On the next morning, at daybreak, we quitted the trench again in order to rest for two days. We went across the fields and took up quarters at Cerney-en-Dormois. We lodged in one of the abandoned houses in the center of the village. Our field kitchen had not yet arrived, so we were obliged to find our own food.
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Startling Prophecy in Paris. All Paris is wildly excited over the extraordinary prophecy of Madame Cleo de Clichy that the war will be over in four weeks.
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It was dark already, and we halted once more. The ground around us was strewn with dead. In the middle of the road were some French batteries and munition wagons, with the horses still attached; but horses and men were dead.
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The commander of the artillery smilingly came up to the major of the infantry and thanked and congratulated him.
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I went to the Opéra Comique one day to hear Marthe Chenal sing the “Marseillaise.” For several weeks previous I had heard a story going the rounds of what is left of Paris life to the effect that if one wanted a regular old-fashioned thrill he really should go to the Opéra Comique on a day when Mlle. Chenal closed the performance by singing the French national hymn. I was told there would be difficulty in securing a seat.
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I met d’Artagnan in a forest of Lorraine. Perhaps Athos, Porthos and Aramis were there too, somewhere in the shadows. I saw only d’Artagnan and talked with him as long as it takes to tell the story. I had forgotten how he looked to Dumas père, but I knew him at once by his bearing and his spirit. His swashbuckling manners are just as arrogantly gay now in the forest of Lorraine and in the trenches of the Vosges as they were long ago in old Paris and on the highroad. He swaggers just as buoyantly with the “poilus” of the Republic as with the musketeers of the Cardinal.
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After a short rest we were commanded to search the burning houses for wounded men. We did not find many of them, for most of the severely wounded soldiers who had not been able to seek safety unaided had been miserably burnt to death, and one could only judge by the buttons and weapons of the poor wretches for what “fatherland” they had suffered their terrible death by fire. With many it was even impossible to find out the nationality they belonged to; a little heap of ashes, a ruined house were all that was left of whole families, whole streets of families.
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On a hill commanding a valley stretching away toward the Rhine is a dense pine forest. From its edge I looked far across the frontier of Germany.
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We left Sugny the next morning, and an hour later we crossed the Belgo-French frontier. Here, too, we had to give three cheers. The frontier there runs through a wood, and on the other side of the wood we placed the 21-cm. mortars in position.
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From a letter of Eugène Lemercier, the French painter who fought and died in World War I.
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At 11 o’clock all further philosophizing was put a stop to; we were ordered to halt, and we were to receive our food from the field kitchen.
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From a letter of Eugène Lemercier, the French painter who fought and died in World War I.
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A little round apple dumpling sort of woman in nun’s costume was bobbing a curtsy to me from the doorway. In excited French she begged me to be seated. For I was “Monsieur l’Américain” who had come to visit Gerbéviller, the little community nestling in the foothills of the Vosges, that has suffered quite as much from Germans as any city, even those in Belgium. It was her “grand pleasure” that I should come to visit her.
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From a letter of Eugène Lemercier, the French painter who fought and died in World War I.
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It was just dawn when I got off a train at Gerbéviller, the little “Martyr City” that hides its desolation as it hid its existence in the foothills of the Vosges.
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From a letter of Eugène Lemercier, the French painter who fought and died in World War I.
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This is a story about what, in the minds of the French military authorities, ranks as the greatest battle in the western theater of operations, following the battle of the Marne.
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It was a drippy day—a day when winter overcoats were uncomfortable but necessary to protect against a wind that swept over the plateau of Artois. A party of newspapermen were beginning a war-corresponding de luxe program arranged by the French war office. The Paris-Boulogne express had been commanded to stop at Amiens, where limousines were waiting in charge of an officer of the Great General Staff.
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The thousands of English soldiers now on French soil are, to Frenchmen, strange, exotic creatures, the study of which is full of delightful surprises. Recently a French journalist traveled to the trenches, interviewed several specimens of the genus Tommy Atkins, and published the results in a Paris newspaper.
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“Grand Quartier Général!” The sentry barring the road jerked his rifle instantly to rigid salute.
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I never expected to drive a motor ambulance, with badly wounded men, down the Champs Elysées. But I did. I have done many things since the war began that I never expected to do;—but somehow that magnificent Champs Elysées—and ambulances—and groans of wounded seemed a combination entirely outside my wildest imaginations.
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“To see the damage done by the Germans in unfortified villages.”
This was the quest that first passed me into the zone of military operations, that first landed me on the field of battle, and gave me my first experience under fire.
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The battle of the Marne was fought by the Allies in the direct interest of the city of Paris. The result was the city’s salvation. At the time, only a small percentage of the inhabitants knew anything about it.
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A night spent sending despatches—a yelling, singing mob beneath the windows making it almost impossible for messengers to cross to the cable office;—a dawn passed in riding from one ministry to another, wherever any portion of the war councils might still be in session;—and a forenoon spent in a Turkish bath, brought me near to the fateful hour on Saturday, August 1st, when France went to war.
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A member of the Garde Republicaine, whose duty was to keep order in the court, was creating great disorder by climbing over the shoulders of the mob in the press section. He ousted friends of the white-faced prisoner in the dock, to make room for a fat reporter from Petit Parisien, who ordinarily did finance but was now relieving a confrère at the lunch hour. The case in court was that of the famous affaire Caillaux and all the world was reading bulletins concerning its progress as fast as special editions could supply them.
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There was no hands-across-the-sea Lafayette stuff about us Americans who joined the Foreign Legion in Paris when the war broke out. We just wanted to get right close and see some of the fun, and we didn’t mind taking a few risks, as most of us had led a pretty rough sort of life as long as we could remember.
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My first and most poignant recollection of the thousands of Americans caught in France at the outbreak of war is in connection with a cable containing some five thousand of their names, which was killed by the censor on the ground that it was code.
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