With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

As for years he has owned one of the famous racing stables in France, his knowledge of them is exceptional.

When last I had seen him he was in silk, on one of his own thoroughbreds, and the crowd, or that part of it that had backed his horse, was applauding, and, while he waited for permission to dismount, he was smiling and laughing. Yesterday, when the plough horses pulled his express-train off the rails, he descended and pushed it back, and, in consequence, was splashed, not by the mud of the race-track but of the trenches. Nor in the misty, dripping, rain-soaked forest was there any one to applaud. But he was still laughing, even more happily.

The trenches were dug around what had been a chalk mine, and it was difficult to tell where the mining for profit had stopped and the excavations for defense began. When you can see only chalk at your feet, and chalk on either hand, and overhead the empty sky, this ignorance may be excused. In the boyaux, which began where the railroad stopped, that was our position. We walked through an endless grave with walls of clay, on top of which was a scant foot of earth. It looked like a layer of chocolate on the top of a cake.

In some places, underfoot was a corduroy path of sticks, like the false bottom of a rowboat; in others, we splashed through open sluices of clay and rain-water. You slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect pressed with each hand against the wet walls of the endless grave.

We came out upon the “hauts de Meuse.” They are called also the “Shores of Lorraine,” because to that province, as are the cliffs of Dover to the county of Kent, they form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry that had been cut into the top of the heights on the side that now faces other heights held by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall of chalk as high as a five-story building. The face of it had been pounded by shells. It was as undismayed as the whitewashed wall of a schoolroom at which generations of small boys have flung impertinent spit-balls. At the edge of the quarry the floor was dug deeper, leaving a wall between it and the enemy, and behind this wall were the posts of observation, the nests of the machine-guns, the raised step to which the men spring when repulsing an attack. Below and back of them were the shelters into which, during a bombardment, they disappear. They were roofed with great beams, on top of which were bags of cement piled three and four yards high.

Not on account of the sleet and fog, but in spite of them, the aspect of the place was grim and forbidding. You did not see, as at some of the other fronts, on the sign-boards that guide the men through the maze, jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts and sleeping-caves bore no such ironic titles as the Petit Café, the Anti-Boche, Chez Maxim. They were designated only by numerals, businesslike and brief. It was no place for humor. The monuments to the dead were too much in evidence. On every front the men rise and lie down with death, but on no other front had I found them living so close to the graves of their former comrades. Where a man had fallen, there had he been buried, and on every hand you saw between the chalk huts, at the mouths of the pits or raised high in a niche, a pile of stones, a cross, and a soldier’s cap. Where one officer had fallen his men had built to his memory a mausoleum. It is also a shelter into which, when the shells come, they dive for safety. So that even in death he protects them.

I was invited into a post of observation, and told to make my entrance quickly. In order to exist, a post of observation must continue to look to the enemy only like part of the wall of earth that faces him. If through its apparently solid front there flashes, even for an instant, a ray of sunlight, he knows that the ray comes through a peep-hole, and that behind the peep-hole men with field-glasses are watching him. And with his shells he hammers the post of observation into a shambles. Accordingly, when you enter one, it is etiquette not to keep the door open any longer than is necessary to squeeze past it. As a rule, the door is a curtain of sacking, but hands and bodies coated with clay, by brushing against it, have made it quite opaque.

The post was as small as a chart-room, and the light came only through the peep-holes. You got a glimpse of a rack of rifles, of shadowy figures that made way for you, and of your captain speaking in a whisper. When you put your eyes to the peep-hole it was like looking at a photograph through a stereoscope. But, instead of seeing the lake of Geneva, the Houses of Parliament, or Niagara Falls, you looked across a rain-driven valley of mud, on the opposite side of which was a hill.

Here the reader kindly will imagine a page of printed matter devoted to that hill. It was an extremely interesting hill, but my captain, who also is my censor, decides that what I wrote was too interesting, especially to Germans. So the hill is “strafed.” He says I can begin again vaguely with “Over there.”