War the Creator — Parts 13 - 15

XIII

The shells began to fall thicker and faster; the Germans were indubitably near at hand.

But where the devil was the regiment?

There was no knowing, except that it was pretty sure to be getting away from those harrying shells.

Chilled, the boys ran through the dripping woods till they came to a clearing.

Here, looking down, they saw the Germans fording the Meuse!

But not without trouble; a French battery had got their range, and was playing red havoc with them, slinging shell after shell of well-aimed shrapnel.

By dozens they melted away under the fire, and the water was full of bobbing corpses drifting downstream.

“We just burst out laughing,” said Georges.

“We couldn’t help it.

Not that it was so funny to see men killed like that by the hundreds, but, after all _we_ had gone through—after the ghastly way we had been butchered at Bertrix, it really did me good to see those ‘Bosches’ suffering themselves at last!

” He didn’t laugh long.

With the German reckless sacrifice of life, column after column was thrown into the river, until more and more got across.

It was time for the boys to be moving now, and they set out toward the westward, tramped all day, eating nothing but the raw beets they dug up in the fields, and finally found the Seventeenth Corps at Raucourt.

They were just in time to join their regiment as it was ordered forward seven more miles for a new engagement.

There, protected by the French batteries, they bivouacked.

Glad enough was Georges of a chance to sleep.

No fear of the coming battle could keep him awake by this time.

At dawn, while the vigilant searchlights were still playing across the opposite hillside, the French guns started firing, and, without breakfast, Georges’s battalion was ordered forward.

In half an hour the enemy was discovered half a mile away.

In the valley between opposite hills the shells were screeching now over their heads—from the French “75’s” the sound of the whizzing projectiles came high and dry like buzz saws—they burst with the awful battering of near-by thunder.

The German “_marmites_” snorted through the air, and exploded with a deeper, more terrible crash.

The regiment halted, and was deployed in four ranks—the first two lying on the ground, the third and fourth kneeling.

The men were mostly quite cool, but Georges confessed that he himself had hard work controlling his nerves while he waited for that attack.

In ten minutes the enemy appeared from behind rising ground and came on—a long, gray-black line of thousands and thousands of men, a _thick_ line, swarming, multitudinous, nearer and nearer.

“Load!

” coolly commanded the captains; “500 meters.

Ready, now—_fire!

_” Their salvo rang out.

The heavy rows of Germans seemed to hesitate for a moment; but no, they were only stopping to fire.

There came a sudden whistling in the air all about and the bullets flew—“for a terribly long minute,” as Georges described it—then the enemy came on again, and kept on coming, in a broad, thick wave, company after company.

And only a battalion of four companies to resist them!

Georges fired without aiming.

What was the use of aiming at that horde of men?

The boys jumped to their feet, fired again and again, and then, as their comrades dropped about them everywhere, they began to retreat, some picking up the wounded as they went.

At first they withdrew in order, turning back to fire another volley; but when the Germans fixed their bayonets and came at them on the double-quick, the French broke, and ran for it, helter-skelter, this way and that, in a second rout, even worse than the first.

Georges ran with the rest, and the shrapnel followed him, killing men on either hand, in front, behind.

Then, over the rise, came the uhlans, yelling, galloping in to cut them up.

Looking back, Georges saw the cavalry sabering and lancing, and he ran like a deer for his life, ran up the hillside, ran into the woods.

He ran for at least a mile with the thunder of the cannon still in his ears.

When, finally, he stopped to take breath, it was only a fragment of his company that he found near him—some ten or eleven men, among them a sergeant.

Where were the others?

Nobody knew.

The regiment, demoralized, had split up into numberless terrified detachments, and wandered all over the countryside.

Such was the inglorious battle of Raucourt.

Of the week following Georges could give no consecutive account.

He remembers only that he and the others tramped and tramped for miles inquiring of peasants, gendarmes, of the stragglers, everyone, everywhere, the whereabouts of the Twentieth Regiment.

They climbed over hills, they rested in little deserted villages where every house was gutted of furniture, doors open, rooms littered, and here and there a starved cat or two, lean and wild.

The roads were alive with refugees, French and Belgian, all plodding mournfully toward the south, dreary processions of wagons and cattle and weeping women, children, and stony-eyed, sulky men.

No, nobody had seen the Twentieth Regiment.

They tramped from Villers to Malmy, and, apparently (Georges isn’t quite sure where they _did_ go), from Malmy to Maire.

At Le Vivier, or perhaps it was Mont Dieu, they found an infantry regiment, but it was not their own.

The Twentieth should be down Vouziers way, said the officers.

So they trudged on.

More and more stray men had joined Georges’s party.

Few of them had knapsacks, some didn’t even have guns.

Hats of all kinds;

costumes—promiscuous but all disheveled.

They were, by this time, a villainously whiskered lot—ragged, dirty, weary, famished, sullen, desperate—without discipline, without leaders.

Occasionally, in some ransacked village they found stale bread or vegetables that they cooked in the woods; whatever else they ate was begged from the few frightened peasants that still remained on their farms.

There was one village, however, that Georges did remember, and that was Les Alleux.

There he slept in an actual bed.

How Les Alleux happened to be abandoned with all its houses undisturbed—with the clocks still going and the furniture in place, even the beds made up—Georges doesn’t know.

Some sudden alarm had evidently caused the inhabitants to fly at a moment’s notice.

What mainly interested him was that they had left their barnyards full of poultry.

Les Alleux was almost gay.

There were some hundred soldiers collected there, now; all tatterdemalion stragglers from the rout, making the most of their unexpected good luck.

There was almost everything to eat except bread.

Georges fairly gorged himself on hot roast chicken and cheese, made merry with the rabble of soldiery, sang, smoked, and then slept for twelve solid hours, with his boots off on a delectable feather bed _and sheets_.

And, for once, without the din of cannon in his ears.

This, however, was hardly the way to save his country.

Georges’s conscience and the booming of German guns awoke him to his duty next morning.

The mob scattered, fleeing south in a hurry.

Georges’s party, he found when they started, had grown smaller.

“I don’t know whether or not I ought to mention this detail,” he told me, “but at least it will show that I wasn’t quite so bad as the rest.

But I think some of the boys found citizens clothes in the houses there at Les Alleux, and got away in them.

At any rate, they didn’t come along with us.

” His Odyssey ended at a village called Pauvres on the highroad between Rethel and Vouziers.

Here they found what was left of the Twentieth Regiment, and Georges was welcomed like one from the dead.

All received new rifles and accoutrements, and the regiment was reorganized.

Of its three battalions there remained hardly enough to form two—a third was made up of waifs and strays from other divisions.

XIV

The Twentieth Regiment now contained a sad and sorry lot of men, weary, discouraged, shamefaced, and sullen at their double defeat.

But when they heard that the army was to retreat still further, and abandon all this rich, flourishing northern country to the invaders without a blow—why, it was incredible!

What was the matter?

Where were their reënforcements?

Only fifteen days ago they had been marching enthusiastically up through the lovely forest of Argonne.

Now they were going to retreat into Champagne.

But they were too busy with preparations to spend much time sulking.

The officers declared that they would lead their men to victory yet.

So the retreat commenced to the booming accompaniment of the threatening German artillery.

Little did Georges know of cool old General Joffre and his desperate plans.

Little did he imagine that the endless falling back, falling back, falling back through Champagne was to go down into history as a masterpiece of Fabian strategy.

All he understood of that campaign was—day after day of retreating along the hard white roads, then into the fields and digging trenches; night after night standing ready in those clayey shoulder-deep holes, waiting for an attack, while the first line of the rear guard fought constantly with the enemy.

So they did their best to hold back the flood of invaders.

So they struggled with the booming cannon ever following them.

It was hard, sour work!

The men, exhausted with the digging and the marching and the watching, with their few hours’ sleep constantly interrupted by alarms, trudged hopelessly southward, too glum to talk.

Constantly the officers encouraged them—“Just to that hill there, men!

Come on!

” but it took more than their optimism to restore the courage of the troops.

Man after man stopped, absolutely incapable of going further, and slumped down by the side of the road only to be forced on, kicked on again by the corps of gendarmes which followed the march.

If the column halted for a minute, half the men fell instantly asleep as they stood.

The minute the trenches were dug they had to prepare to receive the enemy.

Mighty little food these days, and no fresh meat.

Even water was scarce, as the men were forbidden to drink of springs till they had been inspected.

Georges’s regiment was, for the most part of the retreat, held in the second line of the rear guard, and he was, therefore, in but one actual engagement.

In the general campaign it was called, probably, only “a sharp skirmish.

” But, to Georges, it was one of those crises when life says: “Come!

Move up a notch!

” “I was on sentry duty at the end of the trench where the company was sleeping,” said Georges.

“On Tuesday, the 2nd of September it was, near Souain.

I knew everyone’s life depended on me, and it was a terrible strain.

You know the enemy was always right on our heels, night and day.

M’sieu, I was just all eyes, searching everywhere through the dark.

It must have been about two in the morning, when I thought I saw something moving on the opposite hillside.

At first I wasn’t quite sure.

I had to pull my eyes away deliberately, and rest them on something else—you know how your eyes get when you stare too hard and too long; but then, when I looked again quickly, I was sure.

Yes, the ‘Bosches’ were coming!

It was horrible.

I saw them creeping from one bush to another like snakes.

“I kicked the sergeant who was snoring at my feet and pointed.

Instantly all our men were quietly awakened.

My lieutenant told me to stay where I was and pretend not to see anything; but to choose my man and be ready to fire.

Yes, monsieur; it was a ticklish job; I felt rather queer, I confess.

I knew that I would be the very first one to be shot at.

That was about the longest fifteen minutes I ever spent.

“Well, we let them crawl up, crawl up, to within a hundred meters and then just as they all jumped to their feet, the lieutenant shouted: ‘Fire at will!

’ I was ready for the foremost man, and I let him have it right through the forehead.

Here is his helmet, monsieur; see that hole?

” In the hospital at Toulouse, while I listened to his story, he held up a black helmet, trimmed with brass—with a spiked top.

It had never left him since that day.

Yes, I saw that hole—the hole where he had killed his man.

But, when I saw him look at that German helmet, there was an expression on his face that baffled me.

I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that Coco wasn’t there—Coco, with the lead pencil!

No, this was a new person now on that bed in front of me.

It was Georges Cucurou—and he would never be a boy again!

XV

During that terrible retreat, Georges, had been a part of a working, fighting machine, tried to his utmost in mind and body.

He had been hammered, hammered into shape.

Hunger and fatigue had hardened him.

Every day his nerves had been getting more tough and strong.

If his duty consisted of retreating, digging, sleeping three or four hours a day, going without meat and often Without water or wine, he could do it.

On a post card, scrawled in haste from somewhere (no postmark, no date, no indication of any locality being permitted), he wrote to his aunt: DEAR AUNT: _If we keep on retreating like this, we may perhaps get to Paris.

I should be very glad to see you, of course, but I hope not.

There must soon be an end of all this digging and digging, and victory will be ours.

I am afraid you wouldn’t recognize your Georges.

_ Indeed, she wouldn’t have recognized him, but, not only because for weeks he had the dirt caked in his hands and hair and ears, and his uniform hung on him in rags, but partly too because already in his face there was beginning to show something more unlike the old Coco we had known than all that change in his outward self could make him.

He had learned patience, perseverance, caution, confidence in his officers, and faith in the ultimate victory.

He was uplifted by that great wave of high idealism that was transforming France.

Why that steady retreat, further and further south?

Georges and Georges’s company, now that they were tempered by experience, now that they were raging to attack, couldn’t understand.

But still they retreated and retreated.

Back to Suippes they came.

It was a queer entrance that regiment made into Suippes.

On the road, they had overtaken a troop of refugees who, utterly exhausted, could travel no further.

The peasants had a panic of alarm at sight of the column, thinking that the Germans were already upon them.

It was hard work reassuring them; and it ended in a comedy, the soldiers taking a hand at the migration.

Old women were mounted in the handcarts they had been trying to pull and were given a ride into town.

Soldiers unharnessed the donkeys and put the children on their backs.

They pushed at the wagons, they helped along the graybeards, they carried babies in their arms.

Georges, I think, must have begun to realize that he had grown up when he, a veteran now, marched into Suippes, carrying a big basket for a lad of fifteen who looked up to his soldier protector admiringly, and called him “M’sieu.

” No Frenchman will ever forget that dreadful first week of September, 1914. Every day the Germans grew nearer Paris, every day their cowardly aeroplanes sailed over the capital and dropped their futile threats.

What was the French army doing?

We hoped they were merely luring the enemy toward the forts of Paris where the big guns could smash them.

But could the army hold the enemy back, even with that assistance?

Paris was all nervous apprehension.

Then that astounding news—the German army, almost within striking distance, was swerving to the southeast!

What did it mean?

To Georges Cucurou, retreating before those hammering, hammering guns, that quick change in direction was quite as mysterious.

From Suippes his regiment, without stopping to entrench now, marching day and night, instead of keeping on toward Paris, swung sharply to the east, along the road to Ste.

Menehould.

Then, as suddenly, they turned back again into Châlons.

Heavy cannonading was coming now from almost every direction except the south.

Every man was tense with excitement—battle was in the air—surely _something_ was going to happen, _must_ happen!

But further and further south they marched; and along the roads, now, the automobiles were flying like mad, night and day, some with officers, some flying the Red Cross flag.

Over their heads there were French aeroplanes, every day the sky was never quite free of them.

Georges caught his first sight of a British soldier—a khaki-clad dispatch rider on a motorcycle flying past, and another.

They passed hundreds of Paris autobusses at the Division Headquarters, a long, long line that filled the village street at Sompuis, and ambulances, and cycle companies, and farriers’ wagons, the portable forges glowing red in the evening darkness.

Georges recognized the Senegalese spahis in red flowing robes, he saw the Turcos from Morocco—big children they were, grinning black faces with shiny white teeth.

A wagon flew past, with men inside feeding out telephone wire, hooking it with long poles into the ditch, or over bushes, out of the way, as they galloped on.

Best of all, he began to get fresh meat for dinner, from the portable kitchens that hurried from company to company along the road.

But always, never stopping, night or day, more exciting than all the rest, never forgotten, no matter what happened, in the north, growing ever nearer—the steady rumbling thunder of the German guns.