With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

“Yes,” the officer assented doubtfully.

“The idea is that their hearing is better than that of the men, and in case of night attacks they will warn us. But during the day they get so excited barking at the boche dogs that when darkness comes, and we need them, they are worn-out and fall asleep.”

We continued through the forest, and wherever we went found men at work repairing the path and pushing the barb-wire and trenches nearer the enemy. In some places they worked with great caution as, hidden by the ferns, they dragged behind them the coils of wire; sometimes they were able to work openly, and the forest resounded with the blows of axes and the crash of a falling tree. But an axe in a forest does not suggest war, and the scene was still one of peace and beauty.

For miles the men had lined the path with borders of moss six inches wide, and with strips of bark had decorated the huts and shelters. Across the tiny ravines they had thrown what in seed catalogues are called “rustic” bridges. As we walked in single file between these carefully laid borders of moss and past the shelters that suggested only a gamekeeper’s lodge, we might have been on a walking tour in the Alps. You expected at every turn to come upon a châlet like a Swiss clock, and a patient cow and a young woman in a velvet bodice who would offer you warm milk.

Instead, from overhead, there burst suddenly the barking of shrapnel, and through an opening in the tree-tops we saw a French biplane pursued by German shells. It was late in the afternoon, but the sun was still shining and, entirely out of her turn, the moon also was shining. In the blue sky she hung like a silver shield, and toward her, it seemed almost to her level, rose the biplane.

She also was all silver. She shone and glistened. Like a great bird, she flung out tilting wings. The sun kissed them and turned them into flashing mirrors. Behind her the German shells burst in white puffs of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent-looking as the tips of ostrich-plumes. The biplane ran before them and seemed to play with them as children race up the beach laughing at the pursuing waves. The biplane darted left, darted right, climbed unseen aerial trails, tobogganed down vast imaginary mountains, or, as a gull skims the crests of the waves, dived into a cloud and appeared again, her wings dripping, glistening and radiant. As she turned and winged her way back to France you felt no fear for her. She seemed beyond the power of man to harm, something supreme, super-human—a sister to the sun and moon, the princess royal of the air.

After you have been in the trenches it seems so selfish to be feasting and drinking that you have no appetite for dinner.

But after a visit to the defenders of the forests of the Vosges you cannot feel selfish. Visits to their trenches do not take away the appetite. They increase it. The air they breathe tastes like brut champagne, and gases cannot reach them. They sleep on pillows of pine boughs. They look out only on what in nature is most beautiful. And their surgeon told me there was not a single man on the sick-list. That does not mean there are no killed or wounded. For even in the enchanted forest there is no enchantment strong enough to ward off the death that approaches crawling on the velvet moss, or hurtling through the tree-tops.

War has no knowledge of sectors. It is just as hateful in the Vosges as in Flanders, only in the Vosges it masks its hideousness with what is beautiful. In Flanders death hides in a trench of mud like an open grave. In the forest of the Vosges it lurks in a nest of moss, fern, and clean, sweet-smelling pine.