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WAR THE CREATOR
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Copyright, 1915, By P. F. Collier & Son, Inc.
Copyright, 1916, by B. W. Huebsch


War the Creator was first printed in
Collier’s. Acknowledgment is made to that
weekly for permission to publish the story
in volume form.


PRINTED IN U. S. A.

WAR THE CREATOR

I

BECAUSE he was my friend, because he was so lovable, because he suffered much, I want to try to tell the story of a boy who, in two months, became a man. My hero is Georges Cucurou, the son of a shoe-maker of Toulouse. I happened to see him first just before the war began, and not again until after he had been wounded; and the change in him was then so great that I could not rest until I had learned how it had been brought about. Georges is but one of the thousands who have gone into that furnace of patriotism; in France such experiences as his are commonplace now, but when I heard his story I got a glimpse of war in a new aspect. Before, I had thought of it only as stupid, destructive, dire; now, in his illumined face, I saw the work of War the Creator.

His narrative is concerned with only the first six weeks of the fighting, and mostly with that terrible retreat from Belgium, so bitter in its disappointments, so trying to the flamboyant courage of the French. Hardly had they rallied along the Marne and begun to pursue the enemy when Georges was wounded and invalided home. It was there in the hospital that I got his history; and from those talks, and his notebook, and his letters to his aunt, I have reconstructed the trials and emotions of this lad of twenty.

II

Georges, having commenced his regular three years’ military service in October, 1913, got leave to visit his aunt who was keeping a pension in Paris.

How shy and confused he was when I came down to the dining-room that day and surprised him while he was examining his too-faint mustache with great seriousness before the mirror! Charming, I thought him, instantly; a clean, jolly sort of boy, quite too young for that ridiculous soldier’s uniform.

His aunt introduced him (with her arm about his shoulder and a tweak of his ear) by his nickname, “Coco”; and, after he got used to my being a foreigner, he began to talk, using his big brown eyes and his free, expressive hands quite as much as his tongue. Knowing a little of the Midi, I attempted an imitation of the patois. Coco threw back his head and laughed with abandon. That broke the ice, and we became great friends.

He was so curious about everything American that I took him up to my salon to see my typewriter; also my neckties and fancy socks.

“But what’s this?” asked Coco, reading with his funny French pronunciation, “A-mer-i-cain Pencil Compagnie.” It was a novelty, a “perpetual” pencil of the self-sharpening sort, with a magazine filled with little points like cartridges. When I gave it to him, it pleased Coco immensely.

“Just like a rifle!” he exclaimed, as he amused himself by pressing the end and ejecting the bits of lead. He went through the manual of arms with it, laughing; he did a mock bayonet thrust or two, and then aimed it at me in fun, like a child. “Pan!” he cried; “that’s the way we shoot Germans!” The contrast of his red pantaloons and blue coat with the round, innocent face and lips parted like a girl’s was absurd. Why, he was more like those doll soldiers you see at toyshops with curly hair! With his fresh pink cheeks and big brown eyes he seemed no more than sixteen years old.

In the evening we all went out on the crowded Boulevard, where, it being a fête day, they were dancing in front of the open-air band stands. It was a long time before I ceased to think of Coco as jolly, flushed, exuberant, dancing the Tango on the corner by the Sorbonne with his pretty young aunt, as excited and happy as only a lad can be who has come up from a provincial town to see the metropolis for the first time on a holiday.

That was on the 14th of July of 1914. Next day he went back to his caserne at Montauban.

In two weeks war was declared!

Coco, our own blithe Coco, would have to go to the front—oh, his aunt’s white face that day!—and Coco would be in the first line! It seemed like some hideous mistake. But already Coco, pink-cheeked, laughing, shy, his mother’s only boy, was well on his way toward the German shells and machine guns!

III

The French do nothing without a flavoring of sentiment. Rhetoric flowers in the official proclamations; it makes one laugh even to read the textbooks for soldiers, they are so strewn with fine, resounding phrases; and so, of course, it was quite impossible for Coco’s regiment to get away without one of those stirring, gesticulative speeches by the colonel.

It was at the Toulouse railway station—parents in tears. The girls gazed admiringly. Gossipy veterans of ’70, seeing themselves reincarnated in these fresh young soldiers, patronized them egregiously with advice. Coco and the other lads listened, but did not hear; they were smiling at the girls sticking bouquets in their rifle barrels.

“Look back for the last time at your homes and your loved ones,” cried the colonel, with all his badges on his breast, “and shed the tear without which our high sacrifice would not have its price. Lift up your hearts, and so forth, and so forth, my children—en avant!”

Children indeed they were, overflowing with the emotion of the south, these soldiers, and our Coco, with a gulp in his throat, seemed even more young than most. The war! How often had he heard it predicted for that year, or the next, or the next—the inevitable war that was to give France her long-hoped-for revenge. Now, it was actually here! No more blank cartridges, no more sham battles—War!

But Coco’s tears soon dried. They were a merry lot, those twenty-year-old “pioupious,” even on that tiresome trip to the front. The youngsters had the worst of it during the mobilization. They sat all that journey on rough-board temporary benches in the luggage vans. Starting and stopping, side-tracking and backing—munching the emergency rations (hard tack and canned beef), for mother’s cheese and chocolate didn’t last long—waving and yelling to the patriotic spectators along the line, it took them almost three days to reach Châlons.

At the military camp two more days were spent in concentration, exercises, and inspection. The last orders were received. Then, at five o’clock in the morning of the sixth of August, the column started for the frontier.

Coco was a private in the Tenth Company of the Twentieth Regiment of Infantry. His army corps, the Seventeenth, formed the left wing of the Fourth Army. On their left, paralleling their march, was, first, General Ruffey’s cavalry division, and beyond that the Fifth Army, under General Lanrezac. On the extreme left wing of the advance were the British. Meanwhile, marching on Lorraine and Alsace, were the Sixth and Seventh Armies. With all these columns hurrying to the front, filling all the roads, railway transportation was impossible. It was a march of some seventy miles to the frontier.

So, through the lovely forest of Argonne, the boys set out, singing and joking as they strode along. It was pleasant enough at first, a romantic adventure; but with his heavy rifle, his heavy cartridge belt and bayonet, and his musette full of food slung over his shoulder, it was not long before poor Coco began to get weary. On his back, with his knapsack, and his rolled overcoat and his tin bidon and tin gamelle, with the intrenching tool and his share of the company’s baggage, he carried fully sixty pounds. They marched on one side of the road. Along the other side automobiles whirled incessantly back and forth, motor busses filled with provisions rumbled along, dispatch bearers on motorcycles, officers on horseback—raising dust a-plenty.

Coco’s chum—his “copain”—was François Foulot, the son of a cabinetmaker in Toulouse, a big, athletic, kind-hearted chap with a bushy black pompadour. Coco had told me about him in Paris. The two boys were members of a little musical and dramatic club in Toulouse, and had been friends from childhood. You should hear Coco tell how, on that long march, François took care of him, carrying his rifle when Coco was tired, carrying even Coco’s knapsack for him, helping him grease his boots at night when Coco’s feet began to blister. François was like a big brother.

At the nightly bivouacs along the road the two boys always slept side by side; that is, when they slept at all. The excitement (and the hard ground) for the first few nights kept them wide awake, in spite of their fatigue.

“Mon Dieu, how will this all end?” they asked each other. Coco didn’t know, François didn’t know; but neither thought the war could possibly last more than a few months.

IV

Yet there was a terrible earnestness about it all that sobered them. There was something still more terribly earnest ahead! Every automobile that whizzed past them, coming in hot haste from the front, announced it. Every galloping supply wagon, every crouching motorcyclist in uniform flashing by told the same frantic story: “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! The Germans are almost here! France is in danger!”

On those first nights, when Coco’s turn came to stand on sentry duty by the lonely corner of a wood, his eyes strained into the darkness, listening for every sound, the sight of a bush waving in the wind often brought his gun to his shoulder with a quick, excited “Halte-là!”

For Coco, sensitive, earnest, and not a little fearful, was in a high nervous tension. Already the Germans were fighting in Belgium—the killing had commenced. From one of the villages they passed the boy wrote a brave little letter to his mother on a post card: “If anything should happen ... well, one knows one’s duty, and God will do the rest. Lovingly, Coco.”

On, on, through the hilly forests of Argonne they marched, making about twenty-five miles a day. And on that dusty march food was scarce. Poor Coco’s feet, despite the tallow in his socks, were too sore for him to chase chickens, but François succeeded in capturing seven. Not much, however, when their necks were wrung, for a company of 250 men. Even the bread began to run out. But on they went, singing by day and shivering by night—on, on toward Belgium. Coco says that their chief worry was lest they shouldn’t find enough straw to sleep on, or at least enough to tie up their feet in bundles to keep them warm.

At Mouzon they crossed the Meuse, and here Coco slept more comfortably than he had for a week, on a sack full of straw at a farm. After a day’s wait for orders—and no meat even here—they set out again, passed through Carignan, and soon reached the last village in France—Florenville. “Don’t send me any more French money,” Coco here wrote to his mother. “It won’t be any use to me now!” Poor Coco! How little did he know how soon he was to return!

V

On the morning of August 21 they crossed the boundary. Hurrahs from the men—they were going forward to conquer! They were going to deliver this brave little country from the barbaric invader who had laid it waste. Coco was thrilled with the nobility of their mission. “Vive la France!” he shouted with all the rest; but alas, the approaching thunderstorm soon damped his spirits. The rain poured down in torrents, down the back of his neck and into his shoes. Coming to a halt, they bivouacked in a wide field. It thundered and it lightened. Soaked and cheerless, the regiment tried to sleep. The fires wouldn’t burn. One couldn’t even smoke a cigarette. As Coco turned on his side the water oozed under him sloshily.

He dozed off, however, after a while, only to be awakened by a punch in the ribs. “Listen!” François was saying. “What’s that?”

“Thunder, of course!” Coco, irritated, rolled over again, opened his eyes after a while, and saw François still sitting up, alert.

“That’s not thunder!” he exclaimed. “Listen! it’s cannonading!”

Coco sat up now quickly enough. Others woke up to swear at them—and then they listened, too.

“Look!” cried François. Galloping down the road came a dispatch rider. He halted, was challenged by the sentry, and turned in at the colonel’s headquarters. Then he was off again, splattering, clattering through the mud. Then a bugle call: “Fall in!” All over the field the wet men jumped up, slung on their belts, grabbed their rifles and formed dismally in the rain. As they stood waiting, word ran down the column—François passed it to Coco—“The enemy!” An ammunition wagon drove up—boxes of cartridges were distributed. “Load!” ordered the captains. The ranks were fairly buzzing now, everyone asking questions, nobody answering. A whistle blew. “Forward, march!” Coco had no thought of the rain now! The guns grew louder, but still no enemy was visible. The cannonading slackened, grew faint, thundered off in another direction, died, began again far away. But the rumbling was always ahead—the regiment was marching nearer and nearer the fighting. And so on to Bertrix, fifteen miles from the frontier. Coco rather liked Bertrix. Bertrix rather more than liked Coco. The pretty little Luxemburg town welcomed him and all the other young “piou-pious” as its saviors. Nothing was too good for the French soldier boys who had come to deliver them from the Huns. What do you want—cigarettes? beer? bacon? It was quite a jolly affair, with the streets full of smiling women and young girls smiling too, bringing fruit and eggs and preserves, and good, fresh butter.

Coco was already a hero—and, after eight days without meat, that bacon was certainly good! How they all laughed and chattered! But the old men stood apart and listened anxiously; for, through all that rejoicing there came steadily the distant sound of guns. Surely the Germans were coming nearer! If they ever got to Bertrix—The old men shook their heads with foreboding.

Again the whistle blew—Forward! The enemy was only a few miles away now; it was getting exciting. The boys, proud, patriotic, confident, started “La Marseillaise” and the song was taken up by the whole column—“Marchons! Marchons!” they sang—but Coco was singing, he admits, to keep up his courage, as he tramped on through the mud to be shot at. He tried to keep in mind that he was marching on gloriously to fight for his country; but he couldn’t help thinking of what he had heard of those terrible machine guns at Liége and Namur.

Halt! The captain whipped out his field glasses—everybody gazed eagerly ahead. There it was, there! coming steadily nearer, flying low—a German aeroplane—a “Taube” reconnoitering. There was a quick order. As the whir of the motor grew nearer the lieutenant of Coco’s platoon pointed. “Aim!” Fifteen rifles were thrown up, covering the monoplane. “Steady, now, men—wait till she comes near enough—now, Fire!”

Coco fired, jammed down the lever of his gun, shot again, again. Almost over their heads the flyer seemed to stop, turned, volplaned swiftly down—it was too good to be true—swept lower in a wide curve. Then men, shouting, ran for it as it swooped into the field beside the road. Coco ran for his first sight of a German.

Two officers in khaki, limp and pale, were strapped to the seats. One was unconscious, with a red hole in his neck. The other painfully unfastened his strap, and came forward, staggering. He saluted the captain stiffly, a queer smile on his blond German face. Coco heard him say in perfect French:

“I am badly wounded, monsieur. This is my last trip, I’m afraid. Ah, well; you are going to beat us in the end, no doubt. With all your allies there’s little hope for us. But you’ll have to shed a good deal of blood before you win!” Then he suddenly collapsed. Coco saw him fall on the ground in a faint.

“It gave me a mighty queer feeling,” Coco told me, “to look at that dark spot of blood gradually growing bigger and bigger over that officer’s breast. I remember that I wondered if it had been my rifle ball that had wounded him. And that other German, too—I wondered if I had already killed a man. If I had, why wasn’t it murder? What was the difference between war and murder, anyway? Of course these barbarians were invading my country, but—yes, it was my duty to protect France, but—well, I had to give it up. You know there are priests fighting in the ranks, too, in this war, m’sieur! They must know. It’s all right, I suppose—and yet there is always that ‘but’ when you see a thing like that. Well, it was too exciting then for much philosophy. You see, the cannons were getting louder all the time, and the whistle blew and we marched on again. But somehow we didn’t feel much like singing any more!”

Near rising ground they halted. The officers hurried forward, and with field glasses inspected the country ahead; then called the column on. Now they were actually in the danger zone—a wide expanse of fields, dotted with farms here and there, and across, a mile away, were woods, dark, sinister. It was a sunny afternoon; the odor of the damp, warm earth was clean and pungent. There were wide stretches of yellow stubble fields, where the wheat had been lately cut. Some sheaves were still standing, as if the war had interrupted the harvest, half done.

As they advanced cautiously the cannonading ceased. Somehow to Coco the silence was more dreadful even than that incessant muffled reverberation. But those woods yonder—what dangers were they hiding? Every eye was strained in that direction.

Deploying to the left of the road, Coco’s company made for a whitewashed farmhouse half a mile away, across the fields. The other companies fanned out to either side.

No one seemed to know just what was going to happen. Coco’s lieutenant, a jolly, talkative young fellow who had always used to keep his platoon roaring at his jokes, was now unwontedly serious and silent. Coco watched him. He marched on with his field glasses held constantly to his eyes, tripping over roots and bushes and stones and swearing as he went.

On and on toward that dark, mysterious wood through beet fields, across ditches, over hedges they went, till they came to a cross-road leading into the farm. Here they halted.

Coco, nervous, apprehensive, jumped at hearing his name called out. “Cucurou! Bracques! Lemaitre! Go forward and reconnoiter! Careful, now, men!”

VI

Coco wondered why they had to call on him; but, well, it had to be done, his duty, and he did it. With a man on either side of him he walked forward gingerly through a field where cows were grazing, nearer and nearer that horrible wood. He didn’t dare look at the ground; as he stumbled on his eyes never left that wood, so deathly still and mysterious. Were there Germans hidden in those trees? It was his duty to find out. Bracques and Lemaitre didn’t falter; so Coco didn’t falter. He kept right on, nearer and nearer. His one idea was the importance of first seeing the enemy.

Then, suddenly, he heard a high, sharp whistling through the air, and the bullet spattered the earth viciously in front of him. A report cracked lazily out from the trees. Another whistle, another, and the pattering grew nearer. Coco dropped flat on the ground, and crawled cautiously up to a big rock and looked over the top, watching. Still nothing was visible. The balls came faster now; but he crawled warily forward, dragging himself along the ground a little further.

Lemaitre yelled, “Come on back! we’ve drawn their fire—that’s enough,” and Coco, with his heart thumping, was glad enough to return, running for all he was worth till he had reached his company. The men were fretful and restless with excitement, nervous, exclamatory. With a high, snoring drone, a German shell came driving through the air—a boom from the woods—then a sudden, terrifying crash as of thunder let loose as it burst in the rear. Coco turned to see a volcano of black smoke and earth behind him. “Lie down!” shouted the officers, and the men only too willingly dropped flat in the road. “At first,” said Coco, “the men lay looking up into the air trying to see the shells—imagining that they really could! But when the things dropped closer, they began to dodge—as if one could escape them that way!” More shells came, and more, buzzing through the air in a screeching crescendo, bursting with appalling smashes nearer and nearer the line. Then a whistle blew. Forward! All along the front men jumped up, ran ahead, dropped, then rose and ran further in a long, irregular skirmish line, toward that vicious wood. As they advanced, the cannonading burst into a double, triple fury, and the harsh barking of machine guns began—and never once stopped. A hundred yards from the trees the whistle blew again to halt, and then the din grew unbearable, a crashing thunder with shells bursting here, there, in front, behind, in continual explosion. Swept by that murderous tornado, they had to lie down and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait....

A scream of agony! Coco saw on his left a geyser of débris—clods of earth, stones, dust, and smoke, and two men thrown bodily upward. Another crash—nearer—he saw men’s heads and torn-off limbs flying past him. Coco himself, when he rose on one knee to fire (for he was emptying his rifle madly into the wood now), was thrown down again and again by the concussion of the air. He saw sudden upheavals appear—dirt, maimed bodies, rocks, knapsacks, rifles, thrown every way—and a hole would be left big enough for half a dozen men to take refuge in. Once he himself was buried up to his waist with flying dirt, his eyes were filled with dust and he could hardly breathe—the noxious fumes of the lyddite choked him. And always in his ears the incessant crash, bang, crash of the devastating, bursting shells till he couldn’t think. “Lie down! Lie down!” the officers shouted continually, but the men were now frenzied with the slaughter; they were on their knees, on their feet, shooting insanely into that secret, hellish wood, screaming curses.

And, all the time, where was the enemy? Nobody knew. Oh, if it had only come to a reckless charge against no matter what force, it would at least have been a chance for revenge; they would have gone forward like mad dogs. But instead, they had to wait—wait—wait to be killed! Coco saw his friends wounded one by one. Coco said: “Each man when he was hit would throw his arms up over his head—always, it was that same gesture—and then he would fall, bleeding.”

VII

The nerve-racking, deafening din went on and on without a respite. Bracques was hit in the head—he was a living, breathing horror, his whole jaw gone—one hand plucking at his coat. He lay grotesquely uncomfortable on his back, rolling this way and rolling that way on his knapsack and his tin gamelle and the dozen other accouterments he couldn’t get rid of. A dozen lads he had gone to school with in Toulouse were screaming. One called for his mother again and again, “Maman! Maman! Maman!” Most of the wounded lay still in their blood, or moaned and writhed in their agony. On Coco’s left, he said, was a body without a head. Coco, he confessed, thought more than once of running. What was the use of staying only to be butchered? They could do no good that way. But still the regiment held its place; yes, but the regiment was getting strangely thin. It could not last long.

Coco looked round for François, who should have been beside him. There he was, close by, grinning. He called out something to keep up Coco’s courage, but in that inferno Coco couldn’t hear a word. Then, instantly, there was a gigantic explosion; and when Coco rose again, he looked—he grew numb. There was François on his back—with both legs queerly bent in an impossible position. With a sickening wave of nausea Coco saw that both the boy’s legs were shockingly crushed, all but torn off, and his red pantaloons were soaking in blood. François’s face was horrible now; his eyes were shining wildly. Coco, shrinking with horror, managed to crawl toward him....

In the hospital at Toulouse, when Coco told me this, lying in his cot, he shrank convulsively into himself with horror, just as he must have recoiled, I fancy, that day. He wouldn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed on the window. Coco told me then that François’s legs were torn “quite off”—he was sure of it; but I imagine that, in his agony of horror, Coco must have been mistaken, or François would have bled to death very quickly. Coco says he lived for nearly three-quarters of an hour. At any rate, his chum was done for, and suffering torments unspeakable.

“He just looked at me and begged me to kill him,” said Coco, his eyes still on the window. “He said”—Coco could hardly speak now—“he said if—I was his friend—I’d finish him—so he wouldn’t suffer. There was such a terrible noise of the shells bursting that I couldn’t quite hear at first— I had to hold my head close to get what he said.... He said—if he had helped me, ever—now was my chance to be his friend ... and put him out of his misery....”

We were silent for a while. I was looking at him, getting up my courage to ask a question. Finally I dared. I simply had to ask it:

“Did you do it, Coco?”

The tears poured into Coco’s eyes now. He shook his head slowly, without a word.

“Do you regret not having—done what he wanted, Coco?”

Coco said simply, “I don’t know. I would have wanted to die quickly. Perhaps as his friend I ought to have done it. But I am a good Catholic, you know, m’sieur; and I was taught that it is a sin to take human life.” Quite naturally he added: “And yet I suppose I have killed a lot of Germans.” He shook his head wearily. “I can’t understand it. I must leave it for the church to decide. I did the best I could....”

VIII

At last he turned and looked at me with an expression that made me feel guilty enough at having asked. “But that isn’t all, m’sieur; I haven’t told you the worst part yet. Last week his father—François’s father—came here to see me. He asked me if I knew anything about François—how he died. What could I say? Of course I couldn’t tell him. I saw him fall—that’s all I said. And I was glad, then, that I hadn’t done it.... No, I can’t talk about it any more, m’sieur. Don’t ask me to, please!”

IX

For two hours the Twentieth Regiment endured the storm of shell. To advance a regiment of infantry like that without artillery support was surely an incredible piece of criminal stupidity. Some one had blundered. But there were many blunders in those early days of the campaign, and the truth hasn’t all come out even yet.

One interesting fact, however, did come out; although Coco didn’t hear of it for several days. It was a piece of sublime sentimentality impossible in any other than a French army; quite consistent with the character of the romantic, high-spirited colonel who had orated so grandiloquently at the Toulouse railway station. The night before the battle of Bertrix, the colonel had done a strange thing; he had, in the presence of his staff, burned the regimental colors. The enemy was in countless force against him. His Gallic sense of honor, when he was ordered to attack an impregnable position, told him that there was only one thing to do. He must go forward with his men, and die—but the flag must not be captured.

And so, go forward and die he did, that gallant old man. As Coco lay, under that August sun, in the rain of bursting shells, he heard a bugle ring out on the left flank. Four companies rose to their feet and charged that murderous wood. At their head the colonel ran, waving his sword—yes, just like the battle pictures, Coco swears—ran for a few hundred yards toward his inevitable death, and dropped—with his honor unsullied. Behind him his men dropped, too, in appalling numbers—dropped singly and in bunches till they faltered, stopped, then fell back.

At this, the whistles blew at last for the general retreat.

It was high time; for, at the sight of this destruction all over the field, men had already begun to jump up and run toward the rear. Now they all ran—everybody ran—with the shells and shrapnel chasing them. They threw away their knapsacks, they threw away their guns, they ran screaming and crying like children.

Coco threw away his knapsack and musette, too, but kept his rifle as he ran, making for a shelter in the woods on the other side of the road. “You’ve no idea how much worse they were, those shells; when I had turned my back I expected to be hit every moment. My spine fairly cringed.” The remnants of the colonels four companies were pulled together and attempted to cover the retreat. But the regiment had stampeded. The officers shouted and swore, they struck men with their swords, some were even shot, but nothing could stop the rout.

X

It was more than a rout, it was a panic. Into the wood the shells followed them—there seemed to be no escape. Every moment they expected to see the uhlans charging them down. Dodging this way, that way, deafened, shouting over here—over there—the shells dropping to right, to left, as if from the clouds, the men, breathless, exhausted, poured out upon a road, to stagger back almost run over by a clattering battery of guns galloping, too late, galloping toward the firing line. They stopped to pant, and rest; and then ran on.

In half an hour they were out of the range of the German artillery, and they halted exhausted, shamefaced, sick with terror and despair. The officers, too heartbroken even to swear at them, reformed their men with difficulty, and, herding them like frightened sheep, fell back in something like order till they came upon a line of trenches that had been occupied by the Germans.

The pits were filled instantly, and the men were beginning to regain their calmness and courage, when from a near-by hill the terrifying cannonade recommenced. The butchery recommenced—the explosions, and the screams.

Out of the trenches came all that were left alive, and there was no stopping the army now, till, hurrying all night long without food and rest, demoralized, it found its way back to Mouzon. Here the Seventeenth Corps was pulled together for a hasty review. The roll call showed that in Coco’s regiment there were 1,443 dead, wounded, or missing—fully one-third of its strength gone.

The men were in a fury of disappointment and rage against the generals who had been responsible for the massacre. Where was the artillery? Where were the stretcher bearers? Where were the ambulances and surgeons? Not one did Coco see during the battle, after the battle—nor even during that whole terrible retreat.

And it wasn’t at Mouzon alone that there was wondering, complaining, raging at the failure of the campaign. On the left wing the British expeditionary force, hot with rage at not being supported by General Percin, was falling back from defeat at Mons to pursuit at Bavay—and it was not yet out of danger. On the right, the Fifteenth Corps (fat cowards of the Midi) had turned tail and run in Lorraine. Oh, there was something rotten somewhere. Paris was wild. The Government was shuffled, and the President dealt out a new hand—his high trump was Millerand, new Minister of War, but his right bower was Joffre, commander in chief, of whom all the world was soon to hear. To Coco at Mouzon, the news came that the Fourth Army was to be commanded by General de Langle de Carry. Little did Coco care who commanded it. Much more important than that was that he would get one night’s good sleep on a sack of straw.

By this time the boy had begun to realize what war meant. That night he wrote to his aunt: “I have received my baptism of fire, but I am unhurt. It was terrible. Don’t be frightened, and be sure and write to my mother that you have had good news from me.” He signed the post card for the first time “Georges.” Coco had begun to be a man.

If it has ever been your lot to go without having your clothes off for two weeks—to march through dust and mud in them, sleep in them, fight in them, run in them—then you’ll understand how Georges Cucurou longed for a swim in the river Meuse—to bathe his poor, aching blistered feet. But no—up and out again at six o’clock next morning! Off on the road toward Belgium again. A counter-attack. All day and all night they marched.

XI

There was no singing, this time. The Twentieth was smarting with the shame of its defeat; it was savage for revenge; but, held in reserve behind the battle line, it had to wait listening to the booming cannon and the crackle of machine guns for an impatient hour—then they were ordered back to Mouzon.

At Mouzon, news of a fresh defeat awaited them. The town was now distraught, terror-stricken by the ever-nearing, ever-increasing thunder of the German cannonade. When Georges arrived at midnight, almost every house was lighted. The frenzied inhabitants were packing up or hiding their belongings, ready to fly. The “Bosches” were coming!

At dawn, Georges, sleeping by the road-side, was awakened to see a pathetic procession of refugees hurrying away to safety. Pathetic? It was tragic, comic, grotesque, sublime! Everyone was dressed in his best clothes; everyone carried bundles, carried hens, carried trunks, carried the Lord knows what—and the memories of 1870 to boot! Wagon after wagon passed, piled high with furniture, bags, boxes, baskets, and provisions, with women and children atop, and cows tied on behind. Whole families—three generations—trudged on foot, men and women and children, children, children, children, and weeping old grandmothers trundled along in wheelbarrows.

XII

It was a bitter sight for Georges, burning to defend his country. What was the French army good for, anyway, if it couldn’t protect this pretty, innocent little town, so charmingly scattered over the wooded heights of the Meuse? But Mouzon was doomed. Already the sappers with wires and sticks of melinite were blowing up the picturesque old stone bridge.

All next day Georges’s regiment, hidden in the woods, watched the shelling of the town; all next night, hungry, soaked with rain, enraged, they saw it burn, house by house, till at last the flames licked up the belfry of the church. That was the way they defended Mouzon.

Another day; another night of drenching rain in those wretched sopping woods, while the German guns boomed all about them. Georges and two other boys succeeded in building a dirty little shelter of branches covered with wet straw, and they crawled underneath. Water-soaked, the clumsy thing collapsed on top of them in the middle of the night; but, heavy with soldiers’ sleep, it took more than that to wake them. In the morning, however, a shell bursting only a few yards away did succeed in bringing them stumbling out from under the soggy mass—to find to their amazement that their regiment had already departed!

XIII

The shells began to fall thicker and faster; the Germans were indubitably near at hand. But where the devil was the regiment? There was no knowing, except that it was pretty sure to be getting away from those harrying shells. Chilled, the boys ran through the dripping woods till they came to a clearing. Here, looking down, they saw the Germans fording the Meuse! But not without trouble; a French battery had got their range, and was playing red havoc with them, slinging shell after shell of well-aimed shrapnel. By dozens they melted away under the fire, and the water was full of bobbing corpses drifting downstream.

“We just burst out laughing,” said Georges. “We couldn’t help it. Not that it was so funny to see men killed like that by the hundreds, but, after all we had gone through—after the ghastly way we had been butchered at Bertrix, it really did me good to see those ‘Bosches’ suffering themselves at last!”

He didn’t laugh long. With the German reckless sacrifice of life, column after column was thrown into the river, until more and more got across. It was time for the boys to be moving now, and they set out toward the westward, tramped all day, eating nothing but the raw beets they dug up in the fields, and finally found the Seventeenth Corps at Raucourt.

They were just in time to join their regiment as it was ordered forward seven more miles for a new engagement. There, protected by the French batteries, they bivouacked. Glad enough was Georges of a chance to sleep. No fear of the coming battle could keep him awake by this time.

At dawn, while the vigilant searchlights were still playing across the opposite hillside, the French guns started firing, and, without breakfast, Georges’s battalion was ordered forward. In half an hour the enemy was discovered half a mile away. In the valley between opposite hills the shells were screeching now over their heads—from the French “75’s” the sound of the whizzing projectiles came high and dry like buzz saws—they burst with the awful battering of near-by thunder. The German “marmites” snorted through the air, and exploded with a deeper, more terrible crash. The regiment halted, and was deployed in four ranks—the first two lying on the ground, the third and fourth kneeling.

The men were mostly quite cool, but Georges confessed that he himself had hard work controlling his nerves while he waited for that attack. In ten minutes the enemy appeared from behind rising ground and came on—a long, gray-black line of thousands and thousands of men, a thick line, swarming, multitudinous, nearer and nearer.

“Load!” coolly commanded the captains; “500 meters. Ready, now—fire!” Their salvo rang out. The heavy rows of Germans seemed to hesitate for a moment; but no, they were only stopping to fire. There came a sudden whistling in the air all about and the bullets flew—“for a terribly long minute,” as Georges described it—then the enemy came on again, and kept on coming, in a broad, thick wave, company after company. And only a battalion of four companies to resist them! Georges fired without aiming. What was the use of aiming at that horde of men? The boys jumped to their feet, fired again and again, and then, as their comrades dropped about them everywhere, they began to retreat, some picking up the wounded as they went. At first they withdrew in order, turning back to fire another volley; but when the Germans fixed their bayonets and came at them on the double-quick, the French broke, and ran for it, helter-skelter, this way and that, in a second rout, even worse than the first.

Georges ran with the rest, and the shrapnel followed him, killing men on either hand, in front, behind. Then, over the rise, came the uhlans, yelling, galloping in to cut them up. Looking back, Georges saw the cavalry sabering and lancing, and he ran like a deer for his life, ran up the hillside, ran into the woods. He ran for at least a mile with the thunder of the cannon still in his ears. When, finally, he stopped to take breath, it was only a fragment of his company that he found near him—some ten or eleven men, among them a sergeant. Where were the others? Nobody knew. The regiment, demoralized, had split up into numberless terrified detachments, and wandered all over the countryside. Such was the inglorious battle of Raucourt. Of the week following Georges could give no consecutive account. He remembers only that he and the others tramped and tramped for miles inquiring of peasants, gendarmes, of the stragglers, everyone, everywhere, the whereabouts of the Twentieth Regiment. They climbed over hills, they rested in little deserted villages where every house was gutted of furniture, doors open, rooms littered, and here and there a starved cat or two, lean and wild. The roads were alive with refugees, French and Belgian, all plodding mournfully toward the south, dreary processions of wagons and cattle and weeping women, children, and stony-eyed, sulky men. No, nobody had seen the Twentieth Regiment.

They tramped from Villers to Malmy, and, apparently (Georges isn’t quite sure where they did go), from Malmy to Maire. At Le Vivier, or perhaps it was Mont Dieu, they found an infantry regiment, but it was not their own. The Twentieth should be down Vouziers way, said the officers. So they trudged on.

More and more stray men had joined Georges’s party. Few of them had knapsacks, some didn’t even have guns. Hats of all kinds; costumes—promiscuous but all disheveled. They were, by this time, a villainously whiskered lot—ragged, dirty, weary, famished, sullen, desperate—without discipline, without leaders. Occasionally, in some ransacked village they found stale bread or vegetables that they cooked in the woods; whatever else they ate was begged from the few frightened peasants that still remained on their farms.

There was one village, however, that Georges did remember, and that was Les Alleux. There he slept in an actual bed. How Les Alleux happened to be abandoned with all its houses undisturbed—with the clocks still going and the furniture in place, even the beds made up—Georges doesn’t know. Some sudden alarm had evidently caused the inhabitants to fly at a moment’s notice. What mainly interested him was that they had left their barnyards full of poultry.

Les Alleux was almost gay. There were some hundred soldiers collected there, now; all tatterdemalion stragglers from the rout, making the most of their unexpected good luck. There was almost everything to eat except bread. Georges fairly gorged himself on hot roast chicken and cheese, made merry with the rabble of soldiery, sang, smoked, and then slept for twelve solid hours, with his boots off on a delectable feather bed and sheets. And, for once, without the din of cannon in his ears.

This, however, was hardly the way to save his country. Georges’s conscience and the booming of German guns awoke him to his duty next morning. The mob scattered, fleeing south in a hurry. Georges’s party, he found when they started, had grown smaller. “I don’t know whether or not I ought to mention this detail,” he told me, “but at least it will show that I wasn’t quite so bad as the rest. But I think some of the boys found citizens clothes in the houses there at Les Alleux, and got away in them. At any rate, they didn’t come along with us.”

His Odyssey ended at a village called Pauvres on the highroad between Rethel and Vouziers. Here they found what was left of the Twentieth Regiment, and Georges was welcomed like one from the dead. All received new rifles and accoutrements, and the regiment was reorganized. Of its three battalions there remained hardly enough to form two—a third was made up of waifs and strays from other divisions.

XIV

The Twentieth Regiment now contained a sad and sorry lot of men, weary, discouraged, shamefaced, and sullen at their double defeat. But when they heard that the army was to retreat still further, and abandon all this rich, flourishing northern country to the invaders without a blow—why, it was incredible! What was the matter? Where were their reënforcements? Only fifteen days ago they had been marching enthusiastically up through the lovely forest of Argonne. Now they were going to retreat into Champagne. But they were too busy with preparations to spend much time sulking. The officers declared that they would lead their men to victory yet. So the retreat commenced to the booming accompaniment of the threatening German artillery.

Little did Georges know of cool old General Joffre and his desperate plans. Little did he imagine that the endless falling back, falling back, falling back through Champagne was to go down into history as a masterpiece of Fabian strategy. All he understood of that campaign was—day after day of retreating along the hard white roads, then into the fields and digging trenches; night after night standing ready in those clayey shoulder-deep holes, waiting for an attack, while the first line of the rear guard fought constantly with the enemy. So they did their best to hold back the flood of invaders. So they struggled with the booming cannon ever following them. It was hard, sour work! The men, exhausted with the digging and the marching and the watching, with their few hours’ sleep constantly interrupted by alarms, trudged hopelessly southward, too glum to talk. Constantly the officers encouraged them—“Just to that hill there, men! Come on!” but it took more than their optimism to restore the courage of the troops. Man after man stopped, absolutely incapable of going further, and slumped down by the side of the road only to be forced on, kicked on again by the corps of gendarmes which followed the march. If the column halted for a minute, half the men fell instantly asleep as they stood.

The minute the trenches were dug they had to prepare to receive the enemy. Mighty little food these days, and no fresh meat. Even water was scarce, as the men were forbidden to drink of springs till they had been inspected. Georges’s regiment was, for the most part of the retreat, held in the second line of the rear guard, and he was, therefore, in but one actual engagement. In the general campaign it was called, probably, only “a sharp skirmish.” But, to Georges, it was one of those crises when life says: “Come! Move up a notch!”

“I was on sentry duty at the end of the trench where the company was sleeping,” said Georges. “On Tuesday, the 2nd of September it was, near Souain. I knew everyone’s life depended on me, and it was a terrible strain. You know the enemy was always right on our heels, night and day. M’sieu, I was just all eyes, searching everywhere through the dark. It must have been about two in the morning, when I thought I saw something moving on the opposite hillside. At first I wasn’t quite sure. I had to pull my eyes away deliberately, and rest them on something else—you know how your eyes get when you stare too hard and too long; but then, when I looked again quickly, I was sure. Yes, the ‘Bosches’ were coming! It was horrible. I saw them creeping from one bush to another like snakes.

“I kicked the sergeant who was snoring at my feet and pointed. Instantly all our men were quietly awakened. My lieutenant told me to stay where I was and pretend not to see anything; but to choose my man and be ready to fire. Yes, monsieur; it was a ticklish job; I felt rather queer, I confess. I knew that I would be the very first one to be shot at. That was about the longest fifteen minutes I ever spent.

“Well, we let them crawl up, crawl up, to within a hundred meters and then just as they all jumped to their feet, the lieutenant shouted: ‘Fire at will!’ I was ready for the foremost man, and I let him have it right through the forehead. Here is his helmet, monsieur; see that hole?”

In the hospital at Toulouse, while I listened to his story, he held up a black helmet, trimmed with brass—with a spiked top. It had never left him since that day.

Yes, I saw that hole—the hole where he had killed his man. But, when I saw him look at that German helmet, there was an expression on his face that baffled me. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that Coco wasn’t there—Coco, with the lead pencil! No, this was a new person now on that bed in front of me. It was Georges Cucurou—and he would never be a boy again!

XV

During that terrible retreat, Georges, had been a part of a working, fighting machine, tried to his utmost in mind and body. He had been hammered, hammered into shape. Hunger and fatigue had hardened him. Every day his nerves had been getting more tough and strong. If his duty consisted of retreating, digging, sleeping three or four hours a day, going without meat and often Without water or wine, he could do it.

On a post card, scrawled in haste from somewhere (no postmark, no date, no indication of any locality being permitted), he wrote to his aunt:

Dear Aunt: If we keep on retreating like this, we may perhaps get to Paris. I should be very glad to see you, of course, but I hope not. There must soon be an end of all this digging and digging, and victory will be ours. I am afraid you wouldn’t recognize your Georges.

Indeed, she wouldn’t have recognized him, but, not only because for weeks he had the dirt caked in his hands and hair and ears, and his uniform hung on him in rags, but partly too because already in his face there was beginning to show something more unlike the old Coco we had known than all that change in his outward self could make him. He had learned patience, perseverance, caution, confidence in his officers, and faith in the ultimate victory. He was uplifted by that great wave of high idealism that was transforming France.

Why that steady retreat, further and further south? Georges and Georges’s company, now that they were tempered by experience, now that they were raging to attack, couldn’t understand. But still they retreated and retreated. Back to Suippes they came.

It was a queer entrance that regiment made into Suippes. On the road, they had overtaken a troop of refugees who, utterly exhausted, could travel no further. The peasants had a panic of alarm at sight of the column, thinking that the Germans were already upon them. It was hard work reassuring them; and it ended in a comedy, the soldiers taking a hand at the migration. Old women were mounted in the handcarts they had been trying to pull and were given a ride into town. Soldiers unharnessed the donkeys and put the children on their backs. They pushed at the wagons, they helped along the graybeards, they carried babies in their arms. Georges, I think, must have begun to realize that he had grown up when he, a veteran now, marched into Suippes, carrying a big basket for a lad of fifteen who looked up to his soldier protector admiringly, and called him “M’sieu.”

No Frenchman will ever forget that dreadful first week of September, 1914. Every day the Germans grew nearer Paris, every day their cowardly aeroplanes sailed over the capital and dropped their futile threats. What was the French army doing? We hoped they were merely luring the enemy toward the forts of Paris where the big guns could smash them. But could the army hold the enemy back, even with that assistance? Paris was all nervous apprehension. Then that astounding news—the German army, almost within striking distance, was swerving to the southeast! What did it mean?

To Georges Cucurou, retreating before those hammering, hammering guns, that quick change in direction was quite as mysterious. From Suippes his regiment, without stopping to entrench now, marching day and night, instead of keeping on toward Paris, swung sharply to the east, along the road to Ste. Menehould. Then, as suddenly, they turned back again into Châlons.

Heavy cannonading was coming now from almost every direction except the south. Every man was tense with excitement—battle was in the air—surely something was going to happen, must happen! But further and further south they marched; and along the roads, now, the automobiles were flying like mad, night and day, some with officers, some flying the Red Cross flag. Over their heads there were French aeroplanes, every day the sky was never quite free of them. Georges caught his first sight of a British soldier—a khaki-clad dispatch rider on a motorcycle flying past, and another. They passed hundreds of Paris autobusses at the Division Headquarters, a long, long line that filled the village street at Sompuis, and ambulances, and cycle companies, and farriers’ wagons, the portable forges glowing red in the evening darkness. Georges recognized the Senegalese spahis in red flowing robes, he saw the Turcos from Morocco—big children they were, grinning black faces with shiny white teeth. A wagon flew past, with men inside feeding out telephone wire, hooking it with long poles into the ditch, or over bushes, out of the way, as they galloped on. Best of all, he began to get fresh meat for dinner, from the portable kitchens that hurried from company to company along the road. But always, never stopping, night or day, more exciting than all the rest, never forgotten, no matter what happened, in the north, growing ever nearer—the steady rumbling thunder of the German guns.

XVI

The camp of Mailly was a busy place. At the aeroplane sheds the biplanes and Blériots were constantly going and coming, circling in the air, or making ready in long rows upon the level field. The vast plain was filled with troops of all sorts in seemingly inextricable confusion: chasseurs, on horseback, in pale blue tunics, the Alpine chasseurs, with drooping blue berets on their heads, and leggings; cuirassiers with their breastplates and long horsehair plumes, and zouaves with embroidered jackets and baggy red trousers. The Twentieth Regiment, tattered and tired, with many heads bandaged and many with feet through their shoes, dusty, hollow-eyed, marched past, not yet too despairing, as fresh troops greeted them, to cry in answer “Vive la France!” They were not boys now, they were soldiers tempered in the crucible of war. And among them marched Georges Cucurou, with a Prussian helmet tied to his knapsack with a shoestring—a Prussian helmet with a hole through its brass front!

Already rumors were flying fast from column to column. Why this concentration of troops? Why this wide circle swung around the camp of Mailly? Mon Dieu! could it be that they were to retreat no longer? That, at last, they were to make a stand? A hope like a gaining fire sprang up and swept from man to man.

It was early in the morning of Sunday, September 6, that on the heights south of Mailly the regiment was assembled for review. To the accompaniment of an incessant, raging bombardment from the German cannon, the colonel read aloud this message from General Joffre, Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces:

Children of France, the hour of the great battle has arrived! Lift up your hearts! If you wish your Country everlasting honor, let every man die at his post, if necessary, rather than surrender another inch of ground, and the victory will be ours.

It was not Gallic sentimentality now. It was the voice of a leader who wasted no words.

There was a shout of rejoicing—“Vive la France!” Emotion swept the ranks and men wept without shame. The tremendous suggestion put into those thousands of minds had a terrible potency. Georges said that morning he felt as if he were intoxicated; he grew suddenly like a giant. It seemed as if nothing on earth could possibly resist them, now.

Bread and biscuits were handed out and the Twentieth Regiment was hurried to a wood two miles away. Already they had begun to move northward. But again it was their fate to be held in reserve, while the brunt of the attack was given to other troops. The Twentieth was held in the woods all day, all night, while the shells rained in from every direction. Most fell in front or behind, but occasionally a “marmite” would hit the column with devastating fury, and send its mutilated victims flying. There was nothing for it, however, but to stay and stay on, till the last man was killed if need were. Whatever happened, the Germans must not get by!

At dawn, they advanced to the edge of the woods; but, the instant they emerged into the fields, shells and shrapnel poured on them in a torrent. So they held their post. Monday passed without their stirring from those woods. No commissary wagons came with food—nothing could live in the open. They munched their emergency rations, dry biscuits. Monday night, Tuesday, Tuesday night, and still they stayed. A dispatch rider, wounded in the arm, brought orders for them to hold hard and never flinch.

Nothing to eat now but grains of coffee. The water was gone from their canteens, long ago; but the men stretched out their overcoats in the rain, and drank the pools of water as fast as they collected. And, always, night and day, the thunder of the German guns about them. The din was so terrific that the men had fairly to shout to each other—they were almost deaf.