Those larger operations in the rear affect him but indirectly. The details in front are of vital interest. They mean life or death. Every alteration in the landscape demands closest investigation. Boys do not play, nor old women gabble, in No-Man’s-Land. Nothing is done without a reason, and, for every change, there is a cause. An unusual piece of cloth or paper is scrutinized by a hundred men, while a suspicious movement empties their guns.
The soldier acquires the habit of noticing little things. He sees a small, starved flower, struggling for sunshine and strength, alongside the trench. He wonders why it chose such an inhospitable home. Next day, there is no flower, no trench—just an immense, gaping hole in the torn ground.
He watches the rats. Why are they so impudent and important? He grows so accustomed to them, he does not even squirm, when they run across him in the darkness at night. He knows they have enough camp offal and dead men’s bodies—they do not eat the living. He watches the cat with interest. She is an old timer and has seen regiments come and go. Her owners are in exile—they have no home—the Germans took it. So, pussy, a lady of sense and good taste, dwells with the French soldiers. He looks at her long, lanky frame and wishes for some milk to give her, to counteract the poison of the rat food. A shell comes along. Pussy runs into the dugout, but comes out again to be petted. Another shell, again she scurries away. Kitty does not like shells any more than do humans.
War is the great leveler. Deplored as pitiless destroyer, it more than equalizes, a creator of good. It annihilates property, kings and thrones; but it produces men. It taps hitherto unseen springs of sympathy and mutual helpfulness, where thrived formerly but the barren waste of self-sufficiency. It unmasks the humbug and reveals the humanitarian. It teaches individual self-lessness. The cruelties of the oppressor are overcome by love for the oppressed. The dominance of wickedness is brought low by sweet charity for its victims.
CHAPTER XVII
THE INVADED COUNTRY
I have seen the German under many conditions. In the early days of the war, I used to listen to his songs—sung very well. But, he does not sing now. I have watched the smoke rise, in the early morning, as he cooked his breakfast. I have dodged his flares, his grenades, and his sentinels, at night. I have heard his shovels ring as he dug himself down, and have listened to his talk to his neighbor. I have seen him come up on all fours, from his dugout, crying “Kamarad”; and I cannot say, that, as a common soldier, he is a bad fellow.
The brutality seems to start with the sous-officer. It gets more refined and cruel as rank goes up. I have noticed the dazed, hopeless expression of pregnant women at Sillery-Sur-Marne. They stayed under fire of the guns, rather than carry their grief into safety. They emerged from their Calvary, with faces as of the dead, impassive, masklike, hiding scars of agony.
I talked with a young woman shop-keeper at Verpeliers. The Germans had been in her house—slept on the floor, thick as sardines in a box. They ate up her stock and did not pay. Was she not afraid? She laughed a happy laugh. “What me, Monsieur, afraid? I am Francaise. What do I care for those swine? The sous-officers tried to make me give in. They pointed guns at me, and tried to pull me along with them when the French returned. I screamed and fought. Four of my lodgers are where those crosses are at the bend of the road. The others are prisoners. I am paid, all right, and am satisfied.” “Yes,” she continued, “they charged our old men with being in telephonic communication with the French Army. Twelve were arrested, marked with a blue cross on the right cheek, and have not been heard from since. Two, M. Poizeaux, aged 47, and M. Vassel, 78 years old, were brought back and shot the same evening.”
At Rodern, in reconquered Alsace, where the natives spoke German, the streets were marked in German letters, German proclamations were on the walls, and German money was current, I sat with Tex Bondt, in a low Alsatian room, by candle light. The heavy family bed was let into a wall and screened off by a curtain, the floor was of stone, the furniture primitive. A short, squat woman was bewailing her misfortunes. This mother had six sons and three daughters. Three boys mobilized with the German Army. Two were killed. The other is on the Russian front. Of the three, who ran away, and joined the French army, one was killed and two wounded. Two of her girls, nurses in the German Army, were killed during a bombardment. As she listened, I watched emotion come and go in the eyes of the remaining daughter.
In the hospital at Montreuil-Ballay, I met an old man, wounded in the arm. The wound would not knit. Unable to sleep, weeping relieved him. He said, “My wife and I were at home near Lille, in bed one night. The Germans broke in the door, came upstairs, jabbed me with a bayonet and made me get out. I kept going and joined the French Army.”