 CHAPTER IV On the way from Doulan to Montreuil-sur-Mer on a shining summer afternoon, a road between dusty hedges choked, literally strangled, by a torrent of westward-streaming troops of all arms. Every few minutes there would come a break in the flow, and our motor would wriggle through, advance a few yards, and be stopped again by a widening of the torrent that jammed us into the ditch and splashed a dazzle of dust into our eyes. The dust was stifling, but through it what a sight! Standing up in the car and looking back, we watched the river of war wind toward us. Cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers—they swept on as smoothly as if in holiday order. Through the dust, the sun picked out the flash of lances and the gloss of Charger's flanks. Flushed rows and rows of determined faces, found the least touch of gold on faded uniforms. Silvered the sad gray of Mitrailleuse and munition wagons. Close as the men were they seemed allegorically splendid, as if under the arch of the sunset we had been watching the whole French army ride straight into glory. Finally we left the last attachment behind, and had the country to ourselves. The disfigurement of war has not touched the fields of Artois. The thatched farmhouses dozed in gardens full of roses and hollyhocks, and the hedges above the duck-ponds were weighed down with layers of elder blossom. On all sides wheat fields skirted with woodland went billowing away under the breezy light that seemed to carry a breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up and down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell, and such a sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew more and more fabulous and epic. The sun had set, and the sea twilight was rolling in when we dipped down from the town of Montroy to the valley below, where the towers of an ancient abbey church rise above terraced orchards. The gates at the end of the avenue were thrown open, and the motor drove into a monastery court full of box and roses. Everything was sweet and secluded in this medieval place, and from the shadow of cloisters and arched passages, groups of nuns fluttered out, nuns all black or all white, gliding, peering and standing at gaze. It was as if we had plunged back into a century to which motors were unknown, and our car had been some monster cast up from a Barbary shipwreck, and the startled attitudes of these holy women did credit to their sense of the picturesque, for the abbey of Noville is now a great Belgian hospital, and such monsters must frequently intrude on its occlusion. Sunset and summer dusk and the moon, under the monastery windows a walled garden with stone pavilions at the angles and the drip of a fountain, below it tears of orchard terraces fading into a great moon-confused plain that might be either fields or sea. June 20. Today our way ran northeast, through a landscape so English that there was no incongruity in the sprinkling of khaki along the road. Even the villages look English—the same plum-red brick of tidy, self-respecting houses, neat, demure and freshly painted, the gardens all bursting with flowers, the landscape hedgerowed and willowed and fed with water-courses, the people's faces square and pink and honest, and the signs over the shops in a language half-way between English and German. Only the architecture of the towns is French, of a reserved and robust northern type, but unmistakably in the same great tradition. War still seemed so far off that one had time for these digressions as the motor flew on over the undulating miles. But presently we came on an aviation camp spreading its sheds over a wide plateau. Here the khaki throng was thicker and the familiar military stir enlivened the landscape. A few miles farther and we found ourselves in what was seemingly a big English town oddly grouped about a nucleus of French churches. This was Saint-Omer, gray, spacious, coldly clean in its Sunday emptiness. At the street-crossings English sentries stood mechanically directing the absent traffic with gestures familiar to Piccadilly, and the signs of the British Red Cross and St. John's Ambulance hung on club-like facades that might almost have claimed a home in Palmao. The Englishness of things was emphasized as we passed out through the suburbs by the look of the crowd on the canal bridges and along the roads. Every nation has its own way of loitering, and there is nothing so unlike the French way as the English. Even if all these tall youths had not been in khaki and the girls with them so pink and contrived, one would instantly have recognized the passive northern way of letting a holiday soak in instead of squeezing out its juices with feverish fingers. When we turned westward from Saint-Omer, across the same pastures and water-courses, we were faced by two hills standing up abruptly out of the plain, and on the top of one rose the walls and tower of a compact little medieval town. As we took the windings that led up to it, a sense of Italy began to penetrate the persistent impression of being somewhere near the English Channel. The town we were approaching might have been a queer dream blend of Winchelsea and San Gimignano, but when we entered the gates of Castel we were in a place so intensely itself that all analogies dropped out of mind. It was not surprising to learn from the guidebook that Castel has the most extensive view of any town in Europe. One felt at once that it differed in all sorts of marked and self-assertive ways from every other town and would be almost sure to have the best things going in every line. And the line of an illimitable horizon is exactly the best to set off its own quaint compactness. We found our hotel in the most perfect of little market squares, with a Renaissance town hall on one side, and on the other a miniature Spanish palace with a front of rosy brick adorned by grey carvings. The square was crowded with English army motors and beautiful prancing chargers, and the restaurant of the inn, which has the luck to face the pink and grey palace, swarmed with khaki tea-drinkers turning in different shoulders to the widest view in Europe. It is one of the most detestable things about war that everything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result, is such a heightening of life so visually stimulating and absorbing. It was gay and terrible, is the phrase forever recurring in war and peace, and the gaiety of war was everywhere in Castel, transforming the lifeless little town into a romantic stage-setting full of the flash of arms and the virile animation of young faces. From the park on top of the hill we looked down on another picture. All about us was the plain, its distant rim merged in northern sea mist, and through the mist, in the glitter of the afternoon sun, far off towns and shadowy towers lay steeped, as it seemed, in summer quiet. For a moment, while we looked, the vision of war shriveled up like a painted veil. Then we caught the names pronounced by a group of English soldiers leaning over the parapet at our side. That's Dun Kirk, one of them pointed it out with his pipe, and there's Poporig just underneath us, that's Furness beyond, and Ypres, and Dixmude, and Ypour. And at the mention of those names the scene grew dark again, and we felt the passing of the angel to whom was given the key of the bottomless pit. That night we went up once more to the rock of Castel, the moon was full, and as civilians are not allowed out alone after dark, a staff officer went with us to show us the view from the roof of the disused casino on top of the rock. It was the queerest of sensations to push open a glazed door, and find ourselves in a spectral painted room with soldiers dozing in the moonlight on polished floors, their kits stacked on the gaming tables. We passed through a big vestibule among more soldiers lounging in the half-light, and up a long staircase to the roof, where a watcher challenged us and then let us go to the edge of the parapet. Directly below lay the unlit mass of the town. To the north-west a single sharp hill, the Monde Ca, stood out against the sky. The rest of the horizon was unbroken, and floating in misty moonlight. The outline of the ruined towns had vanished, and peace seemed to have won back the world. But as we stood there a red flash started out of the mist far off to the north-west, then another and another flickered up at different points of the long curve. Luminous bombs thrown up along the lines, our guide explained, and just then at still another point a white light opened like a tropical flower spread to full bloom and drew itself back into the night. A flare, we were told, and another white flower bloomed out further down. Below us the roofs of castles slept their provincial sleep, the moonlight picking out every leaf in the gardens, while beyond those infernal flowers continued to open and shut along the curve of death. June 21st. On the road from Castel to Popering. Heat, dust, crowds, confusion, all the sordid, shabby rearview of war. The road running across the plain between white powdered hedges was plowed up by numberless motorvans, supply wagons, and Red Cross ambulances. Laboring through between them came detachments of British artillery, clattering gun carriages, straight young figures on glossy horses, long fidean lines of youths so ingenuously fair that one wondered how they could have looked on the Medusa face of war and lived. Men and beasts in spite of the dust were as fresh and sleek as if they had come from a bath, and everywhere along the wayside were improvised camps, with tents made of wagon covers, where the ceaseless, indomitable work of cleaning was being carried out in all its searching details. Shirts were drying on elder bushes, kettles boiling over gypsy fires, men shaving, blacking their boots, cleaning their guns, rubbing down their horses, greasing their saddles, polishing their stirrups and bits. On all sides a general cheery struggle against the prevailing dust, discomfort, and disorder. Here and there a young soldier leaned against a garden pailing to talk to a girl among the Hollyhawks, or an older soldier initiated a group of children into some mystery of military housekeeping, and everywhere were the same signs of friendly, inarticulate understanding with the owners of the fields and gardens. From the thronged high road we passed into the emptiness of deserted Popering, and out again on the way to Ypres. Beyond the flats and windmills to our left were the invisible German lines, and the staff officer who was with us leaned forward to caution our chauffeur. No tooting between here and Ypres. There was still a good deal of movement on the road, though it was less crowded with troops than near Popering, but as we passed through the last village and approached the low line of houses ahead the silence and emptiness widened about us. That low line was Eep. Every monument that marked it, that gave it an individual outline, is gone. It is a town without a profile. The motor slipped through a suburb of small brick houses and stopped under cover of some slightly taller buildings. Another military motor waited there, the chauffeur relic hunting in the gutted houses. We got out and walked toward the center of the cloth market. We had seen evacuated towns, Verdun, Baden-Villiers, round la top, but we had seen no emptiness like this. Not a human being was in the streets. Endless lines of houses looked down on us from vacant windows. Our footsteps echoed like the tramp of a crowd. Our lowered voices seemed to shout. In one street we came on three English soldiers who were carrying a piano out of a house and lifting it onto a hand-cart. They stopped to stare at us, and we stared back. It seemed an age since we had seen a living being. One of the soldiers scrambled into the cart and tapped out a tune on the cracked keyboard, and we all laughed with relief at the foolish noise. Then we walked on, and were alone again. We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns of La Raine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the earth. At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii. But Eep has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while nearby it has seemed to be a disemboweled corpse. Every window-pain is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off with the different stories exposed as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humble tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the unmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning glory wallpapers, plaster saints pine under glass bells, antemacassars droop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals on office walls. It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as if the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment come back and take up their daily business. And then—crash!—the guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English lines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the lives of a vanished cityful, hung dangling before us in that deathly blast. We had just reached the square before the cathedral when the cannonade began, and its roar seemed to build a roof of iron over the glorious ruins of Epe. The singular distinction of the city is that it is destroyed, but not abased. The walls of the cathedral, the long bulk of the cloth market, still lift themselves above the market place with a majesty that seems to silence compassion. The sight of those facades, so proud in death, recalled a phrase used soon after the fall of Yege, by Belgium's foreign minister. La Belgique ne regrette rien, which ought some day to serve as the motto of the renovated city. We were turning to go when we heard a whore overhead, followed by a volley of Mitraillers. High up in the blue over the center of the dead city flew a German aeroplane, and all about it hundreds of white shrapnel tufts burst out in the summer sky like the miraculous snowfall of Italian legend. Up and up they flew on the trail of the tobe, and on flew the tobe faster still till quariant pack were lost and missed, and the barking of the Mitraillers died out. So we left Epe to the death silence in which we had found her. The afternoon carried us back to Popourin, where I was bound on a quest for lace cushions of the special kind required by our Flemish refugees. The model is unobtainable in France, and I had been told, with few and vague indications, that I might find the cushions in a certain convent of the city, but in which. Popourin, though little injured, is almost empty. In its tidy desolation it looks like a town on which a wicked enchanter has laid a spell. We roamed from quarter to quarter, hunting for someone to show us the way to the convent I was looking for, till at last a passer-by led us to a door which seemed the right one. At our knock the bars were drawn, and a cloistered face looked out. No, there were no cushions there, and the nun had never heard of the order we named. But there were the penitents, the benedictines we might try. Our guide offered to show us the way and we went on. From one or two windows, wandering heads looked out and vanished, but the streets were lifeless. At last we came to a convent where there were no nuns left, but where the caretaker told us there were cushions, a great many. He led us through pale blue passages, up cold stairs, through rooms that smelt of linen and lavender. We passed a chapel with plaster saints in white niches above paper flowers. Everything was cold and bare and blank, like a mind from which memory is gone. We came to a classroom with lines of empty benches facing a blue-mantled virgin, and here on the floor lay rows and rows of lace cushions. On each a bit of lace had been begun, and there they had been dropped when nuns and pupils fled. They had not been left in disorder. The rows had been laid out evenly, a handkerchief thrown over each cushion. And that orderly arrest of life seemed sadder than any scene of disarray. It symbolized the senseless paralysis of a whole nation's emergencies. Here were a houseful of women and children, yesterday engaged in a useful task, and now aimlessly astray over the earth. And in hundreds of such houses, in dozens and hundreds of open towns, the hand of time had been stopped, the heart of life had ceased to beat, all the currents of hope and happiness and industry had been choked, not that some great military end might be gained or the length of the war curtailed, but that, wherever the shadow of Germany falls, all things should wither at the root. The same sight met us everywhere that afternoon. Over fern and burg, and all the little intermediate villages, the evil shadow lay. Germany had willed that these places should die, and wherever her bombs could not reach, her malediction had carried. Only biblical lamentation can convey a vision of this life-drained land. Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire, your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. Late in the afternoon we came to Dunkirk, lying peacefully between its harbour and canals. The bombardment of the previous month had emptied it, and though no signs of damage were visible, the same spellbound air lay over everything. As we sat alone at tea in the hall of the hotel on the Place Jean Barre, and looked out on the silent square in its lifeless shops and cafes, someone suggested that the hotel would be a convenient centre for the excursions we had planned, and we decided to return there the next evening. Then we motored back to Casselle. June 22. My first waking thought was, how time flies! It must be the fourteenth of July. I knew that it could not be the fourth of that specially commemorative month, because I was just awake enough to be sure I was not in America, and the only other event to justify such a terrific clatter was the French national anniversary. I sat up and listened to the popping of guns till a completed sense of reality stole over me, and I realised that I was in the inn of the wild man at Casselle, and that it was not the fourteenth of July, but the twenty-second of June. Then what? A tobe, of course, and all the guns in the place were cracking at it. By the time this mental process was complete I had scrambled up and hurried downstairs, and unbolting the heavy doors had rushed out into the square. It was about four in the morning, the heavenliest moment of a summer dawn, and in spite of the tumult, Casselle still apparently slept. Only a few soldiers stood in the square, looking up at a drift of white cloud behind which, they averred, a tobe had just slipped out of sight. Casselle was evidently used to tobes, and I had the sense of having overdone my excitement and not being exactly in tune, so after gazing a moment at the white cloud, I slunk back into the hotel, barred the door, and dismounted to my room. At a window on the stairs I paused to look out over the sloping roofs of the town, the gardens, the plain, and suddenly there was another crash, and a drift of white smoke blew up from the fruit trees just under the window. It was a last shot at the fugitive, from a gun hidden in one of those quiet provincial gardens between the houses, and its secret presence there was more startling than all the clatter of mitraillures from the rock. Silence and sleep came down again on Casselle, but an hour or two later the hush was broken by a roar like the last trump. This time it was no question of mitraillures. The wild man rocked on its base, and every pain in my windows beat a tattoo. What was that incredible unimagined sound? Why, it could be nothing, of course, but the voice of the big siege-gun of Nick's mood. Five times while I was dressing the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filled with a noise that may be compared, if the human imagination can stand the strain. To the simultaneous closing of all the iron shop shutters in the world. The odd part was that, as far as the wild man and its inhabitants were concerned, no visible effect resulted, and dressing, packing, and coffee-drinking went on comfortably in the strange parentheses between the roars. We set off early for neighbouring headquarters, and it was not till we turned out of the gates of Casselle that we came on signs of the bombardment, the smashing of a gas-house and the converting of a cabbage-field into a crater, which, for some time to come, will spare photographers the trouble of climbing Bessuvius. There was a certain consolation in the discrepancy between the noise and the damage done. At headquarters we learned more of the morning's incidents. Dunn-Kirk, it appeared, had been first visited by the tobe, which afterward came to take the range of Casselle, and the big gun of Nick's mood had then turned all its fury on the French seaport. The bombardment of Dunn-Kirk was still going on, and we were asked, and in fact bidden, to give up our plan of going there for the night. After luncheon we turned north towards the dunes. The villages we drove through were all evacuated, some quite lifeless, others occupied by troops. Presently we came to a group of military motors drawn up by the roadside, and a field black with wheeling troops. Admiral Ronark, our companion from headquarters, exclaimed, and we understood that we had the good luck to come on the hero of Dick's mood in the act of reviewing the marine fusillers and territorial's whose magnificent defence of last October gave that much besieged town another lease of glory. We stopped the motor and climbed to a ridge above the field. A high wind was blowing, bringing with it the booming of the guns along the front. A sun half-veiled in sand-dust shone on pale meadows. Sandy flats, gray windmills. The scene was deserted except for the handful of troops deploying before the officers on the edge of the field. Admiral Ronark, white gloved and in full dress uniform, stood a little in advance, a young naval officer at his side. He had just been distributing decorations to his fusilliers and territorial's, and they were marching past him, flags flying and bugles playing. Every one of those men had a record of heroism, and every face in those ranks had looked on horrors unnameable. They had lost Dick's mood for a while, but they had gained great glory, and the inspiration of their epic resistance had come from the quiet officer who stood there, straight and grave, in his white gloves and gala uniform. One must have been in the north to know something of the tie that exists in this region of bitter and continuous fighting between officers and soldiers. The feeling of the chiefs is almost one of veneration for their men, that of the soldiers a kind of half-humorous tenderness for the officers who have faced such odds with them. This mutual regard reveals itself in a hundred undefinable ways, but its fullest expression is in the tone with which the commanding officers speak the two words oftenest on their lips. My men. The little review over we went on to Admiral Ronok's quarters in the dunes, and thence after a brief visit to another brigade headquarters. We were in a region of sandy hillocks feathered by tamarisk, and interspersed with poplar groves slanting like wheat in the wind. Between these meager thickets the roofs of seaside bungalows showed above the dunes, and before one of these we stopped and were led into a sitting-room full of maps and airplane photographs. One of the officers of the brigade telephoned to ask if the way was clear to Newport, and the answer was that we might go on. Our road ran through the Bois Triangulaire, a bit of woodland exposed to constant shelling. Half the poor, spindling trees were down, and patches of blackened undergrowth and ragged hollows marked the paths of the shells. If the trees of the canonated wood or of strong inland growth their fallen trunks have the majesty of a ruined temple. But there was something humanly pitiful in the frail trunks of the Bois Triangulaire, lying there like slaughtered rows of immature troops. A few miles more brought us to Newport, most lamentable of the victim towns. It is not empty as Eep is empty. Troops are quartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor, knots of tearful zoos came swarming out of the ground like ants. But Eep is majestic in death. Poor Newport, gruesomely comic. About its splendid nucleus of medieval architecture a modern town had grown up, and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrast between the streets of flimsy houses twisted like curl-papers and the ruins of the Gothic cathedral and the cloth market. It is like passing from a smashed toy to the survival of a prehistoric cataclysm. Poor Newport seems to have died in a colic. No less homely image expresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reaching out to the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders. There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing else on the war-front. On the left a line of palsied houses leads up like a string of crutch-propbed beggars in the mighty ruin of the Templar's Tower. On the right the flats reach away to the almost imperceptible humps of masonry that were once the villages of Saint-George, Ramscapel, Purvise, and over it all the incessant crash of the guns stretches a sounding board of steel. In front of the cathedral a German shell has dug a crater thirty feet across, overhung by splintered tree trunks, burnt shrubs, vague mounds of rubbish, and a few steps beyond lies the peacefulest spot in Newport, the graveyard, where the Zouaves have buried their comrades. The dead are laid in rows under the flank of the cathedral, and on their carefully set gravestones have been placed collections of pious images gathered from the ruined houses. Some of the most privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints and virgins that cover the whole slab, and over the handsomest virgins and the most gaily-coloured saints the soldiers have placed the glass bells that once protected the parlor clocks and wedding-reads in the same houses. From sad Newport we motored on to a little seaside colony where gaiety prevails. Here the big hotels and the adjoining villas along the beach are filled with troops just back from the trenches. It is one of the rest-cures of the front. When we drove up a regiment au repos was assembled in the wide sandy space between the principal hotels, and in the centre of the jolly crowd the band was playing. The Colonel and his officers stood listening to the music, and presently the soldiers broke into the wild chanson des oeuvres, of the blank oeuvres. It was the strangest of sight to watch that throng of dusky merry faces under their red fezzes against the background of a sunless northern sea. When the music was over someone with a Kodak suggested a group. We struck a collective attitude on one of the hotel terraces, and just as the camera was being aimed at us the Colonel turned and drew into the foreground a little grinning pock-marked soldier. He's just been decorated. He's got to be in the group. A general exclamation of assent from the other officers, and a protest from the hero. Me! Why, my ugly mug will smash the plate. But it didn't. Reluctantly we turned from this interval in the day's sad round and took the road to La Pan. Dust, dunes, deserted villages. My memory keeps no more definite vision of the run. But at sunset we came on a big seaside colony stretched out above the longest beach I ever saw, along the sea-front, an esplanade bordered by the usual foolish villas, and behind it a single street filled with hotels and shops. All the life of the desert region we had traversed seemed to have taken refuge at La Pan. The long street was swarming with throngs of dark, uniformed Belgian soldiers. Every shop seemed to be doing a thriving trade, and the hotels looked as full as beehives. CHAPTER XXIII. La Pan. The particular hive that has taken us in is at the extreme end of the esplanade, where asphalt and iron railings lapse abruptly into sand and seagrass. When I looked out of my window this morning I saw only the endless stretch of brown sand against the gray roll of the northern ocean, and on a crest of the dunes, the figure of a solitary sentinel. But presently there was a sound of martial music, and long lines of troops came marching along the esplanade and down to the beach. The sands stretched away to east and west, a great field of Mars on which an army could have maneuvered, and the morning exercises of cavalry and infantry began. Against the brown beach the regiments in their dark uniforms looked as black as silhouettes, and the cavalry galloping by in single files suggested a black freeze of warriors encircling the dun-colored flanks of an Etruscan vase. For hours these long drawn-out movements of troops went on to the whale of bugles, and under the eye of the lonely sentinel on the sand-crest. Then the soldiers poured back into the town, and La Paz was once more a busy commonplace bandit-mère. The commonplaceness, however, was only on the surface. For as one walked along the esplanade one discovered that the town had become a citadel, and that all the doll's house villas with their silly gables and sillier names— seaweed, the seagull, mon repos, and the rest—were really a continuous line of barracks swarming with Belgian troops. In the main street there were hundreds of soldiers, pottering along in couples, chatting in groups, romping and wrestling like a crowd of schoolboys, or bargaining in the shops for shellwork souvenirs and sets of postcards, and between the dark green and crimson uniforms was a frequent sprinkling of khaki, with the occasional pale blue of a French officer's tunic. Before luncheon we motored over to Dunkirk, the road runs along the canal between grass flats and prosperous villages. No signs of war were noticeable except on the road, which was crowded with motor vans, ambulances, and troops. The walls and gates of Dunkirk rose before us as calm and undisturbed as when we entered the town the day before yesterday. But within the gates we were in a desert. The bombardment had ceased the previous evening, but a death-hush lay on the town. Every house was shuttered, and the streets were empty. We drove to the Place Jean-Barre, where two days ago we sat at tea in the hall of the hotel. Now there was not a whole pane of glass in the windows of the square. The doors of the hotel were closed, and every now and then someone came out carrying a basket full of plaster from fallen ceilings. The whole surface of the square was literally paved with bits of glass from the hundreds of broken windows, that at the foot of David's statue of Jean-Barre, just where our motor had stood while we had tea, the siege gun of Dixmoud had scooped out a hollow as big as the crater at Nupour. Though not a house on the square was touched, the scene was one of unmitigated desolation. It was the first time we had seen the raw wounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed to accentuate its cruelty. We wandered down the street behind the hotel to the graceful Gothic church of Saint-Eloy, of which one aisle had been shattered. Then, turning another corner, we came on a poor bourgeois house that had had its whole front torn away. The squalid revelation of caved-in floors, smashed wardrobes, dangling bedsteads, heaped-up blankets, topsy-turvy chairs and stoves and wash stands was far more painful than the sight of the wounded church. Saint-Eloy was draped in the dignity of martyrdom, but the poor little house reminded one of some shy, humdrum person suddenly exposed in the glare of a great misfortune. A few people stood in clusters looking up at the ruins, or strayed aimlessly about the streets. Not a loud word was heard. The air seemed heavy with the suspended breath of a great city's activities. The mournful hush of Dunkirk was even more oppressive than the death-like silence of Ypres. But when we came back to the plage en barre, the unbreakable human spirit had begun to reassert itself. A handful of children were playing in the bottom of the crater, collecting specimens of glass and splintered brick, and about its rim the market people, quietly and as a matter of course, were setting up their wooden stalls. In a few minutes the signs of German havoc would be hidden behind stacks of crockery and household utensils, and some of the pale women we had left in mournful contemplation of the ruins would be bargaining as sharply as ever for a saucepan or a butter-tub. Not once, but a hundred times, has the attitude of the average French civilian near the front reminded me of the gallant cry of Calenthea in the broken heart. Let me die smiling. I should have liked to stop and spend all I had in the market of Dunkirk. All the afternoon we wandered about La Paune. The exercises of the troops had begun again, and the deploying of those endless black lines along the beach was a sight of the strangest beauty. The sun was veiled, and heavy surges rolled in under a northerly gale. Toward evening the sun turned to cold tints of jade and pearl and tarnished silver. Far down the beach a mysterious fleet of fishing boats was drawn up on the sand, with black sails belling in the wind, and the black riders galloping by might have landed from them and been riding into the sunset out of some wild northern legend. Presently a knot of buglers took up their stand on the edge of the sea, facing inward, their feet in the surf, and began to play. And their call was like the call of Roland's horn when he blew it down the pass against the heathen. On the sand crest below my window the lonely sentinel still watched. June 24th. It is like coming down from the mountains to leave the front. I never had the feeling more strongly than when we passed out of Belgium this afternoon. I had it most strongly as we drove by a cluster of villas standing apart in a sterile region of seagrass and sand. In one of those villas for nearly a year two hearts at the highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to the world. It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe. Because of the light that comes from it, dead faiths have come to life, weak convictions have grown strong, fiery impulses have turned to long endurance, and long endurance has kept the fire of impulse. In the harbour of New York there is a pompous statue of a goddess with a torch designated as liberty enlightening the world. It seems as though the title on her pedestal might well for the time be transferred to the lintel of that villa in the dunes. On leaving Saint-Homer we took a shortcut southward across rolling country. It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the main road, for presently over the crest of a hill we saw surging toward us a mighty movement of British and Indian troops. A great bath of silver sunlight lay on the wheat fields, the clumps of woodland and the hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalry rode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim-turbaned Indians with delicate, proud faces like the faces of princes and Persian miniatures. Then came a long train of artillery, splendid horses, clattering gun carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by all aglow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never ending. Now and then it was checked by a train of ambulances and supply wagons, or caught and congested in the crooked streets of a village where children and girls had come out with bunches of flowers, and bakers were selling hot loaves to the subtlers, and when we had extricated our motor from the crowd and climbed another hill, we came on another cavalcade surging toward us through the wheat fields. For over an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike the French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days ago, so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front and away from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the long wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to the Vogue. My trip to the east began by a dash toward the North. Near Reem is a little town, hardly more than a village, but in English we have no intermediate term such as Bourg and Petit Bourg, where one of the new Red Cross sanitary motor units was to be seen in action. The inspection over we climbed to a vineyard above the town and looked down at a river valley traversed by a double line of trees. The first line marked the canal which is held by the French, who have gun-boats on it. Behind this ran the high road with the first line French trenches, and just above on the opposite slope were the German lines. The soil being chalky the German positions were clearly marked by two parallel white scorings across the brown hill-front, and while we watched we heard desultery firing, and saw here and there along the ridge the smoke-puff of an exploding shell. It was incredibly strange to stand there, among the vines humming with summer insects, and to look out over a peaceful country heavy with the coming vintage, knowing that the trees at our feet hit a line of gun-boats that were crashing death into those two white scorings on the hill. Reem's itself brings one nearer to the war by its look of death-like desolation. The paralysis of the bombarded towns is one of the most tragic results of the invasion. One's soul revolts at this senseless disorganizing of innumerable useful activities. Compared with the towns of the North, Reem's is relatively unharmed, but for that very reason the rest of life seems the more futile and cruel. The cathedral square was deserted, all the houses around it were closed, and there before us rose the cathedral—a cathedral, rather, for it was not the one we had always known. It was, in fact, not like any cathedral on earth. When the German bombardment began, the west front of Reem's was covered with scaffolding, the shells set it on fire, and the whole church was wrapped in flames. Now the scaffolding is gone, and in the dull provincial square there stands a structure so strange and beautiful that one must search the inferno—or some tale of eastern magic—for words to picture the luminous unearthly vision. The lower part of the front has been warmed to deep tints of umber and burnt sienna. This rich burnishing passes higher up, through yellowish pink and carmine, to a sulfur whitening to ivory. And the recesses of the portals and the hollows behind the statues are lined with a black, denser, and more velvety than any effect of shadow to be obtained by sculptured relief. The interweaving of color over the whole blunted, bruised surface recalls the metallic tints, the peacock and pigeon iridescences, the incredible mingling of red, blue, umber, and yellow of the rocks along the gulf of Ijina, and the wonder of the impression is increased by the sense of its evanescence—the knowledge that this is the beauty of disease and death—that every one of the transfigured statues must crumble under the autumn rains—that every one of the pink or golden stones is already eaten away to the core—that the cathedral of reams is glowing and dying before us, like a sunset. August 14th. A stone and brick chateau in a flat park with a stream running through it—pampous grass, geraniums, rustic bridges, winding paths—how bourgeois and sleepy it would all seem but for the sentinel challenging our motor at the gate. Before the door a collie dozing in the sun and a group of staff officers waiting for luncheon. In doors a room with handsome tapestries, some good furniture, and a table spread with the usual military maps and aeroplane photographs. At luncheon the general, the chiefs of the staff, a dozen in all, an officer from the general headquarters, the usual atmosphere of camaraderie, confidence, good humor, and a kind of cheerful seriousness that I have come to regard as characteristic of the men immersed in the actual facts of the war. I set down this impression as typical of many such luncheon hours along the front. August 15th. This morning we set out for reconquered Alsace. For reasons unexplained to the civilian, this corner of old, new France has hitherto been inaccessible, even to highly placed French officials, and there was a special sense of excitement in taking the road that led to it. We slipped through a valley or two, passed some placid villages with vine-covered gables, and noticed that most of the signs over the shops were German. We had crossed the old frontier unawares, and were presently in the charming town of Massiveau. It was the feast of the assumption, and mass was just over when we reached the square before the church. The streets were full of holiday people, well-dressed, smiling, seemingly unconscious of the war. Down the church steps guided by fond mamas came little girls in white dresses, with white wreaths in their hair, and carrying, in baskets slung over their shoulders, woolly lambs or blue and white virgins. Groups of cavalry officers stood chatting with civilians in their Sunday best, and through the windows of the Golden Eagle we saw active preparations for a crowded mid-day dinner. It was all as happy and parochial as a Hansi picture, and the fine old gabled houses and clean cobblestone streets made the traditional setting for an Alsatian holiday. At the Golden Eagle we laid in a store of provisions, and started out across the mountains in the direction of Thane. The Vosges at this season are in their short mid-summer beauty, rustling with streams, dripping with showers, balmy with the smell of furs and bracken, and of purple thyme on hot banks. We reached the top of a ridge, and hiding the motor behind a skirt of trees, went out into the open to lunch on a sunny slope. Facing us across the valley was a tall conical hill clothed with forest. That hill was Harman-Svillercop, the centre of a long contest in which the French have lately been victorious, and all about us stood other crests and ridges from which German guns still looked down on the valley of Thane. Thane itself is at the valley head, in a neck between hills, a handsome old town, with the air of prosperous stability so oddly characteristic of this tormented region. As we drove through the main street, the pall of war-sadness fell on us again, darkening the light and chilling the summer air. Thane is raked by the German lines, and its windows are mostly shuttered and its streets deserted. One or two houses in the cathedral square have been gutted, but the somewhat over-pinnacled and statute cathedral, which is the pride of Thane, is almost untouched, and when we entered it, vespers were being sung, and a few people, mostly in black, knelt in the nave. No greater contrast could be imagined to the happy feast-day scene we had left a few miles off at Musveau, but Thane, in spite of its empty streets, is not a deserted city. A vigorous life beats in it, ready to break forth as soon as the German guns are silenced. The French administration, working on the best of terms with the population, are keeping up the civil activities of the town as the cannons of the cathedral are continuing the rites of the church. Many inhabitants still remain behind their closed shutters and dive down into their cellars when the shells begin to crash, and the schools, transferred to a neighbouring village, number over two thousand pupils. We walked through the town, visited a vast catacomb of a wine cellar fitted up partly as an ambulance and partly as a shelter for the cellarless, and saw the lamentable remains of the industrial quarter along the river, which has been the special target of the German guns. Thane has been industrially ruined. All its mills are wrecked. But unlike the towns of the north, it has had the good fortune to preserve its outline, its civic personality, a face that its children, when they come back, can recognise and take comfort in. After our visit to the ruins, a diversion was suggested by the amiable administrators of Thane, who had guided our sight-seeing. They were just off for a military tournament which the blankth dragoons were giving that afternoon in neighbouring valley, and we were invited to go with them. The scene of the entertainment was a meadow enclosed in an amphitheatre of rocks, with grassy ledges projecting from the cliff, like tears of opera boxes. These points of vantage were partly occupied by interested spectators, and partly by ruminating cattle. On the lowest slope, the rank and fashion of the neighbourhood was ranged on a semi-circle of chairs, and below in the meadow a lively steeple-chase was going on. The riding was extremely pretty, as French military riding always is. Few of the mounts were thoroughbreds. The greater number, in fact, being local cart-horses barely broken to the saddle, but their agility and dash did the greater credit to their riders. The Lancers in particular executed an effective, musical ride about a central penne, to the immense satisfaction of the fashionable public in the foreground and of the gallery on the rocks. The audience was even more interesting than the artists. Chatting with the ladies in the front row were the general of division and his staff, groups of officers invited from the adjoining headquarters, and most of the civil and military administrators of the restored département du Autrein. All classes had turned out in honour of the Fête, and every one was in a holiday mood. The people among whom we sat were most liaussation property owners, many of them industrials of Thane. Some had been driven from their homes, others had seen their mills destroyed, all had been living for a year on the perilous edge of war, under the menace of reprisals too hideous to picture, yet the humour prevailing was that of any group of merry-makers in a peaceful garrison town. I have seen nothing in my wanderings along the front, more indicative of the good breeding of the French than the spirit of the ladies and gentlemen who sat chatting with the officers on that grassy slope of Alsace. The display of Aut Ecole was to be followed by an exhibition of transportation throughout the ages, headed by a gallish chariot driven by a trooper with a long horsehair moustache and mistletoe wreath, and ending in a motor of which the engine had been taken out and replaced by a large placid white horse. Unluckily a heavy rain began while this instructive number awaited its turn, and we had to leave before Vercingetorix had led his warriors into the ring. August 16th. Up and up into the mountains. We started early, taking our way along a narrow, interminable valley that sloped up gradually toward the east. The road was encumbered with a stream of hooded supply vans drawn by mules, for we were on the way to one of the main positions in the Vorge, and this train of provisions is kept up day and night. Finally we reached a mountain village under fur-clad slopes, with a cold stream rushing down from the hills. On one side of the road was a rustic inn, on the other, among the furs, a chalet occupied by the brigade headquarters. Everywhere about us swarmed the little Chasseur-Alpin in blue tamishanters and leather-gaters. For a year we had been reading of these heroes of the hills, and here we were among them, looking into their thin, weather-beaten faces and meeting the twinkle of their friendly eyes. Very friendly they all were, and yet, for Frenchmen, in articulate and shy. All over the world, no doubt, the mountain silences breed this kind of reserve, this shrinking from the glibness of the valleys. Yet one had fancied that French fluency must soar as high as Mont Blanc. Mules were brought, and we started on a long ride up the mountain. The way led first over open ledges, with deep views into valleys blue with distance, then through miles of forest, first of beach and fur, and finally all of fur. Above the road the wooded slopes rose interminably, and here and there we came on tiers of mules, three or four hundred together, stabled under the trees, installs dug out of different levels of the slope. Nearby were shelters for the men, and perhaps at the next bend a village of trappers' huts, as the officials call the log cabins they build in this region. These colonies are always bustling with life. Men busy cleaning their arms, hauling material for the new cabins, washing or mending their clothes, or carrying down the mountain from the camp kitchen the two handled pales full of steaming soup. The kitchen is always in the most protected quarter of the camp, and generally at some distance in the rear. Other soldiers, their job over, are lolling about in groups, smoking, gossiping, or writing home, the soldier's letter-pad propped on a patched blue knee, a scarred fist laboriously driving the fountain pen received in hospital. Some are leaning over the shoulder of a pal who has just received a Paris paper, others chuckling together at the jokes of their own French journal, the Echo du Ravain, the Journal des Poilus, or the Diable Bleu. Little papers ground out in purplish script on full scab, and adorned with comic sketches and a wealth of local humour. Higher up, under a fur belt at the edge of a meadow, the officer who rode ahead signed to us to dismount and scramble after him. We plunged under the trees into what seemed a thicker thicket, and found it to be a thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of a battery. The big guns were all about us, crouched in these sylvan layers like wild beasts waiting to spring, and near each gun hovered its attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as a bridegroom with his bride. We climbed and climbed again, reaching at last a sunned and wind-burnt common which forms the top of one of the highest mountains in the region. The forest was left below us, and only a belt of dwarf furs ran along the edge of the great grassy shoulder. We dismounted, the mules were tethered among the trees, and our guide led us to an insignificant looking stone in the grass. On one face of the stone was cut the letter F, on the other was a D. We stood on what, till a year ago, was the boundary line between Republic and Empire. Since then, in certain places, the line has been bent back a long way. But where we stood we were still under German guns, and we had to creep along in the shelter of the squat furs to reach the outlook on the edge of the plateau. From there, under a sky of racing clouds, we saw, outstretched below us, the promised land of Alsace. On one horizon, far off in the plain, gleamed the roofs and spires of Colmar. On the other rose the purplish heights beyond the Rhine. Nearby stood a ring of bare hills, those closest to us scarred by ridges of upheav'd earth as if giant mules had been zig-zacking over them, and just under us, in a little green valley, lay the roofs of a peaceful village. The earth ridges and the peaceful village were still German, but the French positions went down the mountain almost to the valley's edge, and one dark peak on the right was already French. We stopped at a gap in the furs and walked to the brink of the plateau. Just under us lay a rock-trimmed lake. More zig-zag earthwork surmounted it on all sides, and on the nearest shore was the branched roofing of another great mule shelter. We were looking down at the spot to which the night-caravans of the Chaussure-Alpin descend to distribute supplies to the fighting line. Who goes there? Attention! You are inside of the lines! A voice called out from the furs, and our companion signed to us to move back. We had been rather too conspicuously facing the German batteries on the opposite slope, and our presence might have drawn their fire on an artillery observation post installed nearby. We retreated hurriedly and unpacked our luncheon-basket on the more sheltered side of the ridge. As we sat there in the grass, swept by a great mountain breeze full of the scent of time and myrtle, while the flutter of birds, the hum of insects, the still and busy life of the hills went on all about us in the mine, the pressure of the encircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not in the mud and the jokes and everyday activities of the trenches that one most feels the damnable insanity of war. It is where it lurks like a mythical monster in scenes to which the mind has already turned for rest. We had not yet made the whole tour of the mountaintop, and after luncheon we rode over to a point where a long narrow yoke connects it with a spur projecting directly above the German lines. We left our mules in hiding, and walked along the yoke, a mere knife-edge of rock trimmed with dwarf vegetation. Suddenly we heard an explosion behind us. One of the batteries we had passed on the way up was giving tongue. The German lines roared back, and for twenty minutes the exchange of invective thundered on. The firing was almost incessant. It seemed as if a great arch of steel were being built up above us in the crystal air, and we could follow each curve of sound from its incipience to its final crash in the trenches. There were four distinct phases. The sharp bang from the cannon, the long furious howl overhead, the dispersed and spreading noise of the shell's explosion, and then the roll of its reverberation from cliff to cliff. This is what we heard as we crouched in the lee of the furs. What we saw when we looked out between them was only an occasional burst of white smoke and red flame from one hillside, and on the opposite one, a minute later, a brown geyser of dust. Presently a deluge of rain descended on us, driving us back to our mules, and down the nearest mountain trail through rivers of mud. It rained all the way. Reigned in such floods and cataracts that the very rocks of the mountains seemed to dissolve and turn into mud. As we slid down through it we met strings of Chaussure-alpain coming up, splashed to the waist with wet red clay, and leading pack mules so coated with it that they looked like studio models from which the sculptor has just pulled off the dripping sheet. Lower down we came on more trap or settlements, so saturated and reeking with wet that they gave us a glimpse of what the winter months on the front must be. No more cheerful polishing of firearms, hauling of faggots, chatting and smoking in sociable groups. Everybody had crept under the doubtful shelter of branches and tarpaulins. The whole army was back in its boroughs. AUGUST 17th Sunshine again for our arrival at Belfort. The invincible city lies unpretentiously behind its green glassy and escutcheon gates, but the guardian lion under the citadel—well, the lion is figuratively as well as literally Allah-otur. With the sunset flush on him, as he crouched aloft in his red lair below the fort, he might almost have claimed kin with his mighty prototypes of the Assurbanipal Fries. One wondered a little seeing whose work he was, but probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize an heroic town than the abstract and elusive divinity who sheds light on the world from New York Harbour. From Belfort back into reconquered Alsace the road runs through a gentle landscape of fields and orchards. We were bound for Danmarie, one of the towns of the plain, and a centre of the new administration. It is the usual Gros Bourg of Alsace, with comfortable old houses in espaliered gardens. Dull, well-to-do, contented—not in the least the kind of setting demanded by the patriotism which has to be fed on pictures of little girls singing the Marseillais, in Alsatian headdresses, and old men with operatic waistcoats tottering forward to kiss the flag. What we saw at Danmarie was less conspicuous to the eye, but much more nourishing to the imagination. The military and civil administrators had the kindness and patience to explain their work and show us something of its results, and the visit left one with the impression of a slow and quiet process of adaptation wisely planned and fruitfully carried out. We did in fact hear the schoolgirls of Danmarie sing the Marseillais, and the boys too. But what was far more interesting, we saw them studying under the direction of the teachers who had always had them in charge, and found that everywhere it had been the aim of the French officials to let the routine of the village policy go on undisturbed. The German signs remain over the shop fronts, except where the shopkeepers have chosen to paint them out, as is happening more and more frequently. When a functionary has to be replaced, he is chosen from the same town or the same district, and even the personnel of the civil and military administration is mainly composed of officers and civilians of Alsatian stock. The heads of both these departments, who accompanied us on our rounds, could talk to the children and old people in German as well as in their local dialect. And as far as a passing observer could discern, it seemed as though everything had been done to reduce to a minimum the sense of strangeness and friction which is inevitable in the transition from one rule to another. The interesting point was that this exercise of tact and tolerance seemed to proceed not from any pressure of expediency, but from a sympathetic understanding of the point of view of this people of the border. I heard in Danmarie not a syllable of lyrical patriotism or postcard sentimentality, but only a kindly and impartial estimate of facts as they were and must be dealt with. August 18th Today again we started early for the mountains. Our road ran more to the westward, through the heart of the Vosges, and up to a fold of the hills near the borders of Lorraine. We stopped at headquarters where a young officer of Dragoons was to join us, and learned from him that we were to be allowed to visit some of the first-line trenches which we had looked out on from a high perched observation post on our former visit to the Vosges. Violent fighting was going on in that particular region, and after a climb of an hour or two we had to leave the motor at a sheltered angle of the road and strike across the hills on foot. Our path lay through the forest, and every now and then we caught a glimpse of the high road running below us in full view of the German batteries. Presently we reached a point where the road was screened by a thick growth of trees, and which an observation post had been set up. We scrambled down and looked through the peephole. Just below us lay a valley with a village in its center, and to the left and right of the village were two hills, the one scored with French, the other with German trenches. The village at first sight looked as normal as those through which we had been passing, but a closer inspection showed that its steeple was shattered and that some of its houses were unroofed. Part of it was held by German, part by French troops. The cemetery adjoining the church and a quarry just under it belonged to the Germans, but a line of French trenches ran from the farther side of the church up to the French batteries on the right-hand hill. Parallel with this line, but starting from the other side of the village, was a hollow lane leading up to a single tree. This lane was a German trench, protected by the guns of the left-hand hill, and between the two lay perhaps fifty yards of ground. All this was close under us, and closer still was a slope of open ground leading up to the village and traversed by a rough cart-track. Along this track in the hot sunshine little French soldiers, the size of tin toys, were scrambling up with bags and loads of faggots, their ant-like activity as orderly and untroubled as if the two armies had not lain trench to trench a few yards away. It was one of those strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the bewildered looker on the utter impossibility of picturing how the thing really happens. While we stood watching, we heard the sudden scream of a battery close above us. The crest of the hill we were climbing was alive with seventy-fives, and the piercing noise seemed to burst out at our very backs. It was the most terrible war-sweak I had heard, a kind of wolfish bang that called up an image of all the dogs of war simultaneously tugging at their leashes. There is a dreadful majesty in the sound of a distant cannonade, but these yelps and hisses roused only thoughts of horror, and there on the opposite slope the black and brown geysers were beginning to spout up from the German trenches, and from the batteries above them came the puff and roar of retaliation. Below us, along the cart-track, the little French soldiers continued to scramble up peaceably to the dilapidated village, and presently a group of officers of dragoons emerging from the wood came down to welcome us to their headquarters. We continued to climb through the forest, the cannonade still whistling overhead, till we reached the most elaborate trapper colony we had yet seen. Half underground, walled with logs and deeply roofed by sods tufted with ferns and moss, the cabins were scattered under the trees, and connected with each other by paths bordered with white stones. Before the Colonel's cabin the soldiers had made a banked-up flower bed sewn with annuals, and farther up the slope stood a log chapel, a mere gable with a wooden altar under it, all tapestryed with ivy and holly. Nearby was the chaplain's subterranean dwelling. It was reached by a deep cutting with ivy covered sides, and ivy and furbows masked the front. This silvan retreat had just been completed, and the officers, the chaplain and the soldiers loitering nearby, were all equally eager to have it seen and hear it praised. The commanding officer, having done the honors of the camp, led us about a quarter of a mile down the hillside to an open cutting which marked the beginning of the trenches. From the cutting we passed into a long, torturous burrow, walled and roofed with carefully fitted logs. The earth floor was covered by a sort of wooden lattice. The only light entering this tunnel was a faint ray from an occasional narrow slit screened by branches, and beside each of these peepholes hung a shield-shaped metal shutter to be pushed over it in case of emergency. The passage wound down the hill, almost doubling on itself in order to give a view of all the surrounding lines. Presently the roof became much higher, and we saw on one side a curtain to niche about five feet above the floor. One of the officers pulled the curtain back, and there on a narrow shelf, a gun between his knees, sat a dragoon, his eye on a peephole. The curtain was hastily drawn again behind his motionless figure lest the faint light at his back should betray him. We passed by several of these helmeted watchers, and then we came to a deeper recess in which a Mitrayer's squatted its black nose thrust through a net of branches. Sometimes the roof of the tunnel was so low that we had to bend nearly double, and at intervals we came to heavy doors made of logs and sheeted with iron which shut off one section from another. It is hard to guess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passage with different levels and countless turnings, but we must have descended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into a half-ruined farmhouse. This building, which had kept nothing but its outer walls and one or two partitions between the rooms, had been transformed into an observation post. In each of its corners a ladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once the second story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peephole. Below, in the dilapidated rooms, the usual life of a camp was going on. Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table, others mending their clothes or writing letters, or chuckling together—not too loud—over a comic newspaper. It might have been a scene anywhere along the second-line trenches, but for the lowered voices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a split in the wall through which I had unconsciously peered, and the presence of these helmeted watchers overhead. We plunged underground again, and began to descend through another darker and narrower tunnel. In the upper one there had been one or two ruthless stretches where one could straighten one's back and breathe, but here we were in pitch blackness, and saved from breaking our necks only by the gleam of the pocket light which the young lieutenant who led the party shed on our path. As he whisked it up and down to warn us of sudden steps or sharp corners, he remarked that at night even this faint glimmer was forbidden, and that it was a bad job going back and forth from the last outpost till one had learned the turnings. The last outpost was a half-ruined farmhouse like the other. A telephone connected it with headquarters, and more dumb dragoons sat motionless on their lofty shelves. The house was shut off from the tunnel by an armoured door, and the orders were that in case of attack that door should be barred from within and the access to the tunnel defended to the death by the men in the outpost. We were on the extreme verge of the defences, on a slope just above the village over which we had heard the artillery roaring a few hours earlier. The spot where we stood was raked on all sides by the enemy's lines, and the nearest trenches were only a few yards away. But of all this nothing was really perceptible or comprehensible to me. As far as my own observation went, we might have been a hundred miles from the valley we had looked down on, where the French soldiers were walking peacefully up the cart-track and the sunshine. I only knew that we had come out of a black labyrinth into a gutted house among fruit trees, where soldiers were lounging and smoking, and people whispered as they do about a death bed. Over a break in the walls I saw another gutted farmhouse close by in another orchard. It was an enemy outpost, and silent watchers and helmets of another shape sat there watching on the same high shelves. But all this was infinitely less real and terrible than the cannonade above the disputed village. The artillery had ceased and the air was full of summer murmurs. Close by on a sheltered ledge I saw a patch of vineyard with dewy cobwebs hanging to the vines. I could not understand where we were, or what it was all about, or why a shell from the enemy outpost did not suddenly annihilate us. And then, little by little, there came over me the sense of that mute reciprocal watching from trench to trench the interlocked stare of innumerable pairs of eyes stretching on, mile after mile, along the whole sleepless line from Dunkirk to Belfort. My last vision of the French front which I had traveled from end to end was this picture of a shelled house where a few men who sat smoking and playing cards in the sunshine had orders to hold out to the death rather than let their fraction of that front be broken. CHAPTER VI. THE TONE OF FRANCE. Nobody now asks the question that so often at the beginning of the war came to me from the other side of the world. What is France like? Everyone knows what France has proved to be like. From being a difficult problem she has long since become a luminous instance. Nevertheless, to those on whom that illumination has shone only from far off, there may still be something to learn about its component elements, for it has come to consist of many separate rays, and the weary strain of the last year has been the spectroscope to decompose them. From the very beginning, when one felt the effulgence as the mere pale brightness before dawn, the attempt to define it was irresistible. There is a tone. The tingling sense of it was in the air from the first days, the first hours. But what does it consist in? And just how is one aware of it? In those days the answer was comparatively easy. The tone of France after the declaration of war was the white glow of dedication, a great nation's collective impulse, since there is no English equivalent for that winged word, Elan, to resist destruction. But at that time no one knew what the resistance was to cost, how long it would have to last, what sacrifices, material and moral it would necessitate. And for the moment baser sentiments were silenced, greed, self-interest, pusillanimity seemed to have been purged from the race. The great sitting of the chamber, that almost religious celebration of defensive union, really expressed the opinion of the whole people. It is fairly easy to soar to the imperian when one is carried on the wings of such an impulse, and when one does not know how long one is to be kept suspended at the breathing limit. But there is a term to the flight of the most soaring Elan. It is likely, after a while to come back broken winged and resign itself to barnyard bounds. National judgments cannot remain for long above individual feelings, and you cannot get a national tone out of anything less than a whole nation. The really interesting thing, therefore, was to see, as the war went on, and grew into a calamity unheard of in human annals, how the French spirit would meet it, and what virtues extract from it. The war has been a calamity unheard of. But France has never been afraid of the unheard of. No race has ever yet so audaciously dispensed with old precedents, as none has ever so revered their relics. It is a great strength to be able to walk without the support of analogies, and France has always shown that strength in times of crisis. The absorbing question, as the war went on, was to discover how far down into the people this intellectual audacity penetrated, how instinctive it had become, and how it would endure the strain of prolonged inaction. There was never much doubt about the army. When a warlike race has an invader on its soil, the men holding back the invader can never be said to be inactive. But behind the army were the waiting millions to whom that long motionless line in the trenches might gradually have become a mere condition of thought, and accepted limitation to all sorts of activities and pleasures. The danger was that such a war, static, dogged, uneventful, might gradually cramp instead of enlarging the mood of the looker's on. Conscription, of course, was there to minimize this danger. Everyone was sharing a like in the glory and the woe. But the glory was not of a kind to penetrate or dazzle. It requires more imagination to see the halo around tenacity than around dash. And the French still cling to the view that they are, so to speak, the patentees and proprietors of dash, and much less at home with his dull drudge of a partner. So there was reason to fear in the long run a gradual but irresistible disintegration, not of public opinion, but of something subtler and more fundamental, public sentiment. It was possible that civilian France, while collectively seeming to remain at the same height, might individually deteriorate and diminish in its attitude towards the war. The French would not be human, and therefore would not be interesting, if one had not perceived in them occasional symptoms of such apparel. There has not been a Frenchman or a French woman save a few harmless and perhaps nervous theorizers, who has wavered about the military policy of the country. But there have naturally been some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there have been such people. One would have had to postulate them if they had not come within one's experience. There have been some to whom it was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or a certain kind of breakfast-roll, though the French, being fundamentally temperate, are far less the slaves of the luxuries they have invented than are the other races who have adopted these luxuries. There have been many more who found the sacrifices of personal happiness, of all that made life livable, or one's country worth fighting for, infinitely harder than the most apprehensive imagination could have pictured. There have been mothers and widows for whom a single grave, or the appearance of one name on the missing list, has turned the whole conflict into an idiot's tale. There have been many such. But there have apparently not been enough to deflect by a hare's breath the subtle current of public sentiment. Unless it is truer, as it is infinitely more inspiring, to suppose that, of this company of blinded baffled sufferers, almost all have had the strength to hide their despair, and to say of the great national effort which has lost most of its meaning to them, though it slay me, yet will I trust in it. That is probably the finest triumph of the tone of France, that its myriad fiery currents flow from so many hearts made insensible by suffering, that so many dead hands feed its undying lamp. This does not, in the least, imply that resignation is the prevailing note in the tone of France. The attitude of the French people, after fourteen months of trial, is not one of submission to unparalleled calamity. It is one of exaltation, energy, the hot resolve to dominate the disaster. In all classes the feeling is the same. Every word and every act is based on the resolute ignoring of any alternative to victory. The French people no more think of a compromise than people would think of facing a flood or an earthquake with a white flag. Two questions are likely to be put to any observer of the struggle who risks such assertions. What, one may be asked, are the proofs of this national tone, and what conditions and qualities seem to minister to it. The proofs, now that the tumult and the shouting dies, and civilian life has dropped back into something like its usual routine, are naturally less definable than at the outset. One of the most evident is the spirit in which all kinds of privations are accepted. No one who has come in contact with the work people and small shopkeepers of Paris in the last year, can fail to be struck by the extreme dignity and grace with which doing without things is practiced. The French woman leaning in the door of her empty boutique still wears the same smile with which she used to calm the impatience of crowding shoppers. The seamstress living on the meager pay of a charity workroom gives her days sowing as faithfully as if she were working for full wages in a fashionable atelier, and never tries, by the least, hint of private difficulties, to extract additional help. The habitual cheerfulness of the Parisian workwoman rises, in moments of sorrow, to the finest fortitude. In a workroom where many women have been employed since the beginning of the war, a young girl of sixteen heard late one morning that her only brother had been killed. She had a moment of desperate distress. But there was a big family to be helped by her small earnings, and the next morning punctually she was back at work. In this same workroom the women have one-half holiday in the week, without reduction of pay. Yet if an order has to be rushed through for a hospital, they give up that one afternoon as gaily as if they were doing it for their pleasure. But if any one who has lived for the last year among the workers and small tradesmen of Paris should begin to cite instances of endurance, self-denial, and secret charity, the list would have no end. The essential of it all is the spirit in which these acts are accomplished. The second question. What are the conditions and qualities that have produced such results? Is less easy to answer. The door is so largely open to conjecture that every explanation must depend largely on the answerer's personal bias. But one thing is certain. France has not achieved her present tone by the sacrifice of any of her national traits, but rather by their extreme keying up. Therefore the surest way of finding a clue to that tone is to try to single out whatever distinctively French characteristics—or those that appear such to the envious alien—have a direct bearing on the present attitude of France. Which, one must ask, of all their multiple gifts, most help the French to-day to be what they are and just the way they are? Intelligence is the first and instantaneous answer. Many French people seem unaware of this. They are sincerely persuaded that the curbing of their critical activity has been one of the most important and useful results of the war. One is told that, in a spirit of patriotism, this fault-finding people has learned not to find fault. Nothing could be more untrue. The French, when they have a grievance, do not air it in the times. Their form is the café and not the newspaper. But in the café they are talking as freely as ever, discriminating as keenly and just judging as passionately. The difference is that the very exercise of their intelligence on a problem larger and more difficult than any they have hitherto faced has freed them from the dominion of most of the prejudices, catch words and conventions that directed opinion before the war. Then their intelligence ran in fixed channels. Now it has overflowed its banks. This release has produced an immediate readjusting of all the elements of national life. In great trials a race is tested by its values, and the war has shown the world what are the real values of France. Never for an instant has this people, so expert in the great art of living, imagined that life consisted in being alive. Enamored of pleasure and beauty, dwelling freely and frankly in the present, they have yet kept their sense of larger meanings, have understood life to be made up of many things past and to come, of renunciation as well as satisfaction, of traditions as well as experiments, of dying as much as of living. Never have they considered life as a thing to be cherished in itself apart from its reactions and its relations. Intelligence first then has helped France to be what she is, and next perhaps one of its corollaries, expression. The French are the first to laugh at themselves for running to words. They seem to regard their gift for expression as a weakness, a possible deterrent to action. The last year has not confirmed that view. It is rather shown that eloquence is a supplementary weapon. By eloquence I naturally do not mean public speaking, nor yet the rhetorical writing too often associated with the word. Rhetoric is the dressing up of conventional sentiment. Eloquence, the fearless expression of real emotion. And this gift of the fearless expression of emotion, fearless that is, of ridicule or of indifference in the hearer, has been an inestimable strength to France. It is a sign of the high average of French intelligence that feeling well worded can stir and uplift it, that words are not half shame facedly regarded as something separate from and extraneous to emotion, or even as a mere vent for it, but is actually animating and forming it. Every additional faculty for exteriorizing states of feeling, giving them a face and a language, is a moral as well as an artistic asset, and Goethe was never wiser than when he wrote, A God gave me the voice to speak my pain. It is not too much to say that the French are at this moment drawing a part of their national strength from their language. The piety with which they have cherished and cultivated it has made it a precious instrument in their hands. It can say so beautifully what they feel that they find strength and renovation in using it. And the word once uttered is passed on, and carries the same help to others. Countless instances of such happy expression could be cited by anyone who has lived the last year in France. On the bodies of young soldiers have been found letters of farewell to their parents that made one think of some heroic Elizabethan verse, and the mothers robbed of these sons have sent them an answering cry of courage. Thank you! such a mourner wrote me the other day, for having understood the cruelty of our fate and having pitied us. Thank you also for having exalted the pride that is mingled with our unutterable sorrow. Simply that, and no more. But she might have been speaking for all the mothers of France. When the eloquent expression of feeling does not issue in action, or at least in a state of mind equivalent to action, it sinks to the level of rhetoric. But in France at this moment expression and conduct supplement and reflect each other. And this brings me to the other great attribute which goes to making up the tone of France, the quality of courage. It is not unintentionally that it comes last on my list. French courage is courage rationalized, courage thought out, and found necessary to some special end. It is as much as any other quality of the French temperament the result of French intelligence. No people so sensitive to beauty, so penetrated with a passionate interest in life, so endowed with the power to express and immortalize that interest can ever really enjoy destruction for its own sake. The French hate militarism. It is stupid, inartistic, unimaginative, and enslaving. There could not be four better French reasons for detesting it. Nor have the French ever enjoyed the savage forms of sport which stimulate the blood of more apathetic or more brutal races. Neither prize-fighting nor bull-fighting is of the soil in France, and Frenchmen do not settle their private differences impromptu with their fists. They do it logically and with deliberation, on the dueling ground. But when a national danger threatens, they instantly become what they proudly and justly call themselves, a war-like nation, and apply to the business in hand the ardor, the imagination, the perseverance that have made them for centuries the great creative force of civilization. Every French soldier knows why he is fighting, and why at this moment physical courage is the first quality demanded of him. Every French woman knows why war is being waged, and why her moral courage is needed to supplement the soldier's contempt of death. The women of France are supplying this moral courage in act as well as in word. French women as a rule are perhaps less instinctively courageous in the elementary sense than their Anglo-Saxon sisters. They are afraid of more things and are less ashamed of showing their fear. The French mother coddles her children, the boys as well as the girls. When they tumble and bark their knees they are expected to cry, and are not taught to control themselves as English and American children are. I have seen big French boys bawling over a cut or bruise that an Anglo-Saxon girl of the same age would have felt compelled to bear without a tear. French women are timid for themselves as well as for their children. They are afraid of the unexpected, the unknown, the experimental. It is not part of the French woman's training to pretend to have physical courage. She has not the advantage of our discipline and the hypocrisies of good form when she is called on to be brave. She must draw her courage from her brains. She must first be convinced of the necessity of heroism. After that she is fit to go bridle to bridle with gendarmes. The same display of reasoned courage is visible in the hasty adaptation of the French woman to all kinds of uncongenial jobs. Almost every kind of service she has been called to render since the war began has been fundamentally uncongenial. A French doctor once remarked to me that French women never really make good sick nurses except when they are nursing their own people. They are too personal, too emotional, and too much interested in more interesting things to take to the fussy details of good nursing except when it can help someone they care for. Even then as a rule they are not systematic or tidy, but they make up for these deficiencies by inexhaustible willingness and sympathy. And it has been easy for them to become good war nurses because every French woman who nurses a French soldier feels that she is caring for her kin. The French war nurse sometimes mislays an instrument or forgets to sterilize a dressing, but she almost always finds the consoling word to say and the right tone to take with her wounded soldiers. That profound solidarity which is one of the results of conscription flowers in wartime, in an exquisite and impartial devotion. This then is what France is like. The whole civilian part of the nation seems merged in one symbolic figure, carrying help and hope to the fighters or passionately bent above the wounded. The devotion, the self-denial, seem instinctive, but they are really based on a reasoned knowledge of the situation and on an unflinching estimate of values. All France knows today that real life consists in the things that make it worth living, and that these things, for France, depend on the free expression of her national genius. If France perishes as an intellectual light and as a moral force every Frenchman perishes with her, and the only death that Frenchmen fear is not death in the trenches, but death by the extinction of their national ideal. It is against this death that the whole nation is fighting, and it is the reasoned recognition of their peril, which, at this moment, is making the most intelligent people in the world the most sublime. End of Chapter 6 End of Fighting France by Edith Wharton