They were the “King of England” cigars burning bravely.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN SERBIA
Salonika, December, 1915.
The chauffeur of an army automobile must make his way against cavalry, artillery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men marching, and ambulances filled with wounded, over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons. It is therefore necessary for him to drive with care. So he drives at sixty miles an hour, and tries to scrape the mud from every wheel he meets.
In these days of his downfall the greatest danger to the life of the war correspondent is that he must move about in automobiles driven by military chauffeurs. The one who drove me from the extreme left of the English front up to hill 516, which was the highest point of the French front, told me that in peace times he drove a car to amuse himself. His idea of amusing himself was to sweep around a corner on one wheel, exclaim with horror, and throw on all the brakes with the nose of the car projecting over a precipice a thousand yards deep. He knew perfectly well the precipice was there, but he leaped at it exactly as though it were the finish line of the Vanderbilt cup race. If his idea of amusing himself was to make me sick with terror he must have spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.
The approaches to hill 516, the base of the hill on the side hidden from the Bulgarians, and the trenches dug into it were crowded with the French. At that point of the line they greatly outnumbered the English. But it was not the elbow touch of numbers that explained their cheerfulness; it was because they knew it was expected of them. The famous scholar who wrote in our school geographies, “The French are a gay people, fond of dancing and light wines,” established a tradition. And on hill 516, although it was to keep from freezing that they danced, and though the light wines were melted snow, they still kept up that tradition and were “gay.”
They laughed at us in welcome, crawling out of their igloos on all fours like bears out of a cave; they laughed when we photographed them crowding to get in front of the camera, when we scattered among them copies of L’Opinion, when up the snow-clad hillside we skidded and slipped and fell. And if we peered into the gloom of the shelters, where they crouched on the frozen ground with snow dripping from above, with shoulders pressed against walls of icy mud, they waved spoons at us and invited us to share their soup. Even the dark-skinned, sombre-eyed men of the desert, the tall Moors and Algerians, showed their white teeth and laughed when a “seventy-five” exploded from an unsuspicious bush, and we jumped. It was like a camp of Boy Scouts, picnicking for one day, and sure the same night of a warm supper and bed. But the best these poilus might hope for was months of ice, snow, and mud, of discomfort, colds, long marches carrying heavy burdens, the pain of frost-bite, and, worst of all, homesickness. They were sure of nothing: not even of the next minute. For hill 516 was dotted with oblong rows of stones with, at one end, a cross of green twigs and a soldier’s cap.