The Marne

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Title: The Marne
A Tale of the War
Author: Edith Wharton
Release Date: January 16, 2013 [eBook #41855]
Language: English
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THE MARNE
A Tale of the War
by
EDITH WHARTON
Macmillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1918
Macmillan and Co., Limited
London · Bombay · Calcutta · Madras
Melbourne
Copyright
THE MARNE
I
Ever since the age of six Troy Belknap of New York had embarked for
Europe every June on the fastest steamer of one or another of the most
expensive lines.
With his family he had descended at the dock from a large noiseless
motor, had kissed his father good-bye, turned back to shake hands with
the chauffeur (a particular friend), and trotted up the gang-plank
behind his mother's maid, while one welcoming steward captured Mrs.
Belknap's bag, and another led away her miniature French bull-dog--also
a particular friend of Troy's.
From that hour all had been delight. For six golden days Troy had ranged
the decks, splashed in the blue salt water brimming his huge porcelain
tub, lunched and dined with the grown-ups in the Ritz restaurant, and
swaggered about in front of the children who had never crossed before,
and didn't know the stewards, or the purser, or the captain's cat, or on
which deck you might exercise your dog, or how to induce the officer on
the watch to let you scramble up for a minute to the bridge. Then, when
these joys began to pall, he had lost himself in others deeper and
dearer. Another of his cronies, the library steward, had unlocked the
book-case doors for him, and, buried for hours in the depths of a huge
library armchair (there weren't any to compare with it on land), he had
ranged through the length and breadth of several literatures.
These six days of bliss would have been too soon over if they had not
been the mere prelude to intenser sensations. On the seventh
morning--generally at Cherbourg--Troy Belknap followed his mother, and
his mother's maid, and the French bull, up the gang-plank and into
another large noiseless motor, with another chauffeur (French, this one)
to whom he was also deeply attached, and who sat grinning and
cap-touching at the wheel. And then--in a few minutes, so swiftly and
smilingly was the way of Mrs. Belknap smoothed--the noiseless motor was
off, and they were rushing eastward through the orchards of Normandy.
The little boy's happiness would have been complete if there had been
more time to give to the beautiful things that flew past them: thatched
villages with square-towered churches in hollows of the deep green
country, or grey shining towns above rivers on which cathedrals seemed
to be moored like ships; miles and miles of field and hedge and park
falling away from high terraced houses, and little embroidered stone
manors reflected in reed-grown moats under ancient trees.
Unfortunately Mrs. Belknap always had pressing engagements in Paris. She
had made appointments beforehand with all her dressmakers, and, as Troy
was well aware, it was impossible, at the height of the season, to break
such engagements without losing one's turn, and having to wait weeks and
weeks to get a lot of nasty rags that one had seen, by that time, on the
back of every other woman in the place.
Luckily, however, even Mrs. Belknap had to eat; and during the halts in
the shining towns, where a succulent luncheon was served in a garden or
a flowery courtyard, Troy had time (as he grew bigger) to slip away
alone, and climb to the height where the cathedral stood, or at least to
loiter and gaze in the narrow crooked streets, between gabled
cross-beamed houses, each more picture-bookishly quaint than its
neighbours.
In Paris, in their brightly-lit and beflowered hotel drawing-room, he
was welcomed by Madame Lebuc, an old French lady smelling of crape, who
gave him lessons and took him and the bull-dog for walks, and who, as he
grew older, was supplemented, and then replaced, by an ugly vehement
young tutor, of half-English descent, whose companionship opened fresh
fields and pastures to Troy's dawning imagination.
Then in July--always at the same date--Mr. Belknap was deposited at the
door by the noiseless motor, which had been down to Havre to fetch him;
and a few days later they all got into it, and while Madame Lebuc
(pressing a packet of chocolates into her pupil's hand) waved a damp
farewell from the doorway, the Pegasus motor flew up the Champs Élysées,
devoured the leafy alleys of the Bois, and soared away to new horizons.
Most often they were mountain horizons, for the tour invariably ended in
the Swiss Alps. But there always seemed to be new ways (looked out by
Mr. Belknap on the map) of reaching their destination; ways lovelier,
more winding, more wonderful, that took in vast sweeping visions of
France from the Seine to the Rhone. And when Troy grew older the
vehement young tutor went with them, and once they all stopped and
lunched at his father's house, on the edge of a gabled village in the
Argonne, with a view stretching away for miles toward the Vosges and
Alsace. Mr. and Mrs. Belknap were very kind people, and it would never
have occurred to them to refuse M. Gantier's invitation to lunch with
his family; but they had no idea of the emotions stirred in their son's
eager bosom by what seemed to them merely a rather inconvenient
deviation from their course. Troy himself was hardly aware of these
emotions at the time, though his hungry interest in life always made him
welcome the least deflection from the expected. He had simply thought
what kind jolly people the Gantiers were, and what fun it was to be
inside one of the quaint stone houses, with small window-panes looking
on old box-gardens, that he was always being whisked past in the motor.
But later he was to re-live that day in all its homely details.
II
They were at St Moritz--as usual.
He and M. Gantier had been for a tramp through the Val Suvretta, and,
coming home late, were rushing into their evening clothes to join Mr.
and Mrs. Belknap at dinner (as they did now regularly, Troy having
reached the virile age of fifteen, and having to justify the possession
of a smoking-jacket and patent-leather shoes). He was just out of his
bath, and smothered in towels, when the tutor opened the door and thrust
in a newspaper.
"There will be war--I must leave to-morrow."
Troy dropped the towels.
War! War! War against his beautiful France! And this young man, his
dearest friend and companion, was to be torn from him suddenly,
senselessly, torn from their endless talks, their long walks in the
mountains, their elaborately planned courses of study--archæology,
French literature, mediæval philosophy, the Divine Comedy, and vistas
and vistas beyond--to be torn from all this, and to disappear from Troy
Belknap's life into the black gulf of this unfathomable thing called
War, that seemed suddenly to have escaped out of the history books like
a dangerous lunatic escaping from the asylum in which he was supposed to
be securely confined!
Troy Belknap was stunned.
He pulled himself together to bid a valiant farewell to M. Gantier (the
air was full of the "Marseillaise" and Sambre-et-Meuse, and everybody
knew the Russians would be in Berlin in six weeks); but once his tutor
was gone the mystery and horror again closed in on him.
France, his France, attacked, invaded, outraged; and he, a poor helpless
American boy, who adored her, and could do nothing for her--not even
cry, as a girl might! It was bitter.
His parents, too, were dreadfully upset; and so were all their friends.
But what chiefly troubled them was that they could get no money, no
seats in the train, no assurance that the Swiss frontier would not be
closed before they could cross the border. These preoccupations seemed
to leave them, for the moment, no time to think about France; and Troy,
during those first days, felt as if he were an infant Winkelried, with
all the shafts of the world's woe gathered into his inadequate breast.
For France was his holiday world, the world of his fancy and
imagination, a great traceried window opening on the universe. And now,
in the hour of her need, all he heard about him was the worried talk of
people planning to desert her!
Safe in Paris, Mr. and Mrs. Belknap regained their balance. Having
secured (for a sum that would have fitted up an ambulance) their
passages on a steamer sailing from England, they could at length look
about them, feel sorry, and subscribe to all the budding war charities.
They even remembered poor Madame Lebuc, stranded by the flight of all
her pupils, and found a job for her in a refugee bureau. Then, just as
they were about to sail, Mrs. Belknap had a touch of pneumonia, and was
obliged to postpone her departure; while Mr. Belknap, jamming his
possessions into a single suit-case, dashed down to Spain to take ship
at Malaga. The turn affairs were taking made it advisable for him to get
back as quickly as possible, and his wife and son were to follow from
England in a month.
All the while there came no news of M. Gantier. He had rejoined his
depot at once, and Troy had had a post-card from him, dated the 6th of
August, and saying that he was leaving for the front. After that,
silence.
Troy, poring over the morning papers, and slipping out alone to watch
for the noon communiqués in the windows of the Paris _Herald_, read of
the rash French advance in Alsace, and the enemy's retaliatory descent
on the region the Belknaps had so often sped over. And one day, among
the names of the ruined villages, he lit on that of the little town
where they had all lunched with the Gantiers. He saw the box-garden with
the horn-beam arbour where they had gone to drink coffee, old M.
Gantier ceremoniously leading the way with Mrs. Belknap; he saw Mme.
Gantier, lame and stout, hobbling after with Mr. Belknap; a little old
aunt with bobbing curls; the round-faced Gantier girl, shy and rosy; an
incredibly dried and smoked and aged grandfather, with Voltairian eyes
and sly snuff-taking gestures; and his own friend, the eldest of the
three brothers; he saw all these modest beaming people grouped about
Mme. Gantier's coffee and Papa Gantier's best bottle of "_Fine_," he
smelt the lime-blossoms and box, he heard the bees in the lavender, he
looked out on the rich fields and woods and the blue hills bathed in
summer light. And he read: "Not a house is standing. The curé has been
shot. A number of old people were burnt in the Hospice. The mayor and
five of the principal inhabitants have been taken to Germany as
hostages."
The year before the war, he remembered, old M. Gantier was mayor!
He wrote and wrote, after that, to his tutor; wrote to his depot, to his
Paris address, to the ruin that had been his home; but had no answer.
And finally, amid the crowding horrors of that dread August, he forgot
even M. Gantier, and M. Gantier's family, forgot everything but the
spectacle of the Allied armies swept back from Liège, from Mons, from
Laon, from Charleroi, and the hosts of evil surging nearer and ever
nearer to the heart of France.
His father, with whom he might have talked, was gone; and Troy could not
talk to his mother. Not that Mrs. Belknap was not kind and full of
sympathy: as fast as the bank at home cabled funds she poured them out
for war charities. But most of her time was spent in agitated
conference with her compatriots, and Troy could not bear to listen to
their endlessly reiterated tales of flight from Nauheim or Baden or
Brussels, their difficulties in drawing money, hiring motors, bribing
hotel-porters, battling for seats in trains, recovering lost luggage,
cabling for funds, and their general tendency to regard the war as a
mere background to their personal grievances.
"You were exceedingly rude to Mrs. Sampson, Troy," his mother said to
him, surprised one day by an explosion of temper. "It is so natural she
should be nervous at not being able to get staterooms; and she had just
given me five hundred dollars for the American ambulance."
"Giving money's no use," the boy growled, obscurely irritated; and when
Mrs. Belknap exclaimed, "Why, Troy, _how callous_--with all this
suffering!" he slunk out without answering, and went downstairs to lie
in wait for the evening papers.
The misery of feeling himself a big boy, long-limbed, strong-limbed, old
enough for evening clothes, champagne, the classics, biology, and views
on international politics, and yet able to do nothing but hang about
marble hotels and pore over newspapers, while rank on rank, and regiment
on regiment, the youth of France and England, swung through the dazed
streets and packed the endless trains--the misery of this was so great
to Troy that he became, as the days dragged on, more than ever what his
mother called "callous," sullen, humiliated, resentful at being
associated with all the rich Americans flying from France.
At last the turn of the Belknaps came too; but, as they were preparing
to start, news came that the German army was at Lille, and civilian
travel to England interrupted.
It was the fateful week, and every name in the bulletins--Amiens,
Compiègne, Rheims, Meaux, Senlis--evoked in Troy Belknap's tortured
imagination visions of ancient beauty and stability. He had done that
bit of France alone with M. Gantier the year before, while Mrs. Belknap
waited in Paris for belated clothes; and the thought of the great
stretch of desolation spreading and spreading like a leprosy over a land
so full of the poetry of the past, and so rich in a happy prosperous
present, was added to the crueller vision of the tragic and magnificent
armies that had failed to defend it.
Troy, as soon as he was reassured about his mother's health, had
secretly rejoiced at the accident which had kept them in France. But now
his joy was turned to bitterness. Mrs. Belknap, in her horrified
surprise at seeing her plans again obstructed, lost all sense of the
impending calamity except as it affected her safety and Troy's, and
joined in the indignant chorus of compatriots stranded in Paris, and
obscurely convinced that France ought to have seen them safely home
before turning her attention to the invader.
"Of course I don't pretend to be a strategist," whimpering or wrathful
ladies used to declare, their jewel-boxes clutched in one hand, their
passports in the other, "but one can't help feeling that if only the
French Government had told our Ambassador in _time_, trains might have
been provided...."
"Or why couldn't _Germany_ have let our Government know? After all,
Germany has no grievance against America...."
"And we've really spent enough money in Europe for some consideration
to be shown us ..." the woeful chorus went on.
The choristers were all good and kindly persons, shaken out of the rut
of right feeling by the first real fright of their lives. But Troy was
too young to understand this, and to foresee that, once in safety, they
would become the passionate advocates of France, all the more fervent in
their championship because of their reluctant participation in her
peril.
("What did I do?--Why, I just simply _stayed in Paris_.... Not to run
away was the only thing one _could_ do to show one's sympathy," he heard
one of the passport-clutchers declare, a year later, in a New York
drawing-room.)
Troy, from the height of his youthful indignation, regarded them all as
heartless egoists, and fled away into the streets from the sound of
their lamentations.
But in the streets was fresh food for misery; for every day the once
empty vistas were filled with trains of farm-waggons, drawn by slow
country horses, and heaped with furniture and household utensils; and
beside the carts walked lines of haggard people, old men and women with
vacant faces, mothers hugging hungry babies, and children limping after
them with heavy bundles. The fugitives of the Marne were pouring into
Paris.
Troy dashed into the nearest shops, bought them cakes and fruit,
followed them to the big hippodrome where they were engulfed in the
dusty arena, and finally, in despair at his inability to do more than
gape and pity, tried to avoid the streets they followed on their way
into Paris from St. Denis and Vincennes.
Then one day, in the sunny desert of the Place de la Concorde, he came
on a more cheering sight. A motley band of civilians, young,
middle-aged, and even grey-headed, were shambling along together, badged
and beribboned, in the direction of the Invalides; and above them
floated the American flag. Troy flew after it, and caught up with the
last marchers.
"Where are we going?... Foreign Legion," an olive-faced "dago" answered
joyously in broken American. "All 'nited States citizens.... Come and
join up, sonnie...." And for one mad moment Troy thought of risking the
adventure.
But he was too visibly only a schoolboy still; and with tears of envy in
his smarting eyes he stood, small and useless, on the pavement, and
watched the heterogeneous band under the beloved flag disappearing in
the doorway of the registration office.
When he got back to his mother's drawing-room the tea-table was still
surrounded, and a lady was saying: "I've offered _anything_ for a
special train, but they won't listen...." And another, in a stricken
whisper: "If they _do_ come, what do you mean to do about your pearls?"
III
Then came the Marne, and suddenly the foreigners caught in Paris by the
German advance became heroes--or mostly heroines--who had stayed to
reassure their beloved city in her hour of need.
"We all owe so much to Paris," murmured Mrs. Belknap, in lovely
convalescent clothes, from her sofa-corner. "I'm sure we can none of us
ever cease to be thankful for this chance of showing it...."
She had sold her staterooms to a compatriot who happened to be in
England, and was now cabling home to suggest to Mr. Belknap that she
should spend the winter in France and take a job on a war charity. She
was not strong enough for nursing, but she thought it would be
delightful to take convalescent officers for drives in the Bois in the
noiseless motor. "Troy would love it too," she cabled.
Mr. Belknap, however, was unmoved by these arguments. "Future too
doubtful," he cabled back. "Insist on your sailing. Staterooms November
tenth paid for. Troy must return to school."
"Future too doubtful" impressed Mrs. Belknap more than "Insist," though
she made a larger use of the latter word in explaining to her friends
why, after all, she was obliged to give up her projected war work.
Meanwhile, having quite recovered, she rose from her cushions, donned a
nurse's garb, poured tea once or twice at a fashionable hospital, and,
on the strength of this effort, obtained permission to carry supplies
(in her own motor) to the devastated regions. Troy of course went with
her, and thus had his first glimpse of war.
Fresh in his mind was a delicious July day at Rheims with his tutor, and
the memory of every detail noted on the way, along the green windings of
the Marne, by Meaux, Montmirail and Epernay. Now, traversing the same
towns, he seemed to be looking into murdered faces, vacant and stony.
Where he had seen the sociable gossiping life of the narrow streets,
young men lounging at the blacksmith's, blue-sleeved carters sitting in
the wine-shops while their horses shook off the flies in the hot
sunshine of the village square, black-pinafored children coming home
from school, the fat curé stopping to talk to little old ladies under
the church porch, girls with sleek hair calling to each other from the
doorways of the shops, and women in sunburnt gingham bending over the
village wash-trough or leaning on their rakes among the hayricks--where
all this had been, now only a few incalculably old people sat in the
doorways and looked with bewildered eyes at strange soldiers fulfilling
the familiar tasks.
This was what war did! It emptied towns of their inhabitants as it
emptied veins of their blood; it killed houses and lands as well as men.
Out there, a few miles beyond the sunny vineyards and the low hills, men
were dying at that very moment by hundreds, by thousands--and their
motionless young bodies must have the same unnatural look as these wan
ruins, these gutted houses and sterile fields.... War meant Death,
Death, Death--Death everywhere and to everything.
By a special favour, the staff-officer who accompanied them managed to
extend their trip to the ruined château of Mondement, the pivot on which
the battle had turned. He had himself been in the thick of the fight,
and standing before the shattered walls of the old house he explained
the struggle for the spur of Mondement: the advance of the grey masses
across the plain, their capture of the ridge that barred the road to
Paris; then the impetuous rush of General Humbert's infantry, repulsed,
returning, repulsed again, and again attacking; the hand-to-hand
fighting in court and gardens; the French infantry's last irresistible
dash, the batteries rattling up, getting into place on the ridge, and
flinging back the grey battalions from the hillside into the marshes.
Mrs. Belknap smiled and exclaimed, with vague comments and a wandering
glance (for the officer, carried away by his subject, had forgotten her
and become technical); while Troy, his map spread on the top of a
shot-riddled wall, followed every word and gesture with eyes that
absorbed at the same time all the details of the immortal landscape.
The Marne--this was the actual setting of the battle of the Marne! This
happy temperate landscape, with its sheltering woods, its friendly
fields and downs flowing away to a mild sky, had looked on at the most
awful conflict in history. Scenes of anguish and heroism that ought to
have had some Titanic background of cliff and chasm had unrolled
themselves among harmless fields, and along wood-roads where wild
strawberries grew and children cut hazel-switches to drive home their
geese. A name of glory and woe was attached to every copse and hollow,
and to each grey steeple above the village roofs....
Troy listened, his heart beating higher at each exploit, till he forgot
the horror of war, and thought only of its splendours. Oh, to have been
there too! To have had even the smallest share in those great hours! To
be able to say, as this young man could say: "Yes, I was in the battle
of the Marne"; to be able to break off, and step back a yard or two,
correcting one's self critically: "No ... it was _here_ the General
stood when I told him our batteries had got through ..." or: "This is
the very spot where the first seventy-five was trained on the valley. I
can see the swathes it cut in the Bavarians as they swarmed up at us a
third and fourth time...."
Troy suddenly remembered a bit of _Henry V._ that M. Gantier had been
fond of quoting:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accurst they were not here,
And hold their manhood cheap, when any speaks
That fought with us....
Ah, yes--ah, yes--to have been in the battle of the Marne!
* * * * *
On the way back, below the crest of the hill, the motor stopped at the
village church and the officer jumped down. "Some of our men are buried
here," he said.
Mrs. Belknap, with a murmur of sympathy, caught up the bunch of roses
she had gathered in the ravaged garden of the château, and they picked
their way among the smashed and slanting stones of the cemetery to a
corner behind the church where wooden crosses marked a row of fresh
graves. Half-faded flowers in bottles were thrust into the loose earth,
and a few tin wreaths hung on the arms of the crosses.
Some of the graves bore only the date of the battle, with "Pour la
France," or "Priez pour lui"; but on others names and numbers had been
roughly burnt into the crosses.
Suddenly Troy stopped short with a cry.
"What is it?" his mother asked. She had walked ahead of him to the
parapet overhanging the valley, and forgetting her roses she leaned
against the low cemetery wall while the officer took up his story.
Troy made no answer. Mrs. Belknap stood with her back to him, and he did
not ask her to turn. He did not want her, or any one else, to read the
name he had just read; of a sudden there had been revealed to him the
deep secretiveness of sorrow. But he stole up to her and drew the
flowers from her hand, while she continued, with vague inattentive
murmurs, to follow the officer's explanations. She took no notice of
Troy, and he went back to the grave and laid the roses on it.
On the cross he had read: "September 12, 1914. Paul Gantier, --th
Chasseurs à pied."
"Oh, poor fellows ... poor fellows. Yes, that's right, Troy; put the
roses on their graves," Mrs. Belknap assented approvingly, as she picked
her way back to the motor.
IV
The 10th of November came, and they sailed.
The week in the steamer was intolerable, not only because they were
packed like herrings, and Troy (who had never known discomfort before)
had to share his narrow cabin with two young German-Americans full of
open brag about the Fatherland; but also because of the same eternally
renewed anecdotes among the genuine Americans about the perils and
discomforts they had undergone, and the general disturbance of their
plans.
Most of the passengers were in ardent sympathy with the Allies, and hung
anxiously on the meagre wirelesses; but a flat-faced professor with
lank hair, having announced that "there were two sides to every case,"
immediately raised up a following of unnoticed ladies, who "couldn't
believe all that was said of the Germans" and hoped that America would
never be "drawn in"; while, even among the right-minded, there subsisted
a vague feeling that war was an avoidable thing, which one had only to
reprobate enough to prevent its recurrence.
They found New York--Mrs. Belknap's New York--buzzing with
war-charities, yet apparently unaware of the war. That at least was
Troy's impression during the twenty-four hours before he was packed off
to school to catch up with his interrupted studies.
At school he heard the same incessant war-talk, and found the same
fundamental unawareness of the meaning of the war. At first the boys
were very keen to hear his story, but he described what he had seen so
often--and especially his haunting impressions of the Marne--that they
named him "Marny Belknap," and finally asked him to cut it out.
The masters were mostly frankly for the Allies, but the Rector had given
out that neutrality was the attitude approved by the Government, and
therefore a patriotic duty; and one Sunday after chapel he gave a little
talk to explain why the President thought it right to try to keep his
people out of the dreadful struggle. The words duty and responsibility
and fortunate privilege recurred often in this address, and it struck
Troy as odd that the lesson of the day happened to be the story of the
Good Samaritan.
When he went home for the Christmas holidays everybody was sending toys
and sugar-plums to the Belgian war-orphans, with little notes from
"Happy American children" requesting to have their gifts acknowledged.
"It makes us so _happy_ to help," beaming young women declared with a
kind of ghoulish glee, doing up parcels, planning war-tableaux and
charity dances, rushing to "propaganda" lectures given by handsome
French officers, and keeping up a kind of continuous picnic on the ruins
of civilization.
Mr. and Mrs. Belknap had inevitably been affected by the surrounding
atmosphere.
"The tragedy of it--the _tragedy_--no one can tell who hasn't seen it
and been through it," Mrs. Belknap would begin, looking down her long
dinner-table between the orchids and the candelabra; and the pretty
women and prosperous men would interrupt their talk, and listen for a
moment, half absently, with spurts of easy indignation that faded out
again as they heard the story oftener.
After all, Mrs. Belknap wasn't the _only_ person who had seen a
battlefield! Lots and lots more were pouring home all the time with
fresh tales of tragedy: the Marne had become--in a way--an old story.
People wanted something newer ... different....
And then, why hadn't Joffre followed up the offensive? The Germans were
wonderful soldiers after all.... Yes, but such beasts ... sheer
devils.... Here was Mr. So-and-so, just back from Belgium--such horrible
stories--really unrepeatable! "Don't you want to come and hear them, my
dear? Dine with us to-morrow; he's promised to come unless he's summoned
to Washington. But do come anyhow; the Jim Cottages are going to dance
after dinner...."
In time Mrs. Belknap, finding herself hopelessly out-storied,
out-charitied, out-adventured, began insensibly to take a calmer and
more distant view of the war. What was the use of trying to keep up her
own enthusiasm when that of her audience had flagged? Wherever she went
she was sure to meet other ladies who had arrived from France much more
recently, and had done and seen much more than she had. One after
another she saw them received with the same eagerness--"Of course we all
know about the marvellous things you've been doing in France--your
wonderful war-work"--then, like herself, they were superseded by some
later arrival, who had been nearer the front, or had raised more money,
or had had an audience of the Queen of the Belgians, or an autograph
letter from Lord Kitchener. No one was listened to for long, and the
most eagerly-sought-for were like the figures in a movy-show, forever
breathlessly whisking past to make way for others.
Mr. Belknap had always been less eloquent about the war than his wife;
but somehow Troy had fancied he felt it more deeply. Gradually, however,
he too seemed to accept the situation as a matter of course, and Troy,
coming home for the Easter holidays, found at the family table a large
sonorous personage--a Senator, just back from Europe--who, after rolling
out vague praises of France and England, began insidiously to hint that
it was a pity to see such wasted heroism, such suicidal determination on
the part of the Allies to resist all offers of peace from an enemy so
obviously their superior.
"She wouldn't be if America came in!" Troy blurted out, reddening at the
sound of his voice.
"America?" some one playfully interjected; and the Senator laughed, and
said something about geographical immunity. "They can't touch _us_. This
isn't our war, young man."
"It may be by the time I'm grown up," Troy persisted, burning redder.
"Well," returned the Senator good-humouredly, "you'll have to hurry, for
the economists all say it can't last more than a year longer. Lord
Reading told me----"
"There's been misery enough, in all conscience," sighed a lady, playing
with her pearls; and Mr. Belknap added gravely: "By the time Troy grows
up I hope wars and war-talk will be over for good and all."
"Oh, well--at his age every fellow wants to go out and kill something,"
remarked one of his uncles sympathetically.
Troy shuddered at the well-meant words. _To go out and kill something!_
They thought he regarded the war as a sport, just as they regarded it
as a moving-picture show! As if any one who had had even a glimpse of it
could ever again think with joy of killing! His boy's mind was sorely
exercised to define the urgent emotions with which it laboured. _To save
France_--that was the clear duty of the world, as he saw it. But none of
these kindly careless people about him knew what he meant when he said
"France." Bits of M. Gantier's talk came back to him, embodying that
meaning.
"Whatever happens, keep your mind keen and clear: open as many windows
on the universe as you can...." To Troy, France had been the biggest of
those windows.
The young tutor had never declaimed about his country; he had simply
told her story and embodied her ideals in his own impatient, questioning
and yet ardent spirit. "Le monde est aux enthousiastes," he had once
quoted; and he had shown Troy how France had always been alive in every
fibre, and how her inexhaustible vitality had been perpetually nourished
on criticism, analysis and dissatisfaction. "Self-satisfaction is
death," he had said; "France is the phoenix-country always rising from
the ashes of her recognized mistakes."
Troy felt what a wonderful help it must be to have that long rich past
in one's blood. Every stone that France had carved, every song she had
sung, every new idea she had struck out, every beauty she had created in
her thousand fruitful years, was a tie between her and her children.
These things were more glorious than her battles, for it was because of
them that all civilization was bound up in her, and that nothing that
concerned her could concern her only.
V
"It seems too absurd," said Mrs. Belknap; "but Troy will be eighteen
to-morrow. And that means," she added with a sigh, "that this horrible
war has been going on for three whole years. Do you remember, dearest,
your fifteenth birthday was on the very day that odious Archduke was
assassinated? We had a picnic on the Morterasch."
"Oh, dear," cried Sophy Wicks, flinging her tennis-racket into the air
with a swing that landed it in the middle of the empty court--"perhaps
that's the reason he's never stopped talking about the war for a single
minute since!"
Around the big tea-table under the trees there was a faint hush of
disapproval. A year before, Sophy Wicks's airy indifference to the
events that were agitating the world had amused some people and won the
frank approval of others. She did not exasperate her friends by
professions of pacifism, she simply declared that the war bored her; and
after three years of vain tension, of effort in the void, something in
the baffled American heart whispered that, things being as they were,
she was perhaps right.
But now things were no longer as they had been. Looking back, Troy
surveyed the gradual development of the war-feeling as it entered into a
schoolboy's range of vision. He had begun to notice the change before
the sinking of the _Lusitania_. Even in the early days, when his
school-fellows had laughed at him and called him "Marny," some of them
had listened to him and imitated him. It had become the fashion to have
a collection of war-trophies from the battlefields. The boys' sisters
were "adopting war-orphans" at long distance, and when Troy went home
for the holidays he heard more and more talk of war-charities, and
noticed that the funds collected were no longer raised by dancing and
fancy-balls. People who used the war as an opportunity to have fun were
beginning to be treated almost as coldly as the pacifists.
But the two great factors in the national change of feeling were the
_Lusitania_ and the training-camps.
The _Lusitania_ showed America what the Germans were, Plattsburg tried
to show her the only way of dealing with them.
Both events called forth a great deal of agitated discussion, for if
they focussed the popular feeling for war, they also gave the opponents
of war in general a point of departure for their arguments. For a while
feeling ran high, and Troy, listening to the heated talk at his parents'
table, perceived with disgust and wonder that at the bottom of the
anti-war sentiment, whatever specious impartiality it put on, there was
always the odd belief that life-in-itself--just the mere raw fact of
being alive--was the one thing that mattered, and getting killed the one
thing to be avoided.
This new standard of human dignity plunged Troy into the lowest depths
of pessimism. And it bewildered him as much as it disgusted him, since
it did away at a stroke with all that gave any interest to the fact of
living. It killed romance, it killed poetry and adventure, it took all
the meaning out of history and conduct and civilization. There had never
been anything worth while in the world that had not had to be died for,
and it was as clear as day that a world which no one would die for could
never be a world worth being alive in.
Luckily most people did not require to reason the matter out in order to
feel as Troy did, and in the long run the _Lusitania_ and Plattsburg won
the day. America tore the gag of neutrality from her lips, and with all
the strength of her liberated lungs claimed her right to a place in the
struggle. The pacifists crept into their holes, and only Sophy Wicks
remained unconverted.
Troy Belknap, tall and shy and awkward, lay at her feet and blushed and
groaned inwardly at her wrong-headedness. All the other girls were
war-mad; with the rupture of diplomatic relations the country had burst
into flame, and with the declaration of war the flame had become a
conflagration. And now, having at last a definite and personal concern
in the affair, every one was not only happier but more sensible than
when a perpetually thwarted indignation had had to expend itself in
vague philanthropy.
It was a peculiar cruelty of fate that made Troy feel Miss Wicks's
indifference more than the zeal of all the other young women gathered
about the Belknap tennis-court. In spite of everything, he found her
more interesting, more inexhaustible, more "his size" (as they said at
school), than any of the gay young war-goddesses who sped their
tennis-balls across the Belknap court.
It was a Long Island Sunday in June. A caressing warmth was in the air,
and a sea-breeze stirred the tops of the lime branches. The smell of
fresh hay-cocks blew across the lawn, and a sparkle of blue water and a
dipping of white sails showed through the trees beyond the hay-fields.
Mrs. Belknap smiled indulgently on the pleasant scene: her judgement of
Sophy Wicks was less severe than that of the young lady's
contemporaries. What did it matter if a chit of eighteen, having taken
up a foolish attitude, was too self-conscious to renounce it?
"Sophy will feel differently when she has nursed some of our own
soldiers in a French base hospital," she said, addressing herself to the
disapproving group.
The young girl raised her merry eyebrows. "Who'll stay and nurse Granny
if I go to a French base hospital? Troy, will _you_?" she suggested.
The other girls about the tea-table laughed. Though they were only
Troy's age, or younger, they did not mind his being teased, for he
seemed only a little boy to them, now that they all had friends or
brothers in the training-camps or on the way to France. Besides, though
they disapproved of Sophy's tone, her argument was unanswerable. They
knew her precocious wisdom and self-confidence had been acquired at the
head of her grandmother's household, and that there was no one else to
look after poor old paralytic Mrs. Wicks and the orphan brothers and
sisters to whom Sophy was mother and guardian.
Two or three of the young men present were in uniform, and one of them,
Mrs. Belknap's nephew, had a captain's double bar on his shoulder. What
did Troy Belknap and Sophy Wicks matter to young women playing a last
tennis-match with heroes on their way to France?
The game began again, with much noise and cheerful wrangling. Mrs.
Belknap walked toward the house to welcome a group of visitors, and Miss
Wicks remained beside the tea-table, alone with Troy. She was leaning
back in a wide basket-chair, her thin ankles in white open-work
stockings thrust out under her short skirt, her arms locked behind her
thrown-back head. Troy lay on the ground and plucked at the tufts of
grass at his elbow. Why was it that, with all the currents of vitality
flowing between this group of animated girls and youths, he could feel
no nearness but hers? The feeling was not particularly agreeable, but
there was no shaking it off: it was like a scent that has got into one's
clothes. He was not sure that he liked her, but he wanted to watch her,
to listen to her, to defend her against the mockery and criticism in the
eyes of the others. At this point his powers of analysis gave out, and
his somewhat extensive vocabulary failed him. After all, he had to fall
back on the stupid old school phrase: she was "his size"--that was all.
"Why do you always say the war bores you?" he asked abruptly, without
looking up.
"Because it does, my boy; and so do you, when you hold forth about it."
He was silent, and she touched his arm with the tip of her swinging
tennis-shoe. "Don't you see, Troy, it's not our job--not just now,
anyhow. So what's the use of always jawing about it?"
She jumped up, recovered her racket, and ran to take her place in a new
set beside Troy's cousin, the captain.
VI
It was not "his job"--that was the bitter drop in all the gladness.
At last what Troy longed for had come: his country was playing her part.
And he, who had so watched and hoped and longed for the divine far-off
event, had talked of it early and late to old and young, had got himself
laughed at, scolded, snubbed, ridiculed, nicknamed, commemorated in a
school-magazine skit in which "Marne" and "yarn" and "oh, darn," formed
the refrain of a lyric beginning "Oh _say_, have you _heard_ Belknap
_flap_ in the breeze?"--he, who had borne all the scoldings and all the
ridicule, sustained by a mysterious secret faith in the strength of his
cause, now saw that cause triumph, and all his country waving with flags
and swarming with khaki, while he had to stand aside and look on,
because his coming birthday was only his nineteenth.... He remembered
the anguish of regret with which he had seen M. Gantier leave St. Moritz
to join his regiment, and thought now with passionate envy of his
tutor's fate. "Dulce et decorum est ..." the old hackneyed phrase had
taken on a beauty that filled his eyes with tears.
Eighteen--and "nothing doing" till he was twenty-one! He could have
killed the cousins and uncles strutting about in uniform and saying:
"Don't fret, old man--there's lots of time. The war is sure to last
another four years." To say that, and laugh, how little they must know
of what war meant!
It was an old custom in the Belknap family to ask Troy what he wanted
for his birthday. The custom (according to tradition) had originated on
his sixth anniversary, when, being given a rabbit with ears that
wiggled, he had grown very red and stammered out: "I _did_ so want a
'cyclopedia...."
Since then he had always been consulted on the subject with a good deal
of ceremony, and had spent no little time and thought in making a
judicious choice in advance. But this year his choice took no thinking
over.
"I want to go to France," he said immediately.
"To France----?" It struck his keen ears that there was less surprise
than he had feared in Mr. Belknap's voice.
"To France, my boy? The Government doesn't encourage foreign travel just
now."
"I want to volunteer in the Foreign Legion," said Troy, feeling as if
the veins of his forehead would burst.
Mrs. Belknap groaned, but Mr. Belknap retained his composure.
"My dear chap, I don't think you know much about the Foreign Legion.
It's a pretty rough berth for a fellow like you. And they're as likely
as not," he added carelessly, "to send you to Morocco or the Cameroon."
Troy, knowing this to be true, hung his head.
"Now," Mr. Belknap continued, taking advantage of his silence, "my
counter-proposition is that you should go to Brazil for three months
with your Uncle Tom Jarvice, who is being sent down there on a big
engineering job. It's a wonderful opportunity to see the country--see it
like a prince too, for he'll have a special train at his disposal. Then,
when you come back," he continued, his voice weakening a little under
the strain of Troy's visible inattention, "we'll see...."
"See what?"
"Well--I don't know ... a camp ... till it's time for Harvard...."
"I want to go to France at once, father," said Troy, with the voice of a
man.
"To do _what_?" wailed his mother.
"Oh, any old thing--drive an ambulance," Troy struck out at random.
"But, dearest," she protested, "you could never even learn to drive a
Ford runabout!"
"That's only because it never interested me."
"But one of those huge ambulances--you'll be killed!"
"Father!" exclaimed Troy, in a tone that seemed to say: "Aren't we out
of the nursery, at least?"
"Don't talk to him like that, Josephine," said Mr. Belknap, visibly
wishing that he knew how to talk to his son himself, but perceiving that
his wife was on the wrong tack.
"Don't you see, father, that there's no use talking at all? I'm going to
get to France anyhow."
"In defiance of our wishes?"
"Oh, you'll forget all that later," said Troy.
Mrs. Belknap began to cry, and her husband turned on her.
"My dear, you're really--really--_I understand Troy!_" he blurted out,
his veins swelling too.
"But if the Red Cross is to send you on that mission to Italy, why
shouldn't Troy wait and go as your secretary?" Mrs. Belknap said,
tacking skilfully.
Mr. Belknap, who had not yet made up his mind to accept the mission,
made it up on the instant. "Yes, Troy--why not? I shall be going
myself--in a month or so."
"I want to go to France," said his son. And he added, laughing with
sudden courage: "You see, you've never refused me a birthday present
yet."
VII
France again--France at last! As the cliffs grew green across the bay he
could have knelt to greet them--as he hurried down the gang-plank with
the eager jostling crowd he could have kissed the sacred soil they were
treading.
The very difficulties and delays of the arrival thrilled and
stimulated him, gave him a keener sense of his being already a humble
participant in the conflict. Passports, identification papers, sharp
interrogatories, examinations, the enforced surrendering of keys and
papers: how different it all was from the old tame easy landings, with
the noiseless motor waiting at the dock, and France lying safe and open
before them whichever way they chose to turn!
On the way over many things had surprised and irritated him--not least
the attitude of some of his fellow-passengers. The boat swarmed with
young civilians, too young for military service, or having, for some
more or less valid reason, been exempted from it. They were all pledged
to some form of relief work, and all overflowing with zeal: "France" was
as often on their lips as on Troy's. But some of them seemed to be
mainly concerned with questions of uniform and rank. The steamer seethed
with wrangles and rivalries between their various organisations, and now
and then the young crusaders seemed to lose sight of the object of their
crusade--as had too frequently been the case with their predecessors.
Very few of the number knew France or could speak French, and most of
them were full of the importance of America's mission. This was
Liberty's chance to Enlighten the World; and all these earnest youths
apparently regarded themselves as her chosen torch-bearers.
"We must teach France efficiency," they all said with a glowing
condescension.
The women were even more sure of their mission; and there were plenty of
them, middle-aged as well as young, in uniform too, cocked-hatted,
badged and gaitered--though most of them, apparently, were going to sit
in the offices of Paris war-charities, and Troy had never noticed that
Frenchwomen had donned khaki for that purpose.
"France must be purified," these young Columbias proclaimed. "Frenchmen
must be taught to respect Women. We must protect our boys from
contamination ... the dreadful theatres ... and the novels ... and the
Boulevards.... Of course we mustn't be hard on the French, for they've
never known Home Life, or the Family ... but we must show them ... we
must set the example...."
Troy, sickened by their blatancy, had kept to himself for the greater
part of the trip; but during the last days he had been drawn into talk
by a girl who reminded him of Miss Wicks, though she was in truth
infinitely prettier. The evenings below decks were long, and he sat at
her side in the saloon and listened to her.
Her name was Hinda Warlick, and she came from the Middle West. He
gathered from her easy confidences that she was singing in a suburban
church choir while waiting for a vaudeville engagement. Her studies had
probably been curtailed by the task of preparing a repertory, for she
appeared to think that Joan of Arc was a Revolutionary hero, who had
been guillotined with Marie Antoinette for blowing up the Bastille; and
her notions of French history did not extend beyond this striking
episode. But she was ready and eager to explain France to Troy, and to
the group of young men who gathered about her, listening to her piercing
accents and gazing into her deep blue eyes.
"We must carry America right into the heart of France--for she has got a
great big heart, in spite of _everything_," Miss Warlick declared. "We
must teach her to love children and home and the outdoor life, and you
American boys must teach the young Frenchmen to love their mothers. You
must set the example.... Oh, boys, do you know what my ambition is? It's
to organize an Old Home Week just like ours, all over France from
Harver right down to Marseilles--and all through the devastated regions
too. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could get General Pershing to let us
keep Home Week right up at the front, at 'Eep and Leal and Rams, and all
those martyr cities--right close up in the trenches? So that even the
Germans would see us and hear us, and perhaps learn from us too?--for
you know we mustn't despair even of teaching the Germans!"
Troy, as he crept away, heard one young man, pink and shock-headed,
murmur shyly to the Prophetess: "Hearing you say this has made it all so
clear to me----" and an elderly Y.M.C.A. leader, adjusting his
eye-glasses, added with nasal emphasis: "Yes, Miss Warlick has expressed
in a very lovely way what we all feel: that America's mission is to
contribute the _human element_ to this war."
"Oh, good God!" Troy groaned, crawling to his darkened cabin. He
remembered M. Gantier's phrase, "Self-satisfaction is death," and felt a
sudden yearning for Sophy Wicks's ironic eyes and her curt "What's the
use of jawing?"
* * * * *
He had been for six months on his job, and was beginning to know
something about it: to know, for instance, that nature had never meant
him for an ambulance-driver.
Nevertheless he had stuck to his task with such a dogged determination
to succeed that after several months about the Paris hospitals he was
beginning to be sent to exposed sectors.
His first sight of the desolated country he had traversed three years
earlier roused old memories of the Gantier family, and he wrote once
more to their little town, but again without result. Then one day he
was sent to a sector in the Vosges which was held by American troops.
His heart was beating hard as the motor rattled over the hills, through
villages empty of their inhabitants, like those of the Marne, but
swarming with big fair-haired soldiers. The land lifted and dipped
again, and he saw ahead of him the ridge once crowned by M. Gantier's
village, and the wall of the terraced garden, with the horn-beam arbour
putting forth its early green. Everything else was in ruins: pale
weather-bleached ruins over which the rains and suns of three years had
passed effacingly. The church, once so firm and four-square on the hill,
was now a mere tracery against the clouds; the hospice roofless, the
houses all gutted and bulging, with black smears of smoke on their inner
walls. At the head of the street a few old women and children were
hoeing vegetables before a row of tin-roofed shanties, and a Y.M.C.A.
hut flew the stars-and-stripes across the way.
Troy jumped down and began to ask questions. At first the only person
who recognized the name of Gantier was an old woman too frightened and
feeble-minded to answer intelligibly. Then a French territorial who was
hoeing with the women came forward. He belonged to the place and knew
the story.
"M. Gantier--the old gentleman? He was mayor, and the Germans took him.
He died in Germany. The young girl--Mlle. Gantier--was taken with him.
No, she's not dead.... I don't know.... She's shut up somewhere in
Germany ... queer in the head, they say.... The sons--ah, you knew
Monsieur Paul? He went first.... What, the others?... Yes: the three
others--Louis at Notre Dame de Lorette; Jean on a submarine: poor
little Félix, the youngest, of the fever at Salonika. _Voilà_.... The
old lady? Ah, she and her sister went away ... some charitable people
took them, I don't know where.... I've got the address somewhere...." He
fumbled, and brought out a strip of paper on which was written the name
of a town in the centre of France.
"There's where they were a year ago.... Yes, you may say: _there's a
family gone--wiped out_. How often I've seen them all sitting there,
laughing and drinking coffee under the arbour! They were not rich, but
they were happy and proud of each other. That's over."
He went back to his hoeing.
* * * * *
After that, whenever Troy Belknap got back to Paris he hunted for the
surviving Gantiers. For a long time he could get no trace of them; then
he remembered his old governess, Mme. Lebuc, for whom Mrs. Belknap had
found employment in a refugee bureau.
He ran down Mme. Lebuc, who was still at her desk in the same big room,
facing a row of horse-hair benches packed with tired people waiting
their turn for a clothing-ticket or a restaurant card.
Mme. Lebuc had grown much older, and her filmy eyes peered anxiously
through large spectacles before she recognized Troy. Then, after tears
and raptures, he set forth his errand, and she began to peer again
anxiously, shuffling about the bits of paper on the desk, and confusing
her records hopelessly.
"Why, is that _you_?" cried a gay young voice; and there, on the other
side of the room, sat one of the young war-goddesses of the Belknap
tennis-court, trim, uniformed, important, with a row of bent backs in
shabby black before her desk.
"Ah, Miss Batchford will tell you--she's so quick and clever," Mme.
Lebuc sighed, resigning herself to chronic bewilderment.
Troy crossed to the other desk. An old woman sat before it in threadbare
mourning, a crape veil on her twitching head. She spoke in a low voice,
slowly, taking a long time to explain; each one of Miss Batchford's
quick questions put her back, and she had to begin all over again.
"Oh, these refugees!" cried Miss Batchford, stretching a bangled arm
above the crape veil to clasp Troy's hand. "Do sit down, Mr.
Belknap.--Dépêchez-vous, s'il vous plaît," she said, not too unkindly,
to the old woman; and added, to Troy: "There's no satisfying them."
At the sound of Troy's name the old woman had turned her twitching
head, putting back her veil. Her eyes met Troy's, and they looked at
each other doubtfully. Then--"Madame Gantier!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, yes," she said, the tears running down her face.
Troy was not sure if she recognized him, though his name had evidently
called up some vague association. He saw that most things had grown far
off to her, and that for the moment her whole mind was centred on the
painful and humiliating effort of putting her case to this strange young
woman who snapped out questions like a machine.
"Do you know her?" asked Miss Batchford, surprised.
"I used to, I believe," Troy answered.
"You can't think what she wants--just everything! They're all alike. She
wants to borrow five hundred francs to furnish a flat for herself and
her sister."
"Well, why not?"
"Why, we don't lend money, of course. It's against all our principles.
We give work, or relief in kind--that's what I'm telling her."
"I see. Could I give it to her?"
"What--all that money? Certainly _not_. You don't know them!"
Troy shook hands and went out into the street to wait for Mme. Gantier;
and when she came he told her who he was. She cried and shook a great
deal, and he called a cab and drove her home to the poor lodging where
she and her sister lived. The sister had become weak-minded, and the
room was dirty and untidy, because, as Mme. Gantier explained, her
lameness prevented her from keeping it clean, and they could not afford
a charwoman. The pictures of the four dead sons hung on the wall, a
wisp of crape above each, with all their ribbons and citations. But when
Troy spoke of old M. Gantier and the daughter Mme. Gantier's face grew
like a stone, and her sister began to whimper like an animal.
Troy remembered the territorial's phrase: "You may say: _there's a
family wiped out_." He went away, too shy to give the five hundred
francs in his pocket.
One of his first cares on getting back to France had been to order a
head-stone for Paul Gantier's grave at Mondement. A week or two after
his meeting with Mme. Gantier, his ambulance was ordered to Epernay, and
he managed to get out to Mondement and have the stone set up and the
grave photographed. He had brought some flowers to lay on it, and he
borrowed two tin wreaths from the neighbouring crosses, so that Paul
Gantier's mound should seem the most fondly tended of all. He sent the
photograph to Mme. Gantier, with a five hundred franc bill; but after a
long time his letter came back from the post-office. The two old women
had gone....
VIII
In February Mr. Belknap arrived in Paris on a mission. Tightly buttoned
into his Red Cross uniform, he looked to his son older and fatter, but
more important and impressive, than usual.
He was on his way to Italy, where he was to remain for three months, and
Troy learned with dismay that he needed a secretary, and had brought
none with him because he counted on his son to fill the post.
"You've had nearly a year of this, old man, and the front's as quiet as
a church. As for Paris, isn't it too frivolous for you? It's much
farther from the war nowadays than New York. I haven't had a dinner like
this since your mother joined the Voluntary Rationing League," Mr.
Belknap smiled at him across their little table at the Nouveau Luxe.
"I'm glad to hear it--about New York, I mean," Troy answered composedly.
"It's _our_ turn now. But Paris isn't a bit too frivolous for me. Which
shall it be, father--the Palais Royal--or the Capucines? They say the
new _revue_ there is great fun."
Mr. Belknap was genuinely shocked. He had caught the war fever late in
life, and late in the war, and his son's flippancy surprised and pained
him.
"The theatre? We don't go to the theatre...." He paused to light his
cigar, and added, embarrassed: "Really, Troy, now there's so little
doing here, don't you think you might be more useful in Italy?"
Troy was anxious, for he was not sure that Mr. Belknap's influence
might not be sufficient to detach him from his job on a temporary
mission; but long experience in dealing with parents made him assume a
greater air of coolness as his fears increased.
"Well, you see, father, so many other chaps have taken advantage of the
lull to go off on leave that if I asked to be detached now--well, it
wouldn't do me much good with my chief," he said cunningly, guessing
that if he appeared to yield his father might postpone action.
"Yes, I see," Mr. Belknap rejoined, impressed by the military character
of the argument. He was still trying to get used to the fact that he was
himself under orders, and nervous visions of a sort of mitigated
court-martial came to him in the middle of pleasant dinners, or jumped
him out of his morning sleep like an alarm-clock.
Troy saw that his point was gained; but he regretted having proposed
the Capucines to his father. He himself was not shocked by the seeming
indifference of Paris: he thought the gay theatres, the crowded shops,
the restaurants groaning with abundance, were all healthy signs of the
nation's irrepressible vitality. But he understood that America's young
zeal might well be chilled by the first contact with this careless
exuberance, so close to the lines where young men like himself were
dying day by day in order that the curtain might ring up punctually on
low-necked _revues_, and fat neutrals feast undisturbed on lobster and
champagne. Only now and then he asked himself what had become of the
Paris of the Marne, and what would happen if ever again----But that of
course was nonsense....
* * * * *
Mr. Belknap left for Italy--and two days afterward Troy's ambulance was
roused from semi-inaction and hurried to Beauvais. The retreat from St.
Quentin had begun, and Paris was once again the Paris of the Marne.
The same--but how different!--were the tense days that followed. Troy
Belknap, instead of hanging miserably about marble hotels and waiting
with restless crowds for the communiqués to appear in the windows of the
newspaper offices, was in the thick of the retreat, swept back on its
tragic tide, his heart wrung, but his imagination hushed by the fact of
participating in the struggle, playing a small dumb indefatigable part,
relieving a little fraction of the immense anguish and the dreadful
disarray.
The mere fact of lifting a wounded man "so that it wouldn't hurt"; of
stiffening one's lips to a smile as the ambulance pulled up in the
market-place of a terror-stricken village; of calling out "Nous les
tenons!" to whimpering women and bewildered old people; of giving a lift
to a family of foot-sore refugees; of prying open a tin of condensed
milk for the baby, or taking down the address of a sister in Paris, with
the promise to bring her news of the fugitives; the heat and the burden
and the individual effort of each minute carried one along through the
endless and yet breathless hours--backward and forward, backward and
forward, between Paris and the fluctuating front, till in Troy's weary
brain the ambulance took on the semblance of a tireless grey shuttle
humming in the hand of Fate....
It was on one of these trips that, for the first time, he saw a
train-load of American soldiers on the way to the battle front. He had,
of course, seen plenty of them in Paris during the months since his
arrival; seen them vaguely roaming the streets, or sitting in front of
cafés, or wooed by polyglot sirens in the obscure promiscuity of
cinema-palaces.
At first he had seized every chance of talking to them; but either his
own shyness or theirs seemed to paralyze him. He found them, as a rule,
bewildered, depressed and unresponsive. They wanted to kill Germans all
right, they said; but this hanging around Paris wasn't what they'd
bargained for, and there was a good deal more doing back home at Podunk
or Tombstone or Skohegan.
It was not only the soldiers who took this depreciatory view of France.
Some of the officers whom Troy met at his friends' houses discouraged
him more than the enlisted men with whom he tried to make friends in the
cafés. They had more definite and more unfavourable opinions as to the
country they had come to defend. They wanted to know, in God's name,
where in the blasted place you could get fried hominy and a real
porter-house steak for breakfast, and when the ball-game season began,
and whether it rained every day all the year round; and Troy's timid
efforts to point out some of the compensating advantages of Paris failed
to excite any lasting interest.
But now he seemed to see a different race of men. The faces leaning from
the windows of the train glowed with youthful resolution. The soldiers
were out on their real business at last, and as Troy looked at them, so
alike and so innumerable, he had the sense of a force, inexorable and
exhaustless, poured forth from the reservoirs of the new world to
replenish the wasted veins of the old.
"Hooray!" he shouted frantically, waving his cap at the passing train;
but as it disappeared he hung his head and swore under his breath.
There they went, his friends and fellows, as he had so often dreamed of
seeing them, racing in their hundreds of thousands to the rescue of
France; and he was still too young to be among them, and could only
yearn after them with all his aching heart!
After a hard fortnight of day-and-night work he was ordered a few days
off, and sulkily resigned himself to inaction. For the first twenty-four
hours he slept the leaden sleep of weary youth, and for the next he
moped on his bed in the Infirmary; but the third day he crawled out to
take a look at Paris.
The long-distance bombardment was going on, and now and then, at
irregular intervals, there was a more or less remote crash, followed by
a long reverberation. But the life of the streets was not affected.
People went about their business as usual, and it was obvious that the
strained look on every face was not caused by the random fall of a few
shells, but by the perpetual vision of that swaying and receding line on
which all men's thoughts were fixed. It was sorrow, not fear, that Troy
read in all those anxious eyes--sorrow over so much wasted effort, such
high hopes thwarted, so many dear-bought miles of France once more under
the German heel.
That night when he came home he found a letter from his mother. At the
very end, in a crossed postscript, he read: "Who do you suppose sailed
last week? Sophy Wicks. Soon there'll be nobody left! Old Mrs. Wicks
died in January--did I tell you?--and Sophy has sent the children to
Long Island with their governess, and rushed over to do Red Cross
nursing. It seems she had taken a course at the Presbyterian without
any one's knowing it. I've promised to keep an eye on the children. Let
me know if you see her."
Sophy Wicks in France! There was hardly room in his troubled mind for
the news. What Sophy Wicks did or did not do had shrunk to utter
insignificance in the crash of falling worlds. He was rather sorry to
have to class her with the other hysterical girls fighting for a pretext
to get to France; but what did it all matter, anyhow? On the way home he
had overheard an officer in the street telling a friend that the Germans
were at Creil....
Then came the day when the advance was checked. The glorious
counter-attack of General Mangin gave France new faith in her armies,
and Paris irrepressibly burst at once into abounding life. It was as if
she were ashamed of having doubted, as if she wanted, by a livelier
renewal of activities, to proclaim her unshakable faith in her
defenders. In the perpetual sunshine of the most golden of springs she
basked and decked herself, and mirrored her recovered beauty in the
Seine.
And still the cloudless weeks succeeded each other, days of blue warmth
and nights of silver lustre; and still, behind the impenetrable wall of
the front, the Beast dumbly lowered and waited. Then one morning, toward
the end of May, Troy, waking late after an unusually hard day, read:
"The new German offensive has begun. The Chemin des Dames has been
retaken by the enemy. Our valiant troops are resisting heroically...."
Ah, now indeed they were on the road to Paris! In a flash of horror he
saw it all. The bitter history of the war was re-enacting itself, and
the battle of the Marne was to be fought again....
The misery of the succeeding days would have been intolerable if there
had been time to think of it. But day and night there was no respite for
Troy's service; and, being by this time a practised hand, he had to be
continually on the road.
On the second day he received orders to evacuate the wounded from an
American base hospital near the Marne. It was actually the old
battleground he was to traverse; only, before, he had traversed it in
the wake of the German retreat, and now it was the allied troops who,
slowly, methodically, and selling every inch dear, were falling back
across the sacred soil. Troy faced eastward with a heavy heart....
IX
The next morning at daylight they started for the front.
Troy's breast swelled with the sense of the approach to something bigger
than he had yet known. The air of Paris, that day, was heavy with doom.
There was no mistaking its taste on the lips. It was the air of the
Marne that he was breathing....
Here he was, once more involved in one of the great convulsions of
destiny, and still almost as helpless a spectator as when, four years
before, he had strayed the burning desert of Paris and cried out in his
boy's heart for a share in the drama. Almost as helpless, yes--in spite
of his four more years, his grown-up responsibilities, and the blessed
uniform thanks to which he, even he, a poor little ambulance-driver of
eighteen, ranked as a soldier of the great untried army of his country.
It was something--it was a great deal--to be even the humblest part, the
most infinitesimal cog, in that mighty machinery of the future; but it
was not enough, at this turning-point of history, for one who had so
lived it all in advance, who was so aware of it now that it had come,
who had carried so long on his lips the taste of its scarcely breathable
air.
As the ambulance left the gates of Paris, and hurried eastward in the
grey dawn, this sense of going toward something new and overwhelming
continued to grow in Troy. It was probably the greatest hour of the war
that was about to strike--and he was still too young to give himself to
the cause he had so long dreamed of serving.
From the moment they left the gates the road was encumbered with huge
grey motor-trucks, limousines, torpedoes, motor-cycles, long trains of
artillery, army kitchens, supply wagons, all the familiar elements of
the procession he had so often watched unrolling itself endlessly east
and west from the Atlantic to the Alps. Nothing new in the sight--but
something new in the faces! A look of having got beyond the accident of
living, and accepted what lay over the edge, in the dim land of the
final. He had seen that look in the days before the Marne....
Most of the faces on the way were French: as far as Epernay they met
their compatriots only in isolated groups. But whenever one of the
motor-trucks lumbering by bore a big U.S. on its rear panel Troy pushed
his light ambulance ahead and skimmed past, just for the joy of seeing
the fresh young heads rising pyramid-wise above the sides of the lorry,
hearing the snatches of familiar song--"Hail, hail, the gang's all
here!" and "We won't come back till it's over over there!"--and shouting
back, in reply to a stentorian "Hi, kid, beat it!", "Bet your life I
will, old man!"
Hubert Jacks, the young fellow who was with him, shouted back too, as
lustily; but between times he was more occupied with the details of
their own particular job--to which he was newer than Troy--and seemed
not to feel so intensely the weight of impending events.
As they neared the Montmirail monument: "Ever been over this ground
before?" Troy asked carelessly, and Jacks answered: "N--no."
"Ah--I have. I was here just after the battle of the Marne, in September
'fourteen."
"That so? You must have been quite a kid," said Jacks with indifference,
filling his pipe.
"Well--not _quite_," Troy rejoined sulkily; and they said no more.
At Epernay they stopped for lunch, and found the place swarming with
troops. Troy's soul was bursting within him: he wanted to talk and
remember and compare. But his companion was unimaginative, and perhaps a
little jealous of his greater experience. "He doesn't want to show that
he's new at the job," Troy decided.
They lunched together in a corner of the packed restaurant, and while
they were taking coffee some French officers came up and chatted with
Troy. To all of them he felt the desperate need of explaining that he
was driving an ambulance only because he was still too young to be
among the combatants.
"But I shan't be--soon!" he always added, in the tone of one who
affirms. "It's merely a matter of a few weeks now."
"Oh, you all look like babies--but you all fight like devils," said a
young French lieutenant seasoned by four years at the front; and another
officer added gravely: "Make haste to be old enough, _cher monsieur_. We
need you all--every one of you...."
"Oh, we're coming--we're all coming!" Troy cried.
That evening, after a hard and harrowing day's work between _postes de
secours_ and a base hospital, they found themselves in a darkened
village, where, after a summary meal under flying shells, some one
suggested ending up at the Y.M.C.A. hut.
The shelling had ceased, and there seemed nothing better to do than to
wander down the dark street to the underground shelter packed with
American soldiers. Troy was sleepy and tired, and would have preferred
to crawl into his bed at the inn; he felt, more keenly than ever, the
humiliation (the word was stupid, but he could find no other) of being
among all these young men, only a year or two his seniors, and none, he
was sure, more passionately eager than himself for the work that lay
ahead, and yet so hopelessly divided from him by that stupid difference
in age. But Hubert Jacks was seemingly unconscious of this, and only
desirous of ending his night cheerfully. It would have looked unfriendly
not to accompany him, so they pushed their way together through the
cellar door surmounted by the sociable red triangle.
It was a big cellar, but brown uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it from
wall to wall. In one corner the men were sitting on packing-boxes at a
long table made of boards laid across barrels, the smoky light of little
oil lamps reddening their cheeks and deepening the furrows in their
white foreheads as they laboured over their correspondence. Others were
playing checkers, or looking at the illustrated papers, and everybody
was smoking and talking--not in large groups, but quietly, by twos or
threes. Young women in trig uniforms, with fresh innocent faces, moved
among the barrels and boxes, distributing stamps or books, chatting with
the soldiers, and being generally homelike and sisterly. The men gave
them back glances as honest, and almost as innocent, and an air of
simple daylight friendliness pervaded the Avernian cave.
It was the first time that Troy had ever seen a large group of his
compatriots so close to the fighting front, and in an hour of ease, and
he was struck by the gravity of the young faces, and the low tones of
their talk. Everything was in a minor key. No one was laughing or
singing or larking: the note was that which might have prevailed in a
club of quiet elderly men, or in a drawing-room where the guests did not
know each other well. Troy was all the more surprised because he
remembered the jolly calls of the young soldiers in the motor-trucks,
and the songs and horse-play of the gangs of trench-diggers and
hut-builders he had passed on the way. Was it that his compatriots did
not know how to laugh when they were at leisure, or was it rather that,
in the intervals of work, the awe of the unknown laid its hand on these
untried hearts?
Troy and Jacks perched on a packing-box, and talked a little with their
neighbours; but presently they were interrupted by the noise of a motor
stopping outside. There was a stir at the mouth of the cavern, and a
girl said eagerly: "Here she comes!"
Instantly the cellar woke up. The soldiers' faces grew young again, they
flattened themselves laughingly against the walls near the entrance, the
door above was cautiously opened, and a girl in a long blue cloak
appeared at the head of the stairs.
"Well, boys--you see I managed it!" she cried; and Troy recognized the
piercing accents and azure gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick.
"_She_ managed it!" the whole cellar roared as one man, drowning her
answer in a cheer. And, "Of course I did!" she continued, laughing and
nodding right and left as she made her triumphant way down the lane of
khaki, to what, at her appearance, had somehow promptly become the stage
at the farther end of a packed theatre. The elderly Y.M.C.A. official
who accompanied her puffed out his chest like a general and blinked
knowingly behind his gold eye-glasses.
Troy's first movement had been one of impatience. He hated all that Miss
Warlick personified, and hated it most of all on this sacred soil, and
at this fateful moment, with the iron wings of doom clanging so close
above their heads. But it would have been almost impossible to fight his
way out through the crowd that had closed in behind her--and he stayed.
The cheering subsided, she gained her improvised platform--a door laid
on some biscuit-boxes--and the recitation began.
She gave them all sorts of things, ranging from grave to gay, and
extracting from the sentimental numbers a peculiarly piercing effect
that hurt Troy like the twinge of a dental instrument. And her audience
loved it all, indiscriminately and voraciously, with souls hungry for
the home-flavour and long nurtured on what Troy called "cereal-fiction."
One had to admit that Miss Warlick knew her public, and could play on
every chord.
It might have been funny if it had not been so infinitely touching. They
were all so young, so serious, so far from home, and bound on a quest so
glorious! And there overhead, just above them, brooded and clanged the
black wings of their doom.... Troy's mockery was softened to tenderness,
and he felt, under the hard shell of his youthful omniscience, the stir
of all the things to which the others were unconsciously responding.
"And now, by special request, Miss Warlick is going to say a few words,"
the elderly eye-glassed officer importantly announced.
Ah, what a pity! If only she had ended on that last jolly chorus, so
full of artless laughter and tears! Troy remembered her dissertations on
the steamer, and winced at a fresh display of such fatuity in such a
scene.
She had let the cloak slip from her shoulders, and stepped to the edge
of her unsteady stage. Her eyes burned large in a face grown suddenly
grave.... For a moment she reminded him again of Sophy Wicks.
"Only a few words, really," she began apologetically; and the cellar
started a cheer of protest.
"No--not that kind. Something different...." She paused long enough to
let the silence prepare them: sharp little artist that she was! Then
she leaned forward. "This is what I want to say. I've come from the
French front--pretty near the edge. They're dying there, boys--dying by
thousands, _now_, this minute.... But that's not it--I know: you want me
to cut it out--and I'm going to.... But this is why I began that way;
because it was my first sight of--things of that sort. And I had to tell
you----"
She stopped, pale, her pretty mouth twitching.
"What I really wanted to say is this. Since I came to Europe, nearly a
year ago, I've got to know the country they're dying for--and I
understand why they mean to go on and on dying--if they have to--till
there isn't one of them left.
"Boys--I know France now--and she's worth it! Don't you make any
mistake!
"I have to laugh now when I remember what I thought of France when I
landed. My! How d'you suppose she'd got on so long without us? Done a
few things too--poor little toddler! Well--it was time we took her by
the hand, and showed her how to behave. And I wasn't the only one
either; I guess most of us thought we'd have to teach her her letters.
Maybe some of you boys right here felt that way too?"
A guilty laugh, and loud applause.
"Thought so," said Miss Warlick, smiling.
"Well," she continued, "there wasn't hardly anything _I_ wasn't ready to
teach them. On the steamer coming out with us there was a lot of those
Amb'lance boys. My! How I gassed to them. I said the French had got to
be taught how to love their mothers--I said they hadn't any
home-feeling--and didn't love children the way we do. I've been round
among them some since then, in the hospitals, and I've seen fellows
lying there shot 'most to death, and their little old mothers in white
caps arriving from 'way off at the other end of France. Well, those
fellows know how to see their mothers coming even if they're blind, and
how to hug 'em even if their arms are off.... And the children--the way
they go on about the children! Ever seen a French soldier yet that
didn't have a photograph of a baby stowed away somewhere in his dirty
uniform? I never have. I tell you, they're _white_! And they're fighting
as only people can who feel that way about mothers and babies. The way
we're going to fight; and maybe we'll prove it to 'em sooner than any of
us think....
"Anyhow, I wanted to get this off my chest to-night; not for _you_, only
for myself. I didn't want to have a shell get me before I'd said
'Veever la France!' before all of you.
"See here, boys--the Marcellaze!"
She snatched a flag from the wall, drawing herself up to heroic height;
and the whole cellar joined her in a roar.
X
The next morning Jacks dragged Troy out of bed by the feet. The room was
still dark, and through the square of the low window glittered a bunch
of stars.
"Hurry call to Montmirail--step lively!" Jacks ordered, his voice thick
with sleep.
All the old names; with every turn of the wheel they seemed to be
drawing nearer and nearer to the ravaged spot of earth where Paul
Gantier slept his faithful sleep. Strange if, to-day of all days, Troy
should again stand by his friend's grave.
They pushed along eastward under the last stars, the roll of the cannon
crashing through the quiet dawn. The birds flew up with frightened cries
from the trees along the roadside; rooks cawed their warning from clump
to clump, and gathered in the sky in dark triangles flying before the
danger.
The east began to redden through the dust-haze of the cloudless air. As
they advanced the road became more and more crowded, and the ambulance
was caught in the usual dense traffic of the front: artillery,
field-kitchens, motor-trucks, horse-wagons, hay-carts packed with
refugees, and popping motor-cycles zigzagging through the tangle of
vehicles. The movement seemed more feverish and uncertain than usual,
and now and then the road was jammed, and curses, shouts and the crack
of heavy whips sounded against the incessant cannonade that hung its
iron curtain above the hills to the north-east. The faces of soldiers
and officers were unshaved sallow drawn with fatigue and anxiety. Women
crouched sobbing on their piled-up baggage, and here and there, by the
roadside, a little country cart had broken down, and the occupants sat
on the bank watching the confusion like impassive lookers-on.
Suddenly, in the thickest of the struggle, a heavy lorry smashed into
Troy's ambulance, and he felt the unmistakable wrench of the
steering-gear. The car shook like a careening boat, and then righted
herself and stopped.
"Oh, hell!" shouted Jacks in a fury. The two lads jumped down, and in a
few minutes they saw that they were stranded beyond remedy. Tears of
anger rushed into Troy's eyes. On this day of days he was not even to
accomplish his own humble job!
Another ambulance of their own formation overtook them, and it was
agreed that Jacks, who was the sharper of the two, was to get a lift to
the nearest town, and try to bring back a spare part, or, failing that,
pick up some sort of a car in which they could continue their work.
Troy was left by the roadside. Hour after hour he sat there waiting and
cursing his fate. When would Jacks be back again? Not at all, most
likely; it was ten to one he would be caught on the way and turned on to
some more pressing job. He knew, and Troy knew, that their ambulance was
for the time being a hopeless wreck, and would probably have to stick
ignominiously in its ditch till some one could go and fetch a spare part
from Paris. And meanwhile, what might not be happening nearer by?
The rumble and thump of the cannonade grew more intense; a violent
engagement was evidently going on not far off. Troy pulled out his map
and tried to calculate how far he was from the front; but the front, at
that point, was a wavering and incalculable line. He had an idea that
the fighting was much nearer than he or Jacks had imagined. The place at
which they had broken down must be about fifteen miles from the Marne.
But could it be possible that the Germans had crossed the Marne?
Troy grew hungry, and thrust his hand in his pocket to pull out a
sandwich. With it came a letter of his mother's, carried off in haste
when he left Paris the previous morning. He re-read it with a mournful
smile. "Of course we all know the Allies must win; but the preparations
here seem so slow and blundering; and the Germans are still so
strong...." (Thump, thump, the artillery echoed: "_Strong!_") And just
at the end of the letter, again; "I do wonder if you'll run across
Sophy...."
He lit a cigarette, and shut his eyes and thought. The sight of Miss
Warlick had made Sophy Wicks's presence singularly vivid to him: he had
fallen asleep thinking of her the night before. How like her to have
taken a course at the Presbyterian Hospital without letting any one
know! He wondered that he had not suspected, under her mocking
indifference, an ardour as deep as his own, and he was ashamed of having
judged her as others had, when, for so long, the thought of her had been
his torment and his joy. Where was she now, he wondered? Probably in
some hospital in the south or the centre: the authorities did not let
beginners get near the front, though, of course, it was what all the
girls were mad for.... Well, Sophy would do her work wherever it was
assigned to her: he did not see her intriguing for a showy post.
Troy began to marvel again at the spell of France--his France! Here was
a girl who had certainly not come in quest of vulgar excitement, as so
many did: Sophy had always kept herself scornfully aloof from the pretty
ghouls who danced and picnicked on the ruins of the world. He knew that
her motives, so jealously concealed, must have been as pure and urgent
as his own. France, which she hardly knew, had merely guessed at through
the golden blur of a six weeks' midsummer trip, France had drawn her
with an irresistible pressure; and the moment she had felt herself free
she had come. "Whither thou goest will I go, thy people shall be my
people...." Yes, France was the Naomi-country that had but to beckon,
and her children rose and came....
Troy was exceedingly tired: he stretched himself on the dusty bank, and
the noise of the road-traffic began to blend with the cannonade in his
whirling brain. Suddenly he fancied the Germans were upon him. He
thought he heard the peppering volley of machine-guns, shouts, screams,
rifle-shots close at hand....
He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
What he had heard was the cracking of whips and the shouting of carters
urging tired farm-horses along. Down a by-road to his left a stream of
haggard country people was pouring from the direction of the Marne. This
time only a few were in the carts: the greater number were flying on
their feet, the women carrying their babies, the old people bent under
preposterous bundles, blankets, garden utensils, cages with rabbits, an
agricultural prize framed and glazed, a wax wedding-wreath under a
broken globe. Sick and infirm people were dragged and shoved along by
the older children: a goitred idiot sat in a wheel-barrow pushed by a
girl, and laughed and pulled its tongue....
In among the throng Troy began to see the torn blue uniforms of wounded
soldiers limping on bandaged legs.... Others too, not wounded, elderly
haggard territorials, with powder-black faces, bristling beards, and the
horror of the shell-roar in their eyes.... One of them stopped near
Troy, and in a thick voice begged for a drink ... just a drop of
anything, for Gods sake. Others followed, pleading for food and drink.
"Gas, gas ..." a young artilleryman gasped at him through distorted
lips.... The Germans were over the Marne, they told him, the Germans
were coming. It was hell back there, no one could stand it.
Troy ransacked the ambulance, found water, brandy, biscuits, condensed
milk, and set up an impromptu canteen. But the people who had clustered
about him were pushed forward by others crying: "Are you mad to stay
here? The Germans are coming!"--and in a feeble panic they pressed on.
One old man, trembling with fatigue, and dragging a shaking brittle old
woman, had spied the stretcher beds inside the ambulance, and without
asking leave scrambled in and pulled his wife after him. They fell like
logs on to the grey blankets, and a livid territorial with a bandaged
arm drenched in blood crawled in after them and sank on the floor. The
rest of the crowd had surged by.
As he was helping the wounded soldier to settle himself in the
ambulance, Troy heard a new sound down the road. It was a deep
continuous rumble, the rhythmic growl of a long train of army-trucks.
The way must have been cleared to let them by, for there was no break or
faltering in the ever-deepening roar of their approach.
A cloud of dust rolled ahead, growing in volume with the growing noise;
now the first trucks were in sight, huge square olive-brown motor-trucks
stacked high with scores and scores of rosy soldiers. Troy jumped to his
feet with a shout. It was an American regiment being rushed to the
front!
The refugees and the worn-out blue soldiers fell back before the
triumphant advance, and a weak shout went up. The rosy soldiers shouted
back, but their faces were grave and set. It was clear that they knew
where they were going, and to what work they had been so hurriedly
summoned.
"It's hell back there!" a wounded territorial called out, pointing
backward over his bandaged shoulder, and another cried: "Vive
l'Amérique!"
"Vive la France!" shouted the truckful abreast of Troy, and the same cry
burst from his own lungs. A few miles off the battle of the Marne was
being fought again, and here were his own brothers rushing forward to
help! He felt that his greatest hour had struck.
One of the trucks had halted for a minute just in front of him, marking
time, and the lads leaning over its side had seen him, and were calling
out friendly college calls.
"Come along and help!" cried one, as the truck got under way again.
Troy glanced at his broken-down motor; then his eye lit on a rifle lying
close by in the dust of the roadside. He supposed it belonged to the
wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance.
He caught up the rifle, scrambled up over the side with the soldier's
help, and was engulfed among his brothers. Furtively he had pulled the
ambulance badge from his collar ... but a moment later he understood the
uselessness of the precaution. All that mattered to any one just then
was that he was one more rifle for the front.
XI
On the way he tried to call up half-remembered snatches of military
lore.
If only he did not disgrace them by a blunder!
He had talked enough to soldiers, French and American, in the last year:
he recalled odd bits of professional wisdom, but he was too excited to
piece them together. He was not in the least afraid of being afraid, but
his heart sank at the dread of doing something stupid, inopportune,
idiotic. His envy of the youths beside him turned to veneration. They
had all been in the front line, and knew its vocabulary, its dangers and
its dodges.
All he could do was to watch and imitate....
Presently they were all tumbled out of the motors and drawn up by the
roadside. An officer bawled unintelligible orders, and the men executed
mysterious movements in obedience.
Troy crept close to the nearest soldier, and copied his gestures
awkwardly--but no one noticed. Night had fallen, and he was thankful for
the darkness. Perhaps by to-morrow morning he would have picked up a few
of their tricks. Meanwhile, apparently, all he had to do was to march,
march, march, at a sort of break-neck trot that the others took as
lightly as one skims the earth in a dream. If it had not been for his
pumping heart and his aching bursting feet, Troy at moments would have
thought it was a dream....
Rank by rank they pressed forward in the night toward a sky-line torn
with intermittent flame.
"We're going toward a battle," Troy sang to himself, "toward a battle,
toward a battle...." But the words meant no more to him than the
doggerel the soldier was chanting at his elbow.
* * * * *
They were in a wood, slipping forward cautiously, beating their way
through the under-growth. The night had grown cloudy, but now and then
the clouds broke, and a knot of stars clung to a branch like swarming
bees.
At length a halt was called in a clearing, and then the group to which
Troy had attached himself was ordered forward. He did not understand the
order, but seeing the men moving he followed, like a mascot dog trotting
after its company, and they began to beat their way onward, still more
cautiously, in little crawling lines of three or four. It reminded Troy
of "playing Indian" in his infancy.
"Careful ... watch out for 'em ..." the soldier next to him whispered,
clutching his arm at a noise in the underbrush; and Troy's heart jerked
back violently, though his legs were still pressing forward.
They were here, then: they might be close by in the blackness, behind
the next tree-hole, in the next clump of bushes--the destroyers of
France, old M. Gantier's murderers, the enemy to whom Paul Gantier had
given his life! These thoughts slipped confusedly through Troy's mind,
scarcely brushing it with a chill wing. His main feeling was one of a
base physical fear, and of a newly-awakened moral energy which had the
fear by the throat and held it down with shaking hands. Which of the two
would conquer, how many yards farther would the resolute Troy drag on
the limp coward through this murderous wood? That was the one thing that
mattered....
At length they dropped down into a kind of rocky hollow overhung with
bushes, and lay there, finger on trigger, hardly breathing. "Sleep a bit
if you can--you look beat," whispered the friendly soldier.
_Sleep!_
Troy's mind was whirling like a machine in a factory blazing with
lights. His thoughts rushed back over the miles he had travelled since
he had caught up the rifle by the roadside.
"My God!" he suddenly thought, "what am I doing here, anyhow? I'm a
deserter."
Yes: that was the name he would go by if ever his story became known.
And how should it not become known? He had deserted--deserted not only
his job, and his ambulance, and Jacks, who might come back at any
moment--it was a dead certainty to him now that Jacks would come
back--but also (incredible perfidy!) the poor worn-out old couple and
the wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance. He, Troy
Belknap, United States Army Ambulance driver, and sworn servant of
France, had deserted three sick and helpless people who, if things
continued to go badly, would almost certainly fall into the hands of the
Germans.... It was too horrible to think of, and so, after a minute or
two, he ceased to think of it--at least with the surface of his mind.
"If it's a court-martial it's a court-martial," he reflected; and began
to stretch his ears again for the sound of men slipping up in the
darkness through the bushes....
But he was really horribly tired, and in the midst of the tension the
blaze of lights in his head went out, and he fell into a half-conscious
doze. When he started into full consciousness again the men were
stirring, and he became aware that the sergeant was calling for
volunteers.
Volunteers for what? He didn't know and was afraid to ask. But it became
clear to him that the one chance to wash his guilt away (was that funny
old-fashioned phrase a quotation, and where did it come from?) was to
offer himself for the job, whatever it might be.
The decision once taken, he became instantly calm, happy and alert. He
observed the gesture made by the other volunteers and imitated it. It
was too dark for the sergeant to distinguish one man from another, and
without comment he let Troy fall into the line of men who were creeping
up out of the hollow.
The awful cannonade had ceased, and as they crawled along single file
between the trees the before-dawn twitter of birds rained down on them
like dew, and the woods smelt like the woods at home.
They came to the end of the trees, and guessed that the dark wavering
wall ahead was the edge of a wheat-field. Some one whispered that the
Marne was just beyond the wheat-field, and that the red flares they saw
must be over Château-Thierry.
The momentary stillness laid a reassuring touch on Troy's nerves, and he
slipped along adroitly at the tail of the line, alert but cool. Far off
the red flares still flecked the darkness, but they did not frighten
him. He said to himself: "People are always afraid in their first
battle. I'm not the least afraid, so I suppose this is not a battle" ...
and at the same moment there was a small shrieking explosion followed
by a horrible rattle of projectiles that seemed to spring up out of the
wheat at their feet.
The men dropped on their bellies and crawled away from it, and Troy
crawled after, sweating with fear. He had not looked back, but he knew
that some of the men must be lying where they had dropped, and suddenly
it occurred to him that it was his business to go and see....
Was it, though? Or would that be disobeying orders again?
The Ambulance driver's instinct awoke in him, and he did not stop to
consider, but turned and crawled back, straight back to the place that
the horrible explosion had come from. The firing had stopped, but in the
thin darkness he saw a body lying in front of him in the flattened
wheat. He looked in the direction from which he had come, and saw that
the sergeant and the rest of the men were disappearing to the right;
then he ramped forward again, forward and forward, till he touched the
arm of the motionless man and whispered: "Hi, kid, it's me...."
He tried to rouse the wounded man, to pull him forward, to tow him like
a barge along the beaten path in the wheat. But the man groaned and
resisted. He was evidently in great pain, and Troy, whom a year's
experience in ambulance work had enlightened, understood that he must
either be carried away or left where he was.
To carry him it was necessary to stand up, and the night was growing
transparent, and the wheat was not more than waist high.
Troy raised his head an inch or two and looked about him. In the east,
beyond the wheat, a pallor was creeping upward, drowning the last
stars. Any one standing up would be distinctly visible against that
pallor. With a sense of horror and reluctance and dismay he lifted the
wounded man and stood up. As he did so he felt a small tap on his back,
between the shoulders, as if some one had touched him from behind. He
half turned to see who it was, and doubled up, slipping down with the
wounded soldier in his arms.
XII
Troy, burning with fever, lay on a hospital bed.
He was not very clear where the hospital was, nor how he had got there;
and he did not greatly care. All that was left of clearness in his brain
was filled with the bitter sense of his failure. He had abandoned his
job to plunge into battle, and before he had seen a German or fired a
shot he found himself ignominiously laid by the heels in a strange place
full of benevolent-looking hypocrites whose least touch hurt him a
million times more than the German bullet.
It was all a stupid agitating muddle, in the midst of which he tried in
vain to discover what had become of Jacks, what had happened to the
ambulance, and whether the old people and the wounded territorial had
been heard of. He insisted particularly on the latter point to the cruel
shaved faces that were always stooping over him, but they seemed unable
to give him a clear answer--or else their cruelty prompted them to
withhold what they knew. He groaned and tossed and got no comfort, till,
suddenly opening his eyes, he found Jacks sitting by his bed.
He poured out his story to Jacks in floods and torrents: there was no
time to listen to what his friend had to say. He went in and out of the
whole business with him, explaining, arguing, and answering his own
arguments. Jacks, passive and bewildered, sat by the bed and murmured:
"All right--all right" at intervals. Then he too disappeared, giving
way to other unknown faces.
The third night (some one said it was the third night) the fever dropped
a little. Troy felt more quiet, and Jacks, who had turned up again, sat
beside him, and told him all the things he had not been able to listen
to the first day--all the great things in which he had played an
unconscious part.
"Battle of the Marne? Sure you were in it--in it up to the hilt, you
lucky kid!"
And what a battle it had been! The Americans had taken Vaux and driven
the Germans back across the bridge at Château-Thierry, the French were
pressing hard on their left flank, the advance on Paris had been
checked--and the poor old couple and the territorial in the ambulance
had not fallen into enemy hands, but had been discovered by Jacks where
Troy had left them, and hurried off to places of safety the same night.
As Troy lay and listened, tears of weakness and joy ran down his face.
The Germans were back across the Marne, and he had really been in the
action that had sent them there! The road to Paris was barred--and Sophy
Wicks was somewhere in France.... He felt as light as a feather, and if
it had not been for his deathly weakness he would have jumped out of bed
and insisted on rejoining the ambulance. But as it was he could only lie
flat and feebly return Jacks's grin....
* * * * *
There was just one thing he had not told Jacks: a little thing that
Jacks would not have understood. Out in the wheat, when he had felt that
tap on the shoulder, he had turned round quickly, thinking that a friend
had touched him. At the same instant he had stumbled and fallen, and
his eyes had grown dark; but through the darkness he still felt
confusedly that a friend was near, if only he could lift his lids and
look.
He did lift them at last; and there in the dawn he saw a French soldier,
haggard and battle-worn, looking down at him. The soldier wore the
uniform of the _chasseurs à pied_, and his face was the face of Paul
Gantier, bending low and whispering: "_Mon petit--mon pauvre petit
gars...._" Troy heard the words distinctly, he knew the voice as well as
he knew his mother's. His eyes shut again, but he felt Gantier's arms
under his body, felt himself lifted, lifted, till he seemed to float in
the arms of his friend.
He said nothing of that to Jacks or any one, and now that the fever had
dropped he was glad he had held his tongue. Some one told him that a
sergeant of the _chasseurs à pied_ had found him and brought him in to
the nearest _poste de secours_, where Jacks, providentially, had run
across him and carried him back to the base. They told him that his
rescue had been wonderful, but that nobody knew what the sergeant's name
was, or where he had gone to.... ("If _ever_ a man ought to have had the
Croix de Guerre--!" one of the nurses interjected emotionally.)
Troy listened and shut his lips. It was really none of his business to
tell these people where the sergeant had gone to; but he smiled a little
when the doctor said: "Chances are a man like that hasn't got much use
for decorations ..." and when the emotional nurse added: "Well, you must
just devote the rest of your life to trying to find him."
Ah, yes, he would do that, Troy swore--he would do it on the
battlefields of France.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
* * * * *
By EDITH WHARTON.
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH.
DESCENT OF MAN, and Other Stories.
THE FRUIT OF THE TREE.
THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN, and Other Stories.
TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS.
THE REEF.
THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY.
XINGU, and Other Stories.
SUMMER. A Novel.
SANCTUARY.
ETHAN FROME.
* * * * *
By WINSTON CHURCHILL.
THE CELEBRITY.
RICHARD CARVEL.
THE CRISIS.
THE CROSSING.
CONISTON.
MR. CREWE'S CAREER.
A MODERN CHRONICLE.
THE INSIDE OF THE CUP.
A FAR COUNTRY.
THE DWELLING PLACE OF LIGHT.
* * * * *
THE WORKS OF THOMAS HARDY
TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.
THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.
A PAIR OF BLUE EYES.
TWO ON A TOWER.
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.
THE WOODLANDERS.
JUDE THE OBSCURE.
THE TRUMPET-MAJOR.
THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA.
A LAODICEAN.
DESPERATE REMEDIES.
WESSEX TALES.
LIFE'S LITTLE IRONIES.
A GROUP OF NOBLE DAMES.
UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE.
THE WELL-BELOVED.
A CHANGED MAN, and other Tales.
WESSEX POEMS, and other Verses.
POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
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