Henry Beston

“ The color of these villages in Lorraine is rather lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the local buff-yellow stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown tone that goes well with the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown landscape. A glorious sky of silvery white cloud masses, pierced with sunlight and islanded with soft blue, shone over the soldier village. There were no combatants in it when we passed through, only the old poilus who drove the wagons to the trenches and the army hostlers who looked after the animals. ”

“ Thus the French army is the soul of democracy, and the officer understands, and is understood by, his men. The spirit of the French army is remarkably fraternal, and this fraternity is at once social and mystical. It has a social origin, for the poilus realize that the army rests on class justice and equal opportunity; it has a mystical strength, because war has taught the men that it is only the human being that counts, and that comradeship is better than insistence on the rights and virtues of pomps and prides. ”

“ When the wounded had begun to arrive at about midnight, a regiment of Zouaves was at hand to help the regular stretcher-bearers; these Zouaves were all young, "husky" men dressed in the baggy red trousers and short blue jacket of their classic uniform, and their strength was in as much of a contrast to the weakness of those whom they handled as their gay uniform was in contrast to the miry, horizon blue of the combatants. There was something grotesque in seeing two of these powerful fellows carrying to the wagons a dirty blue bundle of a human being. ”

“ Suddenly two forms loomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom I have spoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier. Voices murmured in the obscurity, "Who is wounded?"—"Somebody wounded?" And dreamy-eyed ones sat up in the straw. The stolid one—he could not have been much over twenty-one or two—sat down on the edge of the straw near the fireplace, his face showing no emotion, only a pallor. He had a painful but not serious wound; a small fragment of iron, from a shell that had fallen directly into the trench, had lodged in the bones of his foot. ”

“ In the middle of the mêlée a trench light rose, showing the line of halted gray wagons, the motionless horses, and the helmeted drivers. The whole affair passed in silence. When it was judged that the last shell had fallen, whips cracked like pistol shots, and the line lumbered on again.
The food came to us fresh every day in a freight car fitted up like a butcher's shop, in charge of a poilu who was a butcher in civilian life. "So many men—so many grammes," and he would cut you off a slice. ”

“ The gigantic concrete walls of the bomb-proof shelters, the little forts to shelter the machine guns, and the concrete passages in the rear-line trenches will appear as heavy and massive to future generations as Roman masonry appears to us. There are, of course, many unimportant little links of the trench system, upon whose holding nothing depends and for whose domination neither side cares to spend the life of a single soldier, that have only an apology for a second position. The war needs the money for the preparation of important places. ”

“ A little action, some quarrel of sentries, perhaps, was going on behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river. Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad track running across the un-harvested fields. Gleaming palely through the French window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed the deserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished water-tap above the stone sink. The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke upon my ears. ”

“ The poilu is very fond of sweets. Sometimes swish bang! a big shell comes in unexpectedly, and shopkeepers and clients hurry, at a decent tempo, to the cellar. There, in the earthy obscurity, one sits down on empty herring-boxes and vegetable cases to wait calmly for the exasperating Boches to finish their nonsense. There is a smell of kerosene oil and onions in the air. A lantern, always on hand for just such an emergency, burns in a corner. "Have you had a bad time in the trenches this week, Monsieur Levrault?" says the épicière to a big, stolid soldier who is a regular customer. ”

“ I had arrived at the line where the earth of France completely swallows up the army. This disappearance of life in a decor of intense action is one of the most striking things of the war. All about in the surface of the earth were little, square, sooty holes that served as chimneys, and here and there rectangular, grave-like openings in the soil showing three or four big steps descending to a subterranean hut. Fifty feet away not a sign of human life could be distinguished. ”

“ One phase of the business of violence is the work of the military undertaker attached to each secteur, who writes down in his little red book the names of the day's dead, and arranges for the wooden cross at the head of each fresh grave. Every day along the front is a battle in which thousands of men die.
The eastern hills of France, those pleasant rolling heights above Rheims, Verdun, and old, provincial Pont-à-Mousson, have been literally gorged with blood. ”

“ And through the increasing cold and darkness of late afternoon, troops, cannons, horsemen, and motor-trucks vanished toward the edge of the moor where flashed with increasing brilliance the rays of the artillery.
I saw some German prisoners for the first time at T—-, below Verdun. They had been marched down from the firing-line. Young men in the twenties for the most part, they seemed even more war-worn than the French. The hideous, helot-like uniform of the German private hung loosely on their shoulders, and the color of their skin was unhealthy and greenish. ”

“ When this power of adaptability has been reinforced by a tenacious national will "to see the thing through," men will stand hell itself. The slow, dogged determination of the British cannot be more powerful than the resolution of the French. Their decision to continue at all costs has been reached by a purely intellectual process, and to enforce it, they have called upon those ancient foundations of the French character, the sober reasonableness and unbending will they inherit from Rome.
And a new religion has risen in the trenches, a faith much more akin to Mahomet than to Christ. ”

“ The light of two candles hanging from a shelf in loops of wire revealed a clean, high cellar; a mess of straw was strewn along one wall, and a stack of shovels and picks, some of them wrapped in paper, was banked against the other. In the straw lay three oldish men, fully clad in the dark-blue uniform which in old times had signaled the Engineer Corps; one dozed with his head on his arm, the other two were stretched out flat in the mysterious grossness of sleep. A door from the cellar to a sunken garden was open, and through this opening streamed the intense radiance of the rising fire. ”

“ At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of a rifle box. No Man's Land had widened to some three hundred feet of waving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind passed as over the surface of the sea. About fifty feet from the German trenches was a swathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five stout, wooden posts. So thickly was the wire strung that the eye failed to distinguish the individual filaments and saw only the rows of brown-black posts filled with a steely purple mist. Upon this mist hung masses of weather-beaten blue rags whose edges waved in the wind. ”

“ Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris, bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle. For three days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance squads drove continuously. It was a terrible phase of the conflict to see, but he who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the soul of the war. Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that were spiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in its essence, profoundly animal. ”

“ It was still early in the evening, there was a sound of an orchestra somewhere behind, yet ahead of us, lonely and still, with its shops closed and its sidewalks deserted, was one of the greater streets of Bordeaux. Through the drawn curtains of second stories over little groceries and baker-shops shone the yellow light of lamps. What had happened to the Jean, Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the war began? What tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these silent windows not conceal? And every French city is much the same ”

“ Not only do German atrocities seem barbarous, but their thought also. Consider the respective national conceptions of the idea of war. To the Germans, war is an end in itself, and in itself and in all its effects perfect and good. To the French mind, this conception of war is barbaric, for war is not good in itself and may be fatal to both victor and vanquished. ”

“ The big, high room was lit by one light only, a kerosene hand lamp standing on the teacher's desk, and so smoked was the chimney that the wick gave hardly more light than a candle. There was just enough illumination to see about thirty Algerians sitting at the school desks, their big bodies crammed into the little seats, and to distinguish others lying in stretchers here and there upon the floor. At the teacher's table a little French adjutant with a trim, black mustache and a soldier interpreter were trying to discover the identity of their visitors. ”

“ Every one of these wounded soldiers was saturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly to their overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human relation to ordinary meat. ”

“ Every little while a great shell, falling in the city, would blow a great hole of white in the night, and so thundering was the crash of arrival that we almost expected to see the city sink into the earth. ”

“ And looking at the muddy village-town full of men in uniforms of blue, old uniforms of blue, muddy uniforms of blue, in blue that was blue-gray and blue-green from wear and exposure to the weather, I realized that the old days of beautiful, half-barbaric uniforms were gone forever, and that, in place of the old romantic war of cavalry charges and great battles in the open, a new, more terrible war had been created, a war that had not the chivalric externals of the old. ”

“ But late at night the confused murmur of the battle between life and death had subsided, the lights in the wards were extinguished, and only the candle of the night nurse, seen behind a screen, and the stertorous breathing of the many sleepers, brought back the consciousness of human life. ”

“ There are certain streets in Paris, equally unknown to tourist and Parisian—obscure, narrow, cobble-stoned lanes, lined by walls concealing little orchards and gardens. So provincial is their atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to believe one's self on the fringe of an old town, just where little bourgeois villas begin to overlook the fields; but to consider one's self just beyond the heart of Paris is almost incredible. ”

“ The horse attached to the wagon ahead of me went into a frenzy of fear and backed his wagon into my ambulance, smashing the right lamp. In the twinkling of an eye, the soldiers dispersed. Some ran into the fields. Others crouched in the wayside ditch. A cart upset. Another bomb dropped screaming in a field and burst; a cloud of smoke rolled away down the meadow.
When the excitement had subsided, it was found that a soldier had been wounded. The bodies of the horses were rolled over into the ditch, the wreck of the wagon was dragged to the miry field, and the regiment went on. ”

“ Chapter V The Trenches In The "Wood Of Death"
So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlessly tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war more interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, than as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife. ”

“ They know very well why they are fighting; even the most ignorant French laborer has some idea as to what the affair is all about. The Boches attacked France who was peacefully minding her own business; it was the duty of all Frenchmen to defend France, so everybody went to the war. And since the war has gone on for so long, it must be seen through to the very end. Not a single poilu wants peace or is ready for peace. And the French, unlike the English, have continually under their eyes the spectacle of their devastated land. ”

“ For the war has a smell that clings to everything miltary, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, and cantonments, and saturates one's own clothing, a smell compounded of horse, chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human beings. At the guarded exit of the village to the shell zone was a little military cemetery in which rows of wooden crosses stood with the regularity of pins in a paper. ”

“ The French batteries to our left were firing at the Germans, the German batteries were firing at the French trenches and the roads, and the machine guns rattled ceaselessly. I saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of the slope of the Bois-le-Prêtre—vague masses of moving blue on the brown ways. A storm of shells was breaking round certain points in the road and particularly at the entrance to The Wood. I wondered what had become of the audience at the concert. Various sounds, transit of shells, bursting of shells, crashing of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! ”

“ Hearing it, the soldiers en repos would say, talking of The Wood, "It sings (ça chante) ," or, "It knocks (ça tape) up there to-day." The smoke of the bursting shells hung over The Wood in a darkish, gray-blue fog. But since The Wood had a personality for us, many would say simply, "Listen to The Wood."
The shell expresses one idea—energy. The cylinder of iron, piercing the air at a terrific speed, sings a song of swift, appalling energy, of which the final explosion is the only fitting culmination. One gets, too, an idea of an unbending volition in the thing. ”