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

by L. P. Gratacap

For the war went on; west and east the perpetual deluge of shells and shrapnel and bullets, the surges of poisonous gases, the savagery of assassination, and the cruelty of the bayonet, were emptying homes, thinning the ranks, and draining the country of its best, its strongest, men. And now came the trench lines; the insinuating deep gutters in the earth, worming themselves this way and that, here in unutterable perplexity of entrance and exit, there more simple, running on with occasional dug-outs and bomb-proof dungeons, cellar-like dismal caverns of darkness, humidity, and sickness. Stuck in them at various intervals were the platoons of shooting men, the hunters after other men's lives, quick, almost instinctive in their scent of opportunity, almost wolfish in their ample placidity of intention to take those other men's lives, if they could reach them. The long lines of subterranean fortification, stretching, with irregular intervals of defenselessness, like broad gaps in a strong fence, swept over fields, and up hills, and over rivers, and through villages, junketed ever and anon with ruins, shattered homes, or burrowing like the entrails of a corrupting cancer under churches, and massing hither and thither, in coils of black and muddy gashes, like the redoubled and tangled intestines of an animal.

Here went on the daily work of murder, helped by the batteries, and at propitious moments intensified into the uttermost diabolism by the whine, scream, and tear of shells, the detonations of shrapnel, and the thudding din of cannon, the whipping, ping-pong hiss of bullets. And following that splenetic outburst the sudden bolt forward of regiments of men might follow; headlong charges, frenzied rushes, dashes through a hail of shot, men tumbling this way and that, wounded, dying, dead, and then the ferocity of bodily collision with stabs from bayonets, and slashes from swords and all in a tense silence, save for the oppressed suspiration, the swish of brushing bodies pinned to each other, a momentary cry of pain, smothered objurgations.

Over the wavering line of lethal burrows, high in the air, swung or raced the bird-like combatants of the French and the Germans, their shadows sometimes thrown upon a cloud, sometimes drifting over the ground in a grotesque patch—a mere spot perhaps—of gray. Thus the mortal combat sullied the pure air with its disorder. Up to those armed fliers rose the stark stenches of the earth—the smell of unburied corpses—and their eagle eyes looked down upon long stretches of torn mud flats, ploughed by missiles, dreary plains of desolation, beaten into a black and brown hideousness of confused holes and gaping rents, gouged out hillsides, heaped mounds of fantastic earth, stippled everywhere with the half hidden bodies of the dead.

From Ostend to Arras, from Arras to Maubeuge, from Maubeuge to Vouzier, the indented, buried, smoking furrows of human explosives stretched its weary length, concealing armies; hiding, in its ambuscades and pits and mines, volcanoes of ammunition, a vast aneurism draining two nations of their life and substance. What was a half stifled combat here in the east in Galicia and in Poland was a fiercer conflict, and from there as from here—in the west—each hour sent to some home the stab of bereavement.

I could not return to my work. Recurrent chills and nervous breakdowns, constantly augmented by the horrible agony of this insufferable crime, kept my mind weakened, my body helpless.

It was a little more than seven months after the repulse of the invaders at the Battle of the Marne, that the strange symptoms of the spirit visitation that had troubled Gabrielle returned with appalling violence. The spring about St. Choiseul had filled the hills and the valleys with a wonderful beauty, more entrancing because the season had prevailed with rain, and this had imbued the skies with a fascinating vaporousness, which, suffused with sunlight, made the picture about us in the lowlands so lovely in its grace and clinging softness of light and shades. This sweet peacefulness made the horrid nightmare of the war, only a few miles away, more unbearable and hateful. How often that spring Gabrielle and I sat out on the porch late into the night, amid the renewed fragrance of the flowers, the rising chorus of the insect and tree life, murmuring in field and stream and wood and along the grassy edges of the highway, talking over the miseries of our dear land! Gabrielle had worn herself to skin and bone—as the English say—with her work in the hospital at Paris, and now together, both melancholy and disabled, we lingered long in thoughtful communion on what the meaning and upshot of this unwearied struggle might be.

Perhaps it was about the middle of April, 1915, that late at night—it might have been after midnight—as I read in my room some late reports and personal letters from the front, my door—the one leading from my room into Gabrielle's, opened, and my sister appeared at the entrance, in her night dress. In her face was a wild, startled look, as of one who had been surprised in her sleep by some awful dream, and yet trembled under the malign shock.

"Gabrielle," I cried, myself moved to the outcry by her famished, stricken, hunted look, "What is it? Are you ill?"

She did not answer at once, but stole towards me with a wavering stealthiness, as of one escaping from a pursuer. When she was at my side—I had leaped to my feet in consternation and alarm—she flung her arms around my neck, and in a choking whisper, that half audible mixture of breathing and utterance which betokens physical and nervous exhaustion, said:

"Alfred, the spirits are here again, and they crowd my room; they are filling this room now. Don't you feel them? Have you seen, felt, heard nothing? They are the ghosts of the slain—I know it, for they tell me so, and their faces are so imploring—They ask me to stop the war. They tell me—" her voice grew stronger, and in the rush of her emotion and excitement the words followed faster and faster, but still her voice was a whisper only—"They tell me I can help. And O! Alfred their cry for Mercy is piteous. They feel the pain of those who have lost them—whom they have lost too. A voice came to my ears, clear and calm: 'Help us! Help us! Our sadness is yours. We wished to live. Death for us is wrong—too soon—too soon—too soon;' and then it died away, like a fading bell-note, far, far away. And Alfred the voice sounded to me like Sebastien's. O! Alfred there are others too—and some—" she shuddered in my arms, and clasped me convulsively, as if the pain of the recollection were too great to bear.