A Volunteer Poilu | Page 6

a scurry to the rail; some one cried, "Voilà des
Boches," and I saw working in a vineyard half a dozen men in
gray-green German regimentals. A poilu in a red cap was standing
nonchalantly beside them. As the Rochambeau, following the channel,
drew incredibly close to the bank, the Germans leaned on their hoes
and watched us pass, all save one, who continued to hoe industriously
round the roots of the vines, ignoring us with a Roman's disdain.
"Comme ils sont laids" (How ugly they are), said a voice. There was no
surprise in the tone, which expressed the expected confirmation of a
past judgment. It was the pastry cook's voluble wife who had spoken.
The land through which we were passing, up to that time simply the
pleasant countryside of the Bordelais, turned in an instant to the France
of the Great War.
Late in the afternoon, the river, slowly narrowing, turned a great bend,
and the spires of Bordeaux, violet-gray in the smoky rose of early
twilight, were seen just ahead. A broad, paved, dirty avenue, with the
river on one side and a row of shabby houses on the other, led from the
docks to the city, and down this street, marching with Oriental dignity,
came a troop of Arabs. There was a picture of a fat sous-officier
leading, of brown-white rags and mantles waving in the breeze blowing
from the harbor, of lean, muscular, black-brown legs, and dark,
impassive faces. "Algerian recruits," said an officer of the boat. It was a

first glimpse at the universality of the war; it held one's mind to realize
that while some were quitting their Devon crofts, others were leaving
behind them the ancestral well at the edges of the ancient desert. A
faint squeaking of strange pipes floated on the twilight air.
There came an official examination of our papers, done in a
businesslike way, the usual rumpus of the customs, and we were free to
land in France. That evening a friend and I had dinner in a great café
opening on the principal square in Bordeaux, and tried to analyze the
difference between the Bordeaux of the past and the Bordeaux of the
war. The ornate restaurant, done in a kind of Paris Exhibition style, and
decorated with ceiling frescoes of rosy, naked Olympians floating in
golden mists and sapphire skies, was full of movement and light,
crowds passed by on the sidewalks, there were sounds--laughter.
"Looks just the same to me," said my friend, an American journalist
who had been there in 1912. "Of course there are more soldiers.
Outside of that, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the town has not
changed."
But there was a difference, and a great difference. There was a terrible
absence of youth. Not that youth was entirely absent from the tables
and the trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and unhealthy-looking,
afraid to meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the pitiable jeunesse that
could not pass the physical examination of the army. Most of the other
young men who bent over the tables talking, or leaned back on a divan
to smoke cigarettes, were strangers, and I saw many who were
unquestionably Roumanians or Greeks. A little apart, at a corner table,
a father and mother were dining with a boy in a uniform much too large
for him;--I fancied from the cut of his clothes that he belonged to a
young squad still under instruction in the garrisons, and that he was
enjoying a night off with his family. Screened from the rest by a clothes
rack, a larky young lieutenant was discreetly conversing with a
"daughter of joy," and an elderly English officer, severely proper and
correct, was reading "Punch" and sipping red wine in Britannic
isolation. Across the street an immense poster announced, "Conference
in aid of the Belgian Red Cross--the German Outrages in Louvain,

Malines, and Liège--illustrated."
We finished our dinner, which was good and not costly, and started to
walk to our hotel. Hardly had we turned the corner of the Place, when
the life of Bordeaux went out like a torch extinguished by the wind. It
was still early in the evening, there was a sound of an orchestra
somewhere behind, yet ahead of us, lonely and still, with its shops
closed and its sidewalks deserted, was one of the greater streets of
Bordeaux. Through the drawn curtains of second stories over little
groceries and baker-shops shone the yellow light of lamps. What had
happened to the Jean, Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the war
began? What tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these silent
windows not conceal? And every French city is much the same; one
notices in them all the subtle lack of youth, and the animation