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

by L. P. Gratacap

My eye was fastened upon the racing lines. The Germans, unable to bring at once the full power of their batteries to bear upon the French, awaited the attack with their massed infantry; indeed under the vociferous orders of their officers, leaped against it. The shock was blood-curdling. On either side the officers led, and amid the frightful collisions swords, bayonets, the heavily wielded butts of guns swayed, and rose and fell, among the frantic combatants. All loud sounds seemed suddenly stilled, and only the muffled groans and hissing suspirations of the heaving intermingled and vitalized mound of humans were heard and above them the metallic clash of arms.

The gunners dared not fire. It was, as if arrested by the suspense of a mortal conflict, each side was held at bay, except where between the armies this intimate carnage raged. More companies were hurled into the hollow—and from both sides—and the insignificant crease in the landscape became a boiling caldron of death. The German resistance had at first proved successful, and our men were being forced down into the battered and now unrecognizable rivulet, so that the hand to hand engagement filled the hollow with its lethal turbulence.

To and fro the mixed tumult bent and receded, when from our right, somewhere in the rear, a bomb soared. Its hiss, sweetened to a murmur only, sang in my ears as the harbinger of rescue. It fell a little within the German lines, and then came the detonation, and the mangled masses fell backward. The pressure relieved, and the appalling sense of some successor to the avenging missile, breaking down the courage of the enemy, our reinforced battalion was suddenly afforded room, from the enemy's recoil. Our antagonists were ballotted backward, as if struck with doom, and so, swinging their guns into horizontal phalanx, with naked bayonets the French renewed their charge, and drove the ravaged ranks before them, up, over the ridge, and back. The next moment was scarcely passed, before the hollow was again refilled with troops ordered to take and turn the enemy's batteries, somewhat screened in the desolated groves of trees.

In the twinkling of an eye the work was accomplished, and the Germans fled. Down the line for more than a kilometre I suddenly saw on either side of me a frontier of bayonets—from fresh arrivals—fixed and advancing and flashing. The slowly falling rain had relented, and the sun gleamed for an instant on the bared needle points, as if in augury of our success. Then the serried profile of bayonets paused, perhaps for mechanical alignments, tilted upward and moved; moved as with the release of a gigantic spring.

The line swept on. I watched them, fascinated, enthralled by its awful menace. The deserted hollow—no longer a battle field—was almost empty, save of those criss-crossed piles of fallen bodies where the transfixed agony of individual conflict yet remained unchanged, in the attitudes of foes knit together in the horrid embrace of their death-fight. Where the severed corpses, fouled in smoke and grime and dirt, lay shapeless, or distended on back or face, or sometimes with arms twisted in knots among each other, or just alone, hither and thither, solitary bodies unsoiled by any mutilation and bent together, as if bivouacked for sleep. And here too were the wounded, sometimes moaning audibly, sometimes still writhing with the urgent wounds, fresh in leg or arm or breast. And everywhere was the ploughed and tormented earth, trampled and dug into by the straining feet of the combatants, meshed with holes of water and now, under the recovered sun, glistening, wet, and muddy. I hurried along with the Red-Cross men into the hollow with my mission quite driven out of my head; only anxious to assist the wounded to some places of safety and relief. The battle seemed for the moment displaced, though around us the orders sounded, caissons rumbled, regiments poured past us and the intermittent aerial swish of shells was heard, and not so far to the right and to the left the German front was murderously insistent, pinching us where we stood in a dangerous salient.

After lifting a number of the limp bodies of men, in whose faces shone at times the benediction of gratitude, and at others rested just the pallid smile of recognition, or else were filmed with the bleaching shades of death, I went to the top of the ridge beyond which our forward flung companies had routed the Germans. The fearful clash, body against body, was resumed in a ploughed field but the horrors were augmented—though too it had a splendor in it—by the added carnage of the plunging cavalry that now thickened the fight into a crucial contest. The captured batteries were useless here, but they were being dragged into the French lines behind us. I was leaning against one of the willows of the groves, thrashed into a ruin of fallen branches, yielding to sickness of heart that might have thrown me into a faint when I felt my feet tugged at. I started and looked down. In the heavy grass, trampled and rutted, I saw the outstretched body of a soldier, dragging itself upward by my legs, and he had so far freed himself from the herbage that our eyes met. It was Sebastien Quintado.

Perhaps I shouted. I hardly think so. If I had Sebastien never heard me, for he had fallen back again, and lay motionless. For an instant I thought his life had fled. I seized his shoulders, and pulled him within the trees. He was bleeding from a cutlass wound across his chest, and from a gash in his thigh. We carried him back into the camp and he slowly revived. The half extinguished spark was relit. Of course he knew me. He said he knew me as I stood above him on the battlefield, but thought, half deliriously, that it was a dream only.

I had secured excellent quarters for Quintado, and his wounds while grave were surely healing. Had I not met him in time—the very nick of time—he might have bled to death. At the earliest practicable moment I intended to bring him to St. Choiseul. I knew that when I could tell him that, he would be better. L'espoir est à le fond de la santé.

We were in a relay hospital, back some kilometres from the front, and on the road to Paris, where most of the charges were transferred. It was an encampment of tents, and in one of these—indeed it was near Compiègne—the day after I had brought him from the field, and when too at any moment we might find it necessary to hastily retreat, as the Germans pressed on in spite of the grim resistance that like a wall delayed them. I say it was in one of these tents, towards sunset, as the level rays, unchecked by a cloud poured over the camp a light that seemed to wash out the stains of dirt and use, and make it brilliant, that, as I sat near Quintado's cot, I caught his eyes resting upon me with an indescribable affection.