ABBÉ FELIX KLEIN

The descriptions which are to follow belong to history already ancient; to the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. So rapid is the march of events with us now!

The enthusiasm of a wounded soldier in 1914.

The soldier wounded during the first months of the War came to us overflowing with enthusiasm, eager to express himself. His mind was full of picturesque and varied impressions and he asked for nothing better than to tell about them. Willingly he described the emotions and spirit of the moment of departure; his curiosity in the presence of the unknown, the shock of the first contact with the enemy, the dizzy joy of initial successes. He confessed the amazement and pain of the first checks and the headlong retreat which followed them. He spoke of the famous Joffre's "ordre du jour" when, in the battle of the Marne, the men were told to take the offensive. They stopped the enemy. They pursued him. They experienced the intoxication of a victory that gave back to France her old prestige and felt with certainty, although at first confusedly, that their battle was a decisive event in human history.

The wounded of 1918 reflect the long tragedy.

They have faced terrible new weapons.

To this brilliant and epic beginning succeeded a long and sombre tragedy, to this Iliad worthy of a Homer an Inferno worthy of a Dante. So we cannot wonder that the wounded of 1918 differed from those of 1914, and that their faces, like the face of the Florentine poet returning from hell, reflected the terrible things through which they had passed. The suffering of years, the eternal waiting for a decision of arms that did not come, the increasing horror of confronting weapons unknown in the early months—heavy artillery, gas, liquid fire, aëroplane attacks—left their mark upon our soldiers.

Dante imagines the terrible things he recounts. Our soldiers have seen them face to face. New Year after New Year has come and gone, and found them living underground, in constant danger of unseen and unavoidable forms of death, huddled together in damp, dark holes, exposed to rain and snow and shell fire. Rarely was there fighting—as we used to understand the term—but daily death took its toll, and ill and wounded were evacuated to the rear.

Modern battle has become a scientific operation.

Ardor they certainly retained for the assault, and heroism for confronting sheets of fire, or clouds of asphyxiating gas; but in the scientific operation which the modern battle has become, most things that are purely personal are more to be dreaded than desired, a fiery temper counts for much less than coolness, discipline, mastery of self, the spirit of abnegation and self-sacrifice. And when the battle was won, that is to say, when they had taken, not a town with a resounding name, but the ruins of a village, a treeless forest, a dismantled fort, a hill thirty metres high, the survivors still had a task before them which had lost none of its roughness or austerity. They had to organize the new position in haste, dig other shelters, undergo bombardments and reject counter-attacks, all the more violent because the enemy, supported in the rear by positions prepared in advance, was more furious than ever after defeat. Thus it continued—until now, even now, when under the irresistible pressure of the French, the English and the Americans, the German wall is crumbling. At last it will be broken, and the victorious flood of the armies of democracy will pass through. Then our invaded provinces and the sacred soil of Belgium will be freed; then the conditions of just and honorable peace among all the nations of the earth may be dictated on the banks of the Rhine—or farther, if necessary.

Patience and tenacity are necessary.

But to support, while we waited, the monotonous trench-life to accomplish the rapid nocturnal raids or the formidable exploits of the great days and weeks of offensive, required more than that brilliant quality of our fathers, the furia francese that was the synonym of overwhelming courage and the ardor which commands victory. Patience to wait, resignation to accept, tenacity to prolong efforts, deliberate and indomitable will to overcome trials, within and without and to press on to the distant goal of final victory were above all things necessary.

"To the end!"

These qualities, summed up in one expression: "To the end!" so profoundly different from those which hitherto have passed as characteristic of our race, were the ones most noticeable in our combatant of the fourth year of the War. Youthful enthusiasm was no more; each man numbered the dangers run, each man took clear account of those to come.

Patriotism becomes a passion.

Only austere love of duty can sustain a man at such a height. A schoolmaster-sergeant of Lyon, Philippe Gonnard, voices it to a friend inclined to pity him: he was ill enough to get his freedom, but wished, nevertheless, to keep at his post until he was killed: "I intend to stay at the front.... Patriotism for me is a passion. Does that mean that I am happy here far from all I love? You do not think that and I have often said I am not, in prose and verse. But from now until peace, no man of heart can be happy. If I came back, I should be still less happy, because instead of being dissatisfied with my lot, I should be dissatisfied with myself."

Strong will and nobility of soul.

More or less consciously, this was the rock bottom of the character of the soldier of France after three and a half years of war: "Will always on the stretch, anguish conquered, melancholy transformed into nobility of soul—as long as literature does not portray these essential traits of the soldier," says one of our best author-combatants, "all it creates will only be artificial and bear no relation to reality."

"No matter, it is for France."

"No matter, it is for France!" says the wounded soldier to the comrades bending over him, and if it is during an attack he tells them not to stop, not to carry him away "because it is no longer worth while," but to continue without him the noble work for which he is offering his life. Let a chaplain bring him divine help in time and he will die more than resigned, joyous and radiant in the faith of his childhood, bewailing his sins and kissing the crucifix like the French of the Middle Ages. How many times, in the horrible frame of modern war, have words been uttered, scenes enacted, agonies suffered which echoed the most sublime passages of the Chanson de Roland!

Most of the wounded recover.

Many times wounded.

But, thank God, among those who fall without being killed outright, the minority are mortally wounded. Most of them are destined to get well or at least to survive: they know it, and are glad. As soon as they regain consciousness after the shock, the first idea is: "Am I really not dead?" To be wounded does not disconcert them at all. "We are here for that!" said, the other day, one of my young friends of the class 1915, who by exception has been preserved until now. The alternative, in this present War, is not to come out of it wounded, or unwounded, but wounded or dead: to escape death is all that one can reasonably ask. Men who have only been wounded once, are more and more scarce, some have returned to the front four or five times. We had at the hospital a year ago an American sergeant of the Foreign Legion, engaged at Orleans in August, 1914, who having fought in Champagne, on the Somme and in Alsace, had received three wounds, the last at the end of 1915, at Belloy-en-Santerre, when a German bomb had badly damaged his left thigh: "the last" up to that time, for he had to go back under fire and will in all probability receive a fourth wound.

The slightly wounded are lucky.

The most unfortunate.

Those slightly wounded have not much merit, it must be confessed, in being resigned or even joyful. After a rapid dressing at the first station they will rest several days at the hospital at the front, and then get leave of convalescence which they will pass with their families. A wound for them, who can bear a little suffering, means an unexpected holiday and supplementary permission. They are only sorry if they are hit stupidly, out of action or at the beginning of a well-prepared attack, and prevented from going on with it. Let us leave them to their good luck, and stay longer with the severely wounded, those, for instance, who have a leg or arm broken, a fractured jaw, vertebra or ribs bruised, or are deprived of one of their senses—blind, deaf, paralyzed. We unhesitatingly acknowledge that these three last categories of wounded feel their misery profoundly, and need time to get used to it. Those, happily much more numerous, who have only temporarily or permanently lost the use of one of their limbs, generally consider themselves very fortunate. "I have the good wound!" they affect to say, meaning that the War is over for them. So at least they express themselves, not at all wishing to be admired, and trying as it were, to minimize their courage in bearing their trial.

Self-sacrifice of the wounded.

"Arise, ye dead!"

But aside from this paradoxical attitude, they frequently speak and act in the most simple, touching way! It is common to hear one say to the stretcher-bearer who comes to fetch him: "Take my comrade here first; he is much more wounded than I; I can wait...." And that when it means lying on the ground under the bombardment, thirsty, feverish, feeling his strength ebb with his blood. Before any one comes back to get him, often he will try again, if he has a sound arm left, to fire his rifle or his machine-gun once more. Glory surrounds the epic incident of the trench where the only unwounded soldier, seeing the enemy arrive, cried out as if in delirium: "Arise, ye dead!" and the dying really rose, and succeeded, some of them, in firing once more before they fell again, and the assailants fled. A more recent and simpler deed is also worth recording.

A dead observer protects his pilot.

Returning from a bombardment of the enemy's factories in broad daylight, a French machine conducted by two men was attacked by several aviators. The observer, hit by a ball in the chest, dropped down into the carlingue. The pilot seeing this prepared to turn back. But hearing his machine-gun firing again, he concluded that the observer was not seriously hurt. As soon as he landed in France: "Well, what about that wound?" he asked. No answer. He bent down and saw that his companion was dead. Even in his agony he had continued to protect his comrade.

In the beginning of the War the wounded stayed a long, a very long time without being rescued, at the place where they fell, or in the shelter to which they had been able to crawl. Our stretcher-bearers of the American Ambulance found, after the battle of the Marne, many who had lain for days and nights in shell holes, at the foot of trees, in ruined barns or churches! One may guess what the mortality might be! Today, happily, it is no longer so. The field of action is more restricted and the aid is better organized.

Transportation is painful and dangerous.

Relief at the first dressing station.

The nurses devoted and the sufferers resigned.

If transportation, however, is less retarded than three years ago, it is still painful and rather dangerous. Even when a special passage has been dug before the attack for the evacuation of the wounded, all jolts are not avoided in this dark and narrow way; but in going through the ordinary passage-ways, dangerous and unseen obstacles are often encountered—crumbling earth, perhaps, or convoys going in the opposite direction. If they heeded the wounded soldier, the stretcher-bearers would go on open ground. This he frequently does, if he is at all able to get on without aid; once hit he thinks himself invulnerable—a singular illusion which has brought about many catastrophes. At the first dressing-station and at the front hospital, relief begins. In ordinary times, this will be quite complete, and the wounded will not be carried to the rear until they are really able to stand the journey. But while the battle is on, they must go in the greatest haste: the worst cases are thoroughly cared for; the badly hurt who can be moved receive the attention which enables them to depart speedily; the slight cases have to be content with summary consideration. Here one sees the devotion of the nurses and the resignation of the sufferers, and better than resignation: the noble effort not to moan, the murmured prayer, the forgetfulness of self, eagerness to ask news of the fight. Among the falsities of a book a thousand times too vaunted (falsities due not so much to the lie direct as to the constant dwelling on odious details, and the suppression of admirable facts), nothing is farther from the truth than the picture of a hospital at the front where one hears and sees only blaspheming and rebellious men. With most of the wounded who have spoken to me about it in our hospital, and who certainly had the right to bear witness, we proclaim loudly that if the French army had been such as the work in question paints it in this passage and in many others, the War would have ended long ago, and history would never have known the names of the Marne, nor the Yser, nor Verdun, nor the Chemin-des-Dames.

A true picture of our Ambulance at the front.

A true picture of an Ambulance at the front, overflowing with wounded the evening of a battle, I find in these lines by an eyewitness: "Some moderate complaints among the crowded stretchers: one asks for a drink, one wants relief for pain, a bed, a dressing, to be quickly attended. But let some story be told in the group, some incident come out like a trumpet-call, all faces brighten, the men lift themselves a little, the mirage of glory gives them heart again. I commemorate with piety the anonymous example of a little Zouave, doubled over on himself, holding his bullet-pierced abdomen in both hands, whom I heard gently asked: 'Well, little one, how goes it?' Oh, very well, mon Lieutenant, our company has passed the road from B—— to the south; we had gotten there when I was knocked out. It's all right; we are smashing them!"

Their first thought for victory.

I, personally, received such answers from wounded who came to us from the Chemin-des-Dames, or from the fort of Malmaison. When I asked for news, my mind preoccupied with their individual sufferings, their first thought was to tell me of the victory. The ordinary French phrase for "How are you? Comment ça va-t-il?" (literally: How goes it?) may apply to an event or to a person. This being so, it is never of himself that the newly-wounded soldier thinks, but of what is interesting to everybody—the common success. I went to welcome a patient brought in October 26th and asked: "You came tonight?"

"Yes, Father."

"Not too tired by the journey?"

"No, not too much."

"What wound?"

"Jaw pierced by a bullet, arm broken, wound in the thigh."

"How goes it?"

The wounded are delighted with the success of the attack.

"Very well! The wounded who came to the hospital at the front were delighted, we had gotten everything we were trying for!"

"You were in the attack?"

"Unfortunately no, I was wounded the day before."

"In the bombardment?"

"Yes, while we were filling up the trenches to make a way for the tanks toward the fort of Malmaison."

"That must have been pretty constant thundering?"

"Yes, but very soon we did not think of it. In the little bombardments you hear the shells coming and try to get to shelter, but, in those great days, when it is going on all the time, you can no longer distinguish anything, it is a continual noise, a kind of huge snoring. Then you are quite calm."

They do not speak of what they have done or seen.

These are a few illustrations, a few rays of light, such as one still gets sometimes. I do not know if they will become more frequent with the new evolution of the War. They have been rare, and never followed by long expansiveness. Our wounded soldier of the fourth year of the War did not like to speak of what he had done nor of what he had seen. What may be the reasons for his silence? In seeking to interpret them we penetrate a little into the psychology of this taciturn man.

The soldier plays an impersonal part.

First, his impressions of the War are no longer fresh and now he would have some difficulty in analyzing them. It is as with ourselves in a new country: at first we have a thousand things to describe in our letters; after that nothing strikes us any longer. This passage to a sort of unconsciousness is the easier for the soldier as he plays a more impersonal part in the War; a simple cell in a great organism, a simple wheel in an enormous machine, quite beyond his comprehension in its learned complication. Catastrophes happen to him but no adventures: he may be wounded, he may be killed, nothing else. This is no material for fine stories.

A deeper reason for the silence of the witness, or rather the actor, in the great drama of the War, is a very just realization of the impossibility of conveying any idea of it to those who have never been there. It is so very different from anything they know; so out of proportion to the normal life of human beings.

The wounded man does not like to think of war.

To these intellectual motives may be added one of feeling. The wounded soldier does not like to speak of the War because he does not like to think of it: there are too many horrors; he has had to bear too many privations, too much suffering. As soon as he finds himself out of it, he tries to turn his mind away from it as much as possible, and to shake off the impression of it, as the sick man in the morning shakes off his fevered nightmare. Later on, doubtless, when his memories have lost their keen edge, they may attract him again. All he asks for the moment is to forget. One thing especially afflicts his heart and tightens his lips: it is the thought of the comrades he has lost.

Such are the reasons why the later wounded, differing from those at the beginning of the War, shut themselves up in a silence full of gravity.

The men in hospital are grateful.

Infirmities are less felt.

In spite of this, however, you would have a false idea of the military hospital if you thought of it as a place of mournful desolation. Doubtless our earlier patients regained their spirits more quickly, having no years of suffering behind them. But the quiet and serious resignation which reigns in the hospital of to-day does not exclude a certain sweetness; the wounded man appreciates the intelligent and devoted care lavished upon him, he congratulates himself and thanks God for having escaped from mortal peril, for not having fallen to the bottom of the abyss, for remounting now the slope at the summit of which he has a glimpse of the recovery of his strength and activity. If his wound leaves no serious traces, he rejoices to live again as he did before; if it has deprived him of the use of his limbs or of some necessary organ, he consoles himself by the thought that the War is over for him and that soon he will take his place at home. His infirmities, which perhaps will weigh more heavily upon him later, he feels less here, where they are the normal thing and where it is the exception to appear intact.

It is a rest for him not to hear the voice of the cannon. And he likes the moral peace with which the wise kindness of the doctors, the devotion of the nurses, the friendship of the chaplain, surround him; he especially enjoys the many letters he receives from his family, and those which he slowly writes himself, or dictates to an amiable neighbor. Often he has friends and relatives in the neighborhood who come to see him, but what he likes best of all is the visit from his family, his mother, father, wife, his young children.

A dying man is decorated.

A legacy of honor for his family.

Another joy in the life of our wounded is the announcement and then the presentation of his decoration. Once, however, I saw the Cross of Honor received with no sign of satisfaction at all, but that was because it came too late, and its recipient, one of my friends, a brave officer, was about to receive another recompense in heaven. It was very affecting to see the decoration laid on that already gasping breast, without any consciousness on the part of the poor hero. His mother and wife, at least, before they buried him, could take the glorious emblem to hand down as heirloom and as instruction to his three little ones. It is a noble idea of the French Government, to give the decorations of soldiers killed by the enemy to their families—their widows, their orphans, or, if they are not married, to their old parents. During these years filled with emotion, few spectacles have impressed me so deeply as the ceremony of "taking arms" in the court of honor of the Invalides, when in this historic monument, built by Louis XIV. and now the tomb of Napoleon, a General of the Third Republic gave the emblem of the brave to women and children dressed in mourning, at the same time as to rough soldiers newly healed of their wounds and ready to return to the front.

The return to the front.

Often impatient to rejoin his comrades.

Return to the front!... This is the almost invariable ending of the history of our wounded soldier of the fourth year of the War. Return to the front! Never will the heroism required for the acceptance of such a duty be sufficiently admired! After three years of fatigue, privations, of unheard-of dangers, after one or several wounds which brought him within an inch of death, this man who has for long months felt the sweetness, the care, the calm of a comfortable hospital; has had a taste of the charms of family life once more; has little by little turned his thought away from the horrors of war, now he is sent back, to the depot, from which he knows that before long he will be called again to the front! And he submits, resigns himself: what do I say? Often impatient of inaction, of the little rules which annoy his independent temper, he asks to go in advance of the call, to rejoin as a volunteer and without further delay his comrades of Champagne, Lorraine, Flanders or Picardy. He reenters his regiment as the traveler reenters his own country, and his only sadness is to find that during his absence so many old comrades have fallen, so many newcomers have filled the gaps. But the welcome of the survivors warms his heart.

He goes into the trenches at night.

Although it is night—for only at night do they go into the trenches—the sky is ploughed with illuminating fireworks, with projections and projectiles, of various kinds which bursting sow quick flashes of light, and a death often as prompt. In a maze of narrow and complicated paths our friend advances without knowing where and feeling his way: nearer and nearer he approaches to enemies whose sleepless hate growls menacingly below his feet in the ground, around him on the earth, above him in the sky filled with sinister gleams. He goes his way without enthusiasm, but without hesitation, without boasting, but without fear, knowing by long experience what peril he runs, but offering himself calmly to his formidable destiny, ready to answer: "Present!" if God and his country demand his life.

There are no heroes in past history so grand.

What hero in all the centuries of history attains to the grandeur of our hero? Who ever defended, in a war so terrible, a cause so important to the future of the world? Who has striven so hard, suffered so much, so often passed through death? To prove himself equal to his high mission, he has had to rid himself of all egoism, renounce lucre and vain honors, sacrifice family joys; many times he has known the worst extremes of weariness, thirst, hunger and cold; he equals and surpasses in austerity the severest of monks; he practices an obedience and humility that monasteries and Thebaîdes know nothing of, constantly ready to expose himself, as soon as he receives the order, to a terrible and invisible death. No one ever more completely obeyed the counsels of Christ: "If you will be perfect, leave your father and mother, your wife, forsake your possessions, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Me."

Humanity has never shown such moral grandeur.

Those among these brave men who have faith, are conscious of such supernatural life and their letters—admirable collections have been published—reflect a light of authentic saintliness. The others, too, without knowing it, walk in the footsteps of Christ; at the moment of supreme sacrifice He will enlighten them with the brightness of His grace and will admit them, like their believing brothers, into the heaven promised to those who suffer for righteousness. Humanity which has never known horrors like those it is enduring now, has also never shown such moral grandeur, and it is not astonishing that in face of such great crimes and such great virtues, our soul should pause, breathless, incapable of expressing the excess of its emotion.

The devoted war of the American public for the wounded.

I cannot speak to the great American public about our wounded, without saying how much we appreciate the fact that it has followed them, with admirable solicitude, all the length of their hard Calvary. Its stretcher-bearers have helped us rescue them at the front, its ambulances have carried them to our hospitals, where they have found its doctors, its nurses to tend their wounds, its offerings of all kinds to assure their material well-being and their moral comfort. And in after-care it has not been less solicitous: teaching the blind, reeducating the maimed and giving them the costly apparatus which take the place of their lost limbs. When they could not survive, despite efforts of science and devotion, it contributed toward assuring the future of their widows and orphans.

America to-day gives us even her blood; she has from the first given us her gold, given her heart!

The great series of battles, known in general as the Battle of Picardy, formed a prelude to the final acts of the war. A stirring account of these battles is given in the narrative which follows.