If Britain was magnificent, France was miraculous! Loving and desiring peace she accepted the cross of war without a murmur. Her women were no less brave than her men. She wears the hero-star of Roland and the saintly halo of Joan of Arc.
After meeting many men in Paris—statesmen, men of letters, generals—and after visiting the splendid American Ambulance at Neuilly and other institutions in which our boys and girls were giving their help to France in the chivalric spirit of Lafayette, I went out toward the front.
The first visit was under the escort of Captain Francois Monod to a chateau beyond Compiegne, where Rudyard Kipling with his family and I with my family had passed the Christmas week of 1913 together, as joyous guests of the American chatelaine Mrs. Julia Park. She has given the spacious, lovely house for a military hospital. And there, while the German guns thundered a few kilometres away from us and a German sausage balloon floated in the sky, I watched the skilful ministrations of French and American doctors and nurses to the wounded.
One thought haunted me—the memory of Kipling's only son, nineteen years old, who was with us in that happy Christmastide. The lad was reported "missing" after one of the battles between Loos and Hulluch. For six months I sought, with the help of Herr von Kuhlmann, German Minister at The Hague, to find a trace of the brave boy. But never a word could we get.
The second visit was to the battle-field of the Marne under the escort of Captain the Count de Ganay. We motored slowly through the ruined towns and villages. Those which had been wrecked by shellfire were like mouthfuls of broken teeth—chimneys and fragments of walls still standing. Those which had been vengefully burned by the retreating Germans were mere heaps of ashes. Most of our time was spent around the Marais de St. Gond, where the French General Foch held the Thermopylae of Europe.
Four times he advanced across that marsh and was driven back, but not beaten. The fifth time he advanced and stayed, and Paris was forever lost to the Germans. Think of the men who made that last advance and saved Europe from the Potsdam gang. Their graves, carefully marked and tended, lie thickly strewn along the lonely ridges of all that region—humble but immortal reminders of glorious heroism.
The third visit was with the same escort to the fighting front at
Verdun.
The long, bare, rolling ridges between Bar-le-Duc and the Meuse; the high-shouldered hills along the river and around the ruined little city; the open fields, the narrow valleys, the wrecked villages, the shattered woodlands—all were covered with dazzling snow. The sun was bright in a cloudless sky. A bitter, biting wind poured fiercely, steadily out of the north, driving the glittering snow-dust before it. Every man had put on all the clothes he possessed, and more; pads of sheepskin over back and breast; gunny sacks tied around the shoulders. The troops of cavalry, the teams of mules and horses dragging munition-wagons or travelling kitchens or long "75" guns, clattered along the iron surface of the Via Sacra—that blessed road which made the salvation of Verdun possible after the only railway was destroyed. Endless trains of motor-lorries lumbered by. The narrow trenches were coated with ice. The hillside trails were slippery as glass. In the deep dugouts small sheet-iron stoves were burning, giving out a little heat and a great deal of choking smoke. The soldiers sat around them playing cards or telling stories.
But there! What I saw in that shell-pitted, snow-covered, hard-frozen amphitheatre of heroism cannot be described in these brief paragraphs. The serenity, cheerfulness, courtesy, and indomitable courage of the French poilus defending their own land; the scenes in the trenches with the German shells breaking around us and the wounded men being carried past us; the luncheon in the citadel with the commandant and officers in a subterranean room where the motto on the wall, above the world-renowned escutcheon of Verdun, was "On ne passe pas"—"They don't get by"; the dinner with the general and staff of the Verdun army, in a little village "somewhere in France," and their last words to me, "On les aura! Ca peut etre long, mais on les aura!"—"It may take long, but we shall get them!"—all these and a thousand more things are vivid in my memory but cannot be told now.
One scene sticks in my mind and asks to be recorded.