Where Wars Go to Die Page 12

  In the 1890s, if you had asked an educated American, “Who is Winston Churchill?” he or she would have replied, “The bestselling historical novelist, author of Richard Carvel. Why did you ask?”

  Churchill, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, achieved extraordinary success; Richard Carvel sold over two million copies. It made him rich, but he remained a progressive in politics, and ran unsuccessfully for governor of New Hampshire.

  There is an amusing exchange of letters between Churchill (the American one), and Churchill (the English one), wherein the latter agrees to use his middle name in his byline.

  The American Churchill responds:

  “Mr. Winston Churchill is extremely grateful to Mr. Winston Churchill for bringing forward a subject which has given Mr. Winston Churchill much anxiety. Mr. Winston Churchill appreciates the courtesy of Mr. Winston Churchill in adopting the name of ‘Winston Spencer Churchill’ in his books, articles, etc. Mr. Winston Churchill makes haste to add that, had he possessed any other names, he would certainly have adopted one of them.”

  Churchill, forty-six, went to Europe to report on the war. This, for American writers, involved not a short hop across the Channel but a long sea voyage, and the scene he describes appears in many similar wartime books. His A Traveller in War-Time also includes a description of a weapon few Americans had yet seen or written about.

  Sometimes, driving on an errand, I’ll pass Churchill’s old mansion in Cornish, New Hampshire. It’s deserted now, a house fit for haunting—and you don’t have to be a novelist yourself to understand what it says about what time can do to a writer’s memory.

  A Calamity Unheard of in Human Annals

  —Edith Wharton

  It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heights of St. Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with the blue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in the stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of the Bagatelle were as fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Élysées sloped downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The great city, so made for peace and art and all humanist graces seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower.

  The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed them, everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn’t be war! The Cabinets, like naughty children were again dangling their feet over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were, of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic words. Paris went on steadily about her mid-summer business of feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who were the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century.

  All the while, every one knew that other work was going on also. The whole fabric of the country’s seemingly undisturbed routine was threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the sense of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in the balminess of a perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes until the evening papers came.

  At the dressmaker’s, the next morning, the tired fitters were preparing to leave for their usual holiday. They looked pale and anxious—decidedly, there was a new weight of apprehension in the air. And in the rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of white paper against the wall of the Ministere de la Marine. “General mobilization” they read—and an armed nation knows what that means. But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers by read the notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations; the dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was too great to be dramatized.

  That evening, in a restaurant of the rue Royale, we sat at a table in one of the open windows, abreast with the street, and saw the strange new crowds stream by. In an instant we were being shown what mobilization was—a huge break in the normal flow of traffic, like the sudden rupture of a dyke. The street was flooded by the torrent of people sweeping past us to the various railway stations. All were on foot, and carrying their luggage; for since dawn every cab and taxi and motor-omnibus had disappeared. The War Office had thrown out its drag-net and caught them all. The crowd that passed our window was chiefly composed of conscripts, the mobilisables of the first day, who were on the way to the station accompanied by their families and friends; but among them were little clusters of bewildered tourists, labouring along with their bags and bundles, and watching their luggage pushed before them on hand-carts—puzzled inarticulate waifs caught in the cross-tides racing to a maelstrom.

  In the restaurant, the befrogged and red-coated band poured out patriotic music, and the intervals between the courses that so few waiters were left to serve were broken by the ever-recurring obligation to stand up for the Marseillaise, to stand up for God Save the King, to stand up for the Russian National Anthem, to stand up again for the Marseillaise.

  As the evening wore on and the crowd about our window thickened, the loiterers outside began to join in the war-songs. “Allons, debout!”—and the loyal round begins again. “Le chanson de depart!” is a frequent demand; and the chorus of spectators chimes in roundly. A sort of quiet humour was the note of the street. Down the rue Royale, toward the Madeleine, the bands of other restaurants were attracting other throngs, and martial refrains were strung along the Boulevard like its garlands of arc-lights.

  Meanwhile, beyond the fringe of idlers the steady stream of conscripts still poured along. Wives and families trudged beside them, carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles. The impression disengaging itself from all this superficial confusion was that of a cheerful steadiness of purpose. The faces ceaselessly streaming by were serious but not sad; nor was there any air of bewilderment—the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and young men seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it. The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible; they understood their stake in the job, and accepted it …

  There is another army in Paris. Its dingy streams have percolated through all the currents of Paris life, so that wherever one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy confident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people, dazed and slowly moving—men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed against their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees.

  Their faces are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that stare of dumb bewilderment—or that other look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins—can shake off the obsession of the Refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the look of Paris.

  They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying. These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the doors of shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet or intelligible or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a meal-ticket—and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes.

  From Fighting France, by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1919.

  I Shall Stay

  —Mildred Aldrich

  September 8, 1914 … Oh, the things I have seen and felt since I last wrote to you over two weeks ago. Here I am again cut off from the world, and have been since the first of the month. For a week now I have known
nothing of what was going on in the world outside the limits of my own vision. For that matter, since the Germans crossed the frontier our news of the war has been meager. We got the calm, constant reiteration—“Left wing—held by the English—forced to retreat a little.” All the same, the general impression was, that in spite of all that, “all was well.” I suppose it was wise.

  On Sunday week—that was August 30—Amelie walked to Esbly, and came back with the news that they were rushing trains full of wounded soldiers and Belgian refugies through toward Paris, and that the ambulance there was quite insufficient for the work it had to do. So Monday and Tuesday we drove down in the donkey cart to carry bread and fruit, water and cigarettes, and to “lend a hand.”

  It was a pretty terrible sight. There were long trains of wounded soldiers. There was train after train crowded with Belgians—well-dressed women and children—packed on to open trucks, without shelter, covered with dust, hungry and thirsty. The sight set me to doing some hard thinking after I got home that first night. But it was not until Tuesday afternoon that I got my first hint of the truth. That afternoon, while I was standing on the platform, I heard a drum beat in the street, and sent Amelie out to see what was going on. She came back at once to say it was the garde champetre calling on all inhabitants to carry all their guns, revolvers, etc. to the mairie before sundown. That meant the disarming of our departement, and it flashed through my mind that the Germans must be nearer than the official announcements had told us.

  While I stood reflecting a moment—it looked serious—I saw approaching from the west side of the track a procession of wagons. Amelie ran down the track to the crossing to see what it meant, and came back at once to tell me that they were evacuating the towns to the north of us.

  I handed the basket of fruit I was holding into a coach of the train just pulling into the station, and threw my last package of cigarettes after it; and, without a word, Amelie and I went out into the street, untied the donkey, climbed into the wagon, and started for home.

  By the time we got to the road which leads east to Montry, whence there is a road over the hill to the south, it was full of the flying crowd. It was a sad sight. The procession led in both directions as far as we could see. There were huge wagons of grain. There were herds of cattle, flocks of sheep; there were wagons full of household effects, with often as many as twenty people sitting aloft; there were carriages; there were automobiles with the occupants crowded in among bundles done up in sheets; there were women pushing overloaded handcarts; there were women pushing baby-carriages; there were dogs and cats and goats; there was every sort of vehicle you ever saw, drawn by every sort of beast that can draw, from dogs to oxen, from boys to donkeys.

  I asked from where these people had come, and was told that they were evacuating Daumartin and all the towns on the plain between there and Meaux, which meant that Monthyon, Neufmortier, Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry—in fact, all the villages visible from my garden were being evacuated by order of the military authorities.

  One of the most disquieting things about this was to see the effect of the procession as it passed along the road. All the way from Esbly to Montry people began to pack at once, and the speed with which they fell into the procession was disconcerting.

  When we finally escaped from the crowd into the poplar-shaded avenue which leads to the Chateau de Conde, I turned to look at Amelie for the first time. I had had time to get a good hold of myself.

  “Well, Amelie?” I said.

  “Oh, madame,” she replied. “I shall stay.”

  “And so shall I,” I answered …

  It was a little after one o’clock when the cannonading suddenly became much heavier, and I stepped out into the orchard, from which there is a wide view of the plain. I gave one look; then I heard myself say, “Amelie”—as if she could help,—and I retreated. Amelie rushed by me. I heard her say, “Mon Dieu.” I waited, but she did not come back. After a bit I pulled myself together, went out again, and followed down to the hedge where she was standing, looking off to the plain.

  The battle had advanced right over the crest of the hill. The sun was shining on silent Mareuil and Chauconin, but Monthyon and Penchard were enveloped in smoke. From the eastern and western extremities of the plain we could see the artillery fire, but owing to the smoke hanging over the crest of the hill on the horizon, it was impossible to get an idea of the positions of the army. So often, when I first took this place on the hill, I had looked off at the plain and thought, “What a battlefield!” But when I thought that, I had visions very different from what I was seeing. I had imagined long lines of marching soldiers, detachments of flying cavalry, like the war pictures at Versailles and Fontainebleau. Now I was actually seeing a battle, and it was nothing like that. There was only noise, belching smoke, and long drifts of white clouds concealing the hills.

  In the field below me the wheat was being cut. I remembered vividly afterward that a white horse was drawing the reaper, and the women and children were stacking and gleaning. Now and then the horse would stop, and a woman, with her red handkerchief on her head, would stand, shading her eyes a moment, and look off. Then the white horse would turn and go plodding on. The grain had to be got in if the Germans were coming. Talk about the duality of the mind—it is sextuple. I would not dare tell you all that went through mine that long afternoon.

  It was just about six o’clock when the first bomb that we could really see came over the hill. The sun was setting. For two hours we saw them rise, descend, explode. Then a little smoke would rise from one hamlet, then from another; then a tiny flame—hardly more than a spark—would be visible; and by dark the whole plain was on fire, lighting up Mareuil in the foreground, silent and untouched. There were long lines of grain-stacks and mills stretching along the plain. One by one they took fire, until by ten o’clock, they stood like a procession of huge torches across my beloved panorama.

  From A Hilltop on the Marne, by Mildred Aldrich; Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1915.

  Its Purpose is Death

  —Richard Harding Davis

  The change came to Brussels at ten in the morning. The boulevards fell suddenly empty. There was not a house that was not closely shuttered. Along the route by which we now knew the Germans were advancing, it was as though the plague stalked. That no one should fire from a window, that to the conquerors no one should offer insult, Burgomaster Max sent out as special constables men he trusted. Their badge of authority was a walking-stick and a piece of paper fluttering from a buttonhole. These, the police, and the servants and caretakers of the houses that lined the boulevards alone were visible. At eleven o’clock, unobserved but by this official audience, down the Boulevard Waterloo came the advance-guard of the German army. It consisted of three men, a captain and two privates on bicycles. Their rifles were slung across their shoulders, they rode unwarily, with as little concern as the members of a touring-club out for a holiday. Behind them, so close upon each other that to cross from one sidewalk to the other was not possible, came the Uhlans, infantry, and the guns. For two hours I watched them, and then, bored with the monotony of it, returned to the hotel.

  After an hour, from beneath my window, I still could hear them; another hour and another went by. They still were passing. Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain. It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike. It carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling toward you across the seat. The gray uniforms aided this impression. In it each man moved under a cloak of invisibility. It is the gray of the hour just before daybreak, the gray of unpolished steel, of mist among green trees. It was impossible to tell if in that noble square there was a regiment or a brigade. You saw only a fog that melted in to the stones, blended with the ancient house fronts, that shi
fted and drifted, but left you nothing at which to point.

  All through the night, I could hear the steady roar of the passing army. And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain was still unbroken. For three days and three nights the column of gray, with hundreds of thousands of bayonets and hundreds of thousands of lances, with gray transport wagons, gray ammunition carts, gray ambulances, gray cannon, like a river, of steel, cut Brussels in two.

  It is the most efficient organization of modern times; and its purpose only is death.

  From With the Allies, by Richard Harding Davis; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

  Stench of the battlefield

  —Frances Wilson Huard

  That night we slept in a shed hospitably offered by a lone peasant woman, and the next morning crossed the river and set our faces homeward.

  Branching northwards into the open country we chose all the by-roads and short cuts where our carts would pass, in order to avoid the long streams of ambulances and ammunition vans, as well as in the hope of finding better thoroughfares. A drizzling rain had set in the night before, making the roads slippery and uncomfortable. Highways which heretofore had been seldom trodden were full of ruts and bumps, and from Langy to Villiers there was hardly a corner but what showed signs of the invaders’ progress. Over these green and fertile fields whose crops had proudly waved their heads above the lovely Marne, were strewn straw and empty bottles in unimaginable quantities. Thousands of blackened or charred spots dotting the countryside, told of campfires and hasty bivouacs, and as we silently plodded on towards Charny, the growing evidences of recent battle met our saddened gaze.

  Here a shell had burst on the road, in the midst of a bicycle squadron, scattering men and machines to the four winds of Heaven. A little mound, a rough-hewn cross, marked the spot where some sixty soldiers lay in their peaceful sleep, while the melee of tangled wire and iron which had once been machines, as well as blood-stained garments, bits of shell, and human flesh, made a gruesome and indescribable picture.