The Marne : a tale of the war

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES

THE MARNE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA ' MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MARNE

A TALE OF THE WAR

BY

EDITH WHARTON

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1918

COPYRIGHT

THE MARNE

EVER since the age of six Troy Belknap
of New York had embarked for Europe
every June on the fastest steamer of
one or another of the most expensive
lines.

With his family he had descended
at the dock from a large noiseless
motor, had kissed his father good-bye,
turned back to shake hands with the
chauffeur (a particular friend), andtrotted
up the gang-plank behind his mother's
maid, while one welcoming steward
captured Mrs. Belknap's bag, and
another led away her miniature French
bull -dog — also a particular friend of
Troy's.

4 THE MARNE

From that hour all had been delight.
For six golden days Troy had ranged
the decks, splashed in the blue salt
water brimming his huge porcelain tub,
lunched and dined with the grown-ups
in the Ritz restaurant, and swaggered
about in front of the children who had
never crossed before, and didn't know
the stewards, or the purser, or the
captain's cat, or on which deck you
might exercise your dog, or how to
induce the officer on the watch to let
you scramble up for a minute to the
bridge. Then, when these joys began
to pall, he had lost himself in others
deeper and dearer. Another of his
cronies, the library steward, had un-
locked the book- case doors for him,
and, buried for hours in the depths of
a huge library armchair (there weren't
any to compare with it on land), he
had ranged through the length and
breadth of several literatures.

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These six days of bliss would have
been too soon over if they had not been
the mere prelude to intenser sensations.
On the seventh morning — generally at
Cherbourg — Troy Belknap followed his
mother, and his mother's maid, and the
French bull, up the gang-plank and
into another large noiseless motor, with
another chauffeur (French, this one)
to whom he was also deeply attached,
and who sat grinning and cap-touching
at the wheel. And then — in a few
minutes, so swiftly and smilingly was
the way of Mrs. Belknap smoothed —
the noiseless motor was off, and they
were rushing eastward through the
orchards of Normandy.

The little boy's happiness would
have been complete if there had been
more time to give to the beautiful
things that flew past them : thatched
villages with square-towered churches
in hollows of the deep green country,

6 THE MARNE

or grey shining towns above rivers on
which cathedrals seemed to be moored
like ships ; miles and miles of field and
hedge and park falling away from high
terraced houses, and little embroidered
stone manors reflected in reed-grown
moats under ancient trees.

Unfortunately Mrs. Belknap always
had pressing engagements in Paris.
She had made appointments beforehand
with all her dressmakers, and, as Troy
was well aware, it was impossible, at
the height of the season, to break such
engagements without losing one's turn,
and having to wait weeks and weeks
to get a lot of nasty rags that one had
seen, by that time, on the back of every
other woman in the place.

Luckily, however, even Mrs. Belknap
had to eat; and during the halts in
the shining towns, where a succulent
luncheon was served in a garden or a
flowery courtyard, Troy had time (as

THE MARNE 7

he grew bigger) to slip away alone, and
climb to the height where the cathedral
stood, or at least to loiter and gaze in
the narrow crooked streets, between
gabled cross-beamed houses, each more
picture - bookishly quaint than its
neighbours.

In Paris, in their brightly -lit and
beflowered hotel drawing - room, he
was welcomed by Madame Lebuc, an
old French lady smelling of crape, who
gave him lessons and took him and the
bull -dog for walks, and who, as he
grew older, was supplemented, and
then replaced, by an ugly vehement
young tutor, of half - English descent,
whose companionship opened fresh
fields and pastures to Troy's dawning
imagination.

Then in July — always at the same
date — Mr. Belknap was deposited at
the door by the noiseless motor, which
had been down to Havre to fetch him ;

8 THE MARNE

and a few days later they all got into
it, and while Madame Lebuc (pressing
a packet of chocolates into her pupil's
hand) waved a damp farewell from the
doorway, the Pegasus motor flew up
the Champs Elyse'es, devoured the
leafy alleys of the Bois, and soared
away to new horizons.

Most often they were mountain
horizons, for the tour invariably ended
in the Swiss Alps. But there always
seemed to be new ways (looked out
by Mr. Belknap on the map) of reach-
ing their destination ; ways lovelier,
more winding, more wonderful, that
took in vast sweeping visions of France
from the Seine to the Rhone. And
when Troy grew older the vehement
young tutor went with them, and once
they all stopped and lunched at his
father's house, on the edge of a gabled
village in the Argonne, with a view
stretching away for miles toward the

THE MARNE 9

Vosges and Alsace. Mr. and Mrs.
Belknap were very kind people, and
it would never have occurred to them
to refuse M. Gantier's invitation to
lunch with his family ; but they had
no idea of the emotions stirred in their
son's eager bosom by what seemed to
them merely a rather inconvenient
deviation from their course. Troy
himself was hardly aware of these
emotions at the time, though his
hungry interest in life always made
him welcome the least deflection from
the expected. He had simply thought
what kind jolly people the Gantiers
were, and what fun it was to be inside
one of the quaint stone houses, with
small window - panes looking on old
box-gardens, that he was always being
whisked past in the motor. But later
he was to re-live that day in all its
homely details.

II

THEY were at St. Moritz — as usual.

He and M. Gantier had been for a
tramp through the Val Suvretta, and,
coming home late, were rushing into
their evening clothes to join Mr. and
Mrs. Belknap at dinner (as they did
now regularly, Troy having reached
the virile age of fifteen, and having to
justify the possession of a smoking-
jacket and patent-leather shoes). He
was just out of his bath, and smothered
in towels, when the tutor opened the
door and thrust in a newspaper.

"There will be war — I must leave
to-morrow."

Troy dropped the towels.

10

THE MARNE 11

War! War! War against his
beautiful France! And this young
man, his dearest friend and companion,
was to be torn from him suddenly, sense-
lessly, torn from their endless talks,
their long walks in the mountains, their
elaborately planned courses of study —
archaeology, French literature, medieval
philosophy, the Divine Comedy, and
vistas and vistas beyond — to be torn
from all this, and to disappear from
Troy Belknap's life into the black
gulf of this unfathomable thing called
War, that seemed suddenly to have
escaped out of the history books like
a dangerous lunatic escaping from the
asylum in which he was supposed to
be securely confined !

Troy Belknap was stunned.

He pulled himself together to bid
a valiant farewell to M. Gantier (the
air was full of the "Marseillaise" and
Sambre-et-Meuse, and everybody knew

12 THE MARNE

the Russians would be in Berlin in
six weeks) ; but once his tutor was
gone the mystery and horror again
closed in on him.

France, his France, attacked, in-
vaded, outraged ; and he, a poor help-
less American boy, who adored her,
and could do nothing for her — not even
cry, as a girl might ! It was bitter.

His parents, too, were dreadfully
upset ; and so were all their friends.
But what chiefly troubled them was
that they could get no money, no
seats in the train, no assurance that
the Swiss frontier would not be closed
before they could cross the border.
These preoccupations seemed to leave
them, for the moment, no time to think
about France ; and Troy, during those
first days, felt as if he were an infant
Winkelried, with all the shafts of the
world's woe gathered into his inadequate
breast.

THE MARNE 13

For France was his holiday world,
the world of his fancy and imagination,
a great traceried window opening on
the universe. And now, in the hour
of her need, all he heard about him was
the worried talk of people planning to
desert her !

Safe in Paris, Mr. and Mrs. Belknap
regained their balance. Having secured
(for a sum that would have fitted up
an ambulance) their passages on a
steamer sailing from England, they
could at length look about them, feel
sorry, and subscribe to all the budding
war charities. They even remembered
poor Madame Lebuc, stranded by the
flight of all her pupils, and found a job
for her in a refugee bureau. Then, just
as they were about to sail, Mrs. Belknap
had a touch of pneumonia, and was
obliged to postpone her departure ;
while Mr. Belknap, jamming his posses-
sions into a single suit -case, dashed

14 THE MARNE

down to Spain to take ship at Malaga.
The turn affairs were taking made it
advisable for him to get back as quickly
as possible, and his wife and son were
to follow from England in a month.

All the while there came no news of
M. Gantier. He had rejoined his depot
at once, and Troy had had a post-card
from him, dated the 6th of August,
and saying that he was leaving for the
front. After that, silence.

Troy, poring over the morning
papers, and slipping out alone to watch
for the noon communiques in the
windows of the Paris Herald, read of
the rash French advance in Alsace, and
the enemy's retaliatory descent on the
region the Belknaps had so often sped
over. And one day, among the names
of the ruined villages, he lit on that of
the little town where they had all
lunched with the Gantiers. He saw
the box - garden with the hornbeam

THE MARNE 15

arbour where they had gone to drink
coffee, old M. Gantier ceremoniously
leading the way with Mrs. Belknap ; he
saw Mme. Gantier, lame and stout,
hobbling after with Mr. Belknap ; a
little old aunt with bobbing curls ; the
round-faced Gantier girl, shy and rosy ;
an incredibly dried and smoked and
aged grandfather, with Voltairian eyes
and sly snuff -taking gestures ; and his
own friend, the eldest of the three
brothers ; he saw all these modest
beaming people grouped about Mme.
Gantier's coffee and Papa Gantier's
best bottle of "Fine" he smelt the
lime-blossoms and box, he heard the
bees in the lavender, he looked out on
the rich fields and woods and the blue
hills bathed in summer light. And he
read : " Not a house is standing. The
cur£ has been shot. A number of old
people were burnt in the Hospice. The
mayor and five of the principal in-

16 THE MARNE

habitants have been taken to Germany
as hostages."

The year before the war, he remem-
bered, old M. Gantier was mayor !

He wrote and wrote, after that, to
his tutor ; wrote to his depot, to his
Paris address, to the ruin that had been
his home ; but had no answer. And
finally, amid the crowding horrors of
that dread August, he forgot even
M. Gantier, and M. Gantier's family,
forgot everything but the spectacle of
the Allied armies swept back from Liege,
from Mons, from Laon, from Charleroi,
and the hosts of evil surging nearer and
ever nearer to the heart of France.

His father, with whom he might
have talked, was gone ; and Troy could
not talk to his mother. Not that Mrs.
Belknap was not kind and full of sym-
pathy : as fast as the bank at home
cabled funds she poured them out for
war charities. But most of her time

THE MARNE 17

was spent in agitated conference with
her compatriots, and Troy could not bear
to listen to their endlessly reiterated
tales of flight from Nauheim or Baden
or Brussels, their difficulties in drawing
money, hiring motors, bribing hotel-
porters, battling for seats in trains,
recovering lost luggage, cabling for
funds, and their general tendency to
regard the war as a mere background
to their personal grievances.

" You were exceedingly rude to Mrs.
Sampson, Troy," his mother said to him,
surprised one day by an explosion of
temper. " It is so natural she should be
nervous at not being able to get state-
rooms ; and she had just given me
five hundred dollars for the American
ambulance."

"Giving money's no use," the boy
growled, obscurely irritated ; and when
Mrs. Belknap exclaimed, " Why, Troy,
how callom — with all this suffering ! "

18 THE MARNE

he slunk out without answering, and
went downstairs to lie in wait for the
evening papers.

The misery of feeling himself a big
boy, long -limbed, strong -limbed, old
enough for evening clothes, champagne,
the classics, biology, and views on inter-
national politics, and yet able to do
nothing but hang about marble hotels
and pore over newspapers, while rank
on rank, and regiment on regiment,
the youth of France and England,
swung through the dazed streets and
packed the endless trains — the misery
of this was so great to Troy that he
became, as the days dragged on, more
than ever what his mother called
"callous," sullen, humiliated, resentful
at being associated with all the rich
Americans flying from France.

At last the turn of the Belknaps
came too ; but, as they were preparing
to start, news came that the German

THE MARNE 19

army was at Lille, and civilian travel
to England interrupted.

It was the fateful week, and every
name in the bulletins — Amiens, Com-
piegne, Rheims, Meaux, Senlis — evoked
in Troy Belknap's tortured imagination
visions of ancient beauty and stability.
He had done that bit of France alone
with M. Gantier the year before, while
Mrs. Belknap waited in Paris for belated
clothes ; and the thought of the great
stretch of desolation spreading and
spreading like a leprosy over a land so
full of the poetry of the past, and so
rich in a happy prosperous present, was
added to the crueller vision of the tragic
and magnificent armies that had failed
to defend it.

Troy, as soon as he was reassured
about his mother's health, had secretly
rejoiced at the accident which had
kept them in France. But now his
joy was turned to bitterness. Mrs.

20 THE MARNE

Belknap, in her horrified surprise at
seeing her plans again obstructed, lost
all sense of the impending calamity
except as it affected her safety and
Troy's, and joined in the indignant
chorus of compatriots stranded in Paris,
and obscurely convinced that France
ought to have seen them safely home
before turning her attention to the
invader.

" Of course I don't pretend to be
a strategist," whimpering or wrathful
ladies used to declare, their jewel-boxes
clutched in one hand, their passports in
the other, "but one can't help feeling
that if only the French Government
had told our Ambassador in time, trains
might have been provided. ..."

"Or why couldn't G-ermany have
let our Government know ? After all,
Germany has no grievance against
America. ..."

" And we've really spent enough

THE MARNE 21

money in Europe for some consideration
to be shown us ... " the woeful chorus
went on.

The choristers were all good and
kindly persons, shaken out of the rut
of right feeling by the first real fright
of their lives. But Troy was too
young to understand this, and to foresee
that, once in safety, they would become
the passionate advocates of France, all
the more fervent in their championship
because of their reluctant participation
in her peril.

("What did I do ?— Why, I just
simply stayed in Paris. . . . Not to
run away was the only thing one could
do to show one's sympathy," he heard
one of the passport-clutchers declare, a
year later, in a New York drawing-
room.)

Troy, from the height of his youth-
ful indignation, regarded them all as
heartless egoists, and fled away into

22 THE MARNE

the streets from the sound of their
lamentations.

But in the streets was fresh food for
misery ; for every day the once empty
vistas were filled with trains of farm-
waggons, drawn by slow country horses,
and heaped with furniture and house-
hold utensils ; and beside the carts
walked lines of haggard people, old
men and women with vacant faces,
mothers hugging hungry babies, and
children limping after them with heavy
bundles. The fugitives of the Marne
were pouring into Paris.

Troy dashed into the nearest shops,
bought them cakes and fruit, followed
them to the big hippodrome where
they were engulfed in the dusty
arena, and finally, in despair at his
inability to do more than gape and
pity, tried to avoid the streets they
followed on their way into Paris from
St. Denis and Vincennes.

THE MARNE 23

Then one day, in the sunny desert
of the Place de la Concorde, he came
on a more cheering sight. A motley
band of civilians, young, middle-aged,
and even grey-headed, were shambling
along together, badged and beribboned,
in the direction of the Invalides ; and
above them floated the American flag.
Troy flew after it, and caught up with
the last marchers.

"Where are we going? . . . Foreign
Legion," an olive -faced "dago" an-
swered joyously in broken American.
" All 'nited States citizens. . . . Come
and join up, sonnie. ..." And for
one mad moment Troy thought of
risking the adventure.

But he was too visibly only a
schoolboy still ; and with tears of
envy in his smarting eyes he stood,
small and useless, on the pavement,
and watched the heterogeneous band
under the beloved flag disappearing

24 THE MARNE

in the doorway of the registration
office.

When he got back to his mother's
drawing-room the tea-table was still sur-
rounded, and a lady was saying : " I've
offered anything for a special train, but
they won't listen. ..." And another, in
a stricken whisper : " If they do come,
what do you mean to do about your
pearls ? "

Ill

THEN came the Marne, and suddenly
the foreigners caught in Paris by the
German advance became heroes — or
mostly heroines — who had stayed to
reassure their beloved city in her hour
of need.

" We all owe so much to Paris,"
murmured Mrs. Belknap, in lovely con-
valescent clothes, from her sofa-corner.
" I'm sure we can none of us ever cease
to be thankful for this chance of show-
ing it. . . ."

She had sold her staterooms to a
compatriot who happened to be in
England, and was now cabling home
to suggest to Mr. Belknap that she

25

26 THE MARNE

should spend the winter in France and
take a job on a war charity. She was
not strong enough for nursing, but she
thought it would be delightful to take
convalescent officers for drives in the
Bois in the noiseless motor. "Troy
would love it too," she cabled.

Mr. Belknap, however, was unmoved
by these arguments. "Future too
doubtful," he cabled back. "Insist on
your sailing. Staterooms November
tenth paid for. Troy must return to
school."

" Future too doubtful " impressed
Mrs. Belknap more than " Insist,"
though she made a larger use of the
latter word in explaining to her friends
why, after all, she was obliged to give
up her projected war work. Mean-
while, having quite recovered, she rose
from her cushions, donned a nurse's
garb, poured tea once or twice at
a fashionable hospital, and, on the

THE MARNE 27

strength of this effort, obtained per-
mission to carry supplies (in her own
motor) to the devastated regions. Troy
of course went with her, and thus had
his first glimpse of war.

Fresh in his mind was a delicious
July day at Rheims with his tutor, and
the memory of every detail noted on
the way, along the green windings of
the Marne, by Meaux, Montmirail and
Epernay. Now, traversing the same
towns, he seemed to be looking into
murdered faces, vacant and stony.
Where he had seen the sociable
gossiping life of the narrow streets,
young men lounging at the black-
smith's, blue-sleeved carters sitting in
the wine-shops while their horses shook
off the flies in the hot sunshine of the
village square, black-pinafored children
coming home from school, the fat cur£
stopping to talk to little old ladies
under the church porch, girls with sleek

28 THE MARNE

hair calling to each other from the
doorways of the shops, and women in
sunburnt gingham bending over the
village wash-trough or leaning on their
rakes among the hayricks — where all
this had been, now only a few incalcul-
ably old people sat in the doorways and
looked with bewildered eyes at strange
soldiers fulfilling the familiar tasks.

This was what war did 1 It emptied
towns of their inhabitants as it emptied
veins of their blood ; it killed houses
and lands as well as men. Out there,
a few miles beyond the sunny vineyards
and the low hills, men were dying at
that very moment by hundreds, by
thousands — and their motionless young
bodies must have the same unnatural
look as these wan ruins, these gutted
houses and sterile fields. . . . War
meant Death, Death, Death — Death
everywhere and to everything.

By a special favour, the staff-officer

THE MARNE 29

who accompanied them managed to
extend their trip to the ruined chateau
of Mondement, the pivot on which the
battle had turned. He had himself
been in the thick of the fight, and
standing before the shattered walls of
the old house he explained the struggle
for the spur of Mondement : the
advance of the grey masses across the
plain, their capture of the ridge that
barred the road to Paris ; then the
impetuous rush of General Humbert's
infantry, repulsed, returning, repulsed
again, and again attacking; the hand-
to-hand fighting in court and gardens ;
the French infantry's last irresistible
dash, the batteries rattling up, getting
into place on the ridge, and flinging
back the grey battalions from the
hillside into the marshes.

Mrs. Belknap smiled and exclaimed,
with vague comments and a wandering
glance (for the officer, carried away by

30 THE MARNE

his subject, had forgotten her and
become technical) ; while Troy, his map
spread on the top of a shot -riddled
wall, followed every word and gesture
with eyes that absorbed at the same
time all the details of the immortal
landscape.

The Marne — this was the actual
setting of the battle of the Marne !
This happy temperate landscape, with
its sheltering woods, its friendly fields
and downs flowing away to a mild sky,
had looked on at the most awful conflict
in history. Scenes of anguish and
heroism that ought to have had some
Titanic background of cliff and chasm
had unrolled themselves among harm-
less fields, and along wood-roads where
wild strawberries grew and children cut
hazel-switches to drive home their geese.
A name of glory and woe was attached
to every copse and hollow, and to each
grey steeple above the village roofs. . . .

THE MARNE 31

Troy listened, his heart beating higher
at each exploit, till he forgot the
horror of war, and thought only of its
splendours. Oh, to have been there
too ! To have had even the smallest
share in those great hours ! To be able
to say, as this young man could say :
"Yes, I was in the battle of the Marne";
to be able to break off, and step back a
yard or two, correcting one's self critic-
ally : " No ... it was here the General
stood when I told him our batteries had
got through . . ." or: "This is the very
spot where the first seventy-five was
trained on the valley. I can see the
swathes it cut in the Bavarians as they
swarmed up at us a third and fourth
time. ..."

Troy suddenly remembered a bit of
Henry V. that M. Gantier had been
fond of quoting :

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accurst they were not here,

32 THE MARNE

And hold their manhood cheap, when any speaks
That fought with us. ...

Ah, yes — ah, yes — to have been in
the battle of the Marne !

On the way back, below the crest of
the hill, the motor stopped at the village
church and the officer jumped down.
" Some of our men are buried here," he
said.

Mrs. Belknap, with a murmur of
sympathy, caught up the bunch of roses
she had gathered in the ravaged garden
of the chateau, and they picked their
way among the smashed and slanting
stones of the cemetery to a corner
behind the church where wooden crosses
marked a row of fresh graves. Half-
faded flowers in bottles were thrust into
the loose earth, and a few tin wreaths
hung on the arms of the crosses.

Some of the graves bore only the date
of the battle, with " Pour la France," or

THE MARNE 33

" Priez pour lui " ; but on others names
and numbers had been roughly burnt
into the crosses.

Suddenly Troy stopped short with a
cry.

" What is it ? " his mother asked.
She had walked ahead of him to the
parapet overhanging the valley, and
forgetting her roses she leaned against
the low cemetery wall while the officer
took up his story.

Troy made no answer. Mrs. Belknap
stood with her back to him, and he
did not ask her to turn. He did not
want her, or any one else, to read the
name he had just read ; of a sudden
there had been revealed to him the
deep secretiveness of sorrow. But he
stole up to her and drew the flowers
from her hand, while she continued,
with vague inattentive murmurs, to
follow the officer's explanations. She
took no notice of Troy, and he went

34 THE MARNE

back to the grave and laid the roses
on it.

On the cross he had read : " September
12, 1914. Paul Gantier, — th Chasseurs
a pied."

" Oh, poor fellows . . . poor fellows.
Yes, that's right, Troy ; put the roses
on their graves," Mrs. Belknap assented
approvingly, as she picked her way
back to the motor.

IV

THE 10th of November came, and they
sailed.

The week in the steamer was intoler-
able, not only because they were packed
like herrings, and Troy (who had never
known discomfort before) had to share
his narrow cabin with two young
German- Americans full of open brag
about the Fatherland ; but also because
of the same eternally renewed anec-
dotes among the genuine Americans
about the perils and discomforts they
had undergone, and the general dis-
turbance of their plans.

Most of the passengers were in
ardent sympathy with the Allies, and
hung anxiously on the meagre wire-

35

36 THE MARNE

lesses ; but a flat-faced professor with
lank hair, having announced that " there
were two sides to every case," immedi-
ately raised up a following of unnoticed
ladies, who " couldn't believe all that
was said of the Germans" and hoped
that America would never be "drawn
in " ; while, even among the right-
minded, there subsisted a vague feel-
ing that war was an avoidable thing,
which one had only to reprobate enough
to prevent its recurrence.

They found New York — Mrs. Belk-
nap's New York — buzzing with war-
charities, yet apparently unaware of the
war. That at least was Troy's impres-
sion during the twenty -four hours
before he was packed off to school to
catch up with his interrupted studies.

At school he heard the same incessant
war-talk, and found the same funda-
mental unawareness of the meaning of
the war. At first the boys were very

THE MARNE 37

keen to hear his story, but he described
what he had seen so often— and especi-
ally his haunting impressions of the
Marne — that they named him " Marny
Belknap," and finally asked him to cut
it out.

The masters were mostly frankly for
the Allies, but the Rector had given out
that neutrality was the attitude approved
by the Government, and therefore a
patriotic duty ; and one Sunday after
chapel he gave a little talk to explain
why the President thought it right to
try to keep his people out of the dread-
ful struggle. The words duty and
responsibility and fortunate privilege
recurred often in this address, and it
struck Troy as odd that the lesson of
the day happened to be the story of
the Good Samaritan.

When he went home for the Christ-
mas holidays everybody was sending
toys and sugar -plums to the Belgian

38 THE MARNE

war -orphans, with little notes from
" Happy American children " request-
ing to have their gifts acknowledged.

" It makes us so happy to help," beam-
ing young women declared with a kind of
ghoulish glee, doing up parcels, planning
war-tableaux and charity dances, rush-
ing to " propaganda " lectures given by
handsome French officers, and keeping
up a kind of continuous picnic on the
ruins of civilization.

Mr. and Mrs. Belknap had inevit-
ably been affected by the surrounding
atmosphere.

"The tragedy of it — the tragedy —
no one can tell who hasn't seen it and
been through it," Mrs. Belknap would
begin, looking down her long dinner-
table between the orchids and the
candelabra ; and the pretty women and
prosperous men would interrupt their
talk, and listen for a moment, half
absently, with spurts of easy indigna-

THE MARNE 39

tion that faded out again as they heard
the story oftener.

After all, Mrs. Belknap wasn't the
only person who had seen a battlefield !
Lots and lots more were pouring home
all the time with fresh tales of tragedy :
the Marne had become — in a way — an
old story. People wanted something
newer . . . different. . . .

And then, why hadn't Joffre followed
up the offensive ? The Germans were
wonderful soldiers after all. . . . Yes,
but such beasts . . . sheer devils. . . .
Here was Mr. So-and-so, just back from
Belgium — such horrible stories — really
unrepeatable ! " Don't you want to
come and hear them, my dear ? Dine
with us to-morrow; he's promised to
come unless he's summoned to Washing-
ton. But do come anyhow ; the Jim
Cottages are going to dance after
dinner. . . ."

In time Mrs. Belknap, finding herself

40 THE MARNE

hopelessly out -storied, out - charitied,
out -ad ventured, began insensibly to
take a calmer and more distant view of
the war. What was the use of trying
to keep up her own enthusiasm when
that of her audience had flagged?
Wherever she went she was sure to
meet other ladies who had arrived from
France much more recently, and had
done and seen much more than she
had. One after another she saw them
received with the same eagerness — " Of
course we all know about the marvellous
things you've been doing in France —
your wonderful war-work" — then, like
herself, they were superseded by some
later arrival, who had been nearer the
front, or had raised more money, or
had had an audience of the Queen of
the Belgians, or an autograph letter
from Lord Kitchener. No one was
listened to for long, and the most
eagerly-sought-for were like the figures

THE MARNE 41

in a movy - show, forever breathlessly
whisking past to make way for others.

Mr. Belknap had always been less
eloquent about the war than his wife ;
but somehow Troy had fancied he felt
it more deeply. Gradually, however,
he too seemed to accept the situation
as a matter of course, and Troy, coming
home for the Easter holidays, found
at the family table a large sonorous
personage — a Senator, just back from
Europe — who, after rolling out vague
praises of France and England, began
insidiously to hint that it was a pity to
see such wasted heroism, such suicidal
determination on the part of the Allies
to resist all offers of peace from an
enemy so obviously their superior.

" She wouldn't be if America came
in 1 " Troy blurted out, reddening at
the sound of his voice.

"America?" some one playfully
interjected ; and the Senator laughed,

42 THE MARNE

and said something about geographical
immunity. " They can't touch us.
This isn't our war, young man."

" It may be by the time I'm grown
up," Troy persisted, burning redder.

" Well," returned the Senator good-
humouredly, " you'll have to hurry, for
the economists all say it can't last more
than a year longer. Lord Reading
told me "

" There's been misery enough, in all
conscience," sighed a lady, playing with
her pearls ; and Mr. Belknap added
gravely : " By the time Troy grows up
I hope wars and war-talk will be over
for good and all."

" Oh, we'll — at his age every fellow
wants to go out and kill something,"
remarked one of his uncles sympatheti-
cally.

Troy shuddered at the well-meant
words. To go out and kill something !
They thought he regarded the war as

THE MARNE 43

a sport, just as they regarded it as a
moving-picture show ! As if any one
who had had even a glimpse of it could
ever again think with joy of killing !
His boy's mind was sorely exercised to
define the urgent emotions with which
it laboured. To save France — that was
the clear duty of the world, as he saw
it. But none of these kindly careless
people about him knew what he meant
when he said "France." Bits of
M. Gantier's talk came back to him,
embodying that meaning.

" Whatever happens, keep your mind
keen and clear : open as many windows
on the universe as you can. ..." To
Troy, France had been the biggest of
those windows.

The young tutor had never declaimed
about his country ; he had simply told
her story and embodied her ideals in
his own impatient, questioning and yet
ardent spirit. "Le monde est aux

44 THE MARNE

enthousiastes," he had once quoted ;
and he had shown Troy how France had
always been alive in every fibre, and how
her inexhaustible vitality had been per-
petually nourished on criticism, analysis
and dissatisfaction. " Self-satisfaction
is death," he had said ; " France is the
phoenix-country always rising from the
ashes of her recognized mistakes."

Troy felt what a wonderful help it
must be to have that long rich past in
one's blood. Every stone that France
had carved, every song she had sung,
every new idea she had struck out, every
beauty she had created in her thousand
fruitful years, was a tie between her and
her children. These things were more
glorious than her battles, for it was
because of them that all civilization
was bound up in her, and that nothing
that concerned her could concern her
only.

" IT seems too absurd," said Mrs.
Belknap ; "but Troy will be eighteen to-
morrow. And that means," she added
with a sigh, " that this horrible war has
been going on for three whole years. Do
you remember, dearest, your fifteenth
birthday was on the very day that odious
Archduke was assassinated? We had
a picnic on the Morterasch."

" Oh, dear," cried Sophy Wicks,
flinging her tennis-racket into the air
with a swing that landed it in the
middle of the empty court — "perhaps
that's the reason he's never stopped talk-
ing about the war for a single minute
since ! "

Around the big tea-table under the

45

46 THE MARNE

trees there was a faint hush of dis-
approval. A year before, Sophy Wicks's
airy indifference to the events that were
agitating the world had amused some
people and won the frank approval of
others. She did not exasperate her
friends by professions of pacifism, she
simply declared that the war bored her ;
and after three years of vain tension, of
effort in the void, something in the
baffled American heart whispered that,
things being as they were, she was
perhaps right.

But now things were no longer as
they had been. Looking back, Troy
surveyed the gradual development of
the war -feeling as it entered into a
schoolboy's range of vision. He had
begun to notice the change before the
sinking of the Lusitania. Even in
the early days, when his school-fellows
had laughed at him and called him
" Marny," some of them had listened to

THE MARNE 47

him and imitated him. It had become
the fashion to have a collection of
war-trophies from the battlefields. The
boys' sisters were "adopting war-
orphans " at long distance, and when
Troy went home for the holidays he
heard more and more talk of war-
charities, and noticed that the funds
collected were no longer raised by
dancing and fancy-balls. People who
used the war as an opportunity to have
fun were beginning to be treated almost
as coldly as the pacifists.

But the two great factors in the
national change of feeling were the
Lusitania and the training-camps.

The Lusitania showed America what
the Germans were, Plattsburg tried to
show her the only way of dealing with
them.

Both events called forth a great deal
of agitated discussion, for if theyfocussed
the popular feeling for war, they also

48 THE MARNE

gave the opponents of war in general a
point of departure for their arguments.
For a while feeling ran high, and Troy,
listening to the heated talk at his
parents' table, perceived with disgust
and wonder that at the bottom of the
anti-war sentiment, whatever specious
impartiality it put on, there was always
the odd belief that life-in-itself—just
the mere raw fact of being alive — was
the one thing that mattered, and get-
ting killed the one thing to be avoided.
This new standard of human dignity
plunged Troy into the lowest depths
of pessimism. And it bewildered him
as much as it disgusted him, since it
did away at a stroke with all that gave
any interest to the fact of living. It
killed romance, it killed poetry and
adventure, it took all the meaning out
of history and conduct and civilization.
There had never been anything worth
while in the world that had not had to

THE MARNE 49

be died for, and it was as clear as day
that a world which no one would die
for could never be a world worth being
alive in.

Luckily most people did not require
to reason the matter out in order to
feel as Troy did, and in the long run
the Lusitania and Plattsburg won the
day. America tore the gag of neutrality
from her lips, and with all the strength
of her liberated lungs claimed her right
to a place in the struggle. The pacifists
crept into their holes, and only Sophy
Wicks remained unconverted.

Troy Belknap, tall and shy and
awkward, lay at her feet and blushed
and groaned inwardly at her wrong-
headedness. All the other girls were
war-mad ; with the rupture of diplo-
matic relations the country had burst
into flame, and with the declaration of
war the flame had become a conflagra-
tion. And now, having at last a

E

50 THE MARNE

definite and personal concern in the
affair, every one was not only happier
but more sensible than when a per-
petually thwarted indignation had
had to expend itself in vague philan-
thropy.

It was a peculiar cruelty of fate
that made Troy feel Miss Wicks's in-
difference more than the zeal of all
the other young women gathered about
the Belknap tennis-court. In spite of
everything, he found her more interest-
ing, more inexhaustible, more "his
size " (as they said at school), than any
of the gay young war-goddesses who
sped their tennis-balls across the
Belknap court

It was a Long Island Sunday in
June. A caressing warmth was in the
air, and a sea-breeze stirred the tops of
the lime branches. The smell of fresh
hay-cocks blew across the lawn, and a
sparkle of blue water and a dipping of

THE MARNE 51

white sails showed through the trees
beyond the hay-fields.

Mrs. Belknap smiled indulgently on
the pleasant scene : her judgement of
Sophy Wicks was less severe than that
of the young lady's contemporaries.
What did it matter if a chit of eighteen,
having taken up a foolish attitude, was
too self-conscious to renounce it ?

" Sophy will feel differently when
she has nursed some of our own
soldiers in a French base hospital," she
said, addressing herself to the dis-
approving group.

The young girl raised her merry
eyebrows. " Who'll stay and nurse
Granny if I go to a French base
hospital ? Troy, will you ? " she sug-
gested.

The other girls about the tea-table
laughed. Though they were only
Troy's age, or younger, they did not
mind his being teased, for he seemed

52 THE MARNE

only a little boy to them, now that
they all had friends or brothers in the
training-camps or on the way to France.
Besides, though they disapproved of
Sophy's tone, her argument was un-
answerable. They knew her precocious
wisdom and self-confidence had been
acquired at the head of her grand-
mother's household, and that there was
no one else to look after poor old
paralytic Mrs. Wicks and the orphan
brothers and sisters to whom Sophy
was mother and guardian.

Two or three of the young men
present were in uniform, and one of
them, Mrs. Belknap's nephew, had a
captain's double bar on his shoulder.
What did Troy Belknap and Sophy
Wicks matter to young women playing
a last tennis-match with heroes on their
way to France ?

The game began again, with much
noise and cheerful wrangling. Mrs.

THE MARNE 53

Belknap walked toward the house to
welcome a group of visitors, and Miss
Wicks remained beside the tea-table,
alone with Troy. She was leaning
back in a wide basket-chair, her thin
ankles in white open-work stockings
thrust out under her short skirt, her
arms locked behind her thrown-back
head. Troy lay on the ground and
plucked at the tufts of grass at his
elbow. Why was it that, with all the
currents of vitality flowing between
this group of animated girls and youths,
he could feel no nearness but hers ?
The feeling was not particularly agree-
able, but there was no shaking it off:
it was like a scent that has got into
one's clothes. He was not sure that
he liked her, but he wanted to watch
her, to listen to her, to defend her
against the mockery and criticism in
the eyes of the others. At this point
his powers of analysis gave out, and

54 THE MARNE

his somewhat extensive vocabulary
failed him. After all, he had to fall
back on the stupid old school phrase :
she was " his size " — that was all.

"Why do you always say the war
bores you ? " he asked abruptly, without
looking up.

" Because it does, my boy ; and so
do you, when you hold forth about it."

He was silent, and she touched his
arm with the tip of her swinging
tennis -shoe. "Don't you see, Troy,
it's not our job — not just now, anyhow.
So what's the use of always jawing
about it ? "

She jumped up, recovered her racket,
and ran to take her place in a new set
beside Troy's cousin, the captain.

VI

IT was not "his job" — that was the
bitter drop in all the gladness.

At last what Troy longed for had
come : his country was playing her
part. And he, who had so watched
and hoped and longed for the divine
far-off event, had talked of it early and
late to old and young, had got himself
laughed at, scolded, snubbed, ridiculed,
nicknamed, commemorated in a school-
magazine skit in which " Marne " and
"yarn" and "oh, darn," formed the
refrain of a lyric beginning " Oh say,
have you heard Belknap flap in the
breeze?" — he, who had borne all the
scoldings and all the ridicule, sustained
by a mysterious secret faith in the

55

56 THE MAKNE

strength of his cause, now saw that
cause triumph, and all his country
waving with flags and swarming with
khaki, while he had to stand aside and
look on, because his coming birthday
was only his nineteenth. . . . He re-
membered the anguish of regret with
which he had seen M. Gantier leave
St. Moritz to join his regiment, and
thought now with passionate envy of
his tutor's fate. "Dulce et decorum
est ..." the old hackneyed phrase
had taken on a beauty that rilled his
eyes with tears.

Eighteen — and " nothing doing "
till he was twenty - one ! He could
have killed the cousins and uncles
strutting about in uniform and saying :
"Don't fret, old man — there's lots of
time. The war is sure to last another
four years." To say that, and laugh,
how little they must know of what
war meant !

THE MARNE 57

It was an old custom in the Belknap
family to ask Troy what he wanted
for his birthday. The custom (accord-
ing to tradition) had originated on his
sixth anniversary, when, being given
a rabbit with ears that wiggled, he
had grown very red and stammered
out: " I did so want a 'cyclopedia. . . ."

Since then he had always been con-
sulted on the subject with a good deal
of ceremony, and had spent no little
time and thought in making a judicious
choice in advance. But this year his
choice took no thinking over.

"I want to go to France," he said
immediately.

" To France ? " It struck his

keen ears that there was less surprise
than he had feared in Mr. Belknap 's
voice.

" To France, my boy ? The Govern-
ment doesn't encourage foreign travel
just now."

58 THE MARNE

" I want to volunteer in the Foreign
Legion," said Troy, feeling as if the
veins of his forehead would burst.

Mrs. Belknap groaned, but Mr.
Belknap retained his composure.

"My dear chap, I don't think you
know much about the Foreign Legion.
It's a pretty rough berth for a fellow
like you. And they're as likely as
not," he added carelessly, "to send
you to Morocco or the Cameroon."

Troy, knowing this to be true, hung
his head.

"Now," Mr. Belknap continued,
taking advantage of his silence, "my
counter-proposition is that you should
go to Brazil for three months with
your Uncle Tom Jarvice, who is being
sent down there on a big engineering
job. It's a wonderful opportunity to
see the country — see it like a prince
too, for he'll have a special train at
his disposal. Then, when you come

THE MARNE 59

back," he continued, his voice weaken-
ing a little under the strain of Troy's
visible inattention, " well see. . . ."

" See what ? "

" Well — I don't know ... a camp
. . . till it's time for Harvard. ..."

" I want to go to France at once,
father," said Troy, with the voice of
a man.

" To do what ? " wailed his mother.

" Oh, any old thing — drive an am-
bulance," Troy struck out at random.

" But, dearest," she protested, "you
could never even learn to drive a Ford
runabout ! "

" That's only because it never inter-
ested me."

" But one of those huge ambulances
—you'll be killed!"

" Father ! " exclaimed Troy, in a tone
that seemed to say : " Aren't we out
of the nursery, at least ? "

"Don't talk to him like that,

60 THE MARNE

Josephine," said Mr. Belknap, visibly
wishing that he knew how to talk to
his son himself, but perceiving that his
wife was on the wrong tack.

" Don't you see, father, that there's
no use talking at aU ? I'm going to
get to France anyhow."

" In defiance of our wishes ? "

"Oh, you'll forget all that later,"
said Troy.

Mrs. Belknap began to cry, and her
husband turned on her.

"My dear, you're really — really — /
understand Troy!" he blurted out, his
veins swelling too.

"But if the Red Cross is to send
you on that mission to Italy, why
shouldn't Troy wait and go as your
secretary ? " Mrs. Belknap said, tacking
skilfully.

Mr. Belknap, who had not yet made
up his mind to accept the mission,
made it up on the instant. " Yes,

THE MARNE 61

Troy — why not? I shall be going
myself — in a month or so."

" I want to go to France," said his
son. And he added, laughing with
sudden courage: "You see, you've
never refused me a birthday present
yet"

VII

FRANCE again — France at last! As
the cliffs grew green across the bay he
could have knelt to greet them — as he
hurried down the gang-plank with the
eager jostling crowd he could have
kissed the sacred soil they were
treading.

The very difficulties and delays of
the arrival thrilled and stimulated him,
gave him a keener sense of his being
already a humble participant in the con-
flict. Passports, identification papers,
sharp interrogatories, examinations, the
enforced surrendering of keys and
papers : how different it all was from
the old tame easy landings, with the
noiseless motor waiting at the dock,

62

THE MARNE 63

and France lying safe and open before
them whichever way they chose to turn!

On the way over many things had
surprised and irritated him — not least
the attitude of some of his fellow-
passengers. The boat swarmed with
young civilians, too young for military
service, or having, for some more or
less valid reason, been exempted from
it. They were all pledged to some
form of relief work, and all overflowing
with zeal : " France " was as often on
their lips as on Troy's. But some of
them seemed to be mainly concerned
with questions of uniform and rank.
The steamer seethed with wrangles and
rivalries between their various organisa-
tions, and now and then the young
crusaders seemed to lose sight of the
object of their crusade — as had too
frequently been the case with their
predecessors.

Very few of the number knew

64 THE MARNE

France or could speak French, and
most of them were full of the import-
ance of America's mission. This was
Liberty's chance to Enlighten the
World ; and all these earnest youths
apparently regarded themselves as her
chosen torch-bearers.

" We must teach France efficiency,"
they all said with a glowing con-
descension.

The women were even more sure of
their mission ; and there were plenty of
them, middle-aged as well as young,
in uniform too, cocked-hatted, badged
and gaitered — though most of them,
apparently, were going to sit in the
offices of Paris war- charities, and Troy
had never noticed that Frenchwomen
had donned khaki for that purpose.

" France must be purified," these
young Columbias proclaim ed. ' ' French-
men must be taught to respect Women.
We must protect our boys from con-

THE MARNE 65

tamination . . . the dreadful theatres
. . . and the novels . . . and the Boule-
vards. ... Of course we mustn't be
hard on the French, for they've never
known Home Life, or the Family . . .
but we must show them . . . we must
set the example. ..."

Troy, sickened by their blatancy, had
kept to himself for the greater part of
the trip ; but during the last days he
had been drawn into talk by a girl who
reminded him of Miss Wicks, though
she was in truth infinitely prettier. The
evenings below decks were long, and
he sat at her side in the saloon and
listened to her.

Her name was Hinda Warlick, and
she came from the Middle West. He
gathered from her easy confidences that
she was singing in a suburban church
choir while waiting for a vaudeville
engagement. Her studies had probably
been curtailed by the task of preparing

66 THE MARNE

a repertory, for she appeared to think
that Joan of Arc was a Revolutionary
hero, who had been guillotined with
Marie Antoinette for blowing up the
Bastille; and her notions of French
history did not extend beyond this
striking episode. But she was ready
and eager to explain France to Troy,
and to the group of young men who
gathered about her, listening to her
piercing accents and gazing into her
deep blue eyes.

" We must carry America right into
the heart of France — for she has got a
great big heart, in spite of everything"
Miss Warlick declared. "We must
teach her to love children and home
and the outdoor life, and you American
boys must teach the young Frenchmen
to love their mothers. You must set
the example. . . . Oh, boys, do you
know what my ambition is ? It's to
organize an Old Home Week just like

THE MARNE 67

ours, all over France from Harver right
down to Marseilles — and all through
the devastated regions too. Wouldn't
it be lovely if we could get General
Pershing to let us keep Home Week
right up at the front, at 'Eep and Leal
and Rams, and all those martyr cities —
right close up in the trenches ? So that
even the Germans would see us and
hear us, and perhaps learn from us too ?
— for you know we mustn't despair
even of teaching the Germans ! "

Troy, as he crept away, heard one
young man, pink and shock -headed,
murmur shyly to the Prophetess :
" Hearing you say this has made it all

so clear to me " and an elderly

Y.M.C.A. leader, adjusting his eye-
glasses, added with nasal emphasis :
" Yes, Miss Warlick has expressed in a
very lovely way what we all feel : that
America's mission is to contribute the
human element to this war."

68 THE MAKNE

" Oh, good God ! " Troy groaned,
crawling to his darkened cabin. He
remembered M. Gantier's phrase, "Self-
satisfaction is death," and felt a sudden
yearning for Sophy Wicks's ironic
eyes and her curt "What's the use of
jawing ? "

He had been for six months on his
job, and was beginning to know some-
thing about it : to know, for instance,
that nature had never meant him for
an ambulance-driver.

Nevertheless he had stuck to his task
with such a dogged determination to
succeed that after several months about
the Paris hospitals he was beginning to
be sent to exposed sectors.

His first sight of the desolated
country he had traversed three years
earlier roused old memories of the
Gantier family, and he wrote once more
to their little town, but again without

THE MARNE 69

result. Then one day he was sent to a
sector in the Vosges which was held by
American troops. His heart was beat-
ing hard as the motor rattled over the
hills, through villages empty of their
inhabitants, like those of the Marne, but
swarming with big fair-haired soldiers.
The land lifted and dipped again, and
he saw ahead of him the ridge once
crowned by M. Gantier's village, and
the wall of the terraced garden, with
the horn-beam arbour putting forth its
early green. Everything else was in
ruins : pale weather-bleached ruins over
which the rains and suns of three years
had passed effacingly. The church,
once so firm and four-square on the hill,
was now a mere tracery against the
clouds ; the hospice roofless, the houses
all gutted and bulging, with black
smears of smoke on their inner walls. At
the head of the street a few old women
and children were hoeing vegetables

70 THE MARNE

before a row of tin-roofed shanties, and
a Y.M.C.A. hut flew the stars-and-
stripes across the way.

Troy jumped down and began to
ask questions. At first the only person
who recognized the name of Gantier was
an old woman too frightened and feeble-
minded to answer intelligibly. Then
a French territorial who was hoeing
with the women came forward. He
belonged to the place and knew the
story.

" M. Gantier — the old gentleman ?
He was mayor, and the Germans took
him. He died in Germany. The young
girl — Mile. Gantier — was taken with
him. No, she's not dead. ... I don't
know. . . . She's shut up somewhere
in Germany . . . queer in the head,
they say. . . . The sons — ah, you knew
Monsieur Paul? He went first. . . .
What, the others ? . . . Yes : the three
others — Louis at Notre Dame de

THE MARNE 71

Lorette ; Jean on a submarine : poor
little Felix, the youngest, of the fever
at Salonika. Voila. . . . The old lady ?
Ah, she and her sister went away . . .
some charitable people took them, I
don't know where. . . . I've got the
address somewhere. ..." He fumbled,
and brought out a strip of paper on
which was written the name of a town
in the centre of France.

" There's where they were a year
ago. . . . Yes, you may say: there's a
family gone — wiped out. How often I've
seen them all sitting there, laughing and
drinking coffee under the arbour ! They
were not rich, but they were happy and
proud of each other. That's over."

He went back to his hoeing.

After that, whenever Troy Belknap
got back to Paris he hunted for the
surviving Gantiers. For a long time
he could get no trace of them ; then

72 THE MARNE

he remembered his old governess, Mme.
Lebuc, for whom Mrs. Belknap had
found employment in a refugee bureau.

He ran down Mme. Lebuc, who was
still at her desk in the same big room,
facing a row of horse-hair benches
packed with tired people waiting their
turn for a clothing-ticket or a restaurant
card.

Mme. Lebuc had grown much older,
and her filmy eyes peered anxiously
through large spectacles before she
recognized Troy. Then, after tears
and raptures, he set forth his errand,
and she began to peer again anxiously,
shuffling about the bits of paper on the
desk, and confusing her records hope-
lessly.

" Why, is that you ? " cried a gay
young voice ; and there, on the other
side of the room, sat one of the young
war-goddesses of the Belknap tennis-
court, trim, uniformed, important, with

THE MARNE 73

a row of bent backs in shabby black
before her desk.

" Ah, Miss Batchford will tell you —
she's so quick and clever," Mme. Lebuc
sighed, resigning herself to chronic
bewilderment.

Troy crossed to the other desk. An
old woman sat before it in threadbare
mourning, a crape veil on her twitching
head. She spoke in a low voice, slowly,
taking a long time to explain ; each one
of Miss Batchford's quick questions put
her back, and she had to begin all over
again.

" Oh, these refugees ! " cried Miss
Batchford, stretching a bangled arm
above the crape veil to clasp Troy's
hand. " Do sit down, Mr. Belknap. —
D^pechez-vous, s'il vous plait," she said,
not too unkindly, to the old woman ;
and added, to Troy : " There's no satis-
fying them."

At the sound of Troy's name the

74 THE MARNE

old woman had turned her twitching
head, putting back her veil. Her eyes
met Troy's, and they looked at each
other doubtfully. Then — "Madame
Gantier ! " he exclaimed.

"Yes, yes," she said, the tears run-
ning down her face.

Troy was not sure if she recognized
him, though his name had evidently
called up some vague association. He
saw that most things had grown far
off to her, and that for the moment
her whole mind was centred on the
painful and humiliating effort of putting
her case to this strange young woman
who snapped out questions like a
machine.

" Do you know her ? " asked Miss
Batchford, surprised.

"I used to, I believe," Troy answered.

" You can't think what she wants —
just everything! They're all alike.
She wants to borrow five hundred

THE MARNE 75

francs to furnish a flat for herself and
her sister."

"Well, why not?"

"Why, we don't lend money, of
course. It's against all our principles.
We give work, or relief in kind — that's
what I'm telling her."

" I see. Could I give it to her ? "

" What — all that money ? Certainly
not. You don't know them ! "

Troy shook hands and went out
into the street to wait for Mme.
Gantier; and when she came he told
her who he was. She cried and shook
a great deal, and he called a cab and
drove her home to the poor lodging
where she and her sister lived. The
sister had become weak-minded, and
the room was dirty and untidy, because,
as Mme. Gantier explained, her lame-
ness prevented her from keeping it
clean, and they could not afford a
charwoman. The pictures of the four

76 THE MARNE

dead sons hung on the wall, a wisp of
crape above each, with all their ribbons
and citations. But when Troy spoke
of old M. Gantier and the daughter
Mme. G an tier's face grew like a stone,
and her sister began to whimper like
an animal.

Troy remembered the territorial's
phrase : " You may say : there's a
family wiped out" He went away,
too shy to give the five hundred francs
in his pocket.

One of his first cares on getting
back to France had been to order a
head -stone for Paul Gantier's grave
at Mondement. A week or two after
his meeting with Mme. Gantier, his
ambulance was ordered to Epernay,
and he managed to get out to Monde-
ment and have the stone set up and
the grave photographed. He had
brought some flowers to lay on it, and
he borrowed two tin wreaths from

THE MARNE 77

the neighbouring crosses, so that Paul
Gantier's mound should seem the most
fondly tended of all. He sent the
photograph to Mme. Gantier, with a
five hundred franc bill ; but after a
long time his letter came back from
the post-office. The two old women
had gone. . . .

VIII

IN February Mr. Belknap arrived in
Paris on a mission. Tightly buttoned
into his Red Cross uniform, he looked
to his son older and fatter, but more
important and impressive, than usual.

He was on his way to Italy, where
he was to remain for three months,
and Troy learned with dismay that he
needed a secretary, and had brought
none with him because he counted on
his son to fill the post

" You've had nearly a year of this,
old man, and the front's as quiet as
a church. As for Paris, isn't it too
frivolous for you ? It's much farther
from the war nowadays than New
York. I haven't had a dinner like this

THE MARNE 79

since your mother joined the Voluntary
Rationing League," Mr. Belknap smiled
at him across their little table at the
Nouveau Luxe.

" I'm glad to hear it — about New
York, I mean," Troy answered com-
posedly. "It's our turn now. But
Paris isn't a bit too frivolous for me.
Which shall it be, father — the Palais
Royal — or the Capucines? They say
the new revue there is great fun."

Mr. Belknap was genuinely shocked.
He had caught the war fever late in
life, and late in the war, and his son's
flippancy surprised and pained him.

" The theatre ? We don't go to the
theatre. ..." He paused to light his
cigar, and added, embarrassed : " Really,
Troy, now there's so little doing here,
don't you think you might be more
useful in Italy ? "

Troy was anxious, for he was not
sure that Mr. Belknap's influence might

80 THE MARNE

not be sufficient to detach him from his
job on a temporary mission ; but long
experience in dealing with parents made
him assume a greater air of coolness as
his fears increased.

" Well, you see, father, so many other
chaps have taken advantage of the lull
to go off on leave that if I asked to be
detached now — well, it wouldn't do me
much good with my chief," he said
cunningly, guessing that if he appeared
to yield his father might postpone
action.

" Yes, I see," Mr. Belknap rejoined,
impressed by the military character of
the argument. He was still trying to
get used to the fact that he was himself
under orders, and nervous visions of a
sort of mitigated court-martial came to
him in the middle of pleasant dinners,
or jumped him out of his morning
sleep like an alarm-clock.

Troy saw that his point was gained ;

THE MARNE 81

but he regretted having proposed the
Capucines to his father. He himself
was not shocked by the seeming in-
difference of Paris: he thought the
gay theatres, the crowded shops, the
restaurants groaning with abundance,
were all healthy signs of the nation's
irrepressible vitality. But he under-
stood that America's young zeal might
well be chilled by the first contact with
this careless exuberance, so close to
the lines where young men like himself
were dying day by day in order that
the curtain might ring up punctu-
ally on low-necked revues, and fat
neutrals feast undisturbed on lobster
and champagne. Only now and then
he asked himself what had become of
the Paris of the Marne, and what would

happen if ever again But that of

course was nonsense. . . .

Mr. Belknap left for Italy — and two

G

82 THE MARNE

days afterward Troy's ambulance was
roused from semi-inaction and hurried
to Beauvais. The retreat from St.
Quentin had begun, and Paris was
once again the Paris of the Marne.

The same — but how different ! — were
the tense days that followed. Troy
Belknap, instead of hanging miserably
about marble hotels and waiting with
restless crowds for the communiques to
appear in the windows of the news-
paper offices, was in the thick of the
retreat, swept back on its tragic tide,
his heart wrung, but his imagination
hushed by the fact of participating in the
struggle, playing a small dumb inde-
fatigable part, relieving a little fraction
of the immense anguish and the dread-
ful disarray.

. The mere fact of lifting a wounded
man " so that it wouldn't hurt " ; of
stiffening one's lips to a smile as the
ambulance pulled up in the market-

THE MARNE 83

place of a terror-stricken village ; of call-
ing out "Nous les tenons!" to whimper-
ing women and bewildered old people ;
of giving a lift to a family of foot-sore
refugees ; of prying open a tin of
condensed milk for the baby, or taking
down the address of a sister in Paris,
with the promise to bring her news of
the fugitives ; the heat and the burden
and the individual effort of each minute
carried one along through the endless
and yet breathless hours — backward and
forward, backward and forward, between
Paris and the fluctuating front, till in
Troy's weary brain the ambulance took
on the semblance of a tireless grey
shuttle humming in the hand of
Fate. . . .

It was on one of these trips that, for
the first time, he saw a train-load of
American soldiers on the way to the
battle front. He had, of course, seen
plenty of them in Paris during the

84 THE MARNE

months since his arrival; seen them
vaguely roaming the streets, or sitting
in front of cafe's, or wooed by polyglot
sirens in the obscure promiscuity of
cinema-palaces.

At first he had seized every chance of
talking to them; but either his own
shyness or theirs seemed to paralyze
him. He found them, as a rule,
bewildered, depressed and unresponsive.
They wanted to kill Germans all right,
they said ; but this hanging around Paris
wasn't what they'd bargained for, and
there was a good deal more doing
back home at Podunk or Tombstone
or Skohegan.

It was not only the soldiers who took
this depreciatory view of France. Some
of the officers whom Troy met at his
friends' houses discouraged him more
than the enlisted men with whom he
tried to make friends in the cafes. They
had more definite and more unfavour-

THE MARNE 85

able opinions as to the country they had
come to defend. They wanted to know,
in God's name, where in the blasted
place you could get fried hominy and a
real porter-house steak for breakfast, and
when the ball-game season began, and
whether it rained every day all the year
round ; and Troy's timid efforts to
point out some of the compensating
advantages of Paris failed to excite any
lasting interest.

But now he seemed to see a different
race of men. The faces leaning from
the windows of the train glowed with
youthful resolution. The soldiers were
out on their real business at last, and as
Troy looked at them, so alike and so
innumerable, he had the sense of a force,
inexorable and exhaustless, poured forth
from the reservoirs of the new world to
replenish the wasted veins of the old.

"Hooray!" he shouted frantically,
waving his cap at the passing train ; but

86 THE MARNE

as it disappeared he hung his head and
swore under his breath. There they
went, his friends and fellows, as he had
so often dreamed of seeing them, racing
in their hundreds of thousands to the
rescue of France ; and he was still too
young to be among them, and could only
yearn after them with all his aching
heart !

After a hard fortnight of day-and-
night work he was ordered a few days
off, and sulkily resigned himself to
inaction. For the first twenty - four
hours he slept the leaden sleep of weary
youth, and for the next he moped on his
bed in the Infirmary ; but the third day
he crawled out to take a look at Paris.

The long-distance bombardment was
going on, and now and then, at irregular
intervals, there was a more or less
remote crash, followed by a long
reverberation. But the life of the
streets was not affected. People went

THE MARNE 87

about their business as usual, and it was
obvious that the strained look on every
face was not caused by the random fall
of a few shells, but by the perpetual
vision of that swaying and receding line
on which all men's thoughts were fixed.
It was sorrow, not fear, that Troy read
in ah1 those anxious eyes — sorrow over
so much wasted effort, such high hopes
thwarted, so many dear-bought miles of
France once more under the German
heel.

That night when he came home he
found a letter from his mother. At
the very end, in a crossed postscript,
he read : " Who do you suppose sailed
last week? Sophy Wicks. Soon
there'll be nobody left! Old Mrs.
Wicks died in January — did I tell you ?
— and Sophy has sent the children to
Long Island with their governess, and
rushed over to do Red Cross nursing.
It seems she had taken a course at the

88 THE MARNE

Presbyterian without any one's knowing
it. I've promised to keep an eye on
the children. Let me know if you see
her."

Sophy Wicks in France ! There
was hardly room in his troubled mind
for the news. What Sophy Wicks did
or did not do had shrunk to utter in-
significance in the crash of falling
worlds. He was rather sorry to have
to class her with the other hysterical
girls fighting for a pretext to get to
France ; but what did it all matter,
anyhow? On the way home he had
overheard an officer in the street telling
a friend that the Germans were at
Creil. . . .

Then came the day when the advance
was checked. The glorious counter-
attack of General Mangin gave France
new faith in her armies, and Paris
irrepressibly burst at once into abound-
ing life. It was as if she were ashamed

THE MARNE 89

of having doubted, as if she wanted, by
a livelier renewal of activities, to pro-
claim her unshakable faith in her de-
fenders. In the perpetual sunshine of
the most golden of springs she basked
and decked herself, and mirrored her
recovered beauty in the Seine.

And still the cloudless weeks suc-
ceeded each other, days of blue warmth
and nights of silver lustre ; and still,
behind the impenetrable wall of the
front, the Beast dumbly lowered and
waited. Then one morning, toward
the end of May, Troy, waking late
after an unusually hard day, read :
" The new German offensive has begun.
The Chemin des Dames has been re-
taken by the enemy. Our valiant
troops are resisting heroically. . . ."

Ah, now indeed they were on the
road to Paris ! In a flash of horror
he saw it all. The bitter history of
the war was re-enacting itself, and the

90 THE MARNE

battle of the Marne was to be fought
again. . . .

The misery of the succeeding days
would have been intolerable if there
had been time to think of it. But
day and night there was no respite for
Troy's service ; and, being by this time
a practised hand, he had to be continu-
ally on the road.

On the second day he received
orders to evacuate the wounded from
an American base hospital near the
Marne. It was actually the old battle-
ground he was to traverse ; only, before,
he had traversed it in the wake of the
German retreat, and now it was the
allied troops who, slowly, methodically,
and selling every inch dear, were falling
back across the sacred soil. Troy faced
eastward with a heavy heart. . . .

IX

THE next morning at daylight they
started for the front.

Troy's breast swelled with the sense
of the approach to something bigger
than he had yet known. The air of
Paris, that day, was heavy with doom.
There was no mistaking its taste on
the lips. It was the air of the Marne
that he was breathing. . . .

Here he was, once more involved in
one of the great convulsions of destiny,
and still almost as helpless a spectator
as when, four years before, he had
strayed the burning desert of Paris
and cried out in his boy's heart for a
share in the drama. Almost as help-
less, yes — in spite of his four more years,

92 THE MARNE

his grown-up responsibilities, and the
blessed uniform thanks to which he,
even he, a poor little ambulance-driver
of eighteen, ranked as a soldier of the
great untried army of his country. It
was something — it was a great deal —
to be even the humblest part, the
most infinitesimal cog, in that mighty
machinery of the future; but it was
not enough, at this turning-point of
history, for one who had so lived it all
in advance, who was so aware of it now
that it had come, who had carried so
long on his lips the taste of its scarcely
breathable air.

As the ambulance left the gates of
Paris, and hurried eastward in the grey
dawn, this sense of going toward
something new and overwhelming
continued to grow in Troy. It was
probably the greatest hour of the war
that was about to strike — and he was
still too young to give himself to the

THE MARNE 93

cause he had so long dreamed of
serving.

From the moment they left the
gates the road was encumbered with
huge grey motor - trucks, limousines,
torpedoes, motor-cycles, long trains of
artillery, army kitchens, supply wagons,
all the familiar elements of the pro-
cession he had so often watched
unrolling itself endlessly east and west
from the Atlantic to the Alps.
Nothing new in the sight — but some-
thing new in the faces ! A look of
having got beyond the accident of
living, and accepted what lay over the
edge, in the dim land of the final. He
had seen that look in the days before
the Marne. . . .

Most of the faces on the way were
French: as far as Epernay they met
their compatriots only in isolated
groups. But whenever one of the
motor-trucks lumbering by bore a big

94 THE MARNE

U.S. on its rear panel Troy pushed his
light ambulance ahead and skimmed
past, just for the joy of seeing the fresh
young heads rising pyramid -wise above
the sides of the lorry, hearing the
snatches of familiar song — " Hail, hail,
the gang's all here!" and "We won't
come back till it's over over there ! "-
and shouting back, in reply to a
stentorian " Hi, kid, beat it ! ", " Bet
your life I will, old man ! "

Hubert Jacks, the young fellow who
was with him, shouted back too, as
lustily ; but between times he was more
occupied with the details of their own
particular job — to which he was newer
than Troy — and seemed not to feel
so intensely the weight of impending
events.

As they neared the Montmirail
monument: "Ever been over this
ground before ? " Troy asked carelessly,
and Jacks answered : " N — no."

THE MARNE 95

" Ah — I have. I was here just after
the battle of the Marne, in September
'fourteen."

"That so? You must have been
quite a kid," said Jacks with indiffer-
ence, filling his pipe.

"Well — not quite" Troy rejoined
sulkily ; and they said no more.

At Epernay they stopped for lunch,
and found the place swarming with
troops. Troy's soul was bursting
within him : he wanted to talk and
remember and compare. But his
companion was unimaginative, and
perhaps a little jealous of his greater
experience. " He doesn't want to show
that he's new at the job," Troy decided.

They lunched together in a corner
of the packed restaurant, and while
they were taking coffee some French
officers came up and chatted with Troy.
To all of them he felt the desperate
need of explaining that he was driving

96 THE MARNE

an ambulance only because he was still
too young to be among the combatants.

" But I shan't be — soon ! " he always
added, in the tone of one who affirms.
" It's merely a matter of a few weeks
now."

" Oh, you all look like babies — but
you all fight like devils," said a young
French lieutenant seasoned by four
years at the front ; and another officer
added gravely : " Make haste to be old
enough, cher monsieur. We need you
all — every one of you. ..."

" Oh, we're coming — we're all com-
ing ! " Troy cried.

That evening, after a hard and
harrowing day's work between posies
de secours and a base hospital, they
found themselves in a darkened village,
where, after a summary meal under
flying shells, some one suggested ending
upattheY.M.C.A. hut.

The shelling had ceased, and there

THE MARNE 97

seemed nothing better to do than to
wander down the dark street to the
underground shelter packed with
American soldiers. Troy was sleepy
and tired, and would have preferred to
crawl into his bed at the inn ; he felt,
more keenly than ever, the humiliation
(the word was stupid, but he could find
no other) of being among all these
young men, only a year or two his
seniors, and none, he was sure, more
passionately eager than himself for the
work that lay ahead, and yet so hope-
lessly divided from him by that stupid
difference in age. But Hubert Jacks
was seemingly unconscious of this, and
only desirous of ending his night cheer-
fully. ! It would have looked unfriendly
not to accompany him, so they pushed
their way together through the cellar
door surmounted by the sociable red
triangle.

It was a big cellar, but brown

H

98 THE MARNE

uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it
from wall to wall. In one corner the
men were sitting on packing - boxes
at a long table made of boards laid
across barrels, the smoky light of little
oil lamps reddening their cheeks and
deepening the furrows in their white
foreheads as they laboured over their
correspondence. Others were playing
checkers, or looking at the illustrated
papers, and everybody was smoking
and talking — not in large groups, but
quietly, by twos or threes. Young
women in trig uniforms, with fresh
innocent faces, moved among the
barrels and boxes, distributing stamps
or books, chatting with the soldiers,
and being generally homelike and
sisterly. The men gave them back
glances as honest, and almost as inno-
cent, and an air of simple daylight
friendliness pervaded the Avernian
cave.

THE MARNE 99

It was the first time that Troy had
ever seen a large group of his com-
patriots so close to the fighting front,
and in an hour of ease, and he was
struck by the gravity of the young
faces, and the low tones of their talk.
Everything was in a minor key. No
one was laughing or singing or larking :
the note was that which might have
prevailed in a club of quiet elderly
men, or in a drawing-room where the
guests did not know each other well.
Troy was all the more surprised because
he remembered the jolly calls of the
young soldiers in the motor - trucks,
and the songs and horse-play of the
gangs of trench-diggers and hut-builders
he had passed on the way. Was it
that his compatriots did not know how
to laugh when they were at leisure, or
was it rather that, in the intervals of
work, the awe of the unknown laid its
hand on these untried hearts ?

100 THE MARNE

Troy and Jacks perched on a
packing -box, and talked a little with
their neighbours ; but presently they
were interrupted by the noise of a
motor stopping outside. There was a
stir at the mouth of the cavern, and a
girl said eagerly : " Here she comes ! "

Instantly the cellar woke up. The
soldiers' faces grew young again, they
flattened themselves laughingly against
the walls near the entrance, the door
above was cautiously opened, and a girl
in a long blue cloak appeared at the
head of the stairs.

" Well, boys — you see I managed
it I" she cried; and Troy recognized
the piercing accents and azure gaze
of Miss Hinda Warlick.

"She managed it ! " the whole cellar
roared as one man, drowning her answer
in a cheer. And, " Of course I did ! " she
continued, laughing and nodding right
and left as she made her triumphant

THE MARNE 101

way down the lane of khaki, to what,
at her appearance, had somehow
promptly become the stage at the
farther end of a packed theatre. The
elderly Y.M.C.A. official who accom-
panied her puffed out his chest like a
general and blinked knowingly behind
his gold eye-glasses.

Troy's first movement had been one
of impatience. He hated all that Miss
Warlick personified, and hated it most
of all on this sacred soil, and at this
fateful moment, with the iron wings of
doom clanging so close above their
heads. But it would have been almost
impossible to fight his way out through
the crowd that had closed in behind
her — and he stayed.

The cheering subsided, she gained
her improvised platform — a door laid
on. some biscuit-boxes — and the recita-
tion began.

She gave them all sorts of things,

102 THE MARNE

ranging from grave to gay, and extract-
ing from the sentimental numbers a
peculiarly piercing effect that hurt Troy
like the twinge of a dental instrument.
And her audience loved it all, indis-
criminately and voraciously, with souls
hungry for the home-flavour and long
nurtured on what Troy called " cereal-
fiction." One had to admit that Miss
Warlick knew her public, and could
play on every chord.

It might have been funny if it had
not been so infinitely touching. They
were all so young, so serious, so far
from home, and bound on a quest so
glorious ! And there overhead, just
above them, brooded and clanged the
black wings of their doom. . . . Troy's
mockery was softened to tenderness,
and he felt, under the hard shell of his
youthful omniscience, the stir of all
the things to which the others were
unconsciously responding.

THE MARNE 103

" And now, by special request, Miss
Warlick is going to say a few words,"
the elderly eye-glassed officer import-
antly announced.

Ah, what a pity ! If only she had
ended on that last jolly chorus, so full
of artless laughter and tears ! Troy
remembered her dissertations on the
steamer, and winced at a fresh display
of such fatuity in such a scene.

She had let the cloak slip from her
shoulders, and stepped to the edge of
her unsteady stage. Her eyes burned
large in a face grown suddenly grave.
. . . For a moment she reminded him
again of Sophy Wicks.

"Only a few words, really," she
began apologetically ; and the cellar
started a cheer of protest.

" No — not that kind. Something
different. . . ." She paused long
enough to let the silence prepare them :
sharp little artist that she was 1 Then

104 THE MARNE

she leaned forward. "This is what I
want to say. I've come from the
French front — pretty near the edge.
They're dying there, boys — dying by
thousands, now, this minute. . . . But
that's not it — I know : you want me to
cut it out — and I'm going to. ... But
this is why I began that way ; because
it was my first sight of — things of that
sort. And I had to tell you "

She stopped, pale, her pretty mouth
twitching.

"What I really wanted to say is
this. Since I came to Europe, nearly
a year ago, I've got to know the
country they're dying for — and I under-
stand why they mean to go on and on
dying — if they have to — till there isn't
one of them left.

"Boys — I know France now — and
she's worth it! Don't you make any
mistake !

" I have to laugh now when I

THE MARNE 105

remember what I thought of France
when I landed. My ! How d'you
suppose she'd got on so long without
us? Done a few things too — poor
little toddler ! Well — it was time we
took her by the hand, and showed her
how to behave. And I wasn't the
only one either ; I guess most of us
thought we'd have to teach her her
letters. Maybe some of you boys right
here felt that way too ? "

A guilty laugh, and loud applause.

"Thought so," said Miss Warlick,
smiling.

" Well," she continued, " there
wasn't hardly anything / wasn't ready
to teach them. On the steamer coming
out with us there was a lot of those
Amb'lance boys. My ! How I gassed
to them. I said the French had got
to be taught how to love their mothers
— I said they hadn't any home-feeling
— and didn't love children the way we

106 THE MARNE

do. I've been round among them some
since then, in the hospitals, and I've seen
fellows lying there shot 'most to death,
and their little old mothers in white
caps arriving from 'way off at the other
end of France. Well, those fellows
know how to see their mothers coming
even if they're blind, and how to hug
'em even if their arms are off. ...
And the children — the way they go
on about the children ! Ever seen a
French soldier yet that didn't have a
photograph of a baby stowed away
somewhere in his dirty uniform ? /
never have. I tell you, they're white I
And they're fighting as only people can
who feel that way about mothers and
babies. The way we're going to fight ;
and maybe we'll prove it to 'em sooner
than any of us think. . . .

"Anyhow, I wanted to get this off
my chest to-night ; not for you, only
for myself. I didn't want to have a

THE MARNE 107

shell get me before I'd said * Veever la

France ! ' before all of you.

" See here, boys — the Marcellaze ! "
She snatched a flag from the wall,

drawing herself up to heroic height ;

and the whole cellar joined her in a

roar.

X

THE next morning Jacks dragged Troy
out of bed by the feet. The room was
still dark, and through the square of
the low window glittered a bunch of
stars.

" Hurry call to Montmirail — step
lively ! " Jacks ordered, his voice thick
with sleep.

All the old names ; with every turn
of the wheel they seemed to be drawing
nearer and nearer to the ravaged spot
of earth where Paul Gantier slept his
faithful sleep. Strange if, to-day of all
days, Troy should again stand by his
friend's grave.

They pushed along eastward under
the last stars, the roll of the cannon

108

THE MARNE 109

crashing through the quiet dawn. The
birds flew up with frightened cries from
the trees along the roadside ; rooks
cawed their warning from clump to
clump, and gathered in the sky in dark
triangles flying before the danger.

The east began to redden through
the dust-haze of the cloudless air. As
they advanced the road became more
and more crowded, and the ambulance
was caught in the usual dense traffic of
the front : artillery, field - kitchens,
motor-trucks, horse-wagons, hay-carts
packed with refugees, and popping
motor - cycles zigzagging through the
tangle of vehicles. The movement
seemed more feverish and uncertain
than usual, and now and then the road
was jammed, and curses, shouts and
the crack of heavy whips sounded
against the incessant cannonade that
hung its iron curtain above the hills to
the north-east. The faces of soldiers

110 THE MARNE

and officers were unshaved sallow
drawn with fatigue and anxiety.
Women crouched sobbing on their
piled-up baggage, and here and there,
by the roadside, a little country cart
had broken down, and the occupants
sat on the bank watching the confusion
like impassive lookers-on.

Suddenly, in the thickest of the
struggle, a heavy lorry smashed into
Troy's ambulance, and he felt the un-
mistakable wrench of the steering-gear.
The car shook like a careening boat,
and then righted herself and stopped.

"Oh, hell!" shouted Jacks in a
fury. The two lads jumped down, and
in a few minutes they saw that they
were stranded beyond remedy. Tears
of anger rushed into Troy's eyes. On
this day of days he was not even to
accomplish his own humble job !

Another ambulance of their own
formation overtook them, and it was

THE MARNE 111

agreed that Jacks, who was the sharper
of the two, was to get a lift to the
nearest town, and try to bring back a
spare part, or, failing that, pick up some
sort of a car in which they could continue
their work.

Troy was left by the roadside.
Hour after hour he sat there waiting
and cursing his fate. When would
Jacks be back again ? Not at all, most
likely ; it was ten to one he would be
caught on the way and turned on to
some more pressing job. He knew,
and Troy knew, that their ambulance
was for the time being a hopeless
wreck, and would probably have to stick
ignominiously in its ditch till some one
could go and fetch a spare part from
Paris. And meanwhile, what might
not be happening nearer by ?

The rumble and thump of the cannon-
ade grew more intense ; a violent en-
gagement was evidently going on not

112 THE MARNE

far off. Troy pulled out his map and
tried to calculate how far he was
from the front ; but the front, at that
point, was a wavering and incalcu-
lable line. He had an idea that the
fighting was much nearer than he or
Jacks had imagined. The place at
which they had broken down must be
about fifteen miles from the Marne.
But could it be possible that the
Germans had crossed the Marne ?

Troy grew hungry, and thrust his
hand in his pocket to pull out a sand-
wich. With it came a letter of his
mother's, carried off in haste when he
left Paris the previous morning. He
re-read it with a mournful smile. " Of
course we all know the Allies must
win; but the preparations here seem
so slow and blundering; and the Ger-
mans are still so strong. . . . (Thump,
thump, the artillery echoed : " Strong ! ")
And just at the end of the letter, again ;

THE MARNE 113

"I do wonder if you'll run across
Sophy. . . ."

He lit a cigarette, and shut his
eyes and thought. The sight of Miss
Warlick had made Sophy Wicks's pres-
ence singularly vivid to him : he had
fallen asleep thinking of her the night
before. How like her to have taken
a course at the Presbyterian Hospital
without letting any one know! He
wondered that he had not suspected,
under her mocking indifference, an
ardour as deep as his own, and he
was ashamed of having judged her as
others had, when, for so long, the
thought of her had been his torment
and his joy. Where was she now, he
wondered ? Probably in some hospital
in the south or the centre : the authori-
ties did not let beginners get near the
front, though, of course, it was what
all the girls were mad for. . . . Well,
Sophy would do her work wherever it

i

114 THE MARNE

was assigned to her : he did not see
her intriguing for a showy post.

Troy began to marvel again at the
spell of France — his France ! Here was
a girl who had certainly not come in
quest of vulgar excitement, as so many
did : Sophy had always kept herself
scornfully aloof from the pretty ghouls
who danced and picnicked on the ruins of
the world. He knew that her motives,
so jealously concealed, must have been
as pure and urgent as his own. France,
which she hardly knew, had merely
guessed at through the golden blur of
a six weeks' midsummer trip, France
had drawn her with an irresistible
pressure ; and the moment she had felt
herself free she had come. "Whither
thou goest will I go, thy people shall
be my people. . . ." Yes, France
was the Naomi-country that had but
to beckon, and her children rose and
came. .

THE MARNE 115

Troy was exceedingly tired : he
stretched himself on the dusty bank,
and the noise of the road-traffic began
to blend with the cannonade in his
whirling brain. Suddenly he fancied
the Germans were upon him. He
thought he heard the peppering volley
of machine-guns, shouts, screams, rifle-
shots close at hand. . . .

He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

What he had heard was the cracking
of whips and the shouting of carters
urging tired farm-horses along. Down
a by-road to his left a stream of haggard
country people was pouring from the
direction of the Marne. This time only
a few were in the carts : the greater
number were flying on their feet, the
women carrying their babies, the old
people bent under preposterous bundles,
blankets, garden utensils, cages with
rabbits, an agricultural prize framed and
glazed, a wax wedding-wreath under a

116 THE MARNE

broken globe. Sick and infirm people
were dragged and sboved along by the
older children : a goitred idiot sat in a
wheel -barrow pushed by a girl, and
laughed and pulled its tongue. . . .

In among the throng Troy began to
see the torn blue uniforms of wounded
soldiers limping on bandaged legs. . . .
Others too, not wounded, elderly
haggard territorials, with powder-black
faces, bristling beards, and the horror
of the shell-roar in their eyes. . . . One
of them stopped near Troy, and in a
thick voice begged for a drink . . . just
a drop of anything, for God's sake.
Others followed, pleading for food and
drink. "Gas, gas . . ."a young artil-
leryman gasped at him through distorted
lips. . . . The Germans were over the
Marne, they told him, the Germans
were coming. It was hell back there,
no one could stand it.

Troy ransacked the ambulance, found

THE MARNE 117

water, brandy, biscuits, condensed milk,
and set up an impromptu canteen. But
the people who had clustered about him
were pushed forward by others crying :
"Are you mad to stay here? The
Germans are coming ! " — and in a feeble
panic they pressed on.

One old man, trembling with fatigue,
and dragging a shaking brittle old
woman, had spied the stretcher beds
inside the ambulance, and without ask-
ing leave scrambled in and pulled his
wife after him. They fell like logs on
to the grey blankets, and a livid terri-
torial with a bandaged arm drenched in
blood crawled in after them and sank on
the floor. The rest of the crowd had
surged by.

As he was helping the wounded
soldier to settle himself in the am-
bulance, Troy heard a new sound down
the road. It was a deep continuous
rumble, the rhythmic growl of a long

118 THE MARNE

train of army-trucks. The way must
have been cleared to let them by,
for there was no break or faltering
in the ever - deepening roar of their
approach.

A cloud of dust rolled ahead, grow-
ing in volume with the growing noise ;
now the first trucks were in sight,
huge square olive-brown motor-trucks
stacked high with scores and scores of
rosy soldiers. Troy jumped to his feet
with a shout. It was an American
regiment being rushed to the front !

The refugees and the worn-out blue
soldiers fell back before the triumphant
advance, and a weak shout went up.
The rosy soldiers shouted back, but
their faces were grave and set. It was
clear that they knew where they were
going, and to what work they had been
so hurriedly summoned.

" It's hell back there ! " a wounded
territorial called out, pointing backward

THE MARNE 119

over his bandaged shoulder, and another
cried : " Vive 1'Ame'rique ! "

" Vive la France ! " shouted the truck-
ful abreast of Troy, and the same cry
burst from his own lungs. A few miles
off the battle of the Marne was being
fought again, and here were his own
brothers rushing forward to help 1 He
felt that his greatest hour had struck.

One of the trucks had halted for a
minute just in front of him, marking
time, and the lads leaning over its side
had seen him, and were calling out
friendly college calls.

" Come along and help ! " cried one,
as the truck got under way again.

Troy glanced at his broken-down
motor ; then his eye lit on a rifle lying
close by in the dust of the roadside.
He supposed it belonged to the wounded
territorial who had crawled into the
ambulance.

He caught up the rifle, scrambled

120 THE MARNE

up over the side with the soldier's help,
and was engulfed among his brothers.
Furtively he had pulled the ambulance
badge from his collar . . . but a moment
later he understood the uselessness of
the precaution. All that mattered to
any one just then was that he was one
more rifle for the front.

XI

ON the way he tried to call up half-
remembered snatches of military lore.

If only he did not disgrace them by
a blunder !

He had talked enough to soldiers,
French and American, in the last year :
he recalled odd bits of professional
wisdom, but he was too excited to
piece them together. He was not in
the least afraid of being afraid, but his
heart sank at the dread of doing some-
thing stupid, inopportune, idiotic. His
envy of the youths beside him turned
to veneration. They had all been in
the front line, and knew its vocabulary,
its dangers and its dodges.

121

122 THE MARNE

All he could do was to watch and
imitate. . . .

Presently they were all tumbled
out of the motors and drawn up by
the roadside. An officer bawled un-
intelligible orders, and the men exe-
cuted mysterious movements in obedi-
ence.

Troy crept close to the nearest soldier,
and copied his gestures awkwardly —
but no one noticed. Night had fallen,
and he was thankful for the darkness.
Perhaps by to-morrow morning he
would have picked up a few of their
tricks. Meanwhile, apparently, all he
had to do was to march, march, march,
at a sort of break-neck trot that the
others took as lightly as one skims the
earth in a dream. If it had not been
for his pumping heart and his aching
bursting feet, Troy at moments would
have thought it was a dream. . . .

Rank by rank they pressed forward

THE MARNE 123

in the night toward a sky-line torn with
intermittent flame.

" We're going toward a battle," Troy
sang to himself, "toward a battle, to-
ward a battle. ..." But the words
meant no more to him than the
doggerel the soldier was chanting at
his elbow.

They were in a wood, slipping for-
ward cautiously, beating their way
through the under-growth. The night
had grown cloudy, but now and then
the clouds broke, and a knot of stars
clung to a branch like swarming bees.

At length a halt was called in a
clearing, and then the group to which
Troy had attached himself was ordered
forward. He did not understand the
order, but seeing the men moving he
followed, like a mascot dog trotting
after its company, and they began to
beat their way onward, still more

124 THE MARNE

cautiously, in little crawling lines of
three or four. It reminded Troy of
"playing Indian" in his infancy.

" Careful . . . watch out for 'em
..." the soldier next to him whispered,
clutching his arm at a noise in the
underbrush ; and Troy's heart jerked
back violently, though his legs were
still pressing forward.

They were here, then : they might
be close by in the blackness, behind
the next tree-hole, in the next clump
of bushes — the destroyers of France,
old M. Gantier's murderers, the enemy
to whom Paul Gantier had given his
life ! These thoughts slipped con-
fusedly through Troy's mind, scarcely
brushing it with a chill wing. His
main feeling was one of a base physical
fear, and of a newly - awakened moral
energy which had the fear by the
throat and held it down with shaking
hands. Which of the two would con-

THE MARNE 125

quer, how many yards farther would
the resolute Troy drag on the limp
coward through this murderous wood ?
Thatwas theone thing that mattered. . . .

At length they dropped down into
a kind of rocky hollow overhung with
bushes, and lay there, finger on trigger,
hardly breathing. " Sleep a bit if you
can — you look beat," whispered the
friendly soldier.

Sleep f

Troy's mind was whirling like a
machine in a factory blazing with lights.
His thoughts rushed back over the
miles he had travelled since he had
caught up the rifle by the roadside.

" My God ! " he suddenly thought,
" what am I doing here, anyhow ? I'm
a deserter."

Yes: that was the name he would
go by if ever his story became known.
And how should it not become known ?
He had deserted — deserted not only

126 THE MARNE

his job, and his ambulance, and Jacks,
who might come back at any moment
— it was a dead certainty to him now
that Jacks would come back — but also
(incredible perfidy !) the poor worn-out
old couple and the wounded territorial
who had crawled into the ambulance.
He, Troy Belknap, United States Army
Ambulance driver, and sworn servant
of France, had deserted three sick and
helpless people who, if things continued
to go badly, would almost certainly
fall into the hands of the Germans. . . .
It was too horrible to think of, and so,
after a minute or two, he ceased to
think of it — at least with the surface
of his mind.

" If it's a court-martial it's a court-
martial," he reflected ; and began to
stretch his ears again for the sound of
men slipping up in the darkness through
the bushes. . . .

But he was really horribly tired, and

THE MARNE 127

in the midst of the tension the blaze
of lights in his head went out, and he
fell into a half-conscious doze. When
he started into full consciousness again
the men were stirring, and he became
aware that the sergeant was calling for
volunteers.

Volunteers for what ? He didn't
know and was afraid to ask. But it
became clear to him that the one chance
to wash his guilt away (was that funny
old-fashioned phrase a quotation, and
where did it come from ?) was to
offer himself for the job, whatever it
might be.

The decision once taken, he became
instantly calm, happy and alert. He
observed the gesture made by the other
volunteers and imitated it. It was too
dark for the sergeant to distinguish one
man from another, and without comment
he let Troy fall into the line of men
who were creeping up out of the hollow.

128 THE MARNE

The awful cannonade had ceased,
and as they crawled along single file
between the trees the before -dawn
twitter of birds rained down on them
like dew, and the woods smelt like the
woods at home.

They came to the end of the trees,
and guessed that the dark wavering
wall ahead was the edge of a wheat-
field. Some one whispered that the
Marne was just beyond the wheat-field,
and that the red flares they saw must
be over Chateau-Thierry.

The momentary stillness laid a re-
assuring touch on Troy's nerves, and
he slipped along adroitly at the tail of
the line, alert but cool. Far off the
red flares still flecked the darkness, but
they did not frighten him. He said to
himself : " People are always afraid in
their first battle. I'm not the least
afraid, so I suppose this is not a battle "
. . . and at the same moment there

THE MARNE 129

was a small shrieking explosion followed
by a horrible rattle of projectiles that
seemed to spring up out of the wheat
at their feet.

The men dropped on their bellies and
crawled away from it, and Troy crawled
after, sweating with fear. He had not
looked back, but he knew that some of
the men must be lying where they had
dropped, and suddenly it occurred to
him that it was his business to go and
see. . . .

Was it, though ? Or would that be
disobeying orders again ?

The Ambulance driver's instinct
awoke in him, and he did not stop to
consider, but turned and crawled back,
straight back to the place that the
horrible explosion had come from. The
firing had stopped, but in the thin dark-
ness he saw a body lying in front of
him in the flattened wheat. He looked
in the direction from which he had

K

130 THE MARNE

come, and saw that the sergeant and
the rest of the men were disappearing
to the right ; then he ramped forward
again, forward and forward, till he
touched the arm of the motionless man
and whispered : " Hi, kid, it's me. ..."

He tried to rouse the wounded man,
to pull him forward, to tow him like
a barge along the beaten path in the
wheat. But the man groaned and
resisted. He was evidently in great
pain, and Troy, whom a year's ex-
perience in ambulance work had en-
lightened, understood that he must
either be carried away or left where he
was.

To carry him it was necessary to
stand up, and the night was growing
transparent, and the wheat was not
more than waist high.

Troy raised his head an inch or two
and looked about him. In the east,
beyond the wheat, a pallor was creep-

THE MARNE 131

ing upward, drowning the last stars.
Any one standing up would be distinctly
visible against that pallor. With a
sense of horror and reluctance and dis-
may he lifted the wounded man and
stood up. As he did so he felt a small
tap on his back, between the shoulders,
as if some one had touched him from
behind. He half turned to see who it
was, and doubled up, slipping down
with the wounded soldier in his arms.

XII

TROY, burning with fever, lay on a
hospital bed.

He was not very clear where the
hospital was, nor how he had got there ;
and he did not greatly care. All that
was left of clearness in his brain was
filled with the bitter sense of his failure.
He had abandoned his job to plunge
into battle, and before he had seen a
German or fired a shot he found him-
self ignominiously laid by the heels in a
strange place full of benevolent-looking
hypocrites whose least touch hurt him
a million times more than the German
bullet.

It was all a stupid agitating muddle,
in the midst of which he tried in vain

132

THE MARNE 133

to discover what had become of Jacks,
what had happened to the ambulance,
and whether the old people and the
wounded territorial had been heard of.
He insisted particularly on the latter
point to the cruel shaved faces that
were always stooping over him, but
they seemed unable to give him a
clear answer — or else their cruelty
prompted them to withhold what they
knew. He groaned and tossed and
got no comfort, till, suddenly opening
his eyes, he found Jacks sitting by
his bed.

He poured out his story to Jacks in
floods and torrents : there was no time
to listen to what his friend had to say.
He went in and out of the whole
business with him, explaining, arguing,
and answering his own arguments.
Jacks, passive and bewildered, sat by
the bed and murmured : " All right —
all right" at intervals. Then he too

134 THE MARNE

disappeared, giving way to other un-
known faces.

The third night (some one said it
was the third night) the fever dropped
a little. Troy felt more quiet, and
Jacks, who had turned up again, sat
beside him, and told him all the
things he had not been able to listen
to the first day — ah1 the great things
in which he had played an unconscious
part.

"Battle of the Marne? Sure you
were in it — in it up to the hilt, you
lucky kid ! "

And what a battle it had been !
The Americans had taken Vaux and
driven the Germans back across the
bridge at Chateau-Thierry, the French
were pressing hard on their left flank,
the advance on Paris had been checked
— and the poor old couple and the
territorial in the ambulance had not
fallen into enemy hands, but had been

THE MARNE 135

discovered by Jacks where Troy had
left them, and hurried off to places of
safety the same night.

As Troy lay and listened, tears of
weakness and joy ran down his face.
The Germans were back across the
Marne, and he had really been in the
action that had sent them there ! The
road to Paris was barred — and Sophy
Wicks was somewhere in France. . . .
He felt as light as a feather, and if it
had not been for his deathly weakness
he would have jumped out of bed and
insisted on rejoining the ambulance.
But as it was he could only lie flat
and feebly return Jacks's grin. . . .

There was just one thing he had not
told Jacks: a little thing that Jacks
would not have understood. Out in the
wheat, when he had felt that tap on the
shoulder, he had turned round quickly,
thinking that a friend had touched him.

136 THE MARNE

At the same instant he had stumbled
and fallen, and his eyes had grown
dark ; but through the darkness he
still felt confusedly that a friend was
near, if only he could lift his lids and
look.

He did lift them at last ; and there
in the dawn he saw a French soldier,
haggard and battle-worn, looking down
at him. The soldier wore the uniform
of the chasseurs a pied, and his face was
the face of Paul Gantier, bending low
and whispering : " Mon petit — mon
pauvre petit gars. ..." Troy heard
the words distinctly, he knew the voice
as well as he knew his mother's. His
eyes shut again, but he felt Gantier's
arms under his body, felt himself lifted,
lifted, till he seemed to float in the
arms of his friend.

He said nothing of that to Jacks or
any one, and now that the fever had
dropped he was glad he had held his

THE MARNE 137

tongue. Some one told him that a
sergeant of the chasseurs a pied had
found him and brought him in to the
nearest paste de secours, where Jacks,
providentially, had run across him and
carried him back to the base. They
told him that his rescue had been
wonderful, but that nobody knew what
the sergeant's name was, or where he had
gone to. ... ("If ever a man ought
to have had the Croix de Guerre — ! "
one of the nurses interjected emotion-
ally.)

Troy listened and shut his lips. It
was really none of his business to tell
these people where the sergeant had
gone to ; but he smiled a little when
the doctor said : " Chances are a man
like that hasn't got much use for
decorations ..." and when the emo-
tional nurse added : " Well, you must
just devote the rest of your life to
trying to find him."

138 THE MARNE

Ah, yes, he would do that, Troy
swore — he would do it on the battle-
fields of France.

THE END

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