These are the men that spade the trenches, drive the food-transports and ammunition-wagons, and carry through the detail duties of small honor that the army may prosper. When has it happened before that the older generation holds up the hands of the young? At the western front they stand fast that the youth may go forward. They fill in the shell-holes to make a straight path for less-tired feet. They drive up food to give good heart to boys.
War is easy for the young. The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while? Is there any far-off divine event which his death will hasten? The wines of France are good wines, and his home in fertile Normandy was pleasant.
As we stood in the street in the sun one hot afternoon, four men came carrying a wounded man. The stretcher was growing red under its burden. The man's face was greenish white, with a stubble of beard. The flesh of his body was as white as snow from loss of blood. It was torn at the chest and sides. They carried him to the dressing-station, and half an hour later lifted him into our car. We carried him in for two miles. Four flies fed on the red rim of his closed left eye. He lay silent, motionless. Only a slight flutter of the coverlet, made by his breathing, gave a sign of life. At the Red Cross post we stopped. The coverlet still slightly rose and fell. The doctor, brown-bearded, in white linen, stepped into the car, tapped the man's wrist, tested his pulse, put a hand over his heart. Then the doctor muttered, drew the coverlet over the greenish-white face, and ordered the marines to remove him. In the moment of arrival the wounded man had died.
In the courtyard next our post two men were carrying in long strips of wood. This wood was for coffins, and one of them would be his.
A funeral passes our car, one every day, sometimes two: a wooden cross in front, carried by a soldier; the white-robed chaplain chanting; the box of light wood, on a frame of black; the coffin draped in the tricolor, a squad of twenty soldiers following the dead. That is the funeral of the middle-aged man. There is no time wasted on him in the brisk business of war; but his comrades bury him. One in particular faithful at funerals I had learned to know—M. Le Doze. War itself is so little the respecter of persons that this man had found himself of value in paying the last small honor to the obscure dead as they were carried from his Red Cross post to the burial-ground. One hopes that he will receive no hasty trench burial when his own time comes.
I cannot write of the middle-aged man of the Belgians because he has been killed. That first mixed army, which in thin line opposed its body to an immense machine, was crushed by weight and momentum. Little is left but a memory. But I shall not forget the veteran officer of the first army, near Lokeren, who kept his men under cover while he ran out into the middle of the road to see if the Uhlans were coming. The only Belgian army today is an army of boys. Recently we had a letter from André Simont, of the "Obusiers Lourdes, Beiges," and he wrote:
If you promise me you will come back for next summer, I won't get pinked. If I ever do, it doesn't matter. I have had twenty years of very happy life.
If he were forty-five, he would say, as a French officer at Coxyde said to me:
"Four months, and I haven't heard from my wife and children. We had a pleasant home. I was well to do. I miss the good wines of my cellar. This beer is sour. We have done our best, we French, our utmost, and it isn't quite enough. We have made a supreme effort, but it hasn't cleared the enemy from our country. La guerre—c'est triste."
He, too, fights on, but that overflow of vitality does not visit him, as it comes to the youngsters of the first line. It is easy for the boys of Brittany to die, those sailors with a rifle, the stanch Fusiliers Marins, who, outnumbered, held fast at Melle and Dixmude, and for twelve months made Nieuport, the extreme end of the western battle-line, a great rock. It is easy, because there is a glory in the eyes of boys. But the older man lives with second thoughts, with a subdued philosophy, a love of security. He is married, with a child or two; his garden is warm in the afternoon sun. He turns wistfully to the young, who are so sure, to cheer him. With him it is bloodshed, the moaning of shell-fire, and harsh command.