Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them | Page 9

the noise of the street, half dirge, half
battle-cry, while out beyond somewhere the little soldiers in red
breeches were fighting, and the fate of France hung in the balance, that
morning.

Chapter III
After The Marne

At the end of the village the road climbed again from the ravine and
emerged on open fields. A wall of timber, dark and impenetrable as the
woods round an old chateau, rose at the farther end of these fields--the
road cutting through it like a tunnel--and on the brow of the ravine,
commanding the road and the little plain, was a line of trenches. Here
evidently they had fought.
We walked on down the road. Below the northern horizon, where they
were fighting now along the Aisne, rolled the sullen thunder of artillery,
as it had been rolling since daylight. And the autumn wind, cold with
the week of equinoctial rain, puffing out of thickets and across ravines,
brought, every now and then, the horrible odor of death.
Ahead, to the right, one caught the glint of a French infantry's red
trousers. A man was lying there, face downward, on the field. Then
across the open space appeared another--and another--they were
scattered all over that field, bright as the red poppies which were
growing in the stubble and as still. They were in various positions. One
lay on his back, with one knee raised like a man day-dreaming and
looking up at the sky. Another was stretched stiff, with both hands
clinched over his chest. One lay in the ditch close beside us, his head
jammed into the muddy bank just as he had dived there in falling;
another gripped a cup in one hand and a spoon in the other, as if,
perhaps, he might have tried to feed himself in the long hours after the
battle rolled on and left them there.
All these were French, but just at the edge of the thick timber was a
heap--one could scarcely say of Germans, so utterly did the gray,
sodden faces and sodden, gray uniforms merge into anonymity. A
squad of French soldiers appeared at a turn in the road. Two officers
rode beside them, and they were just moving off across the fields
carrying shovels instead of rifles. Looking after them, beyond the belt
of timber, one could see other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to
the left, and here and there smoke. Two more French soldiers appeared
pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms. With the boyish good

nature which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue,
they stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges. They
were burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans. The dead
had been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while the battle line
rolled northward, clear across France.
We turned back toward Crepy, passing again through the shattered
village of Betz. For three days it had been the centre of a battle, the two
forces lying outside it and shelling each other across the town. The
main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on the
edge of the ravine smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood
about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over and over again
what they had seen.
Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked and thrashed, past
the carcasses of horses sprawled stiff-legged in the ditch or in the
stubble, we tramped on to Crepy-en-Valois. The country was empty,
scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled back again, and
now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon
to the north. The little hotel across from the railroad station in Crepy
had kept open through it all. It was the typical Hotel de la Gare of these
little old towns--a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a few
chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets
and under a feather bed. They were used to change, and the mere
coming of armies could not be permitted to derange them.
Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs had been crowded
with English soldiers in retreat; then with Germans--stern, on edge,
sure of being in Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans
falling back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing
French. And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that
kept pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could
hobble over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down.
Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive
unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go