I
The dawn came very reluctantly through the clouds, bringing no sun with it, although the drizzle stopped. The battalion rose from its soggy blankets, kneading stiffened muscles to restore circulation, and gathered in disconsolate shivering groups around the galleys. These had come up in the night, and from them, standing under the dripping pines, came a promising smell of hot coffee. Something hot was the main consideration in life just now. But the fires were feeble, and something hot was long in coming. The cooks swore because dry wood couldn’t be found, and wet wood couldn’t be risked, because it would draw shell-fire. The men swore at the weather and the slowness of the kitchen force, and the war in general, and they all growled together.
“Quite right—entirely fitting and proper!” said the second-in-command of the 49th Company, coming up to where his captain gloomed beside the galley. “We wouldn’t know what to do with Marines who didn’t growl. But, El Capitan, if you’ll go over to that ditch yonder, you’ll find some Frog artillerymen with a lovely cooking-fire. They gave me hot coffee with much rum in it. A great people, the Frogs—” But the captain was already gone, and the second-in-command, who was a lean first lieutenant in a mouse-colored raincoat, had to run to catch up with him.
They returned in time to see their company and the other companies of the battalion lining up for chow. This matter being disposed of, the men cast incurious eyes about them.
The French artillerymen called the place “the Wood of the Seven Pigeons.” There were no pigeons here now. Only hidden batteries of 105s, with their blue-clad attendants huddled in shelters around them. The wood was a sparse growth of scrubby pines that persisted somehow on the long slope of one of the low hills of Suippes, in the sinister Champagne country. Many of the pines were blackened and torn by shell-fire, and the chalky soil was pockmarked with shell craters from Boche counter-battery work, searching for the French guns camouflaged there. Trenches zigzagged through the pines, old and new, with belts of rusty wire. There were graves.
North from the edge of the pines the battalion looked out on desolation where the once grassy, rolling slopes of the Champagne stretched away like a great white sea that had been dead and accursed through all time. Near at hand was Souain, a town of the dead, a shattered skeleton of a place, with shells breaking over it. Beyond and northward was Somme-Py, nearly blotted out by four years of war. From there to the horizon, east and west and north and south, was all a stricken land. The rich topsoil that formerly made the Champagne one of the fat provinces of France was gone, blown away and buried under by four years of incessant shell-fire. Areas that had been forested showed only blackened, branchless stumps, upthrust through the churned earth. What was left was naked, leprous chalk. It was a wilderness of craters, large and small, wherein no yard of earth lay untouched. Interminable mazes of trench work threaded this waste, discernible from a distance by the belts of rusty wire entanglements that stood before them. Of the great national highway that had once marched across the Champagne between rows of stately poplars, no vestige remained.
The second-in-command, peering from the pines with other officers of the battalion, could see nothing that moved in all the desolation. Men were there, thousands of them, but they were burrowed like animals in the earth. North of Somme-Py, even then, Gouraud’s hard-fighting Frenchmen were blasting their way through the lines that led up to the last strongholds of the Boche toward Blanc Mont Ridge, and over this mangled terrain could be seen the smoke and fury of bursting shrapnel shell and high explosive. The sustained roar of artillery and the infernal clattering of machine-guns and musketry beat upon the ears of the watchers. Through glasses one could make out bits of blue and bits of green-gray, flung casually about between the trenches. These, the only touches of color in the waste, were the unburied bodies of French and German dead.
“So this, Slover, is the Champagne,” said the second-in-command to one of his non-coms who stood beside him. The sergeant spat. “It looks like hell, sir!” he said.
The lieutenant strolled over to where a French staff captain stood with a knot of officers in the edge of the pines, pointing out features of this extended field, made memorable by bitter fighting.
“Since 1914 we have fought hard here,” he was saying. “Oh, the French know this Champagne well, and the Boche knows it too. Yonder”—he pointed to the southwest—“is the Butte de Souain, where our Foreign Legion met in the first year that Guard Division that the Prussians call the ‘Cockchafers.’ They took the Butte, but most of the Legion are lying there now. And yonder”—the Frenchman extended his arm with a gesture that had something of the salute in it—“stands the Mountain of Rheims. If you look—the air is clearing a little—you can perhaps see the towers of Rheims itself.”