With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned, native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing onto the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our reserve supply was not visible, and an officer’s sharp command saved us from being invested by storm.
As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were kept back out of range of the German shells, making the town a dead space between them and the firing-line which was beyond. When the Germans retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as it was their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the main square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German guns when the French infantry passed through. Soissons was not a German town.
We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters of shops that had not been torn down by shell-fire closed. Soissons was as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the ridge back of the town.
The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and see the soixante-quinze and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction of the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom of an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the Germans. If that battery were on the opposite side under cover of any one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another shot—and we were not sure that the battery was not on the other side of the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery fire to one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were scattered, according to the accepted practice, and from the central firing-station word to fire was being passed first to one gun and then to another.
Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town. Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward and bullets were waiting for them. They had rolled over on their backs, their rigid hands still in the position of grasping their rifles after the manner of crouching skirmishers.
Our statesman said that we had better give up trying to locate the battery; and one of the officers called a halt to trying to go up to the firing-line on the part of a personally conducted party, after we stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and that freedom in spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the French call élan. Whenever one asked a question of a French private you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know. This definiteness, the result of military training, as well as the Gallic lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know his part. This young man, you realised, had tasted the “salt of life,” as Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had known the intoxication of a charge.
“Does everything go well?” M. Doumer asked.
“It is not going at all, now. It is sticking,” was the answer. “Some Germans were busy up there in the stone quarries while the others were falling back. They have a covered trench and rapid-fire gun positions to sweep a zone of fire which they have cleared.”
Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dugouts as shelter from shells!
There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private saying: “Now this is what the general ought to do!” It was Napoleon’s own plan revealed. “You keep still!” he said. “This army has too many generals.”