It is a double tide of traffic. Both streams are made up of similar constituents, with certain necessary contrasts. There are bodies of infantry, either going up into action or else coming out. There is no mistaking the latter. Their uniforms are splashed, their faces are caked, and their eyes are red for lack of sleep. They are obviously “all in,” but they hobble manfully along, with the comfortable satisfaction of men who have left behind them a task well and truly performed. They exchange ironic greetings with the full-fed, boisterous bands of adventurers whom they encounter hastening in the opposite direction.
Ambulances, again. Those going forward are empty and trim: those returning are travel-stained and crowded. It is rumoured that the American Army has suffered over a hundred thousand casualties during the past few weeks. The fighting in the Argonne Forest has been terrific. Grandpré, through which we expect to pass, has been taken and lost half a dozen times. Each of the ambulances carries a full complement of stretcher-cases; and usually beside the driver sits a gaunt, miry statue with his arm in a sling, or a blood-soaked rag about his head. Occasionally, too, there occurs a civilian farm-wagon, containing a dozen or so less serious cases, with tickets tied to their buttons, on their way to an Evacuation Station. There are also women and children passengers; for the battle zone is extending daily, and it is needful, from sheer humanity, to remove the civil population to safer ground. On the box-seat of one of these wagons sits a small French boy. Perhaps he is eight years old. He is easily the proudest and happiest person in all this dolorous procession, for his right wrist is swathed in a slightly encrimsoned bandage, gloriously conspicuous.
Then there are motor wagons, also full. Those going up contain ammunition, barbed wire, galvanized iron sheeting, engineering material, or rations. Those returning are heaped with salvage of every kind—furniture, the property of the refugees; battlefield dèbris, and, wherever an available chink presents itself, men—footsore men, stragglers, or regular working-parties. The latter are usually coloured, and, with steel helmets balanced at every angle upon their woolly pates, smile upon the seething activity beneath them with the simple enjoyment of a child at its first circus.
These wagons—or camions—are of two types. There are big Thorneycroft lorries, holding three tons and made in England, and smaller vehicles of American design, known as “Quads.” These possess the unusual feature of a drive upon either axle; so that if your rear wheels slip backwards into a ditch or quagmire, your front wheels will continue to function and will extricate you in no time. Heaven knows how these contraptions are steered, but steered they are, and with remarkable skill.
Then there are guns—and more guns. These are mainly French seventy-fives and hundred-and-fifty-fives, with American gun teams. Those going up are workmanlike, but inconspicuous. They are newly painted with the usual red, green, and yellow splashes. The fishing-nets which will be spread above them when they get into action, intersticed with grass, leaves, and twigs, are at present neatly furled and lashed along the barrels. The gunners sprawl anywhere but upon their hard little iron seats. The guns coming out look different. All are plastered with mud; some are on the casualty list, and are being towed upon trolleys by fussy little traction engines.
Here and there in the procession wallow British tanks. These are either “Heavies,” weighing nearly thirty tons and carrying a crew of seven or eight, or “Whippets,” which only require three men and can move at the rate of twelve miles an hour.
The tank is the humourist of this unhumorous War. Its method of joining a close-packed procession of road traffic is characteristic. It appears suddenly out of a wood in a field beside the road, obliterates thirty yards of a hedge, squeezes a ditch flat, and insinuates itself sideways, with jolly abandon, into that part of the procession which happens to be passing at the moment—the whole in a manner reminiscent of that heavy-footed and determined individual who is accustomed by similar tactics to secure for himself a good place in the queue outside a movie pay-box. On the other hand, should you be ditched or disabled in any way, to your own discomfort and the congestion of traffic, a tank is always willing to swing good-humouredly out of the line, scramble across country for a field or so, lurch heavily into the roadway again, harness itself to a tow-rope, and extract you from your present predicament as easily and as suddenly as a mastodon might extract a cork from a bottle.
Certainly our march gave us a comprehensive view of the ingredients of modern warfare. American soldiers, white and black—mostly cheerful; French refugees—all sad. Guns, limbers, camions, carts, ambulances, tanks—all moving in an endless, tumultuous, profane stream. At cross-roads, traffic policeman struggling manfully with an impossible job. Automobiles everywhere—Cadillacs, Fords, and Dodges—all trying to make openings and steal a march upon the rest of Creation. Above us, the sky of France, weeping for her lost children. Around us, the undulating, rain-blurred hillsides of the Argonne Forest. Beneath our feet, Mud, Mud, Mud.
Day after day we tramped—through Toul, the northwest corner of the great rectangle of French soil which has been an American military colony since the summer of nineteen-seventeen; across the trench lines of the old days of stationary warfare, where Frenchmen faced the Boches for three long years. American troops have fought there too. Here, in what was once No Man’s Land, stand the ruins of Seicheprey, famed as having been the scene of the first clash between American and German troops. (It was a raid, and we lost our first prisoners there. Well, we have plenty of Germans now to barter for them, when the time comes—and then some!) Then on past Montfaucon, the Crown Prince’s headquarters at the Battle of Verdun, now an American stronghold; through miles and miles of devastated country, with here and there a little American graveyard (to which we pay due reverence), to Grandpré. This is a mere fragment of a village, clinging to the face of a rock looking south, and is shelled out of recognition. Then on, through the Bois des Loges, following the tide of victory northward, towards Mézières and Sedan. Somewhere to our right lies Verdun, garrisoned by American soldiers—all, that is, save the Citadel, a wondrous Gibraltar dug into the interior of a hill, containing miles of illuminated passageways; barracks, a bakery, an arsenal, a chapel, a theatre. Here the French maintain their own garrison—and maybe their own secrets. Secrets or no, it was that Citadel and that garrison which broke the back of the German assault in the critical days of nineteen-sixteen.