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HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Publishers      New York




  THE DAY OF GLORY


  BY

  DOROTHY CANFIELD

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  1919




  COPYRIGHT, 1919

  BY

  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY




CONTENTS


                                                 PAGE

  ON THE EDGE                                       3

  FRANCE’S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR                   39

  LOURDES                                          89

  SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS                       105

  “IT IS RATHER FOR US TO BE HERE DEDICATED”      133

  THE DAY OF GLORY                                139




THE DAY OF GLORY




ON THE EDGE


As far as Jeanne’s personal life was concerned, what little was left of
it ebbed and flowed to the daily rhythm of the mail. She felt it begin
to sink lower with the fatigue of preparing and serving the lunch for
the six noisy children, always too hungry for the small portions, so
that at the last she divided most of her own part among them. It ebbed
lower and lower during the long hours of the afternoon when she strove
desperately to keep the little ones cheerful and occupied and at the
same time to mend and bake and darn and clean and iron and carry ashes
out and coal in; her long slim pianist’s fingers reddened and roughened
till they bled, because cold cream was far too costly a luxury. It sank
to its stagnant lowest during the tired end of the day when the younger
children, fretful with too much indoors, disputed and quarreled; and
when, as she prepared the evening meal, she tried to help the older
ones with their Latin declensions and Greek verbs so that they might
be worthy sons of their father. And oh, the nights, the long nights,
when she woke again and again, dreaming that she saw André wounded,
dreaming that some one called to her in a loud voice that he had been
killed at the head of his men.

But after midnight she felt the turn of the tide. In less than twelve
hours there might be a letter. She dozed, woke to make the round of the
children’s beds to be sure that they were covered, and noted that it
was three o’clock. In seven hours she might have news again. She slept,
and woke to hear the church clock clang out five, and knew that if she
could but live through five hours more--

In the morning, the countless minor agitations; the early rising in
the cold; the smoky kindling of the fire; the hurried expedition for
the milk through the empty streets, dripping with the clammy fog of
the region; the tumultuous awakening of the children, some noisily
good-natured, some noisily bad-tempered; the preparation of the meager
breakfast in the intervals of buttoning up blouses and smoothing
tousled hair; then, as school time approached, the gradual crescendo
of all the noise and confusion into the climax of the scampering
departure of the three older ones, blue-nosed and shivering in their
worn, insufficient wraps; the gradual decrescendo as she dressed the
thin, white bodies of the younger ones, and strove to invent some game
for them which would keep them active and yet allow her to do the
morning housework--all these tossing, restless waves were the merest
surface agitation. Beneath their irregular, capricious rhythm she
felt physically the steady, upward swelling of her expectation as the
clock-hands swung towards ten.

Till then she knew nothing, nothing of what might have happened during
the portentous night behind her, for every night, like every day, was
portentous. There was no calamity which was impossible. The last four
years had proved that. Anything might have happened since the last news
had come in from the outer world--anything, that is, except the end of
the war. That alone had come to seem impossible.

And yet, in spite of that great flooding tide of her expectancy, when
the ring at the door finally came, it always gave Jeanne an instant’s
violent shock. Her heart flared up like a torch with hope and fear, its
reflection flickering on her thin cheeks as she hurried to the front of
the house and, her delicate work-worn hands shaking, opened the door on
Fate.

First her eye leaped to see that there was not the official-looking
letter without a stamp which she had received so many times in her bad
dreams, the letter from his captain announcing that sous-Lieutenant
Bruneau--no, it had not come yet. She had another day’s respite.

She could breathe again, she could return the white-haired postman’s
“Bonjour, Madame Bruneau.”

Next, even on the days when there was a letter from André, she tore
open the Paris newspaper and read in one glance the last communiqué.
After this her hands stopped shaking. No, there was no specially bad
news. No horror of a new offensive had begun. Then she could even smile
faintly back at the tired old face before her and say, in answer to
his inquiry, “Oh yes, all pretty well, thank you. My own are standing
the winter pretty well. But my brother’s children, they have never
really recovered from the nervous shock of that dreadful experience of
bombardment, when they lost their parents, you know. Of course none of
the six are as plump or as rosy as I would like to have them--Michel is
growing so fast.”

“You ought to thank God, Madame Bruneau, that they are too young. There
are worse things than being thin and white.”

“Yes, yes, Monsieur Larcade,” she apologized hastily for her unmerited
good fortune compared to his, “what news from your sons?”

“Still no news from Salonique. A letter this morning from Jules’s
surgeon. They are not sure whether he will ever be able to walk again.
The wound was so deep--an injury to the spine.”

A wordless gesture of sympathy from her, a weary shifting of his heavy
letter bag, and he went on to the next door, behind which another
woman waited, her hands shaking; and beyond that another one, and then
another.

If it was to be a good day, if there had been a letter from André,
she opened it hurriedly and read it all in one look, even though the
children clung clamoring to her skirts, even though the fire smoked and
threatened to go out. Then she set it carefully in the bosom of her
dress and put on the faded caps and patched wraps and darned mittens to
take the children out for their outing, while she did her marketing.
They were too small to leave alone, even for half an hour.

During the painful experience which her marketing always was, she felt
warmed and sustained by the letter tucked inside her dress. Everything
cost more than the month before, twice as much as the year before when
her income was the same minute sum as now.

But André was alive and unhurt.

She looked longingly at the beefsteak which the older boys needed so
much, her own children, and bought instead the small piece of coarse
pork which must make a stew for them all, those other children of her
blood whom the war had thrown on her hands.

But she had a letter from her husband in her bosom.

She priced the cauliflowers, sighed, and bought potatoes, and less of
them than she had hoped to have, the price having gone up again. She
was horrified to find that rice cost more than it had, an impossible
sum per pound, even the broken, poor-quality grade. She would try
macaroni as a substitute. There _was_ no macaroni, the woman clerk
informed her. There was none at all, at any price. Jeanne turned
to another item on her list. The doctor had said that the children
absolutely must have more fruit in their diet--_fruit_! Well, perhaps
she might be able to manage prunes. They were the cheapest fruit--or
they had been. “Prunes, Madame Bruneau? They are only for the rich.”
She named a price which made Jeanne gasp.

She calculated the amount she would need for one portion each for her
big family. It was out of the question. She was really aghast, and
appealed desperately to the woman clerk, “What do _you_ do?” she asked.
“We do without,” answered the other woman briefly.

“But your children? Growing children can’t be in good health without
_some_ fruit.”

“They’re not in good health,” answered the other grimly. “My Marthe has
eczema, and the doctor says that Henri is just ripe for tuberculosis.”
Her voice died.

Jeanne closed her eyes during the instant’s silence which followed.
The woman clerk shoved aimlessly at the sack of dry beans which stood
between them.

Then they both drew a long breath and began to add up together the cost
of Jeanne’s purchases. She took out her pocketbook, paid soberly, and
went on to the baker’s.

Here a girl weighed out for her with scrupulous care the exact amount
of bread allowed for the family, and took the bread tickets along
with the money in return. At the sight and smell of the fresh-baked
bread the children began their babbling, begging, clamorous demand
which Jeanne dreaded almost more than anything else. She winced away
from this daily pain, crying out, trying hastily to stop them before
the tears came, “No, no, my darlings, you can’t have any now. No,
Jacqueline, _don’t_ tease auntie! Annette dearie, you know if mother
lets you have any now there will be just that much less for you at
lunch and dinner. You _know_ I can’t give you any of what belongs to
the others.” She was imploring them not to ask her for the food she
could not give them. Anything but that! The daily repetition of this
poignant little scene was intolerable. If she could only leave them
at home, could only spare them that daily ordeal of the visit to the
bakeshop where their poor little heads were turned at the sight and
odor of all that food. Not to have _bread_ to give them!

She was almost on her knees before their shrill, insistent demands when
she felt her husband’s letter crackle against her breast, and stopped
short. She was on the edge of losing her head, like men after too long
shell fire when they walk dazedly straight into danger. She knew better
than this! The tragic manner would never do for little children who
cannot live and thrive save in gaiety and lightness of heart. She was
only making a bad matter worse.

She summoned all her strength, put her hand on the letter in her bosom,
and burst resolutely into a hearty laugh. “Oh, children, just see that
funny picture of the little kitten. He’s chasing his tail, do you see,
round and round and round. Annette, do you know how he feels! See, I’ll
hang this string down your back, and you try to catch it by turning
around quickly. See, the faster you turn the faster it gets away from
you. Maurice wants to try? Well, we’ll just hurry home, and I will give
you a piece of old red curtain cord and you _each_ can have a tail and
be a little kitten. And when the big ones get back from school you can
show them how to chase tails. Won’t they laugh?”

They were safe in the street by this time, the bakeshop forgotten, the
loaf in the basket hidden, the children looking up, laughing through
their tears at Jeanne, breathless, pouring all her vitality into her
cheerful face and bright voice, so that there was not enough left to
keep her knees from shaking under her.

Back to the house quickly, lest the wretched war coal, half black
stones, smoking sullenly in the cook-stove, should go out in their
absence. The invention of the curtain-cord tails was still valid, even
after the pork had been put on to cook with the potatoes. The children
were still playing, still unexacting. Jeanne would have time to read
her letter.

She put the paper-thin potato parings to cook in an old kettle for
their three hens, who occasionally presented them with a priceless
fresh egg; and, wiping her cold, wet, potato-stained hands (was it
possible that those hands had ever played Beethoven and Debussy?), took
her treasure out of her bosom and unfolded the double sheet, warm still
from the warmth of her body.

This time she read it slowly, taking in, absorbing to the last cell of
her consciousness, every one of those words, written by candlelight,
underground, to the thunder of shells exploding over the _abri_. They
were plain, homely words enough, rambling, unstudied familiar phrases,
such as husband and wife write to each other when they have shared
their daily life for many years and still try to go on sharing what may
be left to them of days in common.

It had rained, as usual, all day long, but the new trench boots had
kept his feet almost dry. Yet he was ashamed of the price she must
have paid for them--she, straining every nerve to buy food to keep
the children well. He was a man, a grown-up, and the war had done for
them forever. Let him shift as best he could. Everything ought to go
to the children, there would be little enough. But they must have the
best chance we could give them. Whoever else was responsible for the
war certainly the children had nothing to do with it. And they must
be the torch bearers. Did she remember how he had always wondered why
no musician had ever composed music on that theme? He could conceive
such a noble symphonic poem called “The Torch Bearers.” He had wondered
all day if the coal had finally arrived at Méru. It went beyond his
imagination how she could manage at all, the days when the coal supply
was so low. In their little underground _abri_ they had a stove--yes, a
real stove. It had been left there by some American ambulance men who
had used the _abri_ before them. So they were really warm, part of the
time, and occasionally almost dry. But the wood they were burning--it
made him sick. It was what his men tore out from the ruined village
houses near which the trenches ran. Of course it could never be used
for houses again, but when you know what it is to have a home of your
own, and how it grows to be a part of you, it is not much fun to put
parts of other people’s houses into your stove. No, he did not need
any new socks. He did not need _any_thing; she need not go on trying
to slip in some new luxury for him out of her impossibly small budget.
Did she remember that poor Dury, the youngest of his men? He had been
shot yesterday; a stray ball, not meant for anybody in particular--such
a silly way to be killed. And now there was the letter to write to his
mother. Heavens, how he dreaded writing the letters to the parents
of men who died or disappeared! He hoped little Maurice’s throat was
better. What a sickly child that poor kid was! He was evidently one who
would have to be nursed along all through his childhood, and since the
war had killed his parents, it fell to his poor aunt to do the job. And
then--“Now, see here, Jeanne darling, don’t kill yourself over that
little boy because you feel so guilty at not loving him more. He’s not
a lovable kid. His own mother, poor nervous thing, never could keep
from snapping at him, and you know your brother cared enough sight more
for Jacqueline than for him. Don’t you blame yourself. Take it easy!”

Jeanne laid the letter down with a little exclamation, half a laugh.
How ever did André know she did not love the little nephew who reminded
her so of the sister-in-law she had never been able to love? She had
not thought that anybody could guess that the child to whom she was
always the gentlest was the one--and here was André, quite casually
as usual, walking into her most secret places! How he knew her! How
he knew the meaning of her smallest gesture, the turn of her most
carefully worded phrase! How near he was to her! How there was no
corner of her life where he did not come and go, at ease, and how she
welcomed him in, how she rejoiced to feel him thus pervading the poor,
hurried, barren inner life of her, which had bloomed so richly when
they had lived it together. How _married_ they were! That was, after
all, an achievement, to have wrested that glory from so horrible a
thing as life had come to be. Let the heavens fall, she had known what
it was to be one with a noble human soul.

She stood up, her thin face glowing, her tired eyes shining, as they
always were after reading André’s letter. It was the only moment of the
day when she felt herself wholly alive.

This was the high tide of her daily life, poor, scanty trickle of life
it was, even at its best, compared to the fathomless deep surge of the
fullness of the days before the war, days when it had seemed natural
that André should be there always, that they should profoundly live
together, that there should be some leisure, and some music mixed with
their work, and warm rooms and clothes and food as simply as there was
air to breathe.

A whiff of acrid coal smoke in her face, a wailing cry from Maurice who
had pinched his finger, a warning half-hour stroke from the kitchen
clock--she came back to the present with a start and strove loyally to
use for that present the little renewal of strength which came from a
momentary vision of the past. She changed the drafts of the stove,
stirred the stew and, gathering the weeping child up in her tired arms,
began to make a funny nonsense song, purporting to be sung by the hurt
finger. Her voice was obliged to pass through a knot in her throat, but
it came out bravely, and in a moment the children were laughing again,
their thin faces turned toward hers like little pale flowers toward the
sun.

Then there was the table to set, of course in the kitchen, since there
was no coal for another fire in the cold house. How Jeanne suffered
from this suffocating necessity to do everything in one small room! It
made an intolerable trial of every smallest process of the everyday
life, to prepare food, and eat it, and play, and wash, and study, and
bathe the children, and dress and undress them--they were like pigs in
a sty, she often thought, working feverishly to keep a little order
and decency in the room which seemed to her fastidious senses to reek
stiflingly of the effluvia of too-concentrated human life.

As she worked she felt, like an inward bleeding, the slow ebbing of
her forces. The good moment of the day had come and gone. There was
nothing to look forward to now till the mail of the next morning.

And this was a good day, one of the best, when there had been
no special activity on the front, when the daily letter from
André arrived on time. But what of the days when the communiqué
announced laconically, “Heavy artillery fire between Fresnes and
Villers-Raignault”? (André was stationed at Fresnes.) Or worse, when
the great offensives began, when all personal letters from the front
were stopped, when day after day the communiqué announced: “Violent
fighting all along the Champagne front.”

The feeble, tired old postman, shuffling on his rounds, was a very
snake-crowned horror to the dry-eyed women, waiting and hoping and
dreading to see him come. Always there were cases of hysteria at such
times; old Madame Vielé, who shrieked out suddenly in the market-place
that she had seen her son fall dead before her; Marguerite Lemaire,
who, returning from Paris on the night train, had found her husband in
the compartment with her, had kissed him, held his hand, wept on his
breast--and suddenly she was alone, with the train rushing on through
the darkness to Méru, where she was met by the news of his death.

At such times Jeanne braced her shivering limbs and throbbing nerves
to steady rigidity and bore her burden as though she had the strength
of eternity in her heart. Scraps of phrases from André’s letters came
before her eyes, as voices speak to tranced saints. As she worked she
saw, written before her, “Whoever is responsible for the war, the
children are not.” Or again, “We are all evil creatures, God knows,
and our motives must be mixed in this war because they are mixed in
everything else. But with whatever of virtue there is in me, I am
fighting for what I think best fit to survive in the world I wish my
children to inhabit.” Or again, for her own comfort, “Dearest darling
Jeanne, the very powers of hell cannot take away from me the ten years
of supreme happiness you have given me.”

The days went by, one, two, three, four, five, with no letters, with
no words at all beyond the steady advance of the Germans. The nights
went by, the long, long nights, not black and empty, but filled with
dreadful lightning visions of what might be happening, even at that
instant, as she lay in her bed. Jeanne felt no fatigue, no hunger, no
consciousness of her body at all, at such times. It happened once,
after one of these long, numb days, that she cut her hand deeply, and
did not know she had done it till she saw the smears of blood on her
skirt. Her first thought was that it was the only skirt she possessed
and that she must not spoil it with her blood, because there was no
money to buy another.

It was that very evening, after she had tied up the wound on her hand
and was beginning to undress the younger children, interrupting herself
frequently to help Jacques with his Latin, that she heard the front
door of the house open and shut.

She went as cold as ice. Her heart stopped beating, her hair stirred
itself on her head. It had come. Some one had brought a telegram with
the bad news.

She put the children on one side, quietly, opened the kitchen door,
and stepped out into the cold twilight of the hall.

André stood before her, a shadowy figure in the obscurity, pale,
unshaven, muddy, smiling, a strange, dim, tired, infinitely tender
smile. His arms were outstretched toward her.

For a moment--a long, silent, intense moment of full life--she knew
nothing but that he was there, that she held him in her arms, that his
lips were on hers. Nothing else existed. There was no war, no danger,
no fear, no wonder how he could have come. There was nothing in all
her being but the consciousness that they were together again. She was
drowned deep in this consciousness; the blessed flood of it closed over
her head.

Presently the door of the kitchen opened, and the littler ones trooped
out to find her. They could live but so few moments, those littler
ones, without sucking at her vitality.

She fell at once into the happy confusion of the usual leave of
absence, crying out to the children, “See, see, papa has come! See,
Uncle André is here!”

It seemed to her the children were singularly apathetic, not instantly
molten joy as she had been. The younger ones were even a little shy
of him, who was, after all, an unknown man to them; and more than a
little jealous of him, who came to share with them their _maman_, their
auntie, the source and light and warmth of their exacting little, new
lives. It seemed to Jeanne that they looked even more queerly at him
this time than usual, and that there was in the sidelong glances of the
older ones an element of strangeness. Their father was becoming a mere
legend to them, she thought with a painful contraction of her heart.

She found herself talking a great deal, in a quavering, excited voice,
gone back to her old exuberance of expression. It seemed to her that
she finally asked André how it could have happened, his coming, and
that he explained across the children’s clamor that his regiment had
gone down to the gates of hell in the offensive and that what was left
of them had been given a twenty-four hours’ leave of absence.

Oh, yes, she understood with no further words, she who knew by heart
every way of communication between his sector on the front and her
door; he had reached Paris by the 3.20 train, had hurriedly changed
stations, had caught the 4.40 train out and reached Méru at twenty
minutes of seven. And oh, she had not been at the station to meet him!
But of course he had not had time to telegraph. So, if it were only a
twenty-four hour leave, he would need to take the midnight train back.
He had come so far, so far, for five hours with her.

She thought this all out while flying to get him some food, to open the
can of meat, preciously kept for just such a golden chance, to heat the
potatoes which were left, to set Jacques to grinding some coffee, real
coffee, such as they never used, to uncover the sacred little store of
sugar, wide, to his hand! And at the same time to talk to the children.
How unresponsive children are, she thought; how quickly they outgrow
whatever is not immediately present. It is hard to remember that four
years, so long in the life of a child, is all eternity to a young
child; his utmost imagination cannot compass it. She said all this to
André, to explain the children. How absurd to try to explain them to
André, smiling his deep understanding of them and of her, far deeper
than she could ever fathom!

Then she was driving them all upstairs to bed, leaving the kitchen to
André, the big tin bathtub and the clean underclothes which she had
always ready for the first ceremony of every return from the trenches.
If only there were more hot water! But she always let the fire go down
toward night, to save coal. For her there was no need of fire. She
could put a blanket around her shoulders and wrap her legs in a rug of
an evening as she sat writing her letter to André by the poor light
of the one lamp, filled with war kerosene, which smoked and glimmered
uncertainly.

She hardly knew what she was doing as she hurried the children into
their beds in the cold rooms. Hurry as she might, there were six of
them; and many, many, of the priceless, counted-out moments had passed
before she ran down the stairs, as madly as any girl racing to meet her
lover.

André was there, at table, washed, shaven, a little color in his lean,
deeply lined cheeks under their warlike bronze. When he heard her step
flying down the hall, he pushed back from the table and, his napkin
across his knees, a good light of laughter in his eyes, he held out his
arms to her again, crying like the traditional bridegroom, “Alone at
last!”

So it began on the light note, that incredible good fortune of their
evening together, she perching on his knee, watching him eat, filling
his plate, pouring out more coffee, talking, laughing--yes, really
laughing as she only did when André was there on permission. When
he had finished she cleared the table, made up the fire, recklessly
putting in lump after lump of the sticky resinous coal and opening
all the drafts. They sat down together before the stove, beside the
surly ill-conditioned lamp, and their tongues were loosened for much
talk--light, deep, sad, hopeful, brave, depressed, casual, tragic. They
poured out to each other all the thousand things which do not go into
letters, even daily ones. She heard of the unreasonable irritability of
his captain, and the plain, restoring good faith of the old colonel;
the heroism of the men, the cowardly slinking back to a clerical
position at the rear by young Montverdier, the son of their _député_.
He heard of her struggles with the boys’ Latin and mathematics, and
with the little ones’ alphabet. “Just think, André, Annette, the
obstinate little thing, will not admit that B’s name is B. She says
it is ‘loof’ and she knows it is because she dreamed it was--haven’t
children the most absurd ideas?”

She spoke out with a Frenchwoman’s frankness of her moments of horror,
of despair, of doubt of the war’s meaning, of revulsion from the
industrial system which had made the war possible. There deep answered
deep; he brought to her the envenomed hatred of war which fills the
trenches to the brim. “It is not glorious; it is infamous. I am not a
hero; I am a murderer. But there are worse things. It would be worse to
have peace, with the German ideas ruling the world. No, every one of us
would better die than allow that to happen. Yes, I have had too--who
hasn’t?--moments of doubt, moments when the horror of our stupidity
was too great, when I have thought that any other way would be better
than war. But not since the Russian affair, not since the Germans
marched into defenseless Russia. _Russian children will be brought up
in German schools_ to form a new generation of Germans. I would kill
my children with my own hands before having them added to those ranks.
No, since Russia, there seems no other way but to go on to the end, and
to make that end an end to war forever.” The worn phrases, dubious and
tarnished on the facile tongues of public orators, repeated there in
that dimly lighted room by that worn man and suffering woman, became
new, became sacramental.

They clung to each other for a moment again, and gradually felt the
tension of the spirit melt away in the old cure of simple bodily
nearness. His cheek against hers--at the sensation she became just a
woman again.

She stirred, she smiled; she told an amusing story of their queer old
neighbor,--she interrupted herself to say reproachfully, “But I _do_
love little Maurice! I don’t love him _as_ I love the other children,
but just because of that I love him more, because I pity him so.”

“That,” he said with conviction, “must be true because nobody but you
would be capable of such mixed language and emotions.”

She had laughed at this and, remembering suddenly that she had a box
of cigarettes for him, jumped up to get it. He was amazed. Where, in
Heaven’s name, had she been able to get cigarettes in France in 1918?
Ah, that was her little secret. She had her ways of doing things! She
teased him for an instant and then said she had begged it for him from
an American Red Cross camion driver who had stopped there to get water
for his radiator. The recollection brought to mind something painful,
which she poured out before him like all the rest. “Oh but, André,
what do you think the woman in uniform sitting by him said? Of course
she couldn’t have known that I understand English, but even so-- She
looked at me hard, and she said, ‘These heroic Frenchwomen people make
so much fuss about, I notice you don’t see any of _them_ turning out to
run cars or distribute clothes to refugees. Much they bother themselves
for France. They stay right inside their comfortable homes and do
fancywork as usual.’ Yes, she said that. Oh, André, it _hurt_! I was
ashamed that I could be hurt so cruelly by anything but the war.”

This led to talk of America. “All our hope is with them, Jeanne.
You mustn’t mind what one woman said--very likely a tired woman too,
fretted by being in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. All
the future is in their hands, and, by God, Jeanne, I begin to believe
they realize it! They are really coming, you know; they are really
here. I see them with my own eyes, not just doctors and nurses and
engineers and telegraphists, as at first, but real fighting men. They
are in the sector next to ours now. They fight. They fight with a sort
of exuberance, as though it were a game they were playing and meant to
win. And they all say that their country is back of them as France is
back of us, to the last man, woman, and child. They’re queer fellows.
They remind me a little of our Normans and a little of our Gascons, if
you can imagine the combination. Whenever there is a difficulty they
have a whimsical, bragging little phrase, that they drawl out in their
sharp, level voices, ‘Never you mind, the Yanks are coming.’ It made
me smile at first, at their presumption, at their young ignorance.
But there is something hypnotizing about the way they say that jerky,
unlovely phrase, like the refrain of a popular song that sticks in
your mind. It sticks in mine. ‘The Yanks are coming!’ The Russians
have gone, or rather the Russians never were there, but ‘the Yanks are
coming!’”

Jeanne had been looking at him hard, scarcely hearing what he said,
drawing in a new conviction from his eyes, his accent, the carriage
of his head. “Why, André! you are really hoping that it may end as it
ought!” she interrupted him suddenly, “You are really hoping--” He
nodded soberly. “Yes, my darling, I really hope.”

He was silent, smiled, drew her to him with a long breath, his arm
strong and hard about her. They might have been eighteen and twenty
again. “And I know,” he whispered, “that you are the loveliest and the
best and the bravest woman in the world.”

The tears ran down her cheeks at this--happy tears which he kissed
away. When she could speak she protested, saying brokenly that she
was weak, she was helpless in the face of the despair which so often
overcame her, that she was perilously poised on the edge of hysteria.
“Ah, who isn’t near that edge?” he told her. “Not to go over the edge,
that is the most that can be done by even the strongest in these days.”
“No, no,” she told him. “You don’t know how weak I am, how cowardly,
how I must struggle every day, every hour, not to give up altogether,
to abandon the struggle and sink into the abyss with the children.”
“But you don’t give it up,” he murmured, his lips on her cheek. “You
do go on with the struggle. I always find the children alive, well,
happy. _You_ weak! _You_ cowardly! You are the bravest of the brave.”

The clock struck ten.

They went upstairs hand in hand to look at the sleeping children and to
try to plan some future for them. Jeanne told of her anxieties about
Michel, the oldest, who had silent, morose fits of brooding. “He’s old
enough to feel it all. The littler ones only suffer physically.” André
put his father’s hand on the sleeping boy’s forehead and looked down
at him silently, the deep look of strength and comprehension which was
like the wine of life to his wife. She thought it was a benediction
to the boy which no priest could better. André took his watch out of
his pocket and laid it on the table. “See here,” he said, “I’m going
to leave this here for Michel when he wakes in the morning. I only use
the old wrist watch nowadays. It may please the little fellow to know I
think him big enough to have my watch.”

“He’ll make it a talisman--it’s the very thing!” she agreed, touched by
his divining sympathy for the boy’s nature.

They roamed then through the cold deserted rooms of the much-loved
little home, unused because of lack of fuel, but the wan, clustering
memories were too thick even for their tried and disciplined hearts.
They went back into the smoky kitchen, shivering.

       *       *       *       *       *

The clock struck eleven.

As it struck twelve, Jeanne turned back from the door, the lamp in her
hand, the last echo of his footsteps faint in her ears. She stood for a
moment, trance-like, staring at the yellow flame of the lamp, her eyes
wide. Already it seemed impossible that he had been there.

She felt horribly, horribly tired, hardly any other sensation but that.
She went upstairs, undressed rapidly, blew out the light, and lay down
beside little Maurice. She slept with him, that she might be sure to
watch over him carefully enough, fearing that she might not rise in the
cold so readily for him as for the others. Almost at once she fell into
a profound sleep.

She woke with a start, to find herself standing up in her nightgown in
the darkness, on the cold floor, in the middle of the room, the cold,
damp wind blowing in on her from the black opening of the window. And
at once she knew what had happened--knew it as though some one had just
finished telling her.

André had not been there at all that day. He had been killed, that was
it, and her intense longing had brought his spirit straight to her for
a moment, and all the rest she had imagined.

Staring into the darkness, she saw it all with perfect lucidity. That
was why he had looked so dim and shadowy when she had first seen him in
the hall; that was why his smile had been so strange. That was why the
children had seemed so queer; she understood now, it was because they
saw no one there and because they heard her talking to herself.

Did she, then, often talk to herself, that they should do no more than
look sidelong and askance when she did it? Yes, she must have been
slowly going near the edge of dementia during the last weeks, and quite
over the edge into madness the last five days of suspense.

A deadly chill shook her, so that her teeth chattered loudly in the
darkness, audible even to her ears. What did it matter? André had been
killed. There was no meaning in anything any more.

The cold settled around her heart, an icy flood, and congealed in her
veins. She felt herself to be dying and ran out to meet delivering
death.

She heard Andre’s voice saying clearly, “Whoever else is responsible
for the war, the children are not. They must not suffer if we can help
it.”

There was a pause when the world seemed to be slowly shifting under her
feet.

She knew what was coming. In an instant it came. In all that was left
alive of her, she knew that she must try to go on living for the
children.

She turned her back on escape, and in a spiritual agony like the
physical anguish of child-birth, she put out her hands to grope her way
back to the fiery ordeal of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

Her hands, groping in the darkness, fell on something cold and metallic
and round--Andre’s watch, which he had left for Michel!

But if his watch was there, _he had been there himself_.

She ran trembling to the match box, struck a light, and looked. Yes,
there was the watch, and a burned-out cigarette beside it.

The match went out suddenly in the cold, damp breath from the window.

André had come, then! And she--she was in such a pass that she was
incapable of believing that her husband had been with her for an hour.
Stretched on the rack of long separation, her body and brain had lost
the power to conceive of happiness as real. She felt now that she had
not really believed in his presence any of the time. That was why she
had fancied the children looked oddly at him. _She had not been able to
believe it!_

But she did now! It had reached her very self, at last, the knowledge
that he had been there, that he had been of good cheer, that he loved
her, that he thought the war might yet be won for the right, that he
had even laughed, had said--what was that quaint phrase?--“The Yanks
are coming!”

She took the watch up in her hands, laid it against her cheek, and
began to cry, sweet, weak, child-like tears.

She groped her way back to the bed, weeping silently, the watch
clutched tightly in her hand.

She lay down beside the unloved little orphan, whom she loved through
pity; she took him in her arms; she felt the watch cold and hard and
actual against her heart, and, the tears still on her cheeks, she fell
once more asleep, smiling.




FRANCE’S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR


The American public has just heard of Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, the
woman doctor who was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, and
who proved herself so fearless and useful that she was kept there for
two years amid bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. She is being
cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof that women can take men’s
parts, and do men’s work, and know the man’s joy of being useful. But
she is much more than a woman doing a man’s work. She is a human being
of the highest type, giving to her country the highest sort of service,
and remaining normal, sane, and well-balanced.

Long before the tornado of the war burst over the world, Paris knew
her in many varying phases which now, as we look back, we see to have
been the unconscious preparation for the hour of crisis. Personally I
knew of her, casually, as the public-spirited young doctor who was
attached to the Paris _lycée_ where my children go to school, and
who was pushing the “fresh-air” movement for the city poor. People
who met her in a social way knew her as an attractive woman with a
well-proportioned figure, lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one
met once or twice a week at the theater or in the homes of mutual
friends, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk.
Other people who saw her every morning in her laboratory garb, serious,
intent, concentrated, knew her as one of those scientific investigators
who can not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is unsolved.

Those who saw her in the afternoon among the swarming sick and poor of
the _clinique_ of the great Beaujon Hospital, knew her as one of those
lovers of their kind who can not rest as long as the horrible apathy of
public opinion about tuberculosis continues. People who investigated
cures for city ills and who went to visit the model tenement house
for the very poor, near the St. Ouen gate of Paris, knew her as the
originator and planner of that admirable enterprise, whose energy
and forcefulness saw it financed and brought to practical existence.
Observers who knew her in the big international Feminist Conferences
in European capitals, saw an alert, upright, quick-eyed Parisienne,
whose pretty hats showed no sign of the erudition of the head under
them. Friends knew her as the gently bred woman who, although driven
by no material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, comfortable
life of the home-keeping woman for an incessant, beneficent activity,
the well-ordered regularity of which alone kept it from breaking down
her none too robust health. And those intimates who saw her in her
home, saw her the most loved of sisters and daughters, the most devoted
of mothers, adored by the little son to whom she has been father and
mother ever since he was four years old.

No one dreamed of war, but if the very day and hour had been known
for years, Dr. Girard-Mangin could hardly have prepared herself more
completely for the ordeal. Unconsciously she had “trained” for it,
as the runner trains for his race. She was not very strong, slightly
built, with some serious constitutional weakening, but she filled
every day full to the brim with exacting and fatiguing work. She had
two great factors in her favor. One of them was that enviable gift
which Nature gives occasionally to remarkable people, the capacity to
live with very little sleep. The other is even more noteworthy in a
doctor--in whom close acquaintance with the laws of health seems often
to breed contempt.

Dr. Girard-Mangin is that rare bird, a doctor who believes profoundly,
seriously, in the advice which she gives to others, in the importance
of those simple, humdrum laws of daily health which only very
extraordinary people have the strength of mind to obey. Never, never,
she says, as though it were a matter of course, has she allowed
fatigue, or overoccupation, or inertia, or boredom to interfere with
her early morning deep-breathing and physical exercises, and her tonic
cold bath. Never, never, no matter how long or exhausting the day, has
she rolled into bed, dead beat, too tired to go through the simple
processes of the toilet, which make sleep so much more refreshing.
No matter how absorbed in her work, she has always taken the time
at regular intervals to relax, to chat sociably with quite ordinary
people, to go to the theater, to hear music. She has always breakfasted
and lunched with her little boy, has steered him through his spelling
and arithmetic, has gone on walks with him, has been his comrade and
“pal.” This has been as good for her as for him, naturally. Every
summer she has had the courageous good sense to take a vacation in
the country. In short, she is a doctor who takes to her own heart the
advice about rational life which doctors so often reserve for their
patients.

To this woman, tempered to a steel-like strength by self-imposed
discipline and by a regular, well-ordered life, came the great summons.
And it found her ready to the last nerve in her strong, delicate
little hand. You have read, probably, how on that “Day of Doom” when
France called out her men, a _concierge_ received, among mobilization
papers for all the men in the big apartment house, one sending Dr.
Girard-Mangin (presumably also a man, by the name) out to a military
hospital in the Vosges mountains. The notice of mobilization was
handed to a woman, a patriotic woman who long ago had heard the call to
fight for France’s best interests. She had seen her brother go before
her into the fighting ranks and she followed him, into danger and
service. She said a quick good-by to her friends, to her parents, to
her son, her only child, a fine boy of fourteen then, from whom she had
never before been separated.

Will every mother who reads these lines stop here and think what this
means?

There is no need to repeat in detail here what has already been told
of the first three months of her service--her arrival at the field
hospital, disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever-renewed flood
of wounded men, of the astonishment of the doctor in charge. “What,
a woman! This is no place for a woman. But, good God! if you know
anything about surgery, roll up your sleeves and stay!”

There she stayed for three months, those blasting first three months
of the war, when French people put forth undreamed-of strength to
meet a crisis of undreamed-of horror. Out there in that distant
military hospital, toiling incessantly in great heat, with insufficient
supplies, bearing the mental and moral shock of the first encounter
with the incredible miseries of war, that modern, highly organized
woman, separated for the first time from her family, from her child,
fearing everything for them and for her country, had no word, no
tidings whatever, till the 28th of August. Then no knowledge of her
son, of her parents, only a notice that the Government had retreated
from Paris to Bordeaux! Comforting news that, for the first! Next
they knew that Rheims was taken. Then one of the men whose wounds she
dressed told her that he had been able to see the Eiffel Tower from
where he fell. This sounded as though the next news could be nothing
but the German entry into Paris.

All France throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its
normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s
part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among
the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull
her through.

Then the wild period of fury and haste and nervous, emotional
exaltation passed, and France faced another ordeal, harder for
her temperament even than the first fierce onset of the unequal
struggle--the long period of patient endurance of the unendurable. The
miracle of the Marne had been wrought; Paris was saved; the sting and
stimulant of immediate, deadly danger was past; the fatigue from the
supernatural effort of those first months dimmed every eye, deadened
all nerves. Then France tapped another reservoir of national strength
and began patiently, constructively to “organize” the war. And that
daughter of France bent her energies to help in this need, as in the
first.

A rough rearrangement of competences was attempted everywhere on the
front. Dentists no longer dug trenches, bakers were set to baking
instead of currying horses, and expert telegraphers stopped making
ineffectual efforts to cook. It came out then that the real specialty
of the valiant little woman doctor who had been doing such fine work in
the operating-room was not surgery at all. “I’m no surgeon, you know!”
she says, and leaves it to her friends to tell you of the extraordinary
record of her efficiency in that field, the low percentage of losses
in her surgical cases. If you mention this, she says, “Ah, that’s
just because I’m _not_ a born surgeon. I have to take very special
care of my cases to be equal to the job.” It was discovered that
her great specialty was contagious diseases. There was great need
for a specialist of that sort out at Verdun, where, alas! a typhoid
epidemic had broken out. This was before the extra precautions about
inoculations, which were taken later.

Dr. Girard-Mangin was sent to Verdun on November 1st, 1914, and was
there steadily for more than a year, until the 28th of February, 1916.
She found her sick men on mattresses, in tents, on such low ground
that they were often literally in water. Whenever there was freezing
weather, those who cared for them slid about on sheets of ice. Above
them, on higher ground, were some rough old barracks, empty, partly
remodeled, said to have been left there by the Prussians in 1871. “Why
don’t we move the sick up there?” she asked, and was met by all the
usual dragging, clogging reasons given by administrative inertia.

The sheds were not ready to occupy; there were no expert carpenters to
get them ready; it would be impossible to heat them; no order for the
change had come from Headquarters--furthermore, a reason not mentioned,
the sheds, being on higher ground, were more exposed to shell-fire.
Dr. Girard-Mangin had had some experience with administrative inertia
in her struggles for better housing for the poor; and long before the
war she had known what it was to put herself voluntarily in danger--the
scar from a bad tubercular infection on her hand is the honorable proof
of that. She knew that the sick men would be better off in the barracks
on higher ground. So she took them there. Just like that.

She was to have the entire care of the typhoid epidemic, and the only
help which could be given her was to come from twenty men, absolutely
unassorted--such a score as you would gather by walking down any street
and picking up the first twenty men you met. There were several
farm-laborers, a barber, an accountant, miscellaneous factory hands.
The only person remotely approaching a nurse was a man who had had the
training for a pharmacist, but as he had never been able to stay sober
long enough to take his examinations, you may not be surprised that he
was the least useful of them all.

These twenty casually selected human beings went unwillingly up the
hill toward the barracks, ironic, mocking, lazy, indifferent, as human
beings unelectrified by purpose are apt to be. But, although they did
not know it, there marched at their head an iron will, a steel-like
purpose, and an intelligence which was invincible. They took this to
be but a smallish, youngish woman in uniform, and were all in great
guffaws at the comic idea of being under her orders.

Of course, to begin with, she did not know one of her men from another,
but she studied them closely as they worked, driven along by her
direction, setting up the rough camp-stoves, stopping the worst of the
holes in the walls, arranging the poor apologies for mattresses, and
cutting off the tops of gasoline-cans for heating water--for our woman
doctor was asked to take care of several hundred typhoid cases and was
not provided with so much as a bowl that would hold water. Presently,
as they worked, she noticed that there were but nineteen men there. All
day she studied their faces, their bearing, what was written on them
for the seeing eye to read. At night, at supper-time, there were twenty
men. Those clear brown eyes swept around the circle and pounced on a
mild-looking _poilu_ innocently taking his soup with the others.

“Where have you been all day?” she asked him.

He fairly turned pale with astonishment, “Why, how did you--? I’ve been
right here, working!” he tried to bluster her down.

“No, you haven’t. You haven’t been here since a quarter past ten this
morning,” she assured him.

He hung his head a moment, then looked an ugly defiance. “Well, I’ve
been in to Verdun to spend the day with a friend. What are you going to
do about it?”

“I’m going to have you punished for disobeying an officer,” she said
promptly, though so little military had been her beneficent life, that
she had no more idea than you or I or any other woman would have of
what punishment could be given in such a case.

“Officer’s orders!” said the man. “_What_ officer?” All the men laughed.

“I’m your officer,” she said, and went away to telephone to the
military authority in charge of such cases.

“I can’t be expected to have discipline if I’m not backed up,” she
said. “This is a test case. It’s now or never.”

The answer was a non-com and a guard marching up to the barracks,
saluting the military doctor, and, with all due military ceremony,
carrying off the offender for a week in prison. Dr. Girard-Mangin
laughs still at the recollection of the consternation among the
nineteen who were left. “I never had any trouble about _discipline_,
after that,” she says. “Of course there were the utter incompetents
to be weeded out. For that I followed the time-honored army custom of
sending my worst man whenever the demand from Headquarters came for
a good, competent person to be sent to other work! Before long I had
reduced the force of nurses to twelve. Those twelve I kept for all the
time of my service there, and we parted at the end old friends and
tried comrades. I have never lost track of them since. They always
write me once in a while, wherever they are.”

As soon as it grew dark enough, that first night, for the ambulances
to dash out through the blackness, over the shell-riddled roads to the
_abris_, close to the front, the stricken men began to come in. Before
dawn, that very first night, there were fifty-five terrible typhoid
cases brought into the bare sheds. Then it was that Dr. Girard-Mangin,
working single-handed with her score of crude, untrained helpers,
needed all her capacity for going without sleep. Then it was that her
men, seeing her at work, stopped laughing because she was a woman and
admired her because she was a woman doing wonderful things; then,
best of all, forgot that she was a woman, and took her simply for the
matchless leader that she is, in the battle against disease. I think it
was not wholly the guard, marching away the disobedient man to prison,
who was responsible for the fact that our little woman doctor had no
further difficulty with discipline.

The condition of the typhoid patients was harrowing beyond words. A man
going out with his squad to a front-line trench would be stricken down
with fever on arriving. It was impossible for him to return until his
squad was relieved and he could be carried to the rear on a comrade’s
back. There he was, there he must remain, for the three or four or
five days of his squad’s “turn” in the front lines. Can you imagine
the condition of a man with typhoid fever, who has lain in a trench
in the mud for four days, with no shelter from the rain or snow but
an overcoat spread over him, with no care beyond an occasional drink
of water from a comrade’s flask? For your own sake I hope you can not
imagine it. And I will not go into details. Enough to say that such men
were brought in by the tens, by the twenties, by the fifties, filthy
beyond words, at the limit of exhaustion, out of their heads with
weakness and fever and horror.

And there to stem that black tide of human misery stands this little
upright, active, valiant, twentieth-century woman. I think, although we
are not of her nation, we may well be proud of her as a fellow-being
who had voluntarily renounced ease to choose the life which had made
her fit to cope with the crisis of that night--and of the more than
four hundred days and nights following. For cope with it she did,
competently, resolutely, _successfully_. “Oh yes, we gave them cold
baths,” she says, when you ask for details. “We managed somehow.
They had all the right treatment, cold baths, wet packs, injections,
the right food--everything very primitive at first, of course, but
everything you ever do for typhoid anywhere. Our percentage of losses
was very low always.”

“But how? _How?_ How did you manage?” you ask.

“Oh, at the beginning everything was very rough. We had only one
portable galvanized-iron bathtub. Since they were all so badly
infected, there was less danger in bathing them all in the same tub
than in not fighting the fever that way. And then, just as soon as I
could reach the outside world by letter, I clamored for more, and they
were sent.”

“But how could you, single-handed, give cold baths to so many men? It’s
a difficult matter, giving a cold bath to a typhoid patient.”

“I wasn’t single-handed. I had my twelve soldier-nurses.”

“‘_Nurses_,’ you say! Farm-laborers, accountants, barbers, drunken
druggists!”

“But I got rid of that good-for-nothing pharmacist at once! And the
others--the twelve good ones--they learned what to do. They learned how
to give the simple remedies. They learned how to do the other things
enough to give me a report--how to take temperatures, how to give the
baths at the right degree for the right time, how to take the pulse.”

“How could they learn all that?” you ask, amazed.

“I taught them,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, slightly surprised, in the
simplest, most matter-of-fact tone.

You look past her, out there to that hand-to-hand struggle with
death which was carried on by the one indomitable will and the one
well-trained mind, strong enough not only to animate this woman’s body
before you, but those other bodies and ignorant, indocile minds.

“They did it very well, too,” she assures you, and you do not doubt her.

That woman could teach anybody to do anything.

You come back to details. “But how could you get enough water and heat
it for so many baths, on just those rough, small, heating-stoves?”

“Well, we were at it all the time, practically, day and night. We cut
the tops off those big gasoline-cans the automobilists use, and stood
one on every stove up and down the barracks. There wasn’t a moment when
water wasn’t being heated, or used, or carried away.”

“What could you do about intestinal hemorrhages?” you ask. “You
must have had many, with such advanced cases. Your farm-hand nurses
couldn’t----”

“I never tried to teach them how to handle any real crisis, only to
recognize it when it came, and go quickly to fetch me. I taught them
to watch carefully and at the first sign of blood on their patients’
clothing or on the mattress, to take the knapsack out from under the
sick man’s head--they had no other pillow, of course--to lay him down
flat, and then to run and call me, from wherever I was.”

“You must have had almost no sleep at all.”

“That was the greatest help I had, being able to get along on little
sleep. And I got more work out of my helpers than any man could, for
they were ashamed to ask to sleep or rest, seeing that a woman, half
their size, could still keep going.”

“But how about your famous hygienic regularity, the morning exercises
and cold baths and----”

“Oh, as soon as I saw I was in for a long period of regular service, I
took the greatest care to go on with all the things which keep one fit
for regular service.”

“Morning tubs?”

“Yes, morning tubs! I slept--what time I had to sleep--in an abandoned
peasant’s house in an evacuated village near the hospital. I didn’t
take any of the downstairs rooms because people are likely to walk
right into an abandoned house, and part of the time there were soldiers
quartered in the village. Then there was usually somebody in the house
with me. The other times I had it all to myself. I took a room on the
second floor. It happened to have a flight of steps leading up to it,
and another one going out of it into the attic. Of course, I never had
any heat, and the drafts from those two open stairways--well, it was
like sleeping in the middle of a city square. Sometimes I used to take
down a bottle filled with hot water, but the bed was so cold that it
was almost instantly chilled. Many a time I have gone to sleep, all
curled up in a ball, holding my feet in my hands, because they were
so cold, and wakened to find them still as icy. Oh, the cold! That
is the worst enemy of all at the front, the most wearing, the most
demoralizing, the most dehumanizing, because it _lasts_ so. With other
things--hunger, wounds, danger--either it kills you, or it passes. But
the cold is always there.”

She loses herself for a moment in brooding recollection and you wonder
if Jeanne d’Arc ever did anything braver for her country than did this
delicate, stout-hearted modern woman, sleeping alone for months and
months in bitter cold in a deserted house in a deserted village.

She comes back to the present. “And it was there that I took my morning
tubs!” she says with an amused smile. “Of course the water froze hard
into a solid lump. So I put _carbonate de potasse_ into it. This not
only kept it from freezing, but made it alkaline, so that it was an
excellent detergent and stimulant to the skin. I assure you, after a
night in which I had been incessantly called from one bed to another,
when I felt very much done-up, my cold sponge-bath in that water was
like a resurrection. I was made over. Then, of course, no matter how
busy I was, I took care of my feet--changed my stockings and shoes
every day. Feet are one’s weakest point in a long pull like that.”

You venture to remark about a slight limp noticeable when she walks.
“Yes, it comes from a frozen foot--I have to admit it. But it’s really
not my fault. That was later, at the time of the battle at Verdun.
There are always brief crises, when you have to give your all and not
stop to think. I went nine days then without once taking off my shoes.
I hadn’t my other pair by that time. The _Boches_ had them, probably.”

But we have not come to that terrific epic, as yet. Before that second
tornado burst over the heads of the French and of our woman doctor,
there was a long, hard, dull period of four hundred and seventy days of
continuous service--for Dr. Girard-Mangin, being a pioneer woman, felt
in honor bound to do more than a man would do. In the three years and
more of her war service, she has had just three weeks’ furlough, seven
days out of every year to see her son, to see her family, to relax.
Every other day of that long procession of days, she has been on duty,
active, and, as befits a woman, constructively active.

She did not continue resignedly to struggle with tin-can drinking-cups,
and one bathtub for two hundred men. Neither did she rely on the
proverbially slow mills of the Government to grind her out the
necessary supplies. She was not only the army doctor in charge of the
contagious cases in the big sanitary section and hospital near Verdun,
she was also a figure of international importance, the _Présidente_ of
the Hygiene Department of the _Conseil International des Femmes_--her
predecessor had been Lady Aberdeen; she was high in honor at the
big Beaujon Hospital in Paris; she was well-known to the charitable
world in the Society for Hygienic Lodgings for the poor, which owed
so much to her; and she had a wide circle of friends everywhere. The
little _aide major_ sent out from her bare shed-hospital, lacking in
everything, a clarion call for help for her sick men. With years of
experience in organization back of her, she set to work and, in the
midst of the fury of destruction all about her, built up, item by
item, a little corner of order and competent activity. In November,
1914, there was nothing but a windswept shed, with straw pallets and
tin-can utensils. By June of the next year you would have found, if
you had had the courage to go within two kilometers of the front
line, a very well-appointed contagious ward of a military hospital,
where nothing was lacking for the men’s comfort--except a certainty
that the whole thing might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And by
the end of 1915, when there began to be talk of a great German drive
against Verdun, the men under our doctor’s supervision had as good
care as they could have had anywhere, with laboratory and sterilizing
facilities--everything. Dr. Girard-Mangin knew what was the best to be
had in hospitals and she did not rest until somehow, Aladdin-like, she
had made it to blossom, out there in danger and desolation.

All during January of 1916 there was terrific tension along that front.
The monster German offensive against Verdun was in the air. The month
of January passed with desperate slowness, such intent, apprehensive
suspense being torturing for human nerves, especially tired human
nerves which had already been through a long, severe period of trial.

Everybody showed signs of nervousness. Our little doctor stuck
faithfully to her bedrock principles of health, changed her shoes
and stockings every day, took her Spartan baths and rub-downs in her
colder-than-freezing water, went through her deep-breathing and her
setting-up exercises every morning. By such merely feminine reliance on
everyday sanity in life, she kept herself in excellent physical shape,
and did not succumb to the temptation, which is too much for so many
doctors under strain, of hypodermics of strychnin, and other stimulants.

February 1st came. The great storm, looming murkily, had not burst.

February inched itself along, and finally, because human nature can
only stand about so much of strain, nerves began to relax in utter
fatigue.

On February 21st, which was a Monday, it was fairly clear, cold, with
what passes for sunshine in that region. Dr. Girard-Mangin stepped out
in front of her shed-hospital ward, after lunch, and made this remark
to herself: “I don’t believe the _Boches_ are going to pull off that
offensive at all. And to-day is almost sunny. I have a good notion to
go over to the 165th and get my hair washed.” There was an ex-coiffeur
in that regiment who kept on with his trade in his leisure moments.

As this singularly peace-time thought passed through her mind, an
_obus_ screamed its way loudly over her head. “That’s near,” she
thought, “nearer than they generally are.”

Before she could get back into the hospital, the battle of Verdun had
begun.

The blow was delivered with astounding rapidity, and with stunning
force. Up to that time, nothing had ever been conceived like the
violence of the artillery fire. There in the hospital, only two
kilometers back of the front, the noise was so great they could
scarcely hear each other’s voices. Upon those men, and that woman,
unnerved by six weeks of nerve-racking suspense, the great crisis
leaped with murderous fury. It was as though the world were being
battered to pieces about their heads. Each one called up in himself all
the reserve strength his life had given him and, tight-lipped, clung as
best he could to self-control.

The first nerves to give way were in the bakeshop. The bakers suddenly
burst out of their overheated cell and, half-naked in that sharp
cold, clad only in their white-linen aprons and trousers, fled away,
anywhere, away, out of that hell. One of the doctors, seeing this
beginning of the panic, shouted out in an angry attempt to stem the
tide of fear, “Shame on you, men! What are you doing! What would happen
if every one ran away!”

One of the fleeing bakers, dodging with agility the outstretched
restraining arms, called out heartily, with a strong Southern accent,
“Right you are, doctor, perfectly right!” and continued to run faster
than ever. Which typically _Midi_ phrase and action was seized upon by
those gallant French hearts for the laugh which is the Gallic coquetry
in the face of danger.

But even they could not smile at what they next saw. At four o’clock
that afternoon began the spectacle, awful to French eyes, of regiments
of _chasseurs_ fleeing toward the rear.

“So inconceivable was this to me, that I repeated, ‘_Chasseurs!_
Retreating!’”

Dr. Girard-Mangin closed her eyes a moment as if she saw them again.
“Oh, yes, retreating--and no wonder! All their equipment gone, no guns,
no ammunition, no grenades, no bayonets--their bare fists, and those
bleeding, for weapons. Many of them were naked, yes, literally naked,
except for their leather cartridge belts. Everything made of cloth had
been blown from their bodies by the air-pressure from exploding shells.
Many of them were horribly wounded, although they were staggering
along. I remember one man, whose wounds we dressed, who came reeling
up to the hospital, holding his hand to his face, and when he took his
hand down most of his face came with it. Oh, yes, they were retreating,
those who had enough life left to walk. And they told us that Verdun
was lost, that no human power could resist that thrust.”

All that night, and all the next day and all the next night, such men
poured through and past the hospital and during all that time there was
no cessation in the intolerable, maddening din of the artillery. When
you ask Dr. Girard-Mangin how she lived through those days and nights,
she tells you steadily, “Oh, that was not the worst. We could still
work. And we did. More than eighteen thousand wounded passed through
the hospital that week. We had too much to do to think of anything
else. It seemed as though all the men in the world were wounded and
pouring in on us.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the tide of men changed in character somewhat,
and this meant that the end was near. In place of _chasseurs_ and the
ordinary _poilus_, quantities of brown Moroccans, those who fight at
the very front, came fleeing back, horribly wounded, most of them,
yelling wild prayers to Allah, clutching at themselves like children
and howling like wild beasts--impossible to understand or to make
understand. And yet, somehow, the hospital staff, staggering with
fatigue themselves, ministered to them, too, until--this was where
they all touched bottom--until, on Wednesday night, the electricity
suddenly gave out and, in the twinkling of an eye, blackness fell on
the great wards, shaken by the incessant infernal screaming rush of
the shells overhead, by the thunder of the cannon, and filled with the
shrieks of the agonizing wild men from Africa. Blackness like the end
of the world.

Messengers were sent hastily to grope their way down to the nearest
village for candles. But they returned empty-handed. Long before that
the soldiers had carried off all the supply of candles.

“What did you do, all that night?”

Dr. Girard-Mangin makes no light pretense of belittling the experience.

“It was awful beyond anything imaginable,” she tells you gravely. “The
worst thing that can happen to a doctor had come--to be in the midst
of suffering and not to be able to lift a finger to help. All that we
could do was to give them water to drink. We could feel our way to
the water-pitchers. The rest of the time we could only sit, helpless,
listen to the shells and to the wounded men groaning, and wait for
dawn.”

Yes, it is a small, delicately fashioned woman, like you, like me,
who lived through those days and those nights, and came through them
morally and physically intact, into an even greater usefulness. It will
not be a bad thing to remember her the next time we feel “tired” in our
ordinary round of small efforts.

On the next day came the order to evacuate the hospital, bitter proof
of the German success. Dr. Girard-Mangin began sending off her sick
men in relays of four in the only ambulance at her disposal. They were
taken down to the nearest little branch railroad, there put on the
train, and sent--nobody knew where, anywhere out of the range of German
guns.

All day Thursday the evacuation went on. By Thursday evening there
were left only nine men in her ward, men practically dying, far gone
with intestinal hemorrhages, too ill to move. Dr. Girard-Mangin spent
another black night beside her dying men, moving from one to another
in the intense obscurity, raising her voice above the thunder of
the artillery to comfort them, to give them what small help she
could without a light. On Friday all the hospital staff, with a few
exceptions, was to leave. The hospital buildings and equipment were to
be left in the charge of a non-com and two privates; and the men too
ill to transport were to be left with one doctor and two aides. The
rule in the French Sanitary Service for that case is that the youngest
doctor stays with the sick. Dr. Girard-Mangin was the youngest doctor.

But at this, the good head-doctor, who had daughters of his own in
Paris, cried out that there was a limit, that he would never forgive
any man who left a daughter of his alone in such a position, alone
with dying men, alone under fire, alone to face the _Boches_. No, no
Frenchman could be expected to do that.

Dr. Girard-Mangin appealed over his head to the military authority in
command, for permission to do her duty as it fell to her. “I have not
failed in my services so far. It is not just to force me to fail now.”

The military ruling was that the usual rule would hold. The little
woman doctor stayed in danger, and the men went back to the rear. The
parting was a moving one; those comrades of hers who had seen her
working by their sides for so many months took her in their arms and
wept openly as they bade her good-by.

If you venture to ask her what were her own emotions at this moment,
she tells you with a shudder, “Oh, sorrow, black, black sorrow for
France. We all thought, you know, that Verdun had fallen, that the
Germans had pierced the line. No one knew how far they had gone. It was
an awful moment.” Apparently she did not think of herself at all.

All day Friday, she was there with her stricken men and with two
aides. Friday night she lay beside them in the dark. On Saturday the
man left in charge of the hospital buildings went mad from the nervous
tension--they expected almost from hour to hour to see the Germans
appear--and from the hellish noise of the artillery.

I find myself cold as I try to think what another black night meant in
those conditions. Dr. Girard-Mangin passed it and emerged into another
dawn.

On Sunday morning the General in command of that region, amazed to find
that any one was still there, sent peremptory orders that the premises
must be evacuated entirely, dying men and all. They would certainly
be killed if they were kept there. And more, there was no longer
anything to give them to eat. This was a military order and so overrode
the rulings of the Sanitary Service. Dr. Girard-Mangin prepared to
evacuate. She had at her disposition a small _camion_ in which she put
the four men best able to be carried, and her own ambulance in which
she packed the five worst cases, crosswise of the vehicle. To try to
give them some security against the inevitable jolting, she bound
them tightly over and over to their stretchers. Then, with her little
medicine-kit, she got in beside them and told her chauffeur to take
them to Clermont-en-Argonne, and not by the safer route taken by the
_ravitaillement_ convoys, because her sick men could never live through
the length of that trip, but by the shorter road, leading along
directly back of the front.

“I wonder that he was willing to take that dangerous route,” you say.

“I didn’t ask his opinion about it,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin with a ring
of iron in her voice.

So began a wild ride of forty-three kilometers, constantly under fire,
with five men at the point of death. The chauffeur dodged between the
bursting shells, the woman in the car watched her sick men closely and
kept them up with hypodermics of stimulants--which are not administered
by a shaking hand!

You ask respectfully, looking at the white scar on her cheek, “It was
then, during that ride, that you were wounded, wasn’t it?”

She nods, hastily, indifferently, and says, “And when we finally
reached Clermont-en-Argonne, my sick men were no better off, for I
found the hospital absolutely swamped with wounded. I said I was there
with five mortally sick men from Verdun, and they answered, ‘If they
were all Generals we could not take them in. You are mad, Madame, to
bring _sick_ men here.’ So we went on ten kilometers further to a
little village called Froidos, where my face-wound was dressed and
where finally I was able to leave my men, all alive still, in good
hands.”

“They didn’t live to get well, did they?” you ask.

At this question, she has a moment of stupefaction before the picture
of your total incomprehension of what she has been talking about; she
has a moment’s retrospective stare back into that seething caldron
which was the battle of Verdun; she opens her mouth to cry out on your
lack of imagination; and she ends by saying quietly, almost with pity
for your ignorance, “Oh, I never saw or heard of those men again. There
was a great deal too much else to be done at that time.”

Have you lost track of time and place in that adventure of hers? It
is not surprising. She was then in the little village of Froidos, on
the afternoon of Sunday, February 27th, almost exactly a week after
the battle began--and after almost exactly a week of unbelievable
horror--after four nights spent without a light in a great hospital
full of wounded men--after a ride of nearly fifty kilometers constantly
under fire, with mortally sick men. And she now turned, like a
good soldier who has accomplished the task set him, to report at
headquarters for another.

Her headquarters, the _Direction du Service Sanitaire_ was at
Bar-le-Duc. Without a moment’s rest or delay, she set out for
Bar-le-Duc, she and her chauffeur, half-blind with lack of sleep. They
arrived there at midnight. She reported herself at the hospital, so
large that in normal times it holds three thousand wounded. “I have
just brought in the last of the sick from the military hospital at
Verdun,” she said, to explain her presence. They were astounded to
hear that any one had been there so lately. Every one had thought that
certainly the Germans were there by that time.

“Please, is there a place where I may sleep a few hours?” she said.

But there was no place, not one. The great hospital was crowded to the
last inch of its space with wounded--halls, passageways, aisles, even
the stairs had wounded on them. Finally some one gave her a blanket
and she lay down on the floor in the little office of the head-doctor
and slept till morning--five or six hours. Then she went out into the
town to try to find a lodging. Not one to be had, the town being as
full as the hospital. She had not taken her clothes off, naturally, nor
her shoes.

“Oh, then I did feel tired,” she says. “That morning, for the first
time, I knew how tired I was, as I went dragging myself from door to
door, begging for a room and a bed. It was because I was no longer
working, you see. As long as you have work to do, you can go on.”

At last a poor woman took pity on her, said that she and her daughter
would sleep together on one narrow bed, and let her have the other one.

“I was so glad, so glad,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, “to know I was to
have a real bed! I was like a child. When you are as tired as that, you
don’t think of anything but the simple elementals--lying down, being
warm, having something to eat--all your fine, civilized ideas are swept
away.”

She went back toward the hospital to get what few things she had been
able to bring with her, and there she saw her chauffeur waving a paper
toward her. “We are to be off at once,” he said, and showed her an
order to leave Bar-le-Duc without delay, taking two nurses with them,
and to go with all speed to the hospital at Vadelaincourt. They were
crowded with wounded there.

“Then, at once, my tiredness went away,” she says. “It only lasted
while I thought of getting a bed. When I knew we were going into action
once more, I was myself again.”

By two o’clock that afternoon--this was Monday--they were _en route_
for the hospital, the doctor on the seat by the chauffeur, the two
nurses, hysterical with fear over the shells, weeping inside.

“What a terrible, tragic, inspiring trip that was!” she exclaims, and
almost for the only time during her quietly told narration her voice
quivers, her eyes suffuse. “We were going against the tide of fresh
reserves, rushing out to the front--mile after mile, facing those
strongly marching ranks of splendid young Frenchmen, all going out to
suffer the unimaginable horrors from which I had just come. I could not
bear to look into those eager, ardent faces. I was so proud of them, so
yearning over them! And they were so full of spirit, hurrying forward
to the supreme sacrifice. They shouted out to us again and again, ‘The
battle isn’t over yet, is it? Will we get there in time?’ They laughed
light-heartedly, the younger ones, when they saw me and called out,
‘Oh, the women are fighting out there, too, are they?’ Wave after wave
of them, rank on rank, the best of my country, marching out to death.”

They were delayed by an accident to a tire, being instantly--as is the
rule on military roads, always crammed to the last inch--lifted bodily
into a neighboring field for repairs. No stationing for repairs is
allowed on a road where every one is incessantly in movement. While
the repairs were being made, the car sank deeper and deeper into the
mud, and it was a Herculean undertaking to get it back in the main
thoroughfare. As usual, a crowd of good-natured _poilus_ managed this,
heaving together with the hearty good-will to which all drivers of
American ambulances can testify.

Delayed by this, it was nearly midnight when they drew near their
destination. The chauffeur turned off the main road into a smaller
one, a short cut to the hospital, and sank at once in mud up to his
hubs. From twelve o’clock that night till half-past five in the
morning, they labored to make the few kilometers which separated them
from Vadelaincourt. Once the chauffeur, hearing in the dark the rush
of water against the car, announced that he was sure that the river
had burst its banks, that they had missed the bridge and were now in
the main current. Dr. Girard-Mangin got down to investigate and found
herself knee-deep in mud so liquid that its sound had deceived the
chauffeur. They toiled on, the nurses inside the car wringing their
hands.

By the time it was faintly dawn they arrived at the hospital, where the
hard-worked head-doctor, distracted with the rush of wounded, cried
out upon her for being a woman, but told her for Heaven’s sake to stay
and help. The nurses were taken in and set to work, where at once
they forgot themselves and their fears. But again there was no place
for the new doctor to sleep, the hospital being overflowing with human
wreckage. She did what all ambulance people hate to do, she went back
to the reeking ambulance, laid herself on a stretcher, wet boots and
all, drew up about her the typhoid-soaked blankets of her ex-patients,
and instantly fell asleep. The chauffeur had the preferable place of
sleeping under the car, on another stretcher.

She had no more than closed her eyes, when came a loud, imperious
pounding on the car, “Get up quickly. The _médecin-en-chef_ sends
for you at once; terrible lot of wounded just brought in; every hand
needed.”

She went back through the mud to the hospital, had a cup of hot coffee
and--detail eloquent of the confusion and disorganization of that
feverish week--some plum-cake! By what freak of _ravitaillement_ there
was only plum-cake, she never knew.

Then she put on her operating-apron and cap. She went into the
operating-room at half-past seven in the morning. She operated
steadily, without stopping, for more than five hours. At one o’clock
she felt giddy and her legs failed her. She sat down flat on the floor,
leaning back against the wall. “Here it comes!” she said to herself,
fighting the faintness which dissolved all her members, “Here comes
womanishness!”

But it did not come. She sat thus, setting her teeth and tightening
her will until she conquered it. A new relay of doctors came in. She
staggered off, had more coffee, a piece of chocolate and another piece
of plum-cake! And was told that she would be “off duty” till eight that
evening. Where could she go to rest? Nowhere. Snow lay on the fields,
mud was deep in the roads. There was not a bed empty.

“I sat down in a corner, in a chair, quite a comfortable chair,” she
tells you, “and took down my hair and brushed and braided it. You know
how much that rests you!”

Now, Dr. Girard-Mangin is the last person in the world over whom to
sentimentalize, and I swore before beginning to write about her that I
would try not to do it. But I can not restrain myself from asking you
here if you do not feel with me like both laughing and crying at the
inimitable, homely femininity of that familiar gesture, at the picture
of that shining little warrior-figure, returning in that abomination of
desolation to the simple action of a sheltered woman’s everyday home
life?

Then she went to sleep, there in the “quite comfortable” chair, with
her shoes unlaced but still on her feet. “I had lost my other pair
somewhere along the route,” she explains, “and I didn’t dare to take
those off because I knew I could never get them on again if I did.”

There followed twenty days of this terrific routine, steady work in
the operating-room with intervals of seven hours’ “rest,” with nowhere
to go to rest. “But the food got better almost at once,” she says, in
explanation of her having lived through it. “We couldn’t have gotten
along on plum-cake, of course!”

For nine of those twenty days, she never took off her shoes at all, and
the foot was frozen there which now she drags a little in walking.

On March 23rd, a month after the battle of Verdun had begun, the
_médecin-chef-inspecteur_ came to Vadelaincourt, went through the usual
motions of stupefaction to find a woman doctor there, decided--rather
late--that it was no place for a woman, and sent her to Châlons. For
six months thereafter, she was in the Somme, near Ypres, working
specially among the tubercular soldiers, but also taking her full share
of military surgery. “Just the usual service at the front, nothing
of special interest,” she says with military brevity, baffling your
interest, and leaving you to find out from other sources that she was
wounded again in June of that year.

On the 11th of October, 1916, a remarkable and noteworthy event took
place. For once a Governmental action was taken with intelligence.
The Government, wishing to institute a special course of training for
military nurses at the front, called to its organization and direction,
not somebody’s relation-in-law, not a politician’s protégée, but the
woman in France best fitted to undertake the work. Such an action on
the part of any Government is worthy of note!

The hospital which had been built for charitable purposes on the Rue
Desnouettes was loaned to the Government. What was needed for its head
was some one who knew all about what training was essential for nursing
service at the front. Any good military doctor could have done this
part. Also some one was needed who knew all about what is the life
of a woman at the front. Any good nurse of military experience could
have seen to this. Also there was needed a person with experience in
organization, with the capacity to keep a big enterprise in smooth
and regular running. Any good business man could have managed this.
Furthermore there was needed a person with magnetism who could inspire
the women passing through the school with enthusiasm, with ardor, with
devotion-- I needn’t go on, I think. You must have seen that only one
person combined all these qualifications, and she is the one now at the
head of the hospital-school.

Dr. Girard-Mangin received a call summoning her back to that “work at
the rear” which is such a trial for those who have known the glory of
direct service at the front.

This meant drudgery for her, long hours of attention to
uninteresting but important details, work with a very mixed class of
intelligences--the women in her courses of study vary from peasant
girls to officers’ widows; bending her quick intelligence to cope with
sloth and dullness. It meant, worst of all and hardest of all, living
again in the midst of petty bickerings, little personal jealousies,
mean ambitions. Nothing is more startling for those who “come back
from the front” than to find the world at the rear still going on with
its tiny quarrels and disputes, still industriously raking in its
muck-heap. And nothing more eloquently paints our average, ordinary
life than the intense moral depression which attends the return to
it of those who have for a time escaped from it to a rougher, more
dangerous, and more self-forgetful atmosphere.

For me, no part of Dr. Girard-Mangin’s usefulness is more dramatic
than the undramatic phase of it in which she is now faithfully
toiling. Her coolness under fire, her steadiness under overwhelming
responsibilities, her astonishing physical endurance do not thrill me
more than this prompt, disciplined ability to take up civilian life
again and quiet, civilian duties.

She has organized the hospital ingeniously along original lines, as a
perfect reproduction of what the nurses will encounter at the front:
a series of barracks, a ward to each shed, with the nurse’s little
sleeping-cubicle at the end with its rough but sufficient sanitary
arrangements. Another unit is given over to the operating-room and
its appendages, the sterilizing-room, anesthetic-room, etc. Another
is the administrative building, and contains the offices of the
_médecin-en-chef_, the head-nurse, the pharmacy, the bacteriological
laboratory. At one side are very simple but wholesome sleeping quarters
and study-rooms for the fifty and more nurses who pass through the
school every three months. For Dr. Girard-Mangin only takes them in
hand when they have already completed a course of training in ordinary
hospitals. Even then she weeds out rigorously, in the middle of the
short, intensive, concentrated course, those who do not show the
necessary physical, mental, and moral qualities to fit them for the
grave responsibilities they will have at the front, for nurses from
this hospital go out to direct and run the field hospitals, not merely
to be nurses there.

The work for the doctor at the head is a “grind,” nothing less,
monotonous, like all teaching--an ever-reiterated repetition of the
same thing--no glory, no change, no bright face of danger. The clear
brown eyes face it as coolly, as undaunted, as they faced bursting
shells, or maddened soldiers. The clear-thinking brain sees its vital
importance to the country as well as it saw the more picturesque need
for staying with sick men under fire. The well-tempered will keeps
lassitude and fatigue at bay, keeps the whole highly strung, highly
developed organism patiently, steadily, enduringly at work for France.

There, my fellow-citizens in America, there is a citizen to envy, to
imitate!




LOURDES

_From the Ends of the Earth they come--Old and Young, the Lame and the
Blind--to Ask for the Blessing._


Afternoon. There was not a vacant place left in the long line of
waiting sick, so that at the last, when a little, white-faced blind boy
with dreadful horny growths on his eyes, was handed over the heads of
the crowd, he seemed to have come too late.

His mother’s voice rose anxiously, in reiterated piteous demands to the
stretcher-carriers to make a place for him, any place, where he could
receive the blessing, for it was the day of the greatest pilgrimage of
the year, when twenty-five thousand people sang and prayed together for
the cure of the sick, when the Host was carried in solemn procession to
bless them, lying in long lines up and down the broad esplanade.

“Oh, for the love of God, find a place for him!” she implored, in so
strained a voice of entreaty that the crowd, dense as it was, gave way
a little and allowed her to press forward, back of the wheeled chairs
of the cripples. The stretcher-carrier who had taken the child in his
arms hesitated, looking about him for a vacant spot. He glanced at a
wounded soldier, rigid on his litter, his face as white as it would be
in his coffin; and then turned to a child stricken with a disease of
the bones which paralyzed his legs and made of his hands only twisted,
shapeless stumps, but which still permitted him to sit in one of the
wheeled chairs. His little withered body did not half fill it, and it
was there beside him that the attendant decided to put down the blind
boy.

His mother gave a long sigh of intense feeling and between the closely
packed bodies of the crowd strained forward to be near him.

“I’m here, darling, I’m here,” she said in a voice of concentrated
tenderness.

The blind boy turned his hanging head a little, toward the sound of her
voice and stretched back a thin, waxy-white hand. She managed to touch
it for an instant, but then said, “Not now, darling. You mustn’t turn
back toward Mother. You must join your hands and pray to be cured, pray
for the blessing. You must repeat whatever the priest says.”

For at that moment the powerfully built, bearded priest, with the eyes
of fire and the thrown-back head of born command, strode down the
center of the great open place and stood looking intently about him at
the lines of the white-faced sick, and the immense throngs of pilgrims
back of them. He raised his hands suddenly in a vivid gesture, and
cried in a trumpet-like voice, like a captain leading forward a charge,
“Brothers, pray! Pray for our sick. With all your soul, with all the
strength of your body and mind, pray God for our sick!”

He paused a moment. Every eye was on him.

The blind boy held his face lowered meekly as blind children often do,
as sensitive children who know themselves unsightly always do. His
thin, white neck was bent like that of a victim awaiting the blow,
but he put his little pale fingers together and, turning for a moment,
tried to show to his mother that they were in the attitude of prayer.
She whispered, “Yes, yes, darling, that is right. But not toward me.
Toward where the blessing is coming, so that you may be cured.”

“Lord save us! Lord God save us, for we perish!” prayed the priest in a
loud clear voice of exaltation; and after him all the multitude cried
it aloud, in a great murmur like the voice of a forest, or of the sea.

The blind boy’s lips moved with the rest, but his little face was
clouded and anxious. He whispered to the crippled child beside him:

“Are you blind, too, or can you see?”

“I can see,” said the other, “but I have never walked.”

“Then you must show me where I must put my hands so that they will be
toward the blessing,” begged the blind child.

The other took the thin, transparent fingers between his twisted
stumps, and directed them toward the priest, thrillingly upright,
aspiring visibly toward the sky. “There, you must keep them turned
toward the priest now,” he said with an accent of certainty. “Later on
it will be toward the procession as it moves along, and then at the
last toward the church.”

“You must tell me when to change them,” said the blind boy.

He stretched out his joined hands farther in the direction indicated
by his companion and repeated with the others, after the priest, his
little voice lost in the great upward rush of the supplications of the
thousands around him, “Lord! Lord! Our sole trust is in Thee!”

The priest’s voice soared into a glorious note of song, in which the
multitude joined, their eyes on him, their faces solemn in expectation.
The priest sang a line, the multitude chanted a response; the man’s
voice ran out again, yearning, beseeching, the voice of the multitude
rose thousand-fold in answer. The earth seemed to shake in unison, the
low-hanging, heavy gray clouds to send back the sound. The chanting,
imploring, impassioned voice of the throng seemed more alive than its
multitudinous bodies, rapt into utter stillness.

“Is it thus that I should hold my hands?” whispered the blind boy after
a time.

“No, now the procession has just come into the other end of the
square,” said the crippled child. With an effort he leaned, took the
little white fingers again, and pointed them another way.

“So?” asked the blind child humbly.

“Yes, so,” answered the other. He tried to put his own shapeless stumps
together in the attitude of prayer and began to sing with the pilgrims
now defiling before them in endless lines, “Praise! All praise to Thee!
Praise, all praise to Thee, Lord God!” The pilgrims were passing by,
now, in single file, each with his long white taper, burning yellow in
the gray light of the gray day. Their voices were loud and personal,
each one as he passed being heard for an instant alone. “Glory! Glory
to Thee!” they all sang the propitiatory words together, over and
over, a hundred times repeated--the old wrinkled peasants in their
blouses; the elegant officers in their well-cut uniforms; the stout
elderly merchants; the thin, weedy boys; the white-faced, shaven
priests; the black men from Senegal with bushy, woolly hair; the tall,
fair-haired man from England; the occasional soldier on leave in his
shapeless, faded, blue-gray uniform. Above all their voices rose the
silver bugle-like call of the priest, burning, devouring in its ardor,
“Brothers! Brothers! with all your souls, now. GLORY BE TO THEE! Oh,
Lord, save us, for we perish! Lord, our trust is in Thee. Praised be
Thy name!”

With each clamorous exhortation, repeated clamorously by all those
imploring voices, he lifted the multitude up another step toward the
great moment of awe and faith. The tears were streaming down the faces
of many of the women in the crowd. The little boy’s mother sobbed
loudly, and prayed with all her might.

The march past of the innumerable men, the incessant flickering passage
of their pale-yellow lights, the never-ending procession of their
pale, anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed that every one,
everywhere in the world, was marching together, singing and praying,
hoping against hope for a miracle.

“Isn’t it time to change my hands?” asked the little blind boy
desperately. “I have heard so _many_ people pass. I am very, very
tired.”

“No, it is not yet time to change,” said the other, leaning forward to
look down the esplanade. “The procession with the Host goes very slowly
because it stops before each sick person. They are not near yet.”

“My hands are very tired,” murmured the little blind boy, faintly. But
he held his hands out still, praying with the others, as the priest
directed them. “Lord help us, for we perish. Lord! Thou alone canst
save us! Lord, say but one word and we are healed. Lord, say but one
word. But one word, oh, Lord!”

He held his strengthless hands out as he was told, groping helplessly
for the blessing he so sorely needed; his blind eyes turned docilely in
the direction indicated to him; he repeated meekly in his feeble little
voice whatever words he was told to say--and all around him thousands
and thousands of other helpless, docile, suffering human beings in
similar plight, did the same, desperately, their faces groping up
toward the sky, their joined hands imploring, “Lord save us, or we
perish!”

The pilgrims filed past continually, their eyes staringly fixed on the
feeble light of their tapers, their voices torn out of their bodies by
the ever-deepening fervor and hope of the shouted, passionate commands
of the priest, calling, “Brothers! With all your soul pray for our
sick! Lord, say but one word and they are healed! But one word, oh,
Lord!”

“The blessing is very long in coming,” faltered the blind boy timidly,
his face even whiter than at the beginning, his lips blue.

The pilgrims passed constantly, the heavy tramp of their feet shaking
the chair on which sat the little paralyzed boy and the blind child,
their hands outstretched. The men’s voices were hoarse and deep now,
trembling with fatigue and emotion.

The perspiration streamed down the face of the priest as in piercing
tones he exhorted the multitudes, “Brothers, with all your soul, pray!
_Pray!_”

Presently, because he was a weak, sick little child, and because the
blessing was so long in coming, the little blind boy fell asleep, his
head on the shoulder of the paralyzed child.

Then all the care and anxiety and humiliation and sorrow left his
little white face. It was perfect in a perfect peace.

The blessing had come.


_Evening._

Scattered all over the vast stretch of the esplanade, thousands
of little lights flickered and moved about in the rainy darkness,
all that could be seen of the immense multitude gathering for the
evening procession. The top of the great, horseshoe-shaped, marble,
inclined plane up which they were later to defile, was so high above
the ground that not a sound reached there of all those human voices
talking together in the dark, calling to each other, as people tried
to find their friends in the obscurity, and to form groups that they
might march together. The little lights they held were only slightly
sheltered from the gusts of wind-driven rain by cheap paper shades and
they flickered and flared up, and many were extinguished. Although many
went out and were lighted again only once more to have the wind puff
them into blackness, the number of lighted ones grew fabulously as the
crowd assembled. The little yellow spots of life spread further and
further, till around the foot of the huge inclined plane was an ocean
of lights, heaving formlessly, with a futile, aimless motion like the
sea, humanity lost in the darkness.

Then a faint murmur came up through the rain and darkness. Speaking
voices are not heard far, but voices raised in song have wings. The
crowd was beginning to sing.

It was also beginning to take shape. From the foot of the inclined
plane out into the black esplanade, streamed two long files of light,
purposeful, with the sharp, forward-piercing line of the arrow. The
procession was beginning to form.

The murmur rose into a chant as the crowd, hearing the first notes,
took it up, singing as they fell into line. The first of the lights
advanced up the ascent toward the top, which was blazing with light
from the illuminated front of the lofty church. Far, far behind,
stretching twice around the immense esplanade and disappearing into the
distant blackness of the endless avenue, the flickering lights were now
in two lines, moving forward steadily.

The sound of voices grew louder, the advancing files were visible now,
masses intensely black against the night.

The wind roared, the rain beat down. The voices suddenly rang out clear
and vibrant, high above the confused roar of the singing multitudes
below.

Then the glimmering blur of the faces in the reflected light of the
candles shone through the rain; each dim figure, in a momentary
transfiguration, was resplendent in the flare of light from the church,
the voices shouted loud and strong, drowning out in their instant’s
glory of individual life the hoarse chant of the vast crowd below.
Then each figure passed forward out of the light and began to descend
the inclined plane on the other side, going singing down into the
blackness.

There were so many singing now that, although they all sang the same
chant over and over, a chant in which recurs constantly the acclaiming
shout of “Hail! Hail!” they were not singing in tune together nor even
in time, nor even often the same words at the same time.

As the groups passed, each one was singing in its own fashion on a
different key from those gone before and those following them. When
this was too apparent, they sometimes stopped, listened, caught the
note from the pilgrims nearest to them, and burst out again, this time
in harmony. But for the most part they listened only to their own
voices and to those of their friends, and sang lustily in a hearty
discordance.--and so vast was the throng and so simple the joyful air
they chanted, that from that monstrous discordance rose a strange
and wonderful harmony like no other music in the world, with a deep
pulsation longer than that of any other music, beating time, beating
true.

They passed, shouting out loudly the confident words of their song;
the young faces often laughing gaily in the shaking light of their
candles, stopping to light the blown-out flames at the candles of
their friends; the older people tramping forward resolutely, singing,
often not noting that their one light had been blown out and that they
were walking in darkness--no, not walking in darkness, because of the
infinite number of lights about them, carried by their fellows; the
young girls’ eyes glistening through the rain as they gazed upward
toward the circle of white light at the top of the ascent; the old
men’s eyes turned downward on the darkness to which they would descend;
the occasional priest-leader beating time, marshaling the lines; the
occasional children holding to their parents’ hands, their eyes blank
and trustful, fixed on their candles, their pure lips incessantly
shaping the joyful acclaiming shout of “Hail! Hail!”

Sometimes a group lagged behind, either because of the carelessness of
the young people in it, or the fatigue of the old people, and there was
almost a break in the line of lights. But always as they approached the
moment of transfiguration, the ones who were behind hurried forward
shufflingly to keep the line intact. The line was always intact.

The rain beat down on them, but they sang loudly and joyously,
rejoicing in singing together; the wind tore at their garments and
puffed at their frail, unprotected lights. Many went out. But there
were always enough lights left in each group to light those of the
others--if they wished.

Last of all I saw a strong young man whose light had been extinguished,
holding out his lifeless candle to that of an old, poor, bent woman
who, patiently, patiently, offered him her tiny, living flame.




SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS

(_Near Château-Thierry, July, 1918_)


They were detraining in dense brown crowds at what had been the station
before German guns had knocked it into a shapeless heap of tumbled
bricks; they were pouring in on foot along the road from the west;
and when I made my way along the main street to the river, I found
another khaki-clad line leaving the little town, marching heavily,
unrhythmically and strongly out across the narrow, temporary wooden
bridge, laid hastily across the massive stone pillars which were all
that remained of the old bridge.

An old, white-capped woman, who had been one of my neighbors in the
days before the little town had known German guns or American soldiers,
called out to me: “Oh, Madame! See them! Isn’t it wonderful! Just look
at them! All day like that, all night like that. Are there any people
left in America? And are all your people so big, so fine?”

“Where are they going?” I asked her, taking refuge for a moment in her
doorway.

“To the front directly, the poor boys. They’ll be fighting in two
hours--do you hear the big guns off there banging away? And they so
good, like nice big boys! Their poor mothers!”

I addressed myself in English to a soldier loitering near, watching
the troops pass, “So they are going to the front, these boys?” After a
stare of intense surprise, a broad smile broke over his face. He came
closer. “No, ma’am,” he said, looking at me hard. “No, these are the
Alabama boys just coming back from the front. They’ve been fighting
steady for five days.” He added: “My, it seems good to talk to an
American woman. I haven’t seen one for four months!”

“Where are you from?” I asked him.

“Just from the Champagne front, with the Third Division. Two of our
regiments out there were--” He began pouring out exact, detailed
military information which I would not have dreamed of asking him. The
simple-hearted open confidence of the American soldier was startling
and alarming to one who had for long breathed the thick air of
universal suspicion. I stopped his fluent statement of which was his
regiment, where they had been, what their losses had been, where they
were going. “No, no, I mean where are you from in the States?” I raised
my voice to make myself heard above the sudden thunder of a convoy of
munition-camions passing by and filling the narrow street from side to
side.

“Oh, from Kansas City, Missouri. It’s just eight months and seven days
since I last saw the old town.” (Thus does a mother count the very days
of the little new life of her child.)

“And how do you like France?”

“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. The climate’s not so bad. And the towns
would be well enough if they’d clean up their manure-piles better.”

“And the people, how do you get on with them?”

The camions had passed and the street was again filled with American
infantry, trudging forward with an air of resolute endurance.

“Well enough, they don’t cheat you. I forgot and left a fifty-franc
bill lying on the table of a house where I’d bought some eggs, and the
next morning the woman sent her little girl over to camp to give it
back. Real poor-appearing folk they were, too. But I’ve had enough. I
want to get home. Uncle Sam’s good enough for me. I want to hurry up
and win the war and beat it back to God’s country.”

He fell away before the sudden assault on me of an old, old man and his
old wife, with the dirt, the hunted look, the crumpled clothes, the
desperate eyes of refugees: “Madame, Madame, help us! We cannot make
them understand, the Americans! We want to go back to Villers-le-Petit.
We want to see what is left of our house and garden. We want to start
in to repair the house--and our potatoes must be dug.”

I had passed that morning through what was left of their village. For a
moment I saw their old, tired, anxious faces dimly as though across the
long stretch of shattered heaps of masonry. I answered evasively, “But
you know they are not allowing civilian population to go back as yet.
All this region is still shelled. It’s far too dangerous.”

They gave together an exclamation of impatience as though over the
futilities of children’s talk. “But, Madame, if _we_ do not care about
the danger. We never cared! We would not have left, ever, if the
soldiers had not taken us away in camions--our garden and vineyard just
at the time when they needed attention every hour. Well, we will not
wait for permission; we will go back anyhow. The American soldiers are
not bad, are they, Madame? They would surely not fire on an old man and
his wife going back to their homes? If Madame would only write on a
piece of paper that we only want to go back to our home to take care of
it--”

Their quavering old voices came to me indistinctly through the steady
thudding advance of all those feet, come from so far, on so great,
so high, so perilous a mission; come so far, many of them, to meet
death more than half-way--the poor, old, cramped people before me,
blind and deaf to the immensity of the earthquake, seeing nothing but
that the comfort of their own lives was in danger. I had a nervous
revulsion of feeling and broke the news to them more abruptly than I
would have thought possible a moment before. “There is nothing left to
Villers-de-Petit. There is nothing left to go back to.”

Well, they were not so cramped, so blind, so small, my poor old people.
They took the news standing, and after the first clutch at each other’s
wrinkled hands, after the first paling of their already ashy faces,
they did not flinch.

“But the crops, Madame. The vineyards. Are they all gone, too?”

“No, very little damage done there. Everything was kept, of course,
intact for camouflage, and the retreat was so rapid there was not
enough time for destruction.”

“Then we will still go back, Madame. We have brought the things for
spraying the vineyards as far as here. Surely we can get them to
Villers-de-Petit, it is so near now. We can sleep on the ground,
anywhere. In another week, you see, Madame, it will be too late to
spray. We have enough for ours and our neighbors, too. We can save them
if we go _now_. If Madame would only write on a piece of paper in their
language that--”

So I did it. I tore a fly-leaf out of a book lying in the heap of
rubbish before the ruins of a bombarded house (it was a treatise on
Bach’s chorales by the French organist Widor!) and wrote, “These are
two brave old people, inhabitants of Villers-de-Petit, who wish to go
back there to work under shell-fire to save what they can of their own
and their neighbors’ crops. Theirs is the spirit that is keeping France
alive.”

“It probably won’t do you a bit of good,” I said, “but there it is for
what it is worth.”

“Oh, once the American soldiers know what we want, they will let us
pass, we know.” They went off trustfully, holding my foolish “pass” in
their hands.

I turned from them to find another young American soldier standing near
me. “How do you do?” I said, smiling at him.

He gave a great start of amazement at the sound of my American accent.
“Well, how do you like being in France?” I asked him.

“Gee! Are you really an American woman?” he said incredulously, his
young face lighting up as though he saw a member of his own family. “I
haven’t talked to one in so _long_! Why yes, I like France fine. It’s
the loveliest country to look at, isn’t it? I didn’t know any country
could be kept up so, like a garden. How do they _do_ it without any men
left? They must be awfully fine people. I wish I could talk to them
some.”

“Who are these soldiers going through to-day?” I asked. “Are they going
out to the front line trenches, or coming back? I’ve been told both
things.”

He answered with perfect certainty and precision: “Neither. They are
Second Division troops, from Ohio mostly, just out of their French
training-camp, going up to hold the reserve line. They never have been
in action yet.”

Our attention was distracted to the inside of a fruit-shop across
the street, a group of American soldiers struggling with the
sign-language, a flushed, tired, distracted woman shopkeeper volubly
unable to conceive that men with all their senses could not understand
her native tongue. I went across to interpret. One of the soldiers in
a strong Southern accent said, “Oh golly, yes, if you _would_ do the
talkin’ fo’ us. We cyan’t make out whetheh we’ve paid heh or not, and
we wondeh if she’d ’low us to sit heah and eat ouh fruit.”

From the Frenchwoman, “Oh, Madame, please what _is_ it they want now?
I have shown them everything in sight. How strange that they can’t
understand the simplest language!”

The little misunderstanding was soon cleared away. I lingered by the
counter. “How do you like our American troops, Madame?” I asked. “Very
well, very much indeed, if only they could talk. They don’t do any
harm. They are good to the children. They are certainly as brave as
men can be. But there is one thing about them I don’t understand. They
overpay you, often, more than you ask--won’t take change--and yet if
you leave things open, as we always do, in front of the shop, they just
put their hands in and steal as they go by. I have lost a great deal in
that way. If they have so much money, why do they steal?”

I contemplated making, and gave it up as too difficult, a short
disquisition on the peculiarities of the American orchard-robbing
tradition with its ramifications, and instead sat down at the table
with the Americans, who gave me the greeting always repeated, “Great
Scott! its good to talk to an American woman!”

A fresh-faced, splendidly built lad, looked up from the first bite
of his melon, crying: “Yes suh, a cantaloupe, a’ honest-to-the-Lawd
cantaloupe! I neveh thought they’d _heahd_ of such a thing in France.”

They explained to me, all talking at once, pouring out unasked military
information till my hair rose up scandalized, that this was their
first experience with semi-normal civilian life in France because they
belonged to the troops from Georgia, volunteers, that they had been in
the front-line trenches at exactly such a place for precisely so many
weeks where such and such things happened, and before that at such
another place, where they were so many strong, etc., etc.

“So we neveh saw real sto’s to buy things till we struck this town.
And when I saw a cantaloupe I mighty nigh dropped daid! I don’t reckon
I’m likely to run into a watermelon, am I? I suahly would have to be
ca’ied back to camp on a stretcheh if I did!” He laughed out, a boy’s
cloudless laughter. “But say, what do you-all think? I paid fo’ty-five
cents for this slice, yes, ma’am, fo’ty-five cents for a _slice_, and
back home in Geo’gia you pay a nickel for the biggest one in the sto’!”
He buried his face in the yellow fruit.

The house began to shake to the ponderous passage of artillery. The
boys in khaki turned their stag-like heads toward the street, glanced
at the motley-colored, mule-drawn guns and pronounced expertly, “The
43rd, Heavy Artillery, going out to Nolepieds, the fellows from
Illinois. They’ve just been up in the Verdun sector and are coming down
to reinforce the 102nd.”

For the first time the idea crossed my head that possibly their mania
for pouring out military information to the first comer might not be
so fatal to necessary secrecy as it seemed. I rather pitied the spy who
might attempt to make coherent profit out of their candor. “How do you
like being in France?” I asked the boy who was devouring the melon.

He looked up, his eyes kindling, “Well, I was plumb crazy to get heah
and now I’m heah I like it mo’ even than I ’lowed I would.” I looked
at his fresh, unlined boy’s cheeks, his clear, bright boy’s eyes, and
felt a great wave of pity. “You haven’t been in active service yet,” I
surmised.

Unconsciously, gayly, he flung my pity back in my face, “You bet yo’
life I have. We’ve just come from the Champagne front, and the sehvice
we saw theah was suah active, how about it, boys?”

They all burst out again in rapid, high-keyed, excited voices, longing
above everything else for a listener, leaning forward over the table
toward me, their healthy faces flushed with their ardor, talking
hurriedly because there was so much to say, their tense young voices
a staccato clatter of words which brought to me in jerks, horribly
familiar war-pictures, barrage-fires meeting, advancing over dead
comrades, hideous hand-to-hand combats--all chanted in those eager
young voices.

I felt the heavy pain at the back of the head which presages a wave of
mortal war-sickness.

In a pause, I asked, perhaps rather faintly, “And you like it? You are
not ever homesick?”

The boy with the melon spoke for them all. He stretched out his long
arms, his hands clenched to knotty masses of muscles; he set his jaw,
his blue eyes were like steel, his beautiful young face was all aflame.
“Oh, you just get to _love_ it!” he cried, shaking with the intensity
of his feeling. “You just _love_ it! Why, I _neveh_ want to go home! I
want to stay over heah and go right on killin’ _Boches_ all my life!”

At this I felt sicker, stricken with the collective remorse over the
war which belongs to the older generation. I said good-by to them and
left them to their child-like ecstasy over their peaches and melons.

The artillery had passed. The street was again solidly filled with
dusty, heavily laden young men in khaki, tramping silently and
resolutely forward, their brown steel casques, shaped like antique
Greek shepherd hats, giving to their rounded young faces a curious air
of classic rusticity.

An older man, with a stern, rough, plain face stood near me. “How do
you do?” I asked. “Can you tell me which troops these are and where
they are going?” I wondered what confident and uninformed answer I
would receive this time.

Showing no surprise at my speech, he answered, “I don’t know who they
be. You don’t never know anything but your own regiment. The kids
always think they do. They’ll tell you this and they’ll tell you that,
but the truth is we don’t know no more than Ann--not even where we are
ourselves, nor where we’re going, most of the time.”

His accent made me say: “I wonder if you are not from my part of the
country. I live in Vermont, when I’m at home.”

“I’m from Maine,” he said soberly, “a farmer, over draft age of
course. But it looked to me like a kind o’ mean trick to make the boys
do it all for us, so I come along, too.” He added, as if in partial
explanation, “One of my uncles was with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”

“How do you like it, now you’re here?” I asked.

He looked at me heavily. “Like it? It’s hell!” he said.

“Have you been in active service?” I used my usual cowardly evasive
phrase.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve killed some of ’em,” he answered me with brutal,
courageous directness. He looked down at his hands as he spoke, big,
calloused farmer’s hands, crooked by holding the plough-handles. As
plainly as he saw it there, I saw the blood on them, too. His stern,
dark, middle-aged face glowered down solemnly on those strong farmer’s
hands. “It’s dirty work, but it’s got to be done,” he said, gravely,
“and I ain’t a-going to dodge my share of it.”

A very dark-eyed, gracefully-built young soldier came loitering by now,
and stopped near us, ostensibly to look at the passing troops, but
evidently in order to share in the phenomenon of a talk in English with
an American woman. I took him into the conversation with the usual
query, “How do you do, and how do you like being in France?”

He answered with a strong Italian accent, and I dived into a dusty
mental corner to bring out my half-forgotten Italian. In a moment we
were talking like old friends. He had been born in Italy, yes, but
brought up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His grandfather had been one of
Garibaldi’s Thousand, so of course he had joined the American army and
come to France among the first.

“Well, there are more than a Thousand of you this time,” I said,
looking at the endless procession defiling before us.

“_Si, signora_, but it is a part of the same war. We are here to go on
with what the Thousand began.”

Yes, that was true, John Brown’s soul and Garibaldi’s, and those of how
many other fierce old fighting lovers of freedom were marching on there
before my eyes, carried like invisible banners by all those strong
young arms.

An elderly woman in well-brushed dowdy black came down the street
toward us, an expression of care on her face. When she saw me she
said, “Well, I’ve found you. They said you were in town to-day. Won’t
you come back to the house with me? Something important. I’m terribly
troubled with some American officers--oh, the war!”

I went, apprehensive of trouble, and found her house (save for a total
absence of window-glass) in its customary speckless and shining order.
She took me upstairs to what had been a bedroom and was now an office
in the Quartermaster’s department. It was filled with packing-case
improvised desks and with serious-faced, youngish American officers
who, in their astonishment at seeing me, forgot to take their long
black cigars out of their mouths.

“There!” said the woman-with-a-grievance, pointing to the floor. “Just
look at that. Just _look_! I tell them and I _tell_ them, not to put
their horrid boxes on the floor but to keep them on the linoleum, but
they are so stupid, they can’t understand language that any child could
take in! And they drag those boxes just full of nails all over the
floor. I’m _sick_ of them and their scratches!”

A big gun boomed solemnly off on the horizon as accompaniment to this
speech.

I explained in a neutral tone to the officers looking expectantly at
me, what was at issue. I made no comment. None was needed evidently,
for they said with a gravity which I found lovable that they would
endeavor to be more careful about the floor, that indeed they had not
understood what their landlady had been trying to tell them. I gave her
their assurance and she went away satisfied.

As the door closed on her, they broke into broad grins and pungent
exclamations. “Well, how about that! Wouldn’t that get you? With the
town bombarded every night, to think the old lady was working herself
up to a froth about her floor-varnish! And we thinking that every
French person is breaking his heart over the invaded regions!”

One of them said, “I never thought of it before, but I bet you my Aunt
Selina would do just that! I just bet if her town was bombarded she’d
go right on shooing the flies out of her kitchen and mopping up her
pantry floor with skim-milk. Why, the French are just like anybody,
aren’t they? Just like our own folks!”

“They are,” I assured him, “so exactly like our own folks, like
everybody’s own folks that it’s quite impossible to tell the
difference.”

When I went away, the owner of the house was sweeping the garden-path
clear of broken-glass. “This bombardment is such a nuisance!” she said
disapprovingly. “I’d like to know what the place would be like if I
didn’t stay to look after it.”

I looked at her enviously, securely shut away as she was by the rigid
littleness of her outlook from any blighting comprehension of what was
going on about her. But then, I reflected, there are instants when the
comprehension of what is going on is not blighting. No, on the whole I
did not envy her.

Outside the gate I fell in at once with a group of American soldiers.
It was impossible to take a step in any direction in the town without
doing this. After the invariable expressions of surprise and pleasure
over seeing an American woman, came the invariable burst of eager
narration of where they had been and what had been happening to them.
They seemed to me touchingly like children, who have had an absorbing,
exciting adventure and must tumble it all out to the first person
they meet. Their haste, their speaking all at once, gave me only an
incoherent idea of what they wished to say. I caught odd phrases,
disconnected sentences, glimpses through pin-holes.

“One of the fellows, a conscript, that came to fill a vacant place
in our lines, he was only over in France two weeks, and it was his
first time in a trench. He landed there at six o’clock in the evening,
and just like I’m telling you, at a quarter past six a shell up and
exploded and buried him right where he stood. Yes, ma’am, you certainly
do see some very peculiar things in this war.”

From another, “We took the whole lot of ’em prisoners, and passed ’em
back to the rear, but out of the fifteen we took, eight died of sudden
heart-disease before they got back to the prisoners’ camp.” (I tried
not to believe this, but the fact that it was told with a laugh and
received with a laugh reminded me gruesomely that we are the nation
that permits lynching of helpless men by the mob.)

From another, “Some of the fellows say they think about the _Lusitania_
when they go after the _Boche_. I don’t have to come down as far as
that. Belgium’s plenty good enough a whetstone for _my_ bayonet.”
(This reminded me with a thrill that we are the nation that has always
ultimately risen in defense of the defenseless.)

From another, “One of our own darkies went up to one of these here
Senegalese and began talking United States to him. Of course the other
darkey talked back in French, and ours said, ‘Why, you pore thing! You
be’n over heah so long you dun forgot yo’ motheh-tongue!’”

From another, “Oh, I can’t stand the French! They make me tired! And
their jabber! I seen some of ’em talk it so fast they couldn’t even
understand each other! Honest, I did.”

From another, “There’s something that sort of _takes_ me about the
life over here. I’m not going to be in any hurry to go back to the
States and hustle my head off, after the war’s over.”

From another, “Not for mine. Me for Chicago the day after the _Boches_
are licked.”

They were swept away by a counter-current somewhere in the khaki ebb
and flow about us, and I found myself with a start next to a _poilu_,
yes a real _poilu_ with a faded horizon-blue uniform and a domed,
battered, blue French casque, such a _poilu_ as had filled the town
when I had lived there.

“Well,” I said to him, “things have changed here. The town’s khaki
now.” He looked at me out of bright brown eyes, smiled, and entered
into conversation. We talked, of course, of the American soldier,
one of whom came up and stood at my elbow. When I stopped to speak
to him, “Gee!” he said, “I wish I could rip it off like that. I can
say ‘combien’ and ‘trop cher,’ but there I stick. Say, what does the
Frenchman say about us? Now, since that little Belleau-wood business I
guess they see we know a thing or two ourselves about how to run a war!
They’re all right, of course; mighty fine soldiers, but Lord! you’d
know by the way any one of them does business, as if he’s all day for
it, that they couldn’t run a war _fast_, the way it ought to be run,
the way we’re going to run it, now we’re here.”

I did not think it necessary to translate all of this to the
bright-eyed little Frenchman on my other side, who began to talk as
the American stopped. “You asked my opinion of the American troops,
Madame. I will give it to you frankly. The first who came over, your
regular army, the mercenaries, made a very bad impression indeed. All
who have come since have made the best possible impression. They are
really astonishingly courageous, and there could be no better, or more
cordial comrades in the world. But oh! Madame, as far as they really
know how to make modern war, they are children, just children! They
make the mistakes we made four years ago. They have so much to learn of
the technique of war, and they will lose so many men in learning it! It
is sad to think of!”

I did not think it necessary to translate all this to the American who
now shook hands with both of us and turned away. The Frenchman, too,
after a look at the clock in the church-tower, made his compliments,
saluted, and disappeared.

I walked forward and, coming to the church door, stepped inside. It was
as though I had stepped into another world. I had found the only place
in town where there were no soldiers. The great, gray, dim, vaulted
interior was empty.

After the beat of the marching feet outside, after the shuffling to and
fro of the innumerable men quartered in town, after the noisy shops
crowded with khaki uniforms, after the incessant thunderous passage
of the artillery and munitions-camions--the long, hushed quiet of the
empty church rang loud in my ears. I wondered for just an instant if
there could be any military regulation, forbidding our soldiers to
enter the church; and even as I wondered, the door opened and a boy in
khaki stepped in--one out of all those hordes. He crossed himself, took
a rosary out of his pocket, knelt, and began his prayers.

Thirty-thousand soldiers were in that town that day. Whatever else we
are, I reflected, we are not a people of mystics.

But then I remembered the American soldier who had said that Belgium
was a good enough whetstone for his bayonet. I remembered the rough,
gloomy farmer who did not want to shirk his share of the world’s dirty
work. Perhaps there are various kinds of mystics.

Once outside the church I turned to look up Madame Larconneur, the
valiant market-gardener who had been one of my neighbors, a tired young
war-widow, with two little children, whom I had watched toiling early
and late, day and night, to keep intact the little property left her by
her dead soldier husband. I had watched her, drawing from the soil of
her big garden, wet quite literally by her sweat, the livelihood for
her fatherless little girls. I wondered what the bombardment of the
town had done to her and her small, priceless home.

I found the street, I found the other houses there, but where her
little, painfully, well-kept house had stood was a heap of stones and
rubble, and in the place of her long, carefully tended rows of beans
and cabbages and potatoes, were shell-holes where the chalky barren
subsoil streaked the surface, and where the fertile black earth, fruit
of years of labor, was irrevocably buried out of sight. Before all
this, in her poor, neat black, stood the war-widow with her children.

I sprang forward, horrified, the tears on my cheeks. “Oh, Madame
Larconneur, how awful! How awful!” I cried, putting out both hands to
her.

She turned a white, quiet face on me and smiled, a smile that made
me feel infinitely humble. “My little girls are not hurt,” she said,
drawing them to her, “and as for all this--why, if it is a part of
getting other people’s homes restored to them”--her gesture said that
the price was not too high.

The look in her sunken eyes took me for an instant up into a very
high place of courage and steadfastness. For the first time that day,
the knot in my throat stopped aching. I was proud to have her put her
work-deformed hands in mine and to feel on my cheeks her sister’s kiss.

It steadied me somewhat during the difficult next hour, when in the
falling twilight I walked up and down between the long rows of
raw earth, with the innumerable crosses, each with its new, bright
American flag, fluttering in the sweet country air. I needed to recall
that selfless courage, for my heart was breaking with sorrow, with
guilt-consciousness, with protest, as I stood there, thinking of our
own little son, of the mothers of the boys who lay there.

A squad of soldiers were preparing graves for the next day. As they dug
in the old, old soil of the cemetery to make a place for the new flesh
come from so far to lie there forever, a strong odor of corruption and
decay came up in puffs and drifted away down toward the little town
lying below us, in its lovely green setting, still shaking rhythmically
to the ponderous passage of the guns, of the troops, of the camions.

At one side were a few recent German graves, marked with black crosses
and others, marked with stones, dating from the war of 1870, that other
nightmare when all this smiling countryside was blood-soaked--and how
many times before that!

Above me, dominating the cemetery, stood a great monument of white
marble, holding up to all those graves the ironic inscription, “Love ye
one another.”

The twilight fell more and more deeply, and became darkness. The dull,
steady surge of the advancing troops grew louder. Night had come, night
no longer used for rest after labor in the sunlight, night which must
be used to hurry troops and more troops forward over roads shelled by
day.

They passed by hundreds, by thousands, an endless, endless
procession--horses, mules, camions, artillery, infantry, cavalry;
obscure shadowy forms no longer in uniform, no longer from Illinois,
or Georgia or Vermont, no longer even American; only human--young men,
crowned with the splendor of their strength, going out gloriously
through the darkness to sacrifice.




“IT IS RATHER FOR US TO BE HERE DEDICATED”

“_It is rather for us to be here dedicated...._”


Out in the wheat-field, golden under a golden sun, I came suddenly
on the young American soldier, lying dead, his face turned toward
the _Bois de Belleau_. He was the stillest thing in all the silent
countryside, ghostly quiet after the four-days’ din of battle, now
gone forward and thundering on the horizon. Compared to his stillness,
the wheat-stalks, broken and trampled as they were, seemed quivering
conscious life; the trees, although half-shattered by the shell-fire,
fluttered their bright leaves, vividly alive; the weeds by the roadside
vibrated in triumph. They were wounded, mutilated, disfigured, but they
had survived. They were alive. Only the soldier had not survived.

All men go a long journey to meet their death, through many days and
months and years. But he and his comrades had gone a longer than any
man before them. They had passed through all those days and months
and years; and more than that, across unending miles of those other
wheat-fields in a far country and across the unending miles of the
ocean they saw for the first time; but far more than that, they had
crossed incalculable gulfs of traditions, of prejudice, of the tyranny
of old, fixed ideas.

He had come a long journey, he had trod a new road, he was fighting a
new fight, this soldier who had turned his back on the limitations of
the past, who was making forward into the future with all the strength
and faith of his young manhood, when he met his sudden destiny and lay
down forever in a wheat-field of France.

There he lay in a blessed, blessed stillness, having done his best.

Being still alive, and so not permitted to lie down by him to rest,
I left him, and returned to a great city, any great city--all great
cities everywhere in the world being the same.

I stood before the door of a shop. I saw an old, thin, work-deformed
woman cowering before a well-fed man with a brutal voice who stood
over her, angrily shouting at her that she had not sufficiently
burnished the brass hinges of the great glass doors. With the rich
abundance of the wheat-fields still golden before my eyes, I saw her
cowering before him, all her sacred human dignity stripped from her
by her need for food, by the fear of more hunger than even she could
endure.

I saw a woman with a bloated, flabby body, strained together into a
cohesion by steel bands, with a bloated, flabby face covered with red
and white. Small glass-like pieces of white stone were thrust into the
pierced flesh of her ears, gleamed on her protuberant bosom, on her
puffed, useless fingers. With the roar of the distant battle still in
my ears, I heard her saying, “The war is lasting too long! Lucette
tells me that it’s impossible for her to get the right shade of silk
for my corset; the only coiffeur who understands my hair has been sent
to the front; and I have not had a bonbon in ten days.”

I saw a wretched, disinherited son of man, shaking with alcoholism,
rotten with disease, livid with hunger, undone with hopelessness,
flung on a bench like a ragged sack of old bones. Only the palsied
trembling of his dirty hands showed that he lived. But with the awful
odor of real death still in my nostrils, I perceived that he was alive,
while the strong young soldier was dead.

I saw a man with a gross, pale countenance, with white fine linen and
smooth black broad-cloth, who stepped confidently forward, not deigning
to lift his eyes to the crowd about him, sure that they would give way
before the costliness of his ring and pin.

In his soft, white hands he held a newly printed newspaper which, open
at the news from the stock exchange, he read with an expression of
eager rapacity. On his way stood a woman in all the fleshly radiance of
her youth, with some of the holiness of youth still left on her painted
mouth. She, looking at him hungrily, desperately, forced his eyes up to
meet hers. With the glory of the dead soldier still in my soul, I saw
the rapacity in his eyes change to lust, I saw an instant’s sickness in
hers go out, quenched by the bravado of despair.

Oh, American soldier, lying still in the wheat-field of France, did you
come so far a journey to meet your death in order that all this might
continue?

  “_Let us here highly resolve that all these dead shall not have died
  in vain...._”




THE DAY OF GLORY

_... if the armistice is signed, a salvo of cannon from the Invalides
at eleven o’clock will announce the end of the war._


The clock hands crept slowly past ten and lagged intolerably
thereafter. The rapid beating of your heart, telling off the minutes,
brought eleven finally very near. Then the clock, your heart, all the
world, seemed to stand still. The great moment was there. Would the
announcing cannon speak? Such a terrible silence as the world kept
during that supreme moment of suspense! It was the quintessence of all
the moral torture of four nightmare years.

And then ... like a shock within your own body it came, the first
solemn proclamation of the cannon, shaking the windows, the houses, the
very sky, with its news. The war was over. The accursed guns had ceased
tearing to pieces our husbands and our sons and our fathers.

Of all the hundreds of thousands of women who heard those guns, I think
there was not one who did not feel instantly, scalding on her cheeks,
the blessed tears--tears of joy! She had forgotten that there could
be tears of joy. The horrible weight on the soul that had grown to be
a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging flood; the horrible
constriction around the heart loosened. We wept with all our might; we
poured out once for all the old bitterness, the old horror. We felt
sanity coming back, and faith and even hope, that forgotten possession
of the old days.

When the first tears of deliverance had passed, and your knees had
stopped shaking, and your heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your
throat, why, then every one felt one common imperious desire, to leave
the little cramping prison of his own walls, to escape out of the
selfish circle of his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving with that
of all his fellows, to make himself physically, as he felt spiritually,
at one with rejoicing humanity.

And we all rushed out into the streets.

I think there never can have been such a day before, such a day of pure
thanksgiving and joy for every one. For the emotion was so intense
that, during the priceless hours of that first day, it admitted no
other. Human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. The
dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. We lived
and drew our breath only in the knowledge that “firing had ceased at
eleven o’clock that morning,” and that those who had fought as best
they could for the Right had conquered. You saw everywhere supreme
testimony to the nobility of the moment, women in black, with bits of
bright-colored tricolor pinned on their long black veils, with at last
a smile, the most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed eyes. They
were marching with the others in the streets; every one was marching
with every one else, arm in arm, singing:

  _Allons, enfants de la patrie,
  Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_

The houses echoed to those words, repeated and repeated by every band
of jubilant men and women and children who swept by, waving flags and
shouting:

  _Come, children of our country,
  The Day of Glory is here!_

Every group had at its head a permissionnaire or two in field uniform
who had been pounced upon as the visible emblem of victory, kissed,
embraced, covered with flowers, and set in the front rank to carry the
largest flag. Sometimes there walked beside these soldiers working
women with sleeping babies in their arms, sometimes old men in frock
coats with ribbons in their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted,
laughing little munition workers still in their black aprons, but with
tricolored ribbons twisted in their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed
ladies, sometimes women in long mourning veils, sometimes ragged old
beggars, sometimes a cab filled with crippled soldiers waving their
crutches--but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing jubilee.
During those few blessed hours there was no bitterness, no evil
arrogance, no revengeful fury. Any one who saw all that afternoon
those thousands and thousands of human faces all shining with the same
exaltation can never entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing
them to be capable of that pure joy.

_The Day of Glory has come._

The crowd seemed to be merely washing back and forth in surging waves
of thanksgiving, up and down the streets aimlessly, carrying flowers
to no purpose but to celebrate their happiness. But once you were in
it, singing and marching with the others, you felt an invisible current
bearing you steadily, irresistibly, in one direction; and soon, as you
marched, and grew nearer the unknown goal, you heard another shorter,
more peremptory, rhythm mingling with the longer shout, repeated over
and over:

  _Allons, enfants de la patrie,
  Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!_

Now people were beginning to shout: “To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To
Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!” Then you knew that you were being swept
along to the Place de la Concorde, to salute the statue of Strasbourg,
freed from her forty years of mourning and slavery.

The crowd grew denser and denser as it approached that heart of Paris;
and the denser it grew the higher flamed the great fire of rejoicing,
mounting up almost visibly to the quiet gray skies:

  _Come, children of our country,
  The Day of Glory is here!_

“To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!”

No evil epithets hurled at the defeated enemy, not one, not one in
all those long hours of shouting out what was in the heart; no ugly
effigies, no taunting cries, no mention even of the enemy--instead a
fresh outburst of rejoicing at the encounter with a long procession
of Belgians, marching arm in arm, carrying Belgian flags and pealing
out like trumpets the noble Brabançonne! We made way for them with
respectful admiration, we stopped our song to listen to theirs, we let
them pass, waving our hats, our handkerchiefs, cheering them, pressing
flowers upon them, snatching at their hands for a clasp as they went
by, blessing them for their constancy and courage, sharing their relief
till our hearts were like to burst!

We fell in behind them and at once had to separate again to allow the
passage of a huge camion, bristling with American soldiers, heaped up
in a great pyramid of brown. How every one cheered them, a different
shout, with none of the poignant undercurrent of sympathy for pain that
had greeted the Belgian exiles. These brave, lovable, boyish crusaders
come from across the sea for a great ideal, who had been ready to give
all, but who had been blessedly spared the last sacrifice--it was a
rollicking shout which greeted them! They represented the youth, the
sunshine; they were loved and laughed at and acclaimed by the crowd
as they passed, waving their caps, leaning over the side to shake the
myriad hands stretched up to them, catching at the flowers flung at
them, shouting out some song, perhaps a college cheer, judging by the
professionally frantic gestures of a cheer leader, grinding his teeth
and waving his arms wildly to exhort them to more volume of sound.
Whatever it was, it was quite inaudible in the general uproar, the only
coherent accent of which was the swelling cry repeated till it was like
an elemental sound of nature.

_The Day of Glory has arrived._

Now a group of English soldiers overtook us, carrying a great, red,
glorious English flag, adding some hearty, inaudible marching song
to the tumult. As they passed, a _poilu_ in our band sprang forward,
seized one of the Anglo-Saxons in his arms, and kissed him resoundingly
on both cheeks. Then there was laughter, and shouts and handshakings
and more embracing, and they too vanished away in the waves of the
great river of humanity flowing steadily, rapidly toward the statue of
the lost city whose loss had meant the triumph of unscrupulous force,
whose restitution meant the righting of an old wrong in the name of
justice. We were almost there now; the huge open _Place_ opened out
before us.

Now we had come into it, and our songs for an instant were cut short
by one great cry of astonishment. As far as the eye could reach, the
vast public square was black with the crowd, and brilliant with waving
flags. A band up on the terrace of the Tuileries, stationed between
the captured German airplanes, flashed in the air the yellow sheen of
their innumerable brass instruments, evidently playing with all their
souls, but not a sound of their music reached our ears, so deafening
was the burst of shouting and singing as the crowd saw its goal, the
high statue of the lost city, buried in heaped-up flowers and palms, a
triumphant wreath of gold shadowing the eyes which so long had looked
back to France from exile.

Ah, what an ovation we gave her! Then we shouted as we had not done
before, the great primitive, inarticulate cry of rejoicing that bursts
from the heart too full. We shook out our flags high over our heads, as
we passed, we cast our flowers up on the pedestal, we were swept along
by the current--we were the current ourselves!

At the base of the statue a group of white-haired Alsatians stood, men
and women, with quivering lips and trembling hands. Theirs was the
honor to arrange the flowers which, tossed too hastily by the eager
bearers, fell to the ground.

As they stooped for them, and reached high to find yet one more corner
not covered with blooms, a splendid, fair-haired lad, sturdy and tall,
with the field outfit of the French soldier heavy on his back, pushed
his way through the crowd.

He had in his hand a little bouquet--white and red roses, and
forget-me-nots. His eyes were fixed on the statue. He did not see the
old men and women there to receive the flowers. He pressed past them
and with his own young hands laid his humble offering at the feet of
the recovered city. He looked up at the statue and his lips moved. He
could not have been more unconscious if he had been entirely alone in
an Alsatian forest. The expression of his beautiful young face was
such that a hush of awe fell on those who saw him.

An old woman in black took his hand in hers and said: “You are from
Alsace?”

“I escaped from Strasbourg to join the French army,” he said, “and all
my family are there.” His eyes brimmed, his chin quivered.

The old woman had a noble gesture of self-forgetting humanity. She took
him in her arms and kissed him on both cheeks. “You are my son,” she
said.

They all crowded around him, taking his hand. “And my brother!” “And
mine!” “And mine!”

The tears ran down their cheeks.




BY DOROTHY CANFIELD


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LITTLE JOURNEYS TOWARDS PARIS (1914-1918)

By W. HOHENZOLLERN, translated and adapted for unteutored minds by
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Graceful essays about the average citizen in his apartment house, in
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HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS      NEW YORK




_The Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged, of_

THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE

COMPILED BY

BURTON E. STEVENSON


has been revised from end to end--590 poems have been added, pages
renumbered, author, title, and first line indices, and the biographical
matter corrected, etc., etc.

The hundreds of letters from readers and poets suggesting additions or
corrections as well as the columns of reviews of the first edition have
been considered. Poets who were chary of lending their support to an
unknown venture have now generously permitted the use of their work.

This edition includes the “new” poets such as MASEFIELD, CHESTERTON,
FROST, RUPERT BROOKE, DE LA MARE, RALPH HODGSON, etc.

  “A collection so complete and distinguished that it is difficult to
  find any other approaching it sufficiently for comparison.”--_New
  York Times Book Review_ on the first edition.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Day of Glory, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher