Wooden Crosses

Wooden Crosses
By Roland Dorgeles

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921
by
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS
I.--BROTHERS IN ARMS
II.--IN THE SWEAT OF THY BROW
III.--THE RED PENNON
IV.--GOOD DAYS
V.--VIGIL
VI.--THE MILL WITH NO SAILS

VII.--IN THE CAFƒ DE LA MARINE
VIII.--MOUNT CALVARY
IX.--MOURIR POUR LA PATRIE
X.--OUR LADY OF THE RAG-PICKERS
XI.--VICTORY
XII.--IN THE GARDEN OF THE DEAD
XIII.--THE HOUSE WITH THE WHITE BOUQUET
XIV.--LOVE'S OWN WORDS
XV.--EN REVENANT DE MONTMARTRE
XVI.--THE HERO'S RETURN
XVII.--AND NOW IT IS OVER

Wooden Crosses
CHAPTER I
BROTHERS IN ARMS
ALTHOUGH flowers were already scarce at this season of the year,
none the less there had been found enough to bedeck all the rifles in the
company, and, as rich in blossoms as a cemetery, the battalion, drums
and fifes at its head, had poured helter-skelter across the town between
two mute hedgerows of wide-eyed onlookers.
With songs and tears and laughing and drunkards' quarrellings and
heart-rending good-byes they had gone on board their train. All night
they had rolled along, had eaten their sardines and emptied their

water-bottles by the wretched glimmer of a single candle; then, tired of
their loud talk, they had gone to sleep, heaped up one against another,
heads on shoulders, their legs intermingled with one another.
Dawn had awakened them. Hanging out their carriage doors, they
scanned the villages, from which the early morning smoke was rising,
for traces of the recent fighting. Man hailed man from carriage to
carriage.
"Talk about a war; not as much as a spire smashed up!"
Then the houses opened their eyes, the roadways came to life, and
finding voice once more to shout facetious love-makings, they flung
their withered flowers at the women who were on the platform at every
station, waiting the unlikely return of their vanished sailormen. At
every halt they eased themselves and filled the water-bottles. And at
length, about ten o'clock, they detrained at Dormans, stupefied and
bruised.
A pause of an hour for soup, and they went off by the road--no drums
and fifes, no flowers, no waving handkerchiefs--and reached the village
where our regiment was resting, close up behind the lines.
There it was just like a great fair; their weary flock was broken up into
little groups--one to a company--and the quartermasters rapidly marked
off for each a section or squad, which they must hunt up from farm to
farm, like shelterless tramps, reading on every door the big white
numbers marked in chalk.
BrŽval, the corporal, who was coming out from the grocer's shop,
found the three that were for us as they were dragging along in the
street, crushed under their overladen packs, in which brand-new camp
utensils shone with an insolent brilliancy.
"Third company, fifth squad? I'm the corporal. Come on; we're billeted
down at the end of the dear old town."
When they came into the courtyard it was Fouillard, the cook, who

gave the warning.
"I say, lads, there's the new chums coming."
And flinging down in front of the blackened ashlar of his rustic
fireplace the armful of paper he had just fetched up out of the cellar, he
examined the new comrades.
"You've not let yourself be cheated," he said solemnly to BrŽval.
"They're as fine as new pins."
All of us had got up and were ringing round the three bewildered
soldiers with a curious group. They stared at us and we stared at them,
without a word spoken. They were arriving from behind, arriving from
the towns. Yesterday they had still been walking along real streets
seeing women, trains, shops; yesterday they were still living the lives
of men. And we took stock of them wonderingly, enviously, as though
they had been travellers disembarking from strange legendary lands.
"And so, you lads, they're not bothering themselves too much back
there?"
"And dear old Panama," asked Vairon, "what are they up to there?"
They on their side eyed us hard, as though they had fallen among
savages. Everything must have astonished them in this first meeting,
our baked faces, our widely incongruous get-up; Papa Hamel's
imitation otter-skin cap; the filthy, once white neckerchief Fouillard
wore knotted about his neck; Vairon's trousers, stiff and shining with
grease; the cape Lagny wore, the liaison orderly, who had stitched an
astrachan collar on to a zouave's hood; some in a "rag-picker's" round
jacket, some in artillery tunics--each and everyone accoutred according
to his own fashion; fat Bouffioux, who wore his identification disc in
his kŽpi, as Louis XI. wore his medals; a machine gunner with his
metal shoulder-pieces and his iron gauntlet that made him look like a
man-at-arms from CrŽcy; little BŽlin with his head thrust up to the ears