The tribute was immense; the building seemed to rock in the vibrations caused by the thunders of applause. All were standing, hats and caps filled the air, a sea of handkerchiefs sprang up, and the flags were torn from the walls and the standards, and mingled their brave colors in the ocean of snow. I saw Gabrielle between the Capitaine and Privat Deschat pale and rigid as if transfixed with pain.
Père Antoine spoke then, and invited M. de Birot to become chairman of the supplementary meeting, designed to form committees, and outline plans for practical work. We were most successful; the principal committee, that of Hospital Supplies, made me its chairman, and I instantly began my work. It was this work that carried me over the department, and kept me long weeks from home. Gabrielle wished to go to Paris and serve under the Red Cross, but I opposed that vigorously and kept her at St. Choiseul where she did nobly, gathering hospital supplies and furnishings for the soldiers, and where was inaugurated that mystical and supernatural VISITATION that led—as the world now knows—to the suppression of the raging conflict, as it threatened to level all of Europe in smouldering ruin; when—was it not so?—the HAND of GOD rested upon the earth, and the Armies shrank back from the Vision and DISSOLVED.
On August twenty-second the mailed hand of the Germans sprang over the borders of France, and from Mons to Luxembourg, its outstretched fingers were crushing the land and strangling its people. Against those groping fingers the twined hands of the French and English were now eagerly—albeit with some trepidation—also grappling. On the twenty-fourth there was reported terrific fighting on the Sambre and the Meuse. On the twenty-fifth, the French and English allies retreated, forced back by the hammering strength and anvil blows of the Germans, who dealt their coups de tonnerre while banked against each other around their massed guns, the whole monster moved onward like some titanic physical eruption.
Again on the twenty-sixth the allies reluctantly yield—yielding everywhere with fierce retributive blows on their part, and consolidating as they retreat, every energy of resistance behind them, while they prepare new lines of defense, and gather together every available scrap of support, material and human. On the twenty-seventh the news is received that the battle line reaches from Maubeuge to the mountains of the Vosges, and that the Germans number one million men. Against this mountainous avalanche of soldiery and guns the grimmest determination alone can hold its ground. But the walls are unbroken and the raging flood breaks through nowhere yet.
On the twenty-ninth I was far north with the armies, in the Red-Cross ambulances. The Germans fought their way to La Fère—north-west of Laon, and about 140 kilometres from Paris (about 90 miles), but the watch word Tiens ferme—Hold tight—was passed from mouth to mouth, and the tense strain of dogged endurance held the fronts together, each inch fought for with savage fury.
Someone blundered; there seems to be no doubt of that. We were not receiving reinforcements as we should; the troops had been urged into Alsace, tempted by a barren victory, and the large support which these battalions could have provided failed. C'était miserable!
On the thirtieth our left yielded. A gigantic battle was fought out in the department of the Aisnes near La Fère, at Guise and Laon, on the road to Paris. The English allies proved to be adamant, immovable. Under Sir John French at Mons and at Cambrai, they saved the day.
The cannonading was deafening, and the red tongues of fire quivered in dense volumes along the struggling lines of men, shot forward here, stumbling backward there, crowded in disarranged groups that swayed this way and that. Ever and anon terrific rushes forced, from either side, into the open midst the raging storm of the vomiting guns, impotent sallies, whose human units fell beneath the withering, blasting discharges of the cannon, torn into fragments by the bursting shells, or suddenly trampled into disfigured masses by maddened charges of cavalry, these last again stricken into death or helpless mutilation by the converging fire of the batteries, victim and victor, man and horse, heaped up in a throbbing or motionless blackened mass, filtered through with the oozing streams of blood, where indeed to the disembodied ear, that might have bent above them, rose the cries of suffering, or the last murmurs of the anguished dying, or the indistinguishable agonized prayers of those who yet lived and prayed for deliverance.
Above the armies on either side the air was loaded with the brown and bluescent clouds of smoke, in which the lurid splashes of carmine from bursting shells broke momentary gaps. The dropping shells sent to every side scurrying figures, pressed against each other in panic, when with sullen roar, lost almost amidst the universal din and clash and swelter of noise, its imprisoned powers were released in straight lines of fire, carrying along their blinding thread of light the shattering steel missiles of death, the blistering resin and sulphur, while at the inner edges of that crushed resurgence of living men lay the victims of its rage, limbless soldiers, bodies stricken into shapelessness, the fainting suitors of Death gasping for breath.
But often the harsh steel missile, with its cracked sides, emitting the fell arsenal of its sputtering and lightning driven contents, failed to meet its desired mark, the soft flesh and the brittle bones of living men. It sank, defeated, upon the impassive earth, vengefully burrowing its hot way into the yielding ground, becoming in its burial a mimic volcano, ripping aside its earthen tomb, as its detonation, deadened to a hideous grumble, sent ball and canister through the soil, spattering far and wide with dirt and mud and grass, the curtains of the ambulances, the wheels of the wagons, the guards of the ammunition motors, the backs and shins and breasts of men. Back of the lines the gouged earth showed everywhere the frightful plunges of the foiled demons, while with inconstant frequency noticeable to the trained eye, not unobserved by those who thereby just escaped destruction, lay the black bolides, extinguished and harmless.