ONE OF THE SECTIONS AT VERDUN

I

It gave us rather a wrench to leave Pont-À-Mousson. The Section had been quartered there since April, 1915, and we were attached to the quaint town and to the friends we had made. The morning of our departure was warm and clear. Walking along the convoy, which had formed in the road before our villa, came the poilus, and shook hands with each conducteur. "Au revoir, monsieur." "Au revoir, Paul." "Bonne chance, Pierre!" We took a last look at the town which had sheltered us, at the scene of the most dramatic moments in our lives. Above the tragic silhouette of a huddle of ruined houses rose the grassy slopes of the great ridge crowned by the Bois-le-PrÊtre, the rosy morning mists were lifting from the shell-shattered trees, a golden sun poured down a spring-like radiance. Suddenly a great cloud of grayish white smoke rose over the haggard wood and melted slowly away in the northeast wind; an instant later, a reverberating boom signalled the explosion of a mine in the trenches. There was a shrill whistle, our lieutenant raised his hand, and the convoy swung down the road to Dieulouard. "Au revoir, les AmÉricains! " cried our friends. A little, mud-slopped, blue-helmeted handful, they waved to us till we turned the corner. "Au revoir, les AmÉricains!"

II

We left Pont-À-Mousson imagining that our Section was in for a month's repairing and tinkering at the military motor park, but as we came towards B. our opinion changed. We began to pass file after file of troops, many of them the khaki-clad troupes d'attaque, bull-necked Zouaves, and wiry, fine-featured Arabs. A regiment was halted at a crossroad; some of the men had taken off their jackets and hung them to the cross-beam of a wayside crucifix. On the grass before it, in the circle of shade made by the four trees which pious Meusian custom here plants round a Calvaire, sprawled several powerful-looking fellows; one lay flat on his belly with his face in his Turkish cap. Hard by, in a little copse, the regimental kitchen was smoking and steaming away. A hunger-breeding smell of la soupe, la bonne soupe, assailed our nostrils. Quite by himself, an older man was skilfully cutting a slice of bread with a shiny, curved knife. The rooks eddied above the bare brown fields. Just below was a village with a great cloud of wood smoke hanging over it.

Late in the afternoon we were assigned quarters in the barracks of B.

III

At B. we found an English Section that had been as suddenly displaced as our own. Every minute loaded camions ground into town and disappeared towards the east, troops of all kinds came in, flick, flack, the sun shining on the barrels of the lebels, a train of giant mortars, mounted on titanic trucks and drawn by big motor lorries, crashed over the pavements and vanished somewhere. Some of our conducteurs made friends with the English drivers, and swapped opinions as to what was in the wind. One heard, "Well, those Frenchies have got something up their sleeve. We were in the battle of Champagne, and it began just like this." A voice from our American West began, "Say—what kind of carburetors do you birds use?" New England asked, "How many cars have you got?" And London, on being shown the stretcher arrangements of our cars, exclaimed, "That ain't so dusty,—eh, wot?" Round us, rising to the full sea of the battle, the tide of war surged and disappeared. At dusk a company of dragoons, big helmeted men on big horses, trotted by, their blue mantles and mediÆval casques giving them the air of crusaders. At night the important corners of the streets were lit with cloth transparencies, with "Verdun" and a great black arrow painted on them. Night and day, going as smoothly as if they were linked by an invisible chain, went the hundred convoys of motor lorries. There was a sense of something great in the air—a sense of apprehension. "Les Boches vont attaquer Verdun."

IV

On the 21st the order came to go to M. The Boches had made their first attack that morning; this, however, we did not know. At M., a rather unlovely eighteenth-century chÂteau stands in a park built out on the meadows of the Meuse. The flooded river flowed round the dark pines. At night one could hear the water roaring under the bridges. The chÂteau, which had been a hospital since the beginning of the war, reeked with ether and iodoform; pasty-faced, tired attendants unloaded mud, cloth, bandages, and blood that turned out to be human beings; an over-wrought doctor-in-chief screamed contradictory orders at everybody, and flared into crises of hysterical rage.

Ambulance after ambulance came from the lines full of clients; kindly hands pulled out the stretchers, and bore them to the wash-room. This was in the cellar of the dove-cote, in a kind of salt-shaker turret. Snip, snap went the scissors of the brancardiers, who looked after the bath,—good souls these two; the uniforms were slit from mangled limbs. The wounded lay naked in their stretchers while the attendant daubed them with a hot soapy sponge; the blood ran from their wounds through the stretcher to the floor, and seeped into the cracks of the stones. A lean, bearded man, closed his eyes over the agony of his opened entrails and died there. I thought of Henner's dead Christ.

Outside, mingling with the roaring of the river, came the great, terrible drumming of the bombardment. An endless file of troops were passing down the great road. Night came on. Our ambulances were in a little side street at right angles to the great road; their lamps flares beat fiercely on a little section of the great highway. Suddenly, plunging out of the darkness into the intense radiance of the acetylene beams, came a battery of 75's, the helmeted men leaning over on the horses, the guns rattling and the harness clanking, a swift picture of movement that plunged again into darkness. And with the darkness, the whole horizon became brilliant with cannon fire.

V

We were well within the horseshoe of German fire that surrounded the French lines. It was between midnight and one o'clock, the sky was deep and clear, with big ice-blue winter stars. We halted at a certain road to wait our chance to deliver our wounded. It was a mÊlÉe of beams of light, of voices, of obscure motions, sounds. Refugees went by, decent people in black, the women being escorted by a soldier. One saw sad, harassed faces. A woman came out of the turmoil, carrying a cat in a canary cage; the animal swept the gilded bars with curved claws, and its eyes shone black and crazily. Others went by pushing baby carriages full to the brim with knick-knacks and packages. Some pushed a kind of barrow. At the very edge of earth and sky was a kind of violet-white inferno, the thousand finger-like jabs of the artillery shot unceasing to the stars, the great semi-circular aurÉole flares of the shorter pieces were seen a hundred times a minute. Over the moorland came a terrible roaring such as a river might make tumbling through some subterranean abyss. A few miles below, a dull, ruddy smouldering in the sky told of fires in Verdun. The morning clouded over, the dawn brought snow. Even in the daytime the great cannon flashes could be seen in the low, brownish snow-clouds.

On the way to M., two horses that had died of exhaustion lay in a frozen ditch. Ravens, driven from their repast by the storm, cawed hungrily in the trees.

VI

We slept in the loft of one of the buildings that formed the left wing of the courtyard of the castle. To enter it, we had to pass through a kind of lumber-room on the ground floor in which the hospital coffins were kept. Above was a great, dim loft, rich in a greasy, stably smell, a smell of horses and sweaty leather, the odor of a dirty harness room. At the end of the room, on a kind of raised platform, was the straw in which we lay; a crazy, sagging shelf, covered with oily dust, bundles of clothes, knapsacks, books, candle ends, and steel helmets, ran along the wall over our heads. All night long, the horses underneath us squealed, pounded, and kicked. I see in the lilac dawn of a winter morning the yellow light of an officer's lantern, and hear the call, "Up, boys—there's a call to B." The bundles in the dirty blankets groan; unshaven, unwashed faces turn tired eyes to the lantern; some, completely worn out, lie in a kind of sleepy stupor. A wicked screaming whistle passes over our heads, and the shell, bursting on a near-by location, startles the dawn.

The snow begins to fall again. The river has fallen, and the air is sickish with the dank smell of the uncovered meadows. A regiment on the way to the front has encamped just beyond the hospital. The men are trying to build little shelters. A handful of fagots is blazing in the angle of two walls; a handful of grave-faced men stand round it, stamping their feet. In the hospital yard, the stretcher-bearers unload the body of an officer who has died in the ambulance. The dead man's face is very calm and peaceful, though the bandages indicate terrible wounds. The cannon flashes still jab the snowy sky.

VII

The back of the attack is broken, and we are beginning to get a little rest. During the first week our cars averaged runs of two hundred miles a day. And this over roads chewed to pieces, and through the most difficult traffic. In one of the places, there was a formidable shell gantlet to run.

This morning I drove to B. with a poilu. He asked me what I did en civil. I told him. "I am a pÂtissier," he replied. "When this business is over, we shall have some cakes together in my good warm shop, and my wife shall make us some chocolate." He gave me his address. A regiment of young men marched singing down the moorland road to the battle-line. "Ah, les braves enfants!" said the pastry cook.

Henry Sheahan