(Near Chateau-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![106] 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[107] 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[108] 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.[109] 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[110] 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[111] 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.
[112]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,[113] 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[114] 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,[115] 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[116] 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[117] 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[118] 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, ov............