XIII
THE RED TRIANGLE OF WAR
THERE came a day when I had to do with a very different red triangle from that with which I had been concerned all summer. This was the red triangle of war and destruction, fire and flaming sword, the triangle from which the German fell back to the Hindenburg line, leaving to beautiful France the heritage of blackened, dismantled, unrestorable cities, towns and villages.
One hundred and fifty kilometers our speedometer registered when we had threaded in and out among these ruins of a once prosperous, happy and rich country; had looked down into Saint Quentin and the German lines and had returned to the French general headquarters at night.
Sherman in his march to the sea never dreamed of destruction like that. The only parallel I have seen is the total abolition of Wytschaete, at Messines Ridge, and that was the result of bombardment, not of deliberate dynamiting and burning. It is one thing for a town to be wiped out between the hammer and the anvil of two opposing armies and another for it to suffer no bullet wound, but only bombs.
We were in Joan of Arc's country; and we met a little Joan of to-day. Even her name was Jeanne; and she sat on my knee, gazed a while at the photo of a little American lad then gravely kissed him and smiled the quietest, most adorable of smiles into my face. Her eyes were deep and dark with the mystery of a childhood spent between the waves of two great armies; her features were perfect, beautiful to a degree; and, later, when I stood in Joan's chapel, where she took the holy communion in armor before setting off to Orleans, the child's face was reflected to me in the white marble of Joan's effigy. For months this little girl's home had been in the hands of the Hun, and now it was left to her desolate.
A Spanish senator was of our party, a quick moving, springy, courtly gentleman of Andalusia, with his Sancho Panza by his side, his secretary. They seemed to me strange modern remnants of a day when their own land took the lead in all such titanic struggles as this. Not being able to speak their tongue, nor to understand much of their French, I could not pierce deeply into their state of mind; but we stood side by side at general headquarters, and gazed upon the beautiful structure that had often held the greatest warrior of all time—Napoleon—and each thought our own thoughts. Strange how much less one hears the name of Napoleon these days in France, than ever before. After all, even his battles have paled into comparative insignificance.
We went mile after mile over roads, once the most perfect in the world, now broken and patched, from town to town and village to village, whose names have been pathetically prominent in the dispatches. Noyon, Chauny, Ham, Roye, Lassigny. One can understand a part of the destruction as intended to deprive the French of their resources; for example, the wilderness of blackened, twisted iron in what were once the factories, sugar factories, mirror factories and the like. But one cannot understand the destruction of cathedrals, too far from the Hindenburg line to serve as observatories.
We stepped into what was left of one beautiful church. Designedly or not, a bit of the roof was left over the altar, the choir and the organ console; and on the door was printed a list of stated services. We heard the organ rolling and found a poilu with bowed head and closed eyes playing in deep-throated minor tones the sorrows of the souls of men. All the metal of the great pipes had been stripped away by the Roche to supply his need of copper, and the organ itself, under the roof-less portion of the ruined transept grinned hollow and black as a skull. I could scarcely bear the music of desolation, and the bowed head of France.
There were acres and acres of interlaced barbed wire in the fields along all our roads, miles and miles of trenches that had been first lines, second lines, transverse and communication systems. It seemed horribly confused, and yet once it was all part of a definite plan. Poppies, dog daisies, wild flowers and weeds of all kinds were now taking these trenches gently and peacefully and covering up, as if ashamed, the violent toil of men.
Sometimes the trenches were on each side of our road, and here the foes had faced each other across thirty yards of paved No Man's Land. Again the ditches would coil and uncoil through a village or group of farmhouses, and once the yawning serpent writhed into the cellar windows of a mansion and out on the other side. Chateaux that had once been beautiful, well nigh perfect, crowning lovely wooded heights, now stood, if they could be said to stand, so lamely did they lean and totter, blackened, windowless, shattered.
One can understand the destruction of forest trees for lumbering purposes; but when giants of forty years are thrown down and left to rot, and when fruit trees are girdled, that could not have borne for some years to come, so young were they, one wonders whether any plan except utter ruthlessness lay back of it all. The towns may be rebuilt—though it would be easier to begin elsewhere and build all over anew—but the trees cannot be replaced under two generations. And as for the lives of the young girls, the young mothers, the youths, driven away into practical slavery, and starved into debauchery and prostitution, they can never be restored except somewhere in a beyond.
Most of this red triangle was never fought over. There are few wooden crosses to tell the tale of struggle between man and man. It was simply wrecked, burned, crimsoned with the unshed blood of hearts bleeding internally; and how the heart of France drips, drips, drips! With the sad-eyed, feature-drawn captain beside me, a man who had spent two years and nine months in trench and firing line, since the sixth of August, 1914, and, unwounded outwardly, but physically somewhat broken, had been taken out for lighter staff duties, I could do nothing but murmur: "Je ne comprend pas—I cannot understand." He grimly murmured in reply: "Non! Bon! Je ne comprend pas."
We paused at Prince Eitel Friedrich's pleasure ground—the lodge he established and held for months and even years, for champagne parties, cards and carousals. And I recalled what I had been told in the Isle of Wight, where this young princeling had been a-pleasuring when the war came on. He was suddenly called home, near the end of July, 1914. Somebody knew what was coming. The young barbarian, according to the natives of the isle, smashed up the furniture in his rooms, tore the hangings, soiled the linens and upholsteries in unspeakable ways, and stole away very unlike the Arabs. There are other such tales told of the Hohenzollerns in Europe; they seem to have this sort of way about them.
Standing near the prince's famous Chris, or dug-out, we could see the Saint Quentin Cathedral clearly; and we could see the shells falling and exploding in the ground between. Then we passed into the zone of fire. Here everything was covered with camouflage. Every cameon or motor truck, every tent, every camp object, was ringstreaked with paint to look like the ground. The roads, at exposed points were, of course, hung with screens of grass or colored fibers to hide passing motors and men from enemy eyes. We knew now we could be reached at any time by German fire.
The poilu, however, went about in this realm of fire, with less apparent care for his safety than Tommy Atkins; for, whereas, the latter always dons his steel helmet and keeps his gas protector handy when near the line, the former comes and goes, and even walks along the roads and fields in his cap. We saw engineers building telephone lines—and such neat, natty work they were doing, too, within three or four miles of the German lines—entirely without helmets. Our car gathered a ground telephone wire around its front axle at one place and ran away with it. Signal corps men at the instrument must have been startled. Our chauffeur took his wire cutters and clipped it calmly and left the end to be found by the searching engineers.
While this delay took place, I heard the hum of planes and stepped out of the car to look up. There he was, the little silver insect; he must have been sixteen thousand feet above us. I was trying to make him out, when he darted into a cloud and disappeared. Then came two planes that I knew were French, lower down, but climbing, and I was satisfied of the nationality of the first one. He must have borne the black cross, while the two with the tri-color circles must have been after him.
Closer and closer we came to the lines, until we dismounted at last and took the rest of the way afoot. Through fields of clover, along hedge rows, over ditches, we made our way about a mile up the ridge until we crept into a well concealed outlook and could gaze straight away down to the lines and the beleaguered city beneath. It was a quiet day, although some artillery activity was going on. Our own guns were playing on each side of us and occasionally some of our "big stuff" went rumbling like a train of cars over our heads. We could hear the Roche gun speak, wait a few minutes and then hear the explosion of the shell to right or left. One quickly gets accustomed to the difference in language of the batteries, friend or foe.
Just beside us, on the hillside, poilus were quietly digging and building. We asked them what they were engaged upon, another observatory? No, it was a telephone station. Then we retraced our steps and thought of the city lying yonder that the French could, at any moment, blow to kingdom come, and capture. Only they prefer, if possible, to spare its beauty; and squeeze the Roche out.
On the route that we passed was the town where Miss Morgan was faithfully at work, and had been for many months, ministering to the hungry, needy, refugee people of the district. We saw ambulances, too, with the Stars and Stripes upon them, and young Americans in the drivers' seats.
At one point we passed a single grave—McConnell's it was—within ten feet of the roadside. It will ever be a sacred spot to French and Americans alike. The tricolor circle of the French air service marks it; flowers are kept fresh on it; the flags of both nations float in the winds above it. It is the lovely resting place of a man who fought, alone in the clouds, fell to his death alone, resolutely went to his great renunciation like him who trod the wine press alone; but who, to-day, please God, is not alone, but is with the hundreds of the heroic who confer together over the feeble little struggles of that distant little planet where once they lived and strove.