War the Creator — Parts 16 - 18

XVI

The camp of Mailly was a busy place.

At the aeroplane sheds the biplanes and Blériots were constantly going and coming, circling in the air, or making ready in long rows upon the level field.

The vast plain was filled with troops of all sorts in seemingly inextricable confusion: chasseurs, on horseback, in pale blue tunics, the Alpine chasseurs, with drooping blue _berets_ on their heads, and leggings;

cuirassiers with their breastplates and long horsehair plumes, and zouaves with embroidered jackets and baggy red trousers.

The Twentieth Regiment, tattered and tired, with many heads bandaged and many with feet through their shoes, dusty, hollow-eyed, marched past, not yet too despairing, as fresh troops greeted them, to cry in answer “_Vive la France!

_” They were not boys now, they were soldiers tempered in the crucible of war.

And among them marched Georges Cucurou, with a Prussian helmet tied to his knapsack with a shoestring—a Prussian helmet with a hole through its brass front!

Already rumors were flying fast from column to column.

Why this concentration of troops?

Why this wide circle swung around the camp of Mailly?

_Mon Dieu!

_ could it be that they were to retreat no longer?

That, at last, they were to make a stand?

A hope like a gaining fire sprang up and swept from man to man.

It was early in the morning of Sunday, September 6, that on the heights south of Mailly the regiment was assembled for review.

To the accompaniment of an incessant, raging bombardment from the German cannon, the colonel read aloud this message from General Joffre, Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces: _Children of France, the hour of the great battle has arrived!

Lift up your hearts!

If you wish your Country everlasting honor, let every man die at his post, if necessary, rather than surrender another inch of ground, and the victory will be ours.

_ It was not Gallic sentimentality now.

It was the voice of a leader who wasted no words.

There was a shout of rejoicing—“_Vive la France!

_” Emotion swept the ranks and men wept without shame.

The tremendous suggestion put into those thousands of minds had a terrible potency.

Georges said that morning he felt as if he were intoxicated; he grew suddenly like a giant.

It seemed as if nothing on earth could possibly resist them, now.

Bread and biscuits were handed out and the Twentieth Regiment was hurried to a wood two miles away.

Already they had begun to move northward.

But again it was their fate to be held in reserve, while the brunt of the attack was given to other troops.

The Twentieth was held in the woods all day, all night, while the shells rained in from every direction.

Most fell in front or behind, but occasionally a “_marmite_” would hit the column with devastating fury, and send its mutilated victims flying.

There was nothing for it, however, but to stay and stay on, till the last man was killed if need were.

Whatever happened, the Germans must _not_ get by!

At dawn, they advanced to the edge of the woods; but, the instant they emerged into the fields, shells and shrapnel poured on them in a torrent.

So they held their post.

Monday passed without their stirring from those woods.

No commissary wagons came with food—nothing could live in the open.

They munched their emergency rations, dry biscuits.

Monday night, Tuesday, Tuesday night, and still they stayed.

A dispatch rider, wounded in the arm, brought orders for them to hold hard and never flinch.

Nothing to eat now but grains of coffee.

The water was gone from their canteens, long ago; but the men stretched out their overcoats in the rain, and drank the pools of water as fast as they collected.

And, always, night and day, the thunder of the German guns about them.

The din was so terrific that the men had fairly to shout to each other—they were almost deaf.

XVII

On Wednesday morning another messenger got through with orders to advance.

From that corpse-strewn wood there emerged a band of men that might have been taken for theatrical desperadoes.

Uniforms in shreds, coats gone, shoes gone, knees sticking through trousers legs, and elbows through sleeves, all plastered with mud to a uniform gray, like khaki; wild-eyed with hunger and reckless now, everyone’s nerves on edge, cursing, weeping, mad, ready for anything except more inaction!

_Forward!

_ The men, famished as they were, yelled at the sound of that welcome word.

Anywhere, out of that infernal wood—anywhere, through any hell, to get at the enemy!

Forward they went on the run like hounds after hare, and the run warmed them up.

The sun came out and they raced on, steaming.

“We didn’t mind the shells at all, then,” said Coco.

“Lying on the ground waiting for them at Bertrix we had nothing to do but be afraid—but now we had no time.

All we thought of was to get at those cursed ‘Bosches’ as fast as we could.

” And so through the bursting shells, across the wide field to rising ground.

It was there, on that hillside, they got a sight of what had happened during those deadly days along the Marne.

First, rows and rows of twisted, limp-lying Frenchmen, dead for long, thrown by the shells into horribly fantastic groups; and sickening heads and limbs lying scattered alone.

Bodies everywhere, mostly resting face up to the sky, eyes open, staring.

In places they were stretched regularly in long straight lines; on other fields the corpses were dotted all about singly.

“One had to jump over them every minute,” said Georges.

Further on, the French dead were mingled with Germans, piled sometimes four high like a football scrimmage.

Then, in a sparsely wooded tract they passed the relics of a bayonet fight—fearful!

Apparently, the French African troops had chased a battalion of retreating Germans up against a wall, and the bodies were, well—the “Turcos” do not stab merely in the breast—they do not stab merely to kill—they stab anywhere, they stab joyfully, like demons.

More and more German dead were passed, leaped over, even trod on where the way was narrow, and still the thundering of cannon came from every side.

It seemed as if the whole world were fighting—as if all the old quiet ways of life had ceased to exist, even in memory.

Still they pushed forward, marched to the west of Vitry-le-François, crossed the Marne on a pontoon bridge at Blacy under a rain of rifle fire, and hurried through a beet field for a crest above the long, white, poplar-lined national road at Couvrol.

The “Bosches” were in retreat!

A motorcyclist, racing from Vitry to Châlons with dispatches, had stopped to yell out the news.

As Georges struggled desperately up through the soft loam, his view was extended over the country about the Marne.

Here, on those same wide rolling plains, Attila and all his Huns had fought his ancestors when France was but a nucleus of scattered Roman settlements; and here that horde had been defeated and driven back to their wildernesses.

Now, no matter in which direction he gazed, he could see the modern barbarians strewing destruction.

Puffs of smoke were in the air everywhere, but thickest about Vitry-le-François.

The shells from the French “75’s” burst beautifully with a cloud of jet black and white.

The fleecy snowy-white puffs, gray red in the center, showed where the shrapnel sent its shower of leaden balls.

But, oftener than all the rest, came the droning “_marmites_” of the German big guns, bursting with heavy thunder in a sudden reddish flash, changing into a spume of drab smoke, edged with white.

To the westward, village after village was smoking.

Machine guns were spitting, crackling along the roads, volleys of rifle fire snapped from every wood.

Up and up went the Twentieth Regiment, till it came to the top of the little hill.

Smack-bang in their faces, a salvo of bullets greeted the men.

Another volley, another!

Georges, staggering back, taken by surprise with the others, as men dropped all about him, caught sight on a low hillside beyond of a deep gray mass of men extended in battle front only a hundred meters away.

There, waiting to hold back the advance, was at least a full regiment of infantry—one of those hundreds of little rear guards that were left absolutely unsupported, to cover the German retreat, and to fight to the death without hope of success.

The Twentieth, rallying instantly, shouted a defiant answer to the German “Hurrahs,” and sent its volley into the enemy.

Beside Georges, a man named Charles Griffe, one of the few of his friends left from Toulouse, suddenly fell, clasping his hands over his head as he crumpled down.

The sudden excitement seemed to hypnotize Georges.

“The blood seemed to boil in my head,” he expressed it.

He didn’t hear the command to fix bayonets at all; the first thing he knew he was running like a machine, yelling with the others, down into the ravine and up the other side, and always with the horror of those points of gleaming steel ahead, climbing zig-zag up the slope toward—what?

It seemed impossible to go against that row of sharp bayonets and live.

XVIII

So much Georges told me; more he would not tell, at first, except that he thought the Germans stopped firing at about thirty meters distance, and began to sing the “_Wacht am Rhein_.

” Now I have always wanted to know the details of a typical bayonet fight—just how the issue is decided, why a Frenchman might not win here, and a German there, and so keep the victory uncertain.

That, in fact, was one of the things I went to Toulouse to find out.

But, to get any vivid picture of that bloody encounter was impossible.

Georges simply shook his head.

“It was too horrible,” he said.

At last he confessed reluctantly that when he saw the men ahead of him bayoneting the Germans, jabbing like madmen, he too gave a jump, and shut his eyes and stabbed at something he had seen in front of him, advancing with a long steel point—something that suddenly stopped singing, and squealed “like a wounded horse,” he said.

“I remember only that I pulled out my bayonet, and felt a jet of warm blood strike my face,” Georges went on, when I forced him.

“Then, I must have almost fainted, I think; I don’t know what happened till I found myself wiping my face, and something was holding me.

It was the bayonet of that German’s that was caught in the wing of my overcoat, somehow—and he was lying on the ground with the blood still coming out of his stomach.

There were lots of our men on the ground, but lots more of Germans.

The rest of them were running; they were two hundred meters away by this time, and our men were after them, sticking them like pigs....

The sight of it made me sick....

When they came back, I was standing there, just leaning on my gun, swaying ...

and it was raining ...

I didn’t know it was raining at all till then ...

but the blood was almost entirely washed off my coat....

Isn’t that enough, m’sieur?

I cant _bear_ to think about it.

”