They showed me their rifles and their field kit, asked me to feel the weight of their knapsacks, and laughed when I said that I should faint with such a burden. In each black sack the French soldier carried—in addition to the legendary bâton of a field-marshal—a complete change of underclothing, a second pair of boots, provisions for two days, consisting of desiccated soup, chocolate and other groceries, and a woollen night-cap. Then there were his tin water-bottle, or bidon (filled with wine at the beginning of the war), his cartridge belt, rifle, military overcoat strapped about his shoulders, and various other impedimenta.
"It's not a luxury, this life of ours," said a tall fellow with a fair moustache belonging to the famous 20th Regiment of the line, which was the first to enter Nancy after the German occupation of the town in 1870.
He pointed to the rows of straw beds on which some of his comrades lay asleep, and to the entire lack of comfort in the whitewashed room.
"Some of you English gentlemen," he said, "would hardly like to lie down here side by side with the peasants from their farms, smelling of their barns. But in France it is different. We have aristocrats still, but some of them have to shake down with the poorest comrades and know no distinction of rank now that all wear the same old uniform."
It seemed to me a bad uniform for modern warfare—the red trousers and blue coat and the little képi made famous in many great battle pictures—but the soldier told me they could not fight with the same spirit if they wore any other clothes than those which belong to the glorious traditions of France.
24
When I was taken to Colonel Duchesne, second-in-command to General Foch, he gave me a smiling greeting, though I was a trespasser in the war zone, and he wanted to know what I thought of his "boys," what was my opinion of the mobilization, and what were my impressions of the way in which France had responded to the call. I answered with sincerity, and when I spoke of the astonishing way in which all classes seemed to have united in defence of the nation, Colonel Duchesne had a sudden mist of tears in his eyes which he did not try to hide.
"It is sublime! All politics have been banished. We are one people, with one ideal and one purpose—La France!"
Then he came to the business of my visit—to obtain a permit to march with the French troops.
"It is very difficult," said the Colonel. "General Foch would do all he could for you—he loves the English—but no French correspondents are allowed on the frontier, and we can hardly make a distinction in your favour. Still, I will put your appeal before the general. The answer shall be sent to your hotel."
25
It was while waiting for this reply that I was able to explore Nancy and to see the scenes of mobilization. The town was under martial law. Its food-supplies were under strict supervision by the commandant. Every motor-car and cart had been commandeered for the use of the army, and every able-bodied citizen had been called to the colours. I was the only guest in the Grand Hotel and the manager and his wife attended to my wants themselves. They were astounded to see me in the town.
"You are the only foreigner left," they said, "except those who are under armed guard, waiting to be taken to the Swiss frontier. Look! there go the last of them!"
Through the glass windows of the hotel door I saw about two hundred men marching away from the square surrounded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. They carried bundles and seemed to droop under the burden of them already. But I fancy their hearts were heaviest, and I could see that these young men—waiters and hairdressers and tradesmen mostly of Swiss nationality—were unwilling victims of this tragedy of war which had suddenly thrust them out of their business and smashed their small ambitions and booted them out of a country which had given them a friendly welcome. On the other side of the fixed bayonets were some women who wept as they called out "Adieu!" to their fair-haired fellows. One of them held up a new-born baby between the guards as she ran alongside, so that its little wrinkled face touched the cheek of a young man who had a look of agony in his eyes.
That night I heard the shrill notes of bugle calls and going to my bedroom window listened to the clatter of horses' hoofs and saw the dim forms of cavalry and guns going through the darkness—towards the enemy. No sound of firing rattled my window panes. It still seemed very quiet—over there to the East. Yet before the dawn came a German avalanche of men and guns might be sweeping across the frontier, and if I stayed a day or two in the open town of Nancy I might see the spiked helmets of the enemy glinting down the streets. The town was not to be defended, I was told, if the French troops had to fall back from the frontier to the fortresses of Belfort and Toul.
A woman's voice was singing outside in the courtyard when I awakened next day. How strange that any woman should sing in an undefended town confronted by such a peril. But none of the girls about the streets had any fear in their eyes. German frightfulness had not yet scared them with its nameless horrors.
28
I did not stay in Nancy. It was only the French War Office in Paris who could give permission for a correspondent to join the troops. This unfortified town has never echoed in the war to the tramp of German feet, and its women's courage has not been dismayed by the worst horrors. But since those days of August 1914, many women's faces have blanched at the sight of blood—streams of blood sopping the stretchers in which the wounded have been carried back from the frontier, which seemed so quiet when I listened at the open window. Those soldiers I talked to in the general headquarters—how many of them are now alive? They were the men who fought in Alsace and Lorraine, when whole battalions were decimated under a withering shell-fire beyond the endurance of human courage, and who marched forward to victories, and backward in retreats, and forward again over the dead bodies of their comrades and corrupting heaps of German dead, in an ebb and flow of warfare which made the fields and the woods one great stench of horror, from which there came back madmen and maimed creatures, and young men, lucky with slight wounds, who told the tale of things they had seen as though they had escaped from hell. I met some of them afterwards and turned sick and faint as I listened to their stories; and afterwards on the western side of the French front, three hundred miles from Nancy, I came upon the dragoons of Belfort who had ridden past me in the sunshine of those August days. Then they had been very fine to see in their clean uniforms and on their glossy horses, garlanded with flowers. At the second meeting they were stained and warworn, and their horses limped with drooping heads, and they rode as men who have seen many comrades fall and have been familiar with the ways of death. They were fine to see again, those dirty, tired, grim-faced men. But it was a different kind of beauty which sent a queer thrill through me as I watched them pass.
Chapter III The Secret War
1
It was the most astounding thing in modern history, the secrecy behind which great armies were moving and fighting. To a civilization accustomed to the rapid and detailed accounts of news, there was something stupefying in the veil of silence which enshrouded the operations of the legions which were being hurled against each other along the frontiers. By one swift stroke of the military censorship journalism was throttled. All its lines of communication were cut, suddenly, as when, in my office, I spoke from Paris to England, and found myself with a half-finished sentence before a telephone which would no longer "march," as they say across the Channel. Pains and penalties were threatened against any newspaper which should dare to publish a word of military information beyond the official communiqués issued in order to hide the truth. Only by a careful study of maps from day to day and a microscopic reading between the lines could one grope one's way to any kind of