As he ceased, he stepped forward to touch glasses with each of us,—the invariable French custom,—and next moment a magnificent Chasseur band, outside on the terrace, crashed into the "Star-Spangled Banner." Quite thrilling, I assure you. Later, we strolled through the fine old gardens, chatting with the officers while the band played. The general, while the most military man imaginable, has a very attractive brusque affability. We are a good-sized crowd as Americans run, and the French, who average shorter and stockier, never cease to wonder at our height. The old chap grabbed three or four of us by the shoulders and lined us up.
"Mais vous êtes des gaillards," he said, smiling; "see, I am five or six centimetres shorter than any of you. But wait, we have a giant or two."
With that he called over a grinning captain and pulled him back to back with our biggest man, whom he topped by a full inch.
"But, my general," laughed the officer, "it is not good to be so tall—too much of one sticks out of a trench."
The owner of the château—a stately woman of fifty, proud of her name, her race, and her country, and an angel from heaven to the sick and poor for miles around—is an example of the kind of patriotism of which, I fear, we are in need. Her husband is dead; when the war broke out she had a daughter and two sons—gallant young officers whose brief lives had been a constant source of satisfaction and pride to their mother. The elder was killed at the Marne, and a while ago, the younger, her special pet, was killed here in an attack. A woman of her kind, to whom the continuance of an old name was almost a religion, could undergo no harder experience. At the grave-side she stood erect and dry-eyed, with a little proud smile on her lips, as her last boy was buried. "Why should I weep?" she asked some one who would have comforted her; "there is nothing finer my boys could have done if they had lived out their lives." Her heart must be very nearly broken in two, but never a sign does she give; going about among her hospitals and peasant families as cheerful, interested, even gay, as if her only cares were for others. There is true courage for you!
To-day I went to a new post for some sick men, and who should be waiting for me but my friend Jean, of whom I wrote you before! His company has been transferred to this place. It was great to see his grinning face and to chatter Spanish with him. As the sick men had not finished lunch, Jean asked me to his mess, and we had a jolly meal with his pals. I have had to give up wine, as it seems to blacken our teeth horribly (all of us have noticed it, and we can trace it to no other source), and the Frenchmen can't get over the joke of seeing one drink water—extraordinary stuff to drink! All right to run under bridges or for washing purposes, but as a beverage—a quaint American conceit, handed down no doubt from the red aborigines—les peaux rouges indigènes—of our continent. Jean admitted that since December, 1914, he had not tasted water, and no one else could remember the last occasion when he had tried it.
As word had just come from the trenches that a wounded man was on the way in, I got my helmet and we strolled down the boyau to meet the stretcher-bearers. It was, to me, a new section of the front and very interesting. The country is broken and hilly, and the lines zigzag about from crest to valley in the most haphazard way, which really has been painfully worked out to prevent enfilading fire. There is scarcely any fighting here, as neither side has anything to gain by an advance, which would mean giving up their present artillery positions.
In one place the boyau ran down a steep slope, badly exposed, and Jean said, "Follow me on the run!" We sprinted for twenty yards, and next moment, tat-tat-tat-tat came from the Boches, and little spurts of dust shot up behind us. They can never shoot quickly enough to hurt any one at this point, Jean said, but after all, "You can't blame a fellow for trying."
At the next turn we came on a train of the little grenade donkeys—so small that they make the tiniest Mexican burro seem a huge clumsy brute. They do not show above the shallowest trench, and each one carries two panniers full of grenades. These last are vicious little things of cast iron, checkered so as to burst into uniform square fragments, and about the size and shape of lemons. They make an astonishingly loud bang when they go off, and if close enough, as in a narrow trench, are pretty bad. At a little distance, of course, they are not very dangerous. In the trench warfare—raids, infantry attacks, and so forth—they seem to have supplanted rifles, just as the knife has supplanted the bayonet.