________________________________________________
_ After breakfast Claude reported to Headquarters and talked with
one of the staff Majors. He was told he would have to wait until
tomorrow to see Colonel James, who had been called to Paris for a
general conference. He had left in his car at four that morning,
in response to a telephone message.
"There's not much to do here, by way of amusement," said the
Major. "A movie show tonight, and you can get anything you want
at the estaminet,--the one on the square, opposite the English
tank, is the best. There are a couple of nice Frenchwomen in the
Red Cross barrack, up on the hill, in the old convent garden.
They try to look out for the civilian population, and we're on
good terms with them. We get their supplies through with our own,
and the quartermaster has orders to help them when they run
short. You might go up and call on them. They speak English
perfectly."
Claude asked whether he could walk in on them without any kind of
introduction.
"Oh, yes, they're used to us! I'll give you a card to Mlle.
Olive, though. She's a particular friend of mine. There you are:
'Mlle. Olive de Courcy, introducing, etc.' And, you understand,"
here he glanced up and looked Claude over from head to foot,
"she's a perfect lady."
Even with an introduction, Claude felt some hesitancy about
presenting himself to these ladies. Perhaps they didn't like
Americans; he was always afraid of meeting French people who
didn't. It was the same way with most of the fellows in his
battalion, he had found; they were terribly afraid of being
disliked. And the moment they felt they were disliked, they
hastened to behave as badly as possible, in order to deserve it;
then they didn't feel that they had been taken in--the worst
feeling a doughboy could possibly have!
Claude thought he would stroll about to look at the town a
little. It had been taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1914,
after their retreat from the Marne, and they had held it until
about a year ago, when it was retaken by the English and the
Chasseurs d'Alpins. They had been able to reduce it and to drive
the Germans out, only by battering it down with artillery; not
one building remained standing.
Ruin was ugly, and it was nothing more, Claude was thinking, as
he followed the paths that ran over piles of brick and plaster.
There was nothing picturesque about this, as there was in the war
pictures one saw at home. A cyclone or a fire might have done
just as good a job. The place was simply a great dump-heap; an
exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of American
towns. It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned
brick and broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered
beams and rafters, stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy
water. An American soldier had stepped into one of those holes a
few nights before, and been drowned.
This had been a rich town of eighteen thousand inhabitants; now
the civilian population was about four hundred. There were people
there who had hung on all through the years of German occupation;
others who, as soon as they heard that the enemy was driven out,
came back from wherever they had found shelter. They were living
in cellars, or in little wooden barracks made from old timbers
and American goods boxes. As he walked along, Claude read
familiar names and addresses, painted on boards built into the
sides of these frail shelters: "From Emery Bird, Thayer Co.
Kansas City, Mo." "Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colo." These
inscriptions cheered him so much that he began to feel like going
up and calling on the French ladies.
The sun had come out hot after three days of rain. The stagnant
pools and the weeds that grew in the ditches gave out a rank,
heavy smell. Wild flowers grew triumphantly over the piles of
rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours
came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the
Germans did to it.
Claude paused before a little shanty built against a
half-demolished brick wall. A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with
a canary, singing beautifully. An old woman was working in the
garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster the rain had
washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops
and neat lettuce heads. Claude approached her, touched his
helmet, and asked her how one could find the way to the Red
Cross.
She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow. "Vous
savez le tank Anglais? Non? Marie, Marie!"
(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way
or that from a disabled British tank that had been left on the
site of the old town hall.)
A little girl ran out of the barrack, and her grandmother told
her to go at once and take the American to the Red Cross. Marie
put her hand in Claude's and led him off along one of the paths
that wound among the rubbish. She took him out of the way to show
him a church,--evidently one of the ruins of which they were
proudest,--where the blue sky was shining through the white
arches. The Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a
little foot sticking to her robe showed where the infant Jesus
had been shot away.
"Le bebe est casse, mais il a protege sa mere," Marie explained
with satisfaction. As they went on, she told Claude that she had
a soldier among the Americans who was her friend. "Il est bon, il
est gai, mon soldat," but he sometimes drank too much alcohol,
and that was a bad habit. Perhaps now, since his comrade had
stepped into a cellar hole Monday night while he was drunk, and
had been drowned, her "Sharlie" would be warned and would do
better. Marie was evidently a well brought up child. Her father,
she said, had been a schoolmaster. At the foot of the convent
hill, she turned to go home. Claude called her back and awkwardly
tried to give her some money, but she thrust her hands behind her
and said resolutely, "Non, merci. Je n'ai besoin de rien," and
then ran away down the path.
As he climbed toward the top of the hill he noticed that the
ground had been cleaned up a bit. The path was clear, the bricks
and hewn stones had been piled in neat heaps, the broken hedges
had been trimmed and the dead parts cut away. Emerging at last
into the garden, he stood still for wonder; even though it was in
ruins, it seemed so beautiful after the disorder of the world
below.
The gravel walks were clean and shining. A wall of very old
boxwoods stood green against a row of dead Lombardy poplars.
Along the shattered side of the main building, a pear tree,
trained on wires like a vine, still flourished,--full of little
red pears. Around the stone well was a shaven grass plot, and
everywhere there were little trees and shrubs, which had been too
low for the shells to hit,--or for the fire, which had seared the
poplars, to catch. The hill must have been wrapped in flames at
one time, and all the tall trees had been burned.
The barrack was built against the walls of the cloister,--three
arches of which remained, like a stone wing to the shed of
planks. On a ladder stood a one-armed young man, driving nails
very skillfully with his single hand. He seemed to be making a
frame projection from the sloping roof, to support an awning. He
carried his nails in his mouth. When he wanted one, he hung his
hammer to the belt of his trousers, took a nail from between his
teeth, stuck it into the wood, and then deftly rapped it on the
head. Claude watched him for a moment, then went to the foot of
the ladder and held out his two hands. "Laissez-moi," he
exclaimed.
The one aloft spat his nails out into his palm, looked down, and
laughed. He was about Claude's age, with very yellow hair and
moustache and blue eyes. A charming looking fellow.
"Willingly," he said. "This is no great affair, but I do it to
amuse myself, and it will be pleasant for the ladies." He
descended and gave his hammer to the visitor. Claude set to work
on the frame, while the other went under the stone arches and
brought back a roll of canvas,--part of an old tent, by the look
of it.
"Un heritage des Boches," he explained unrolling it upon the
grass. "I found it among their filth in the cellar, and had the
idea to make a pavilion for the ladies, as our trees are
destroyed." He stood up suddenly. "Perhaps you have come to see
the ladies?"
"Plus tard."
Very well, the boy said, they would get the pavilion done for a
surprise for Mlle. Olive when she returned. She was down in the
town now, visiting the sick people. He bent over his canvas
again, measuring and cutting with a pair of garden shears, moving
round the green plot on his knees, and all the time singing.
Claude wished he could understand the words of his song.
While they were working together, tying the cloth up to the
frame, Claude, from his elevation, saw a tall girl coming slowly
up the path by which he had ascended. She paused at the top, by
the boxwood hedge, as if she were very tired, and stood looking
at them. Presently she approached the ladder and said in slow,
careful English, "Good morning. Louis has found help, I see."
Claude came down from his perch.
"Are you Mlle. de Courcy? I am Claude Wheeler. I have a note of
introduction to you, if I can find it."
She took the card, but did not look at it. "That is not
necessary. Your uniform is enough. Why have you come?"
He looked at her in some confusion. "Well, really, I don't know!
I am just in from the front to see Colonel James, and he is in
Paris, so I must wait over a day. One of the staff suggested my
coming up here--I suppose because it is so nice!" he finished
ingenuously.
"Then you are a guest from the front, and you will have lunch
with Louis and me. Madame Barre is also gone for the day. Will you
see our house?" She led him through the low door into a living
room, unpainted, uncarpeted, light and airy. There were coloured
war posters on the clean board walls, brass shell cases full of
wild flowers and garden flowers, canvas camp-chairs, a shelf of
books, a table covered by a white silk shawl embroidered with big
butterflies. The sunlight on the floor, the bunches of fresh
flowers, the white window curtains stirring in the breeze,
reminded Claude of something, but he could not remember what.
"We have no guest room," said Mlle. de Courcy. "But you will come
to mine, and Louis will bring you hot water to wash."
In a wooden chamber at the end of the passage, Claude took off
his coat, and set to work to make himself as tidy as possible.
Hot water and scented soap were in themselves pleasant things.
The dresser was an old goods box, stood on end and covered with
white lawn. On it there was a row of ivory toilet things, with
combs and brushes, powder and cologne, and a pile of white
handkerchiefs fresh from the iron. He felt that he ought not to
look about him much, but the odor of cleanness, and the
indefinable air of personality, tempted him. In one corner, a
curtain on a rod made a clothes-closet; in another was a low iron
bed, like a soldier's, with a pale blue coverlid and white
pillows. He moved carefully and splashed discreetly. There was
nothing he could have damaged or broken, not even a rug on the
plank floor, and the pitcher and hand-basin were of iron; yet he
felt as if he were imperiling something fragile.
When he came out, the table in the living room was set for three.
The stout old dame who was placing the plates paid no attention
to him,--seemed, from her expression, to scorn him and all his
kind. He withdrew as far as possible out of her path and picked
up a book from the table, a volume of Heine's Reisebilder in
German.
Before lunch Mlle. de Courcy showed him the store room in the
rear, where the shelves were stocked with rows of coffee tins,
condensed milk, canned vegetables and meat, all with American
trade names he knew so well; names which seemed doubly familiar
and "reliable" here, so far from home. She told him the people in
the town could not have got through the winter without these
things. She had to deal them out sparingly, where the need was
greatest, but they made the difference between life and death.
Now that it was summer, the people lived by their gardens; but
old women still came to beg for a few ounces of coffee, and
mothers to get a can of milk for the babies.
Claude's face glowed with pleasure. Yes, his country had a long
arm. People forgot that; but here, he felt, was some one who did
not forget. When they sat down to lunch he learned that Mlle. de
Courcy and Madame Barre had been here almost a year now; they
came soon after the town was retaken, when the old inhabitants
began to drift back. The people brought with them only what they
could carry in their arms.
"They must love their country so much, don't you think, when they
endure such poverty to come back to it?" she said. "Even the old
ones do not often complain about their dear things--their linen,
and their china, and their beds. If they have the ground, and
hope, all that they can make again. This war has taught us all
how little the made things matter. Only the feeling matters."
Exactly so; hadn't he been trying to say this ever since he was
born? Hadn't he always known it, and hadn't it made life both
bitter and sweet for him? What a beautiful voice she had, this
Mlle. Olive, and how nobly it dealt with the English tongue. He
would like to say something, but out of so much . . . what? He
remained silent, therefore, sat nervously breaking up the black
war bread that lay beside his plate.
He saw her looking at his hand, felt in a flash that she regarded
it with favour, and instantly put it on his knee, under the
table.
"It is our trees that are worst," she went on sadly. "You have
seen our poor trees? It makes one ashamed for this beautiful part
of France. Our people are more sorry for them than to lose their
cattle and horses."
Mlle. de Courcy looked over-taxed by care and responsibility,
Claude thought, as he watched her. She seemed far from strong.
Slender, grey-eyed, dark-haired, with white transparent skin and a
too ardent colour in her lips and cheeks,--like the flame of a
feverish activity within. Her shoulders drooped, as if she were
always tired. She must be young, too, though there were threads
of grey in her hair,--brushed flat and knotted carelessly at the
back of her head.
After the coffee, Mlle. de Courcy went to work at her desk, and
Louis took Claude to show him the garden. The clearing and
trimming and planting were his own work, and he had done it all
with one arm. This autumn he would accomplish much more, for he
was stronger now, and he had the habitude of working
single-handed. He must manage to get the dead trees down; they
distressed Mademoiselle Olive. In front of the barrack stood four
old locusts; the tops were naked forks, burned coal-black, but
the lower branches had put out thick tufts of yellow-green
foliage, so vigorous that the life in the trunks must still be
sound. This fall, Louis said, he meant to get some strong
American boys to help him, and they would saw off the dead limbs
and trim the tops flat over the thick boles. How much it must
mean to a man to love his country like this, Claude thought; to
love its trees and flowers; to nurse it when it was sick, and
tend its hurts with one arm. Among the flowers, which had come
back self-sown or from old roots, Claude found a group of tall,
straggly plants with reddish stems and tiny white blossoms,-- one
of the evening primrose family, the Gaura, that grew along the
clay banks of Lovely Creek, at home. He had never thought it very
pretty, but he was pleased to find it here. He had supposed it
was one of those nameless prairie flowers that grew on the
prairie and nowhere else.
When they went back to the barrack, Mlle. Olive was sitting in
one of the canvas chairs Louis had placed under the new pavilion.
"What a fine fellow he is!" Claude exclaimed, looking after him.
"Louis? Yes. He was my brother's orderly. When Emile came home on
leave he always brought Louis with him, and Louis became like one
of the family. The shell that killed my brother tore off his arm.
My mother and I went to visit him in the hospital, and he seemed
ashamed to be alive, poor boy, when my brother was dead. He put
his hand over his face and began to cry, and said, 'Oh, Madame,
il etait toujours plus chic que moi!'"
Although Mlle. Olive spoke English well, Claude saw that she did
so only by keeping her mind intently upon it. The stiff sentences
she uttered were foreign to her nature; her face and eyes ran
ahead of her tongue and made one wait eagerly for what was
coming. He sat down in a sagging canvas chair, absently twisting
a sprig of Gaura he had pulled.
"You have found a flower?" She looked up.
"Yes. It grows at home, on my father's farm."
She dropped the faded shirt she was darning. "Oh, tell me about
your country! I have talked to so many, but it is difficult to
understand. Yes, tell me about that!"
Nebraska--What was it? How many days from the sea, what did it
look like? As he tried to describe it, she listened with
half-closed eyes. "Flat-covered with grain-muddy rivers. I think
it must be like Russia. But your father's farm; describe that to
me, minutely, and perhaps I can see the rest."
Claude took a stick and drew a square in the sand: there, to
begin with, was the house and farmyard; there was the big
pasture, with Lovely Creek flowing through it; there were the
wheatfields and cornfields, the timber claim; more wheat and
corn, more pastures. There it all was, diagrammed on the yellow
sand, with shadows gliding over it from the half-charred locust
trees. He would not have believed that he could tell a stranger
about it in such detail. It was partly due to his listener, no
doubt; she gave him unusual sympathy, and the glow of an unusual
mind. While she bent over his map, questioning him, a light dew
of perspiration gathered on her upper lip, and she breathed
faster from her effort to see and understand everything. He told
her about his mother and his father and Mahailey; what life was
like there in summer and winter and autumn--what it had been like
in that fateful summer when the Hun was moving always toward
Paris, and on those three days when the French were standing at
the Marne; how his mother and father waited for him to bring the
news at night, and how the very cornfields seemed to hold their
breath.
Mlle. Olive sank back wearily in her chair. Claude looked up and
saw tears sparkling in her brilliant eyes. "And I myself," she
murmured, "did not know of the Marne until days afterward, though
my father and brother were both there! I was far off in Brittany,
and the trains did not run. That is what is wonderful, that you
are here, telling me this! We, we were taught from childhood that
some day the Germans would come; we grew up under that threat.
But you were so safe, with all your wheat and corn. Nothing could
touch you, nothing!"
Claude dropped his eyes. "Yes," he muttered, blushing, "shame
could. It pretty nearly did. We are pretty late." He rose from
his chair as if he were going to fetch something . . . . But
where was he to get it from? He shook his head. "I am afraid," he
said mournfully, "there is nothing I can say to make you
understand how far away it all seemed, how almost visionary. It
didn't only seem miles away, it seemed centuries away."
"But you do come,--so many, and from so far! It is the last
miracle of this war. I was in Paris on the fourth day of July,
when your Marines, just from Belleau Wood, marched for your
national fete, and I said to myself as they came on, 'That is a
new man!' Such heads they had, so fine there, behind the ears.
Such discipline and purpose. Our people laughed and called to
them and threw them flowers, but they never turned to look . . .
eyes straight before. They passed like men of destiny." She threw
out her hands with a swift movement and dropped them in her lap.
The emotion of that day came back in her face. As Claude looked
at her burning cheeks, her burning eyes, he understood that the
strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost
like a gift of prophecy.
A woman came up the hill carrying a baby. Mlle. de Courcy went to
meet her and took her into the house. Clause sat down again,
almost lost to himself in the feeling of being completely
understood, of being no longer a stranger. In the far distance
the big guns were booming at intervals. Down in the garden Louis
was singing. Again he wished he knew the words of Louis' songs.
The airs were rather melancholy, but they were sung very
cheerfully. There was something open and warm about the boy's
voice, as there was about his face-something blond, too. It was
distinctly a bland voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and
waving. Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new
kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the
shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of
beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life,
he saw.
When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the
creeping sunlight. "I didn't know there were any French girls
like you," he said simply, as she sat down.
She smiled. "I do not think there are any French girls left.
There are children and women. I was twenty-one when the war came,
and I had never been anywhere without my mother or my brother or
sister. Within a year I went all over France alone; with
soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody. Everything is different
with us." She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father
had been an instructor in the Military School. He had died since
the beginning of the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war
of 1870. Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men
would be left to see the day of victory.
She looked so tired that Clause knew he had no right to stay.
Long shadows were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave;
but an hour more or less wouldn't matter. Two people could hardly
give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.
"Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get
through this war?" he asked as he rose.
He wrote it down in his notebook.
"I shall look for you," she said, giving him her hand.
There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the
edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he
stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the
sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the
glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop
which he would never find again.
The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front.
They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their
route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and
then turning to the left. It was not advisable to go the latter
half of the way before nightfall, so they took their time through
the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.
When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting
in the end of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing
the dried mud out of his kilts. The horses were munching in their
nose-bags, and the driver had disappeared. The Americans hadn't
happened to meet with any Highlanders before, and were curious.
This one must be a good fighter, they thought; a brawny giant
with a bulldog jaw, and a face as red and knobby as his knees.
More because he admired the looks of the man than because he
needed information, Hicks went up and asked him if he had noticed
a military cemetery on the road back. The Kilt nodded.
"About how far back would you say it was?"
"I wouldn't say at all. I take no account of their kilometers,"
he replied dryly, rubbing away at his skirt as if he had it in a
washtub.
"Well, about how long will it take us to walk it?"
"That I couldn't say. A Scotsman would do it in an hour."
"I guess a Yankee can do it as quick as a Scotchman, can't be?"
Hicks asked jovially.
"That I couldn't say. You've been four years gettin' this far, I
know verra well."
Hicks blinked as if he had been hit. "Oh, if that's the way you
talk--"'
"That's the way I do," said the other sourly.
Claude put out a warning hand. "Come on, Hicks. You'll get
nothing by it." They went up the road very much disconcerted.
Hicks kept thinking of things he might have said. When he was
angry, the Sergeant's forehead puffed up and became dark red,
like a young baby's. "What did you call me off for?" he
sputtered.
"I don't see where you'd have come out in an argument, and you
certainly couldn't have licked him."
They turned aside at the cemetery to wait until the sun went
down. It was unfenced, unsodded, and a wagon trail ran through
the middle, bisecting the square. On one side were the French
graves, with white crosses; on the other side the German graves,
with black crosses. Poppies and cornflower ran over them. The
Americans strolled about, reading the names. Here and there the
soldier's photograph was nailed upon his cross, left by some
comrade to perpetuate his memory a little longer.
The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to
sing, flying home from somewhere. Claude and Hicks sat down
between the mounds and began to smoke while the sun dropped.
Lines of dead trees marked the red west. This was a dreary
stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie.
They smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night. On a
cross at their feet the inscription read merely: Soldat Inconnu,
Mort pour La France.
A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who
fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too
young. They died and took their secret with them,--what they were
and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France.
How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a
shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the
Anchises. It was a pleasant name to say over in one's mind, where
one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never
blush.
Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the
silence. "Somehow, Lieutenant, 'mort' seems deader than 'dead.'
It has a coffinish sound. And over there they're all 'tod,' and
it's all the same damned silly thing. Look at them set out here,
black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question is, who
put 'em here, and what's the good of it?"
"Search me," the other murmured absently.
Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face
wrinkled with the gravity and labour of his cerebration. "Well,"
he brought out at last, "we'd better hike. This afterglow will
hang on for an hour,--always does, over here."
"I suppose we had." They rose to go. The white crosses were now
violet, and the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow.
Behind the dead trees in the west, a long smear of red still
burned. To the north, the guns were tuning up with a deep
thunder. "Somebody's getting peppered up there. Do owls always
hoot in graveyards?"
"Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant. It's a peaceful spot,
otherwise. Good-night, boys," said Hicks kindly, as they left the
graves behind them.
They were soon finding their way among shell holes, and jumping
trench-tops in the dark,-beginning to feel cheerful at getting
back to their chums and their own little group. Hicks broke out
and told Claude how he and Dell Able meant to go into business
together when they got home; were going to open a garage and
automobile-repair shop. Under their talk, in the minds of both,
that lonely spot lingered, and the legend: Soldat Inconnu, Mort
pour La France. _
Read next: Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On": Chapter 11
Read previous: Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On": Chapter 9
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