No Frenchman will ever forget that dreadful first week of September, 1914. Every day the Germans grew nearer Paris, every day their cowardly aeroplanes sailed over the capital and dropped their futile threats. What was the French army doing? We hoped they were merely luring the enemy toward the forts of Paris where the big guns could smash them. But could the army hold the enemy back, even with that assistance? Paris was all nervous apprehension. Then that astounding news—the German army, almost within striking distance, was swerving to the southeast! What did it mean?
To Georges Cucurou, retreating before those hammering, hammering guns, that quick change in direction was quite as mysterious. From Suippes his regiment, without stopping to entrench now, marching day and night, instead of keeping on toward Paris, swung sharply to the east, along the road to Ste. Menehould. Then, as suddenly, they turned back again into Châlons.
Heavy cannonading was coming now from almost every direction except the south. Every man was tense with excitement—battle was in the air—surely something was going to happen, must happen! But further and further south they marched; and along the roads, now, the automobiles were flying like mad, night and day, some with officers, some flying the Red Cross flag. Over their heads there were French aeroplanes, every day the sky was never quite free of them. Georges caught his first sight of a British soldier—a khaki-clad dispatch rider on a motorcycle flying past, and another. They passed hundreds of Paris autobusses at the Division Headquarters, a long, long line that filled the village street at Sompuis, and ambulances, and cycle companies, and farriers’ wagons, the portable forges glowing red in the evening darkness. Georges recognized the Senegalese spahis in red flowing robes, he saw the Turcos from Morocco—big children they were, grinning black faces with shiny white teeth. A wagon flew past, with men inside feeding out telephone wire, hooking it with long poles into the ditch, or over bushes, out of the way, as they galloped on. Best of all, he began to get fresh meat for dinner, from the portable kitchens that hurried from company to company along the road. But always, never stopping, night or day, more exciting than all the rest, never forgotten, no matter what happened, in the north, growing ever nearer—the steady rumbling thunder of the German guns.
XVI
The camp of Mailly was a busy place. At the aeroplane sheds the biplanes and Blériots were constantly going and coming, circling in the air, or making ready in long rows upon the level field. The vast plain was filled with troops of all sorts in seemingly inextricable confusion: chasseurs, on horseback, in pale blue tunics, the Alpine chasseurs, with drooping blue berets on their heads, and leggings; cuirassiers with their breastplates and long horsehair plumes, and zouaves with embroidered jackets and baggy red trousers. The Twentieth Regiment, tattered and tired, with many heads bandaged and many with feet through their shoes, dusty, hollow-eyed, marched past, not yet too despairing, as fresh troops greeted them, to cry in answer “Vive la France!” They were not boys now, they were soldiers tempered in the crucible of war. And among them marched Georges Cucurou, with a Prussian helmet tied to his knapsack with a shoestring—a Prussian helmet with a hole through its brass front!
Already rumors were flying fast from column to column. Why this concentration of troops? Why this wide circle swung around the camp of Mailly? Mon Dieu! could it be that they were to retreat no longer? That, at last, they were to make a stand? A hope like a gaining fire sprang up and swept from man to man.
It was early in the morning of Sunday, September 6, that on the heights south of Mailly the regiment was assembled for review. To the accompaniment of an incessant, raging bombardment from the German cannon, the colonel read aloud this message from General Joffre, Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces:
Children of France, the hour of the great battle has arrived! Lift up your hearts! If you wish your Country everlasting honor, let every man die at his post, if necessary, rather than surrender another inch of ground, and the victory will be ours.
It was not Gallic sentimentality now. It was the voice of a leader who wasted no words.