The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me

by William Allen White

And there we were that summer day, when time and events had changed the face of fate, looking out across the blighted field of Champagne at what might have been the wreck of France.

All is changed now. At every railroad junction the American Red Cross has built cantonments, where beds and food and baths and disinfecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for the homeward bound soldiers of France. The American Red Cross has the name of every French soldier's family that is in need, and that family's needs are being supplied by the American Red Cross. And the sure hope of victory has given the leadership of France a mastery of the forces of evil in the lower levels of the Nation's political consciousness that will make it impossible for the kaiser's friends, the courtesans, to accomplish anything next winter.

We gazed across the field that afternoon and seeing the blotched acres, weed blasted, shell-pocked, blistered with white trenches and scarred with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and miles, and we thought how perfectly does the spirit of man mark the picture of his soul's agony upon his daily work.

It was late in the afternoon when we left that sector of the line. We passed a bombed hospital where two doctors and three nurses had been killed a night or two before. It was a disquieting sight, and the big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the German airmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. Gradually as we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter and fainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into a wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. It was bombed to death—but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate, all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here and there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to their homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle of commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral and found its outlines there—a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and—if stone and iron can be conscious—vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet square has been gouged in the pavement by a German shell, and the hole uncovers a hidden passage to the Cathedral of which no one in this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about, gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place cast upon us, at the details of the devastation. The roof, of course, is but a film of wood and iron rent with big holes. The walls are intact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spires and gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, and the windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of the church gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of glass as art treasures.

That evening at supper in Chalons, we met some American boys who said the French were selling this glass from the windows of Rheims made from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and green bitters bottles, and still later we saw an English Colonel who had bought a job lot of it and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in a piece!

We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the back of the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalk with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to Henry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the stone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole in the pavement, and then to a broken iron shell. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but a few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock up on post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talk French, learned that another shell would be due in three or four minutes, we left town.

The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hidden only, and at that rather poorly, by camouflage—straw woven into mats, and burlap, badly torn. We were between the German guns five miles away, and the sunset. Great holes in the ground beside the road indicated where they had been dropping shells, so our driver tramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hour and we skedaddled.

From the road out of Rheims we dropped into the valley of the Marne, a most beautiful vine-clad valley, where the road turns sharply from the German lines and soon passes out of the German range and the shell holes at the side of the road disappear. But even shell holes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley as we wound down into it from the hill. Vines were everywhere. Rows and rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in the earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and they gave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It glowed with colour. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted the checkered fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Tall dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in our faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold on their uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills, all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of colours. And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered, there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias—even the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the German bombardment—villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan, from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the Germans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, running pell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers.

As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after division of the French army was quartered upon the population, thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far away," but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful, and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover, the emotions of France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope lash the home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village, in the street, in the home. Five millions of men during the last three years and a half have passed and re-passed, through those fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous and gentle and as kind.

For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded with soldiers—kindly French soldiers who were clearly living happily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henry burst forth, "My good Heavens, man—what if this were in Wichita or Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were there alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting about here were just little children three years ago when their daddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but rest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia—or back East in Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awful thing—what a hell in the earth, war is!"