ERIZE is, without exception, the dullest place beneath the sun—a small town, now a mass of crumbling ruins, holding not above two dozen civilians, who are, for the most part, still less interesting than the town. Of course, there are Grand’mère and Grand-père, no relation to each other, but so christened by us because they are the only two octogenarians here. Grand’mère is not properly from Erize. Her home is somewhere north of Verdun, in a town with an unpronounceable name and long since destroyed. She, herself, carries proudly on her wrinkled forehead a two-inch scar from shrapnel, and informs us tearfully that her two sons have died in action, “pour la patrie,” she concludes, with a faint smile.
I met Grand’mère for the first time when I picked an unripe apple from an overburdened tree. The old woman appeared from the depths of a nearby building and advanced menacingly towards me, hobbling along on a cane, and pouring forth as she came an unintelligible tirade from which I gathered that the apple reposing guiltily in my hand was hers—not mine. A single franc served to wreathe her face in smiles and to obtain undisputed claim to the apple and her good graces in the future. Ira furor brevis est. I afterwards learned that houses in Erize rent for fifty francs a year, this including several acres of farm land.
Grand-père, aged ninety-eight, I met near the temporary kitchen where the cook was giving him a cup of Pinard, which he drank eagerly, while Grand’mère gave him wise counsel, to which he replied as Omar Khayyam might have done.
But they are the only characters of interest here. The fields surrounding the town have as their redeeming feature a system of old trenches, with much barbed wire and an occasional shell-fragment to reward the searcher. The German advance was stopped less than a mile from here, and the trenches have been used since for practice.
The dugouts interest us particularly. We are later to become surfeited with them, but as yet they are still delightfully novel. The rumble of the guns can be heard plainly from here, and at rare intervals a saucisse rises on the horizon, much to our joy and excitement.
THE saucisse is a balloon shaped like a sausage—hence its name. At the front they are in the sky by the hundreds on both sides to direct the fire of the artillery and to observe the enemy’s operations generally. They are consequently made the objective of the aeroplane, and many are brought down every day. The aeroplane dodges along from cloud to cloud, and when he is just over the saucisse suddenly swoops down, and with a tic-tic-tic from his machine-gun the bag crumples up in a cloud of black smoke and flames, the observer jumps out with his parachute, and the aeroplane dashes off pursued by many shells.
In the balloons the observers all have parachutes and usually make their escape, although often they have to spend a little time dangling from the limb of some tree.