They are essentially trench defenders, lookout men. The young ones do the coursing. These attack, the others guard. But how they do guard, how they hold the ground, once won! Nearing the front, if you meet them on the march as they are about to be relieved, you can recognize them even from afar by two signs: they march without any military coquetry, even dragging their feet a little, and they have everything with them that they can possibly carry—sacks, blankets, cans, bagpipes, cartridge-boxes, with the neck of a bottle sticking out of their trousers pocket. Even when you get near enough to see their faces many of these men do not look at you; they are intent upon their own thoughts. They know the hard week ahead of them. But the wind and rain are already old friends; the mud of the trenches does not frighten them; patience has long been their lot; they accept death’s lottery, knowing well that they are protecting those they have left behind, and they go at it as to a great task whose harvest may not be reaped or even known until months later.
In truth, these men from the provinces—vine-growers, teamsters, little peasant farmers, the most numerous of all among today’s combatants—will have played a magnificent rôle in the Great War. History will have to proclaim this, in justice to the French villages, and may the Government see fit to honor and aid these silent heroes who will have done so much to save the country.
They disappear quickly, lost in the defiles or swallowed up by the mist, which night has thickened. Once in the trenches, they find the work begun the previous week and which has been carried on by their comrades’ hands, and when it comes their turn to guard the battlements they hide themselves in the same holes in the clay wall. No unnecessary movements, no flurry, no bravados, no setting off of flashes or grenade and bomb-throwing, by which the younger troops immediately show their presence in the trenches, and which only provokes a reply from the enemy.
They are holding fast, but they keep still about it. Suddenly the Boches are coming. There are some splendid sharpshooters in this regiment, and in the attack of the Seventh and in the surprise attempt of the Fourteenth at daybreak it was seen what these men could do. An officer said to me: “They suffer the least loss; they excel in shelters of earthwork, they merge right into the turf.”
Many of the sectors of the front are held by this guard of older men. When the German reserves were hurled in pursuit of the Belgian Army in 1914, threatening the shores of Pas de Calais, a territorial division checked the onslaught of the best troops of the German Empire. Of their work in the trenches, Mr. Bazin writes:
But do not let anyone think theirs is a life of inaction; work is not lacking; even night is a time of reports, of revictualing, of reconnoitering, or repairing barbed-wire entanglements.
When the sector is quiet, however, the territorial enjoys some free hours. He writes a great deal; makes up for all the time past when he wrote almost no letters at all and for all the time to come when he promises himself to leave the pen hidden on the groove of the ink-well, idle on the mantel. One of them said to me: “They have put up a letter-box in my village. What will it be good for after the war—a swallow’s nest?”
Many of these letters contain only a recital of uneventful days and the prescribed formalities of friendship or love, banal to the general public but dear enough to those who are waiting and who will sit around the lamp of an evening and comment on every word. I know young women throughout the country who receive a letter from their husbands every day. The war has served as a school for adults. Sometimes expediency entirely disappears and it is the race which speaks, and the hidden faith, and the soul which perhaps has never thus been laid bare.
Here is a letter which has been brought to my notice. For a year it had been carried in the pocket of a territorial who wrote it as his last will and testament, and when he was killed it was sent to his widow. Read it and see if you would not like to have had him who wrote it as a friend and neighbor:
“My dear, today, as I am writing these lines, my heart feels very big, and if you ever read them it will be because I died doing my duty. I ask you, before I go, to bring up our children in honor and in memory of me, for I have loved them very dearly, and I shall have died thinking of them and of you. Tell them I died on the field of honor, and that I ask them to offer the same sacrifice the day France shall need their arms and hearts. Preserve my certificate of good conduct, and later make them know that their father would like to have lived for them and for you, whom I have always held so dear. Now, I do not want you to pass the rest of your life worshiping one dead. On the contrary, if during your life you meet some good, industrious young fellow capable of giving you loyal aid in rearing our children, join your life with his and never speak to him of me, for if he loves you it would only cast the shadow of a dead man upon him—it is over, my dear. I love you now and forever, even through eternity. Good-bye! I shall await you over there. Your adoring Jean.”