Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
The Glory of the Coming
CHAPTER V. SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY
HAD we waited that night for Opportunity to knock at our door I am inclined to think we might be waiting yet. We went out and we set a trap for Opportunity, and we caught her. No matter how or whence, the chance we coveted for a lift to the battle came to us before the night was many hours old. But before the design assumed shape we were to meet as blithe a young Britisher as ever I have seen, in the person of one Captain Pepper, a red-cheeked Yorkshireman in his early twenties, a fit and proper type of the men England has sent out to officer her forces overseas.
One of our Red Cross ambulances, while scouting out toward Noyon that afternoon, picked him up as he trudged up the road alone, with a fresh machine-gun wound through the palm of his right hand and his cap on the back of his head. His wound had been tied up at a casualty-dressing station and he had set out then to walk a distance of twenty-odd kilometres to Soissons, where he was told he might find a hospital to shelter him.
He dined with us, along with the ambulance driver who brought him in; and afterward he insisted on sitting a while with us, though he had been fighting, day and night almost continuously since the beginning of the battle and plainly was far spent from fatigue and lack of sleep. So far as I might judge, though, he did not have a nerve in his body. Gesturing with his swathed hand he told us not what he himself had done – somehow he managed in his self-effacing way to steer away from the personal note in his recital – but mainly about the stupendous tragedy in which he had played his part. Considering him as he sat there on a broken sofa with his long legs outstretched before a wood fire, one could not doubt that it had been a creditable part.
We gathered that in the second day of the fighting, as the English fell back before overwhelming odds but fighting for every inch, he became separated from his company. Next morning he found himself without a command in the heels of the orderly retreat and had offered himself for service to the first superior officer he met. Thereupon he was put in charge of a mixed detachment of two hundred men – gathered up anyhow and anywhere – and with his motley outfit had been told off to hold a strip of woods somewhere south of Chauny. Under him, he said, were stragglers cut off from half a dozen battered line regiments, and along with these, cooks, wagon drivers, engineers, officers’ servants and stretcher bearers. In front of the squad, beyond the woods, was a strip of marsh, and this natural barrier gave them an advantage which, plus pluck, enabled them to beat off not one but several oncoming waves of Germans.
“We had machine guns, luckily enough,” he said; “and, my word, but we gave the beggars a proper drubbing! We piled them up in heaps along the edges of that bally old bog. Everywhere along the Front – where we were and everywhere else, too, from what I can hear – they have outnumbered us four or five to one, but I’m quite sure we’ve killed or wounded ten of them for every man of ours that has been laid out since this show started four days ago.
“Well, that’s all, except that this morning about ten o’clock I was hit and had to quit and come away, because you see I wouldn’t be much use with one hand out of commission and bleeding all over the shop – would I now? I’m sorry to have to leave the chaps – they were a sporting lot; but since I had to stop a bullet I’m glad I’ve got a nice clean cushy wound. I shall be glad to get a taste of Blighty too; I’m a bit fagged, as you might say.”
His head nodded forward on his chest when he got this far, and his limbs relaxed.
He protested, though, against being bundled off to bed, saying he was quite comfortable and that his hand scarcely pained him at all, but the man who had brought him took him away. As for Carroll and Green and me, we slept that night, what sleeping we did, with our clothes on us, ready to rise and hunt the wine cellar if anything of a violently unpleasant nature occurred over our heads. During the hours before daylight there was a spirited spell of banging and crashing somewhere in the town, and not so far away either, if one might judge by the volume of the tumult, which rattled the empty casement frame alongside my bed and made the ancient house to rock and creak; but when dawn came the gables above us were still intact and we were enjoying our beauty sleep in the calm which succeeded the gust of shelling or of bombing or whatever it was.
CHAPTER VI. THROUGH THE BATTLE’S FRONT DOOR
IMMEDIATELY after breakfast, in accordance with a plan already formulated, we quietly took possession of one of those small American-made cars, the existence of which has been responsible for the addition of an eighth joke to the original seven jokes in the world. We didn’t know it then, but for us the real adventure was just starting. There were four of us in the flivver – the driver, a young American in uniform, whose duties were of such a nature that he travelled on a roving commission and need necessarily report to none concerning his daily movements; and for passengers, our own three selves. For warrant to fare abroad we had a small American flag painted on the glass wind shield, one extra tire, and an order authorising us to borrow gasoline – simply these and nothing more. Very unostentatiously we rode out of Soissons, steering a northwesterly course. We might not know exactly where we were going or when we should be back, but we were on our way.
At the same time, be it here said, there was method of a sort in our scheme of things, for we were aiming, as closely as we might, at the point where approximately the main French command jointed on to the right wing of the British, we figuring that at the junction place, where the overlapping and intermingled areas of control met, and more especially in a confused period when one army was falling back and the other bringing up its reserves, we stood a better chance in our credential-less and unaccredited state of wriggling on up from the back lines to the Front than would elsewhere be possible.
We reckoned the prospect after this fashion: If the French find us traversing the forbidden lands they may take it for granted that the British permitted us to pass. If we fall under the eyes of British guardians of the trail they are equally likely to assume that the French let us through. And so it turned out; which I claim is added proof that the standing luck of the American newspaper reporter on a difficult assignment is not to be discounted.
In stock we had one trump card, and only one, and we played it many a time during that somewhat crowded day. All of us were in khaki with tin helmets upon our heads and gas masks swung over our shoulders. The heavy trench coats in which we were bundled prevented betrayal to the casual eye of the fact that none of us wore badges denoting rank, upon our collars or shoulder straps. Outfitted thus we might have been major generals or we might have been second lieutenants of the American Expeditionary Forces. Who, on a cursory scrutiny of us, was to say?
So we decided among ourselves that ours must be a rôle suggestive of great personal importance and urgent business. Did any wayside sentinel, whether British or French, move out upon the crown of the road as though he meant to halt us, one of us, with an authoritative arm, would wave him clear of our path and we would go flitting imperiously by as though the officiousness of underlings roused in us only a passing annoyance. It proved a good trick. It may never work again in this war, but I bear witness that it has worked once.
In the very first leg of this expedition good old Madame Bonneaventure stood our friend. The River Aisne skirts the city of Soissons. At the far side of the bridge, spanning the stream, which bridge we must cross, stood a French noncom, charged, as we knew, with the duty of examining the passes of those outbound. If we disregarded his summons to halt, complications of a painful nature would undoubtedly ensue. But as the car slowed up, all of us with our fingers figuratively crossed, he either recognised the driver as one who passed him often or was impressed by our bogusly impressive mien, or possibly accepted the painted flag on Tin Lizzie’s weather-beaten countenance as warrant of our authenticity.
As he waved to us to proceed and then came to a salute, we, returning the salute in due form, were uttering three silent but nonetheless vehement cheers. I think we also shook hands. We were past the first and by long side the most formidable barrier. The farther we proceeded toward the battle the greater would be our chances of proceeding, it being generally assumed that no one gets very deeply into the district of active hostilities unless he has a proper errand there and has proved it to the satisfaction of the highway warders behind.
Through several villages that were reduced by shell fire to litter heaps and tenanted only by detachments of French soldiers we passed. Next we skirted up the sides of a steep hill and rounded the crest to where, spread out before our eyes, was a glorious panorama of the terrain below and beyond.
We drew in our breaths. Each one of us had seen something of the panoply of warfare in the making, but nothing in my own experience since Belgium in 1914 had equalled this. All the world appeared to have put on cartridge belts and gone to war. As far as the eye could reach, away off yonder to where sky line and earth line met behind the dust screen, cavalry, artillery, infantry, supply trains, munition trains, and all imaginable branches of the portable machinery of an army were in sight and in motion. Their masses hid the earth with a shifting pattern as though a vast blue-grey carpet were magically weaving itself. Overhead, singly, in pairs and in formations, like flights of wild fowl, the scout planes, the observation planes and the battle planes went winging. They were like silver gulls escorting limitless schools of porpoise through placid waters.
Usually there is a seemingly interminable confusion in the vision of a great force upon the forward go. To the lay eye it appears that the whole movement has got itself inextricably snarled. This line travels one course, that line goes in exactly the opposite direction, a third one is bisecting the first two at cross angles. But here one great compelling influence was sending all the units forward along a common current. The heavy vehicles held to the roads which threaded the plain; the infantry took short cuts across lots, as it were; the cavalry traversed the fields and penetrated the occasional thickets; the sky craft trod the alleys of the air – but they all headed toward the same unseen goal. There was no doubt about it – France was hurrying up a most splendid army to reenforce the hard-pressed defenders of French soil, where the Hun pushed against the line of the inward-bending and battered but yet unbroken British battalions.
We coasted down off the heights into the plateau, and now as we came in among them we had opportunity for appraising the temper of those men hurrying on their forward march to the killing pits. Who says France is war wearied or that her sons are tired of fighting? No suggestion was there here of dumb oxen driven to slaughter. Why, these men were like bridegrooms bound for the marriage feast. They sang as they marched or as they rode. Usually what they sang was a snatch of some rollicking chanson, and through the dirt masks they grinned into our faces as we went slithering by.
There were hails and friendly gestures for us. It might be a boy private with a sprig of early spring wild flowers jauntily stuck in his cap who waved at us. It might be a cook balancing himself on the tailboard of a travelling field kitchen who raised a sweaty visage from his steaming soup caldron and made friendly circles in the air with a dripping iron instrument that was too big for a spoon and too small for a spade; or it might be a gunner on a bouncing ammunition truck with enough of potential death and disaster bestowed under his sprawled legs to blow him and, incidentally, us into ten million smithereens if ever it went off.
Kilometre after kilometre we skihooted through the press, and it was a comic thing to see how a plodding regiment would swing over or a battery would bounce and jolt off the fairway into the edges of the ditch at the insistent toot-toot of our penny whistle of a horn to let us by. It made one think of whales making room in a narrow tideway for an impudent black minnow to pass. And always there was the drone of the questing aëroplanes overhead and the thunderous roaring of the guns in front. We overtook one train of supply trucks with the markings of the U. S. A. and manned by dusty lads in the khaki fustian of Yankeeland – evidence that at least one arm of our service would have a hand in the epochal task confronting our allies. All the rest of it was French.
For us there was no halt until we reached Blérencourt. Now this place was a place having a particular interest for us, since it was at Blérencourt that the organisation known as the American Fund for French Wounded, which is headed by Miss Anne Morgan and which has for its field personnel American women exclusively, had during the past nine months centred its principal activities.
In the outskirts of the town, now evacuated of almost all its civilian residents, stand the massive stone gateways and the dried moat of the magnificent château of Blérencourt, which was destroyed by the peasants in the time of the Terror and never rebuilt. What remains constitutes one of the most picturesque physical reminders of the French Revolution that is to be found in the country to-day. We rode under the arched stone portals – and lo, it was almost as though we had come into the midst of a smart real-estate development somewhere on Long Island within easy communicating distance of New York City.
French francs, provided by the state, and American dollars, donated by the folks back home, had been used under American supervision to construct a model colony upon the exact site of the ancient castle of some vanished noble family of the old régime. There was a model barracks, a model dormitory, a model schoolhouse, two model cottages and an office building that was a model among models – all built of planking, all glistening and smart with fresh paint, all with neat doorsteps in front of them and trim flower plots and vegetable gardens about them. There was a chicken house and a chicken run, dotted with the shapes of plump fowls. There was a storeroom piled high with clothing and food sent over from America to the A. F. F. W. for distribution among destitute natives of the devastated districts, of which this, until a year ago, had been the centre.
These incongruously modern structures snuggled right up under the venerable walls of the battlements. Indeed several of the buildings were cunningly built into the ruins, so that on one side the composite edifice would show a withered stone face, with patches of furze growing in the chinks of the crumbled masonry like moles on the forehead of a withered crone, and on the other would present a view of a smart cottage with a varnished shingle roof and a painted front door which apparently had just arrived from some planing mill in the States. Underneath the floor was a cellar four hundred years old, but the curtains in the window had seemingly been cut and stitched only yesterday. Somehow, though, the blended effect was immensely effective. It made me think of Home-dale-on-the-Sound grafted upon a background of Louis the Grand; and for a fact that was exactly what it was.
This creation, representing as it did nine months of hard work on the part of devoted American women, had been closed only the day before. It stayed in operation until it seemed probable that the German legions might penetrate this far south in their effort to ford the River Oise. The little pupils of the kindergarten had been sent away in trucks, the main dormitory had been turned into a temporary resting place for refugees, and the American ranges in the kitchen had done valiant service in the cooking of hot meals for exhausted women and children tramping in from the north and west. Before the managers and teachers left at dusk of the preceding evening two crippled French soldiers, specially detailed for work here by the government, had been assigned to place vessels of kerosene in each building, with instructions to fire the oil at the first signs of approaching Germans.
The cans of inflammables were still in their places when we arrived and the maimed watchmen, one of them a one-armed man and the other a one-legged, had camped all night on the premises ready on warning to apply the torch and destroy this frontier outpost of American charity and American efficiency. But in the forenoon word was come that the enemy had been brought to bay seven miles away and that he might not break through the British-French line. He did break through, but that is another story. So Mrs. Dike, of New York, and Miss Blagden, of Philadelphia, two of Miss Morgan’s assistants, had motored in from below, filled with thanksgiving that the patient work of their hands and their hearts would almost certainly be spared.
While Mrs. Dike, with tears in her eyes, was telling us of the things that had been accomplished here and while the troopers poured in unceasing streams along the main road beyond the gateway, a handful of belated refugees crept in under the weathered armorial bearings on the keystonp of the archway, to be fed and cared for and then sent along in the first empty truck that came by going toward Soissons.
In this group of newcomers was an elderly little man in a worn high hat and a long frock coat with facings of white dust upon its shiny seams, who looked as though he might be the mayor of some inconsequential village. He carried two bulging valises and a huge umbrella. With him was his wife, and she had in one hand a cage housing two frightened canaries and under the other arm a fat grey tabby cat which blinked its slitted eyes contentedly.
The most pitiable figure of them all to my way of thinking was an old woman – yes, a very old woman – she must have been all of eighty. Alongside one of the buildings I came upon her sitting in a huddle of her most treasured possessions. She was bent forward, with her gnarled hands folded in the lap of her dress, which was silk and shiny, for naturally when she fled from her home she had put on her back the best that she owned. Under the cope of a queer little old black bonnet with faded purple cloth flowers upon it her scanty hair lay in thin neat folds, as white and as soft as silk floss. Her feet in stiff, new, black shoes showed beneath her broad skirts. Her face, caving in about the mouth where her teeth were gone and all crosshatched with wrinkles, was a sweet, kindly, most gentle old face – the kind of face that we like to think our dead-and-gone grandmothers must have had.
She sat there ever so patiently in the soft sunlight, waiting for the truck which would carry her away to some strange place among stranger folk. When I drew near to her, wishing with all my heart that I knew enough of her tongue to express to her some of the thoughts I was thinking, she looked up at me and smiled a friendly little smile, and then raising her hands in a gesture of resignation dropped them again in her lap. But it was only with her lips that she smiled, for all the time her chin was quivering and her faded old blue eyes were brimming with a sorrow that was past telling in words.
She still sat there as we got into our car and drove off toward the battle. Looking back, the last thing I saw before we rounded the corner of the wall was her small black shape vivid in the sunshine. And I told myself that if I were an artist seeking to put upon canvas an image that would typify and sum up the spirit of embattled France to-day I would not paint a picture of a wounded boy soldier; nor yet one of a winged angel form bearing a naked sword; nor yet one of the full-throated cock of France, crowing his proud defiance. I would paint a picture of that brave little old withered woman, with the lips that smiled and the chin that quivered the while she smiled.
