The End: How the Great War Was Stopped. A Novelistic Vagary

by L. P. Gratacap

Behind that wavering and uneasy or else just stiffened frontier of combat, where the murderous duel was played its sharpest, where men with blood-shot eyes, blackened bodies, and rent clothing were lashed into a maniacal heroism, where officers at intervals feeling the necessity, or inspired by the traditional splendor of service, dashed into the open and in the withering rain of shot and shell, upright, and with sentinel precision, directed the fire or exhorted their men to steadfastness—behind that marvellous line of human endurance, the fluctuating panorama of supply and reparation and reinforcement spread. Here were the gathered platoons ready for entering the thinning lines, the marshalled helpers of the ambulance corps, the doctors and orderlies, the racing caissons constantly feeding the rapacious and smoothly running cannon, the more distant assemblages of the commissariat, and behind them—a long long way off—that perpetual train of fleeing victims, the procession of the evicted, hidden, as to their resemblances to human proportions, under loads of domestic goods, the paraphernalia of the household, so that they indistinguishably took on the appearance of a vast titanic, coarsely corrugated and dirtily colored reptile, worming its way endlessly into the distance.

And when the eye, freed momentarily from its awful imprisonment in that hideous wrestle of death and life, turned outward to the wide horizons, the image of the desolating ravages of war were multiplied. The confused flames and smoke-clouds of burning villages or deserted shelters rose tardily into the dimmed skies, while, caught nearer at hand perchance, and beyond the invading surges of the Germans, if seen at all through the screen of vapors, the broken angular edges of wall and parapet, tower and steeple, cut the horizon with cruel indentations.

I had reached the neighborhood of a little village near Noyon, and intended to enter the lines, having a special pass which would permit me to come quite close to the firing ranges. The reason for this urgency on my part was the knowledge that Sebastien was with the Third Fusiliers, in a division of the Fifth Army Corps, and a letter sent by him to Dora Destin which had been communicated to the captain by an attaché of Gallieni who was commandant of Paris, told his sweetheart that he was not well, and expressed a wish to hear from her. Dora had come to me with the letter, stained with tears, and begged me to make an effort to get to Quintado, and to take him not only her message—written in the neatest hand-writing—but a package of woven odds and ends which would help his comfort in the camps. Poor girl, she was inconsolable.

It was about two in the afternoon of a dull day, with the skies heavily laden with gray flat clouds, and there was a light drizzle falling, with occasional sharper gusts of wind that smote the rain into keen lines slanting eastward. I had pushed on—helped by my commission—and found access almost to the immediate front unhindered. The Third Fusiliers, I was told, held a part of the most exposed part of the field, and that the battle was raging at that instant. That fact was too evident. I heard the continuous roar of the guns; I saw the shells exploding above and around me, while past me through the open ways of access and retreat the stretchers passed in undeviating succession, in their rapid methodical transference of the wounded to the field hospitals further out, and in the direction of Compiègne. The incessant strain of anxious incisive movement, the troubled crowding of exertion among the waiters, the sharp punctuated orders, the bristling worry of preparation, the racing ambulances—these indications behind the lines formed the declarative prelude, were one approaching the battle from behind it, of its terrible reality. As reality lay just beyond that thicket of trees, that hastily constructed redoubt, that furrowed field where shallow trenches cut it lengthwise, that crumbling hut, smoking with concealed flames and spitting gun-shots.

I knew that the battle raged, but I insisted on making my way forward, and the favoring chance of a sudden disturbance, some intense propulsion of the enemy driving our soldiers rearward in a dishevellement—quickly overcome—brought me right within the focus of the fight. I was seized up in the refluent movement that reestablished our line. The oscillation sent me eastward, and I was thrown down, rolled over and almost trampled on, in a furious despairing rush forward of artillery. I fell within sight of a hillock, whose little yet unscathed crown of grass was sprinkled with daisies—the pathetic irony of flowers in that waste of slaughter! I crawled to this trivial protection, and, with a prayer on my lips, dug myself into the yielding mould, and watched. The battle line was still somewhat beyond me and to my amazement and satisfaction I soon discovered that I was actually in the companies of the Third Fusiliers. Was Sebastien in the front?

As I recall that instant now, it seems almost an illusion that it occurred at all. It was the concentrated immensity of it; its vast superabundant detail, crushed into a measure of time out of all proportion insignificant, that put it among the categories of dreams. Before me was a very slight declension of the ground, forming a sort of broad hollow, traversed at its centre by a stream-bed, now almost dry, but retaining a penurious thread of water, somewhat replenished now by the rain, which, assisted by frequent depressions had gathered into stagnant pools. Beyond the hollow to the right and to the left, were two sparse clumps of trees, crowning the opposite crest of the subsidence. Sheltered in these puny groves were cannon which had apparently just reached that forward position, as the gunners were seen desperately forcing them into position. Between the cannon-groups came the tightly compacted formation of the Germans—wedge-like—half crouchingly as they advanced, the close combination of figures making a chain of stern set faces above the pressed guns and bristling bayonets.

Our men had been driven off the opposite ridge, where the crippled trees showed the bitterness of the contest, and where lay motionless bodies in heaps while down the very gradual decline—less frequently—could be detected the fallen figures, some yet moving, and still nearer to my point of view strewn from end to end of the hollow were the dead and dying, while—gruesome spectacle—the darkened waters of the pools betrayed the slow infiltration of blood. From the hollow the French had retreated to the southern edge, and were now entrenching themselves for a new stand, at the moment when the Germans, recovering their confidence after a partial repulse, renewed the attack, and were coming again to close quarters with our soldiers. Our positions were being shelled. The mitrailleuse rapidly seizing position would soon add their panic-breeding terrors, belching forth their destroying torrents of ball and canister. The soft hiss of an ascending bomb reached my ears, and later the roar or ripping whine of its explosion. Our artillery, entangled in the previous debacle, was not yet reorganized for response, and the moment looked perilously uncertain for our defense.

Quickly the commanding officers realized that the stabilizing help of a vigorous charge would bring to the derailment time to straighten out, and, before the full power of the enemy's batteries could be developed, inflict a salutary repulse. There was a breathing space left. A moment's halt had brought with it reawakened energies, and when the order was given the ground thickened with men, and the disarray, as by the flourish of a wand of dissipation, vanished, and with shouts the braced bodies poured forward into that shallow trough, sprang across it, and rose on its opposite edge.

I too had risen out of my half buried position, and, transported by the surpassing glory of the effort became oblivious of danger. The cheering lines shot on, men dropping from the ranks and rolling backward, becoming limp and silent, to be seized the next minute by the quickly following support, and carried out of danger to the ambulances.