have photographs) during this
war. They do not fall into spasms of
horror and indignation over atroci-
ties "that cannot be mentioned,"
as the English papers say. They
mention them in full and book them
to the account. They do not discuss,
nor consider, nor waste an emotion
over anything that Germany says or
boasts or argues or implies or intrigues
after. They have the heart's ease
that comes from all being at work for
their country; the knowledge that
the burden of work is equally dis-
tributed among all; the certainty that
the women are working side by side
with the men; the assurance that
when one man's task is at the

130 FRANCE AT WAR

moment ended, another takes his
place.

Out of these things is born their
power of recuperation in their leisure;
their reasoned calm while at work;
and their superb confidence in their
arms. Even if France of to-day
stood alone against the world's enemy,
it would be almost inconceivable to
imagine her defeat now; wholly so
to imagine any surrender. The war
will go on till the enemy is finished.
The French do not know when that
hour will come; they seldom speak of
it; they do not amuse themselves
with dreams of triumphs or terms.
Their business is war, and they do
their business.

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

<(o5

THE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Santa Barbara

^IS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW.

'^mrm-^

UC SOUTHERN

REGIONAL LIBRARY FACIUjY

3 1205 00470 6246

A A 000 293 563 3

Uwlllhi[filinu^,