THE WAR,—MADAME

PAUL G£RALDY

The Second Instalment of the Narrative of a French Soldier's Visit to Paris

CORPORAL MAURICE VERNIER, on twentyfour hours' leave from the trenches, has lunched in Paris where now he is drinking his afternoon tea, and where he will spend only a few more hours before returning to the front. Already he has called on Fabienne, and found her feminine frivolity anything but charming, in these changed times. Now he is explaining to a sympathetic friend, the mother of one of his own comrades, just what war is,—not the newspaper correspondents' war, but the war of the soldiers themselves.

MADAME BAUMER has straightened her thin shoulders and commences again: "Yes, it is too much for me sometimes, and drives me frantic. If you knew how frightful it is, all this routine of a house that runs on just exactly the same—and despite the war. I have nightmares occasionally. I see cavalry charging. . And when I awake here I am in Paris, and there is my bath waiting for me, and breakfast, and my dresses, and the letters that people write who are tired of hoping and calculating and predicting and have gone back to talking about themselves. Where is my son Jean all this time? What is he doing? And you who are here to-day, where will you be to-morrow, Maurice?"

I cover up a happy smile.

"Madame Baumer, these are romantics. The cakes, the hot tea—and the horrors of war! Look at me. What would your son think if he could hear you? Why, your boy, Lieutenant Baumer, madame, is at this moment enjoying his tea, too, in his Canha, at the front, and very comfortably, and drinking two cups to our one. As he has a first-class pastry-cook as orderly, his cakes are first cousins to yours. That for your antithesis! Come! Come! Trust him a little! Listen. I'm going to explain it all to you. I shut my eyes. I can see him. To-day, precisely, he is in the first-line trenches. Don't put on that tragic look! He is sitting, without a care, in the shelter that he has as section chief, under his roof of sticks and dirt.

He is dressed like a private in a moonblue, hooded cloak and that admirable modem helmet which comes down to us, all the same, from such far-away traditions—that light Burgundian casque, so strong and quasi-religious, which gives our men out there, when there is a group of them, the look of a celestial army; strange head-gear, I agree, for the head of a spindling Parisian, but splendid when our soldiers wear it, and marvellously symbolic of our mstic but gentle France with her peasant strength. It is by this casque and this blue that they will enter into their legend. . . . Your Jean looks well in his helmet and horizon-blue. To a button of his cloak he has hung his gas-mask, in a cloth bag. From time to time he draws his revolver and amuses himself by aiming at a rat. On the table his orderly, Poil, has set the tea and butter biscuit. He munches one, while, lying on the bed with its iron springs and straw mattress, Tissot, his inseparable friend that he has no doubt told you about—twenty years old, and an underlieutenant because he is a Superior Normal School man—reads to him one of the books of poetry his canteen is always full of. Outside, naturally, a cyclone of 77-centimetre shells. . . . But why do you object to that cyclone of 77's? Jean is there expressly to observe the effects of them. Two French monoplanes escape from a swarm of little white puffs. . . . Elvire, aux yeux baisses, reads Tissot in his girl voice, and Jean, who adores these verses and listens to them rapturously, says gently, 'Tissot, what a cackling you do make of it!' in a futile attempt to hide his pleasure.

"No doubt I shall see Jean. His regiment and mine are in the same brigade, and, though there have been some famous shifts in our sector these days, I count on not being far from him. Do you want me do tell him that you cried? Come, don't listen to that imagination of yours. Jean is in high spirits at the front—fighting always gives one high spirits; in the first place, it is action, and then there are a lot of you. Why, it is in the toughest moments that you feel the craziest gayety! When the Campaign had just begun I was awfully scared.I can still see myself lying in a beet-field, in the sun, wearing the old red breeches, that seem now to date from another age. Little stifled rustlings, that sounded as if they might be field-mice and things hurrying down into their holes in the ground, punctured the ground at my side, behind me, far, near, everywhere. And the sweat streamed from my body, from my face, from my eyes—wetting the ground all about. I was waiting for the bullet that would come and find lodgment in the ground, after passing through my skull or my back. My imagination traced in advance the lightning route of its passage. Oh, I was very badly informed. I lacked practice so! But somebody was creeping up to me—close. I recognized the tall lieutenant whom I liked because he was so graceful. He called me, at the top of his lungs on account of the hubbub: 'Vernier!'—He actually knew my name — 'My lieutenant?' — 'Here, my wallet—it's in the left pocket of my jacket.'—'Yes, my lieutenant. And mine is in the left pocket of my capote.' —'I see; look sharp; we're going to make a push.' The soil was chipped off by a shell at our very sides. 'Piji . . . piji . . . piji . . . !' chuckled the swarming rifle-balls. But too late; we'd come to an understanding! Ah, but wasn't I happy all of a sudden! Happy doesn't half express it. All my blood was dancing a fandango of joy through my veins. You see, I had found a pal, a fellow of my own sort, who would understand. What did anything else matter? The sun blinded our eyes with its midsummer glare. Puffs of blackish smoke burst without darkening an azure sky like the skies in fairyland. On the left, a chateau was burning on its hilltop—burning methodically, like the good castle it was. The rabbits were beating it from the invasion of their fields. The row the batteries made was so tremendous that it became really ridiculous. What in the name of common sense would it have mattered if Vernier, Maurice, had died there?

"And I leaped forward. Whilst I was running, drunk with faintness and delight, I began singing at the top of my voice that motif of 'Scheherazade' that has run in our heads ever since the last Ballet Russe, exaggerating still further the furious, wild air of.it: 'Si do re, do re! fa mi re, do re! . . . do si do re do.' At the climax of it, when there came a shell, sliding on I know not what aerial rails, and wrecked the atmosphere above me, I paused a few seconds, nose deep in my beet-roots, shrivelled myself up as small as possible under my knapsack, and waited for the explosion to bring death or relief. Then, when it was all over, I picked up my tune again, tipsy with joy: 'La sol la do si, la si sol!' I was never in such high spirits in all my life."

Madame Baumer shook her head.

"You are a kind friend. But I knew that already. One only has to read your letters to know you all, children that you are. No doubt, your hearts are the salt of the earth, and you live gayly in the face of death, without a care. But death is there all the same, and at the very minute I am talking to you is robbing me of my child, perhaps. Oh, if you only knew the anguish I suffer a hundred times a day, and how it wakes me up at night, stone-cold; if you knew how it makes me shiver when the beli rings, or the postman comes, and I think: 'This time it will be bad news!' For that's the way it would happen; some one would ring the doorbell and Lucie would come with a letter, or to say there was a caller ..."

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But I break in upon her voice, all wet with tears:

"What a neurasthenic you're becoming! We don't think so much as all that, we others! Action purges us of all those toxic poisons that come from reflecting too much. Why do you believe in the probability of an outcome that no one of us believes is possible even? We, why. we are too proud to think that vve can be wounded. You would do well to cultivate this same pride, that gets the better of bad luck. Take my word for it, we take all the proper precautions, but it is from superstition and an instinctive need of obeying the rules of the game rather than from fear of any accident. When some comrade falls near me I know, I am positively certain, that if I had been in his place no such thing would have happened to me. Don't you see? Each of us has absolute confidence in the powers which will that he shall live. The big shells are meant for other folks. One says to himself: 'I! I whom they are expecting at home; I who am here with this hand of mine; I who march in the middle of so many men without ever getting myself mixed up with them;

I whose coat just like the other coats remains all the same my coat; I who feel everything, who see everything, who, when we are hungry, am hungrier than the rest, and when we are thirsty, am thirstier; I who suffer more and enjoy things more; I who have only to shut my eyes to stop the life of the whole world; I who am perhaps the cause of this war (for isn't it perhaps just to punish me for having shirked my second year's service that Fate has wanted to make me a soldier again?) ; I, finally, Vernier, I, Maurice, raison d'etre of the universe—how could it come about that I should die? If the others are killed, that is to even things up with my good luck !' And that is what every one of us thinks. It is so strong, one's sureness of surviving, that you can't help jollying him a little, this Death who won't get you, who is afraid of you. Death may strike close beside you and spatter you with blood, but you feel yourself far from Death, so far that you haven't even any sense of physical repulsion. Shall I confess it? This Death who has touched so many comrades near me, so many friends—sometimes I feel an intellectual curiosity about him, as if it were some one whom I shall never meet, even, unless I stir my stumps. Is that a little perverse? Standing on the plain some day, if a bullet grazed me, it wouldn't be, I'm certain, the instinct of safety that would make me drop, but a sort of fatherly appeal from my reason, something like this: 'Come, now, you big fooi: get off of that; you're going to finish by getting yourself killed!'

"Since we cannot die, why on earth do our mothers persist in being afraid of our dying?"

"Oh, Maurice," says Madame Baumer, "what fine speeches you make, and how you do get wound up!"

"But if we do get hit, all the same, and have a second's time to see how wrong we were, and how presumptuous—that does not make us the least bit sore. You take the blow, you are—surprised, and you accept the adventure because they would be only too happy—they, over there, the enemy, Fate, all the elements that knock you out—if they knew that you were groaning or raging. An immense resignation, made up of a lot of pride and a lot of humility, that is what fills the eyes of our men in moments like these; the pride of the individual whose brave soul defies blind forces, and a sense of the futility of our human race with which higher powers make their sport. . . . Death, out there, is never tragical, madame! I still hear little Bossard under the hail of machine guns shouting: 'We're falling like flies. Mustn't stay here. Forward!' and starting to sing as he takes his first leap; 'Auprbs dc ma blonde'—and falling back with a thud, jesting in a weaker voice: 'Badoum ! Versailles.

. . . End of the line!' "

Madame Baumer hides her eyes.

"Don't," she urges. "It's frightful!"

I repeat stubbornly:

"No, death is never tragic. That is what you must be told. Death for oneself, death for others, we accept it either way without a protest.

"Yes, yes, I know what you are trying to tell me about the tragedy of those who do not die, but arc wounded. And yet, in the stations, when train-loads of the wounded go by, men exhausted from hemorrhages, fever, and travel, women go to the cars and hand up wine and fruit. They give the men pencils, too, and post-cards so that they can write and send news to their families. But often men are too weak to write and the women do it for them. Do you know what these unfortunates always, invariably, dictate— these men whose flesh is bleeding under their bandages? A name, an address, and then the words: 'Everything is all right with me.' "

Madame Baumer listens and reflects.

"Will you listen to one more reminiscence? During the September hikes, when we had been going for days and days (we'd lost track of them!), it seemed to us as if our fatigue had gone way beyond the limits of human endurance. Of all those atrocious hours, I can only recall one night when, walking in my track like a pack-horse and after having believed a thousand times already that I had gone my limit, I fixed my eyes on a lantern hung on some wagon several yards ahead of me—as if that could drag me forward! For quite a distance I had no further sensations. That lantern filled my brain full, and held all that was left to me of consciousness. I felt sure that I should fall if that light failed me, that I should die there in the black night from physical and moral weariness. It alone bound me to life. . . . And all of a sudden it went out. I saw death much better in that moment than I had seen it in the heaviest bombardments. I felt it. It touched me. My recollections, my love-affairs, the world, all my interior universe, fell down the bottomless pit. But just then I saw the lantern again. A cavalryman, passing between it and me, had for a second intercepted its light. And I walked on to the haltingplace.

"Since then, madame, I have heard lots of stories of the battle of the Marne. I shall read a great many more. But for me Joffre's Order of the Day, the pursuit, Von Kluck's mistake, Foch's sublime decision, the great German retreat, and the saving of Paris is history—or legend. Of the greatest victory in the world I, who lived through it all, saw nothing at all, and remember nothing, except the flame of a two-cent candle fastened by a wagoner to a rusty hook on his truck. It is like that with lots of people—good people, too—they reduce the biggest sort of events to the size of a rushlight. We mustn't lay it up against them."

It is for me to break a silence.

"Dear madame, it is very late. I must be leaving you. Come! No! I don't want you to kiss me. I want to go just as I used to go, notwithstanding I have such a fine helmet. I kiss your hands. Goodby. Your tea was excellent. You want to kiss me all the same? Very well, I'll deliver your kiss to Jean. But what a wretched soldier I am! A real soldier would have made you laugh, and now your eyes are wet! I am indeed sorry."

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"No! You have cheered me up. You were nice. I shall have more courage now, for since seeing you again I have almost become reconciled to the war."

"Madame," I say, with my hand on the door, "they used to tell me that the morals of a country suffer when, for several years running, the winters aren t cold. It seems that then there are hard times and the Chambers lack a quorum. And I had an old aunt who would say, laying down her newspaper: 'There is no such thing as reverence any more. We need a good war.' "

"Alas! Maurice. ..."

"Come, come, madame!"

"Good-by,''she repeats once more. "I hope that-"

She does not finish. And as I see that she has flushed:

"I hope so, too," I say, laughing.

And now on the staircase, where I skip half the steps, making as little noise as possible with my thick hob-nailed boots, I hum some waltz or other. The street again—and just the hour I love!

I walk straight ahead, young, happy, and it is all I can do to keep from running. The daylight, even distributed, is as if filtered through parchment. The women are extraordinary.

And yet, after a few steps, I feel a sensation of flatness, a weariness of myself, that sense of emptiness which comes to one on days when one has done too much talking. The idea of seeing still more faces which will reflect my own becomes all at once quite insupportable. I ought to have accepted Fabienne's dinner invitation. Heavens, but I am lonely. After all, though, what was the telephone invented for?

In the booth where I impatiently turn the pages of the telephone-book I have the frightful presentiment that Fabienne will not be in. I wonder why I'm looking for her number ? I still remember it. I will verify it, but,—yes, I was right.

Madame is in. I am so blissful that I tremble. . . . Her voice is surprised at first, then delighted. "But I am delighted!" she tells me in a tone calmer than my pride could have desired. No matter! She is expecting me. We will dine alone at her apartment.

I call a taxi, and, soon, I find an exquisite Fabienne: happy, alert, and with her hair rearranged.

"Take off that awful helmet," she says. "You look like a fireman. You know, Mr. Change-Your-Mind, that the dinner is to be brought in from outside. So we'll have to take it as it comes."

Fabienne would like to know what I think of the Russian retreat, and whether the Roumanians really do love France. I bring her round, without much difficulty, to more feminine subjects. Some easy transitions, and now we are off on stories of her girl friends. I listen to these thin little comedies and watch the play of them over her subtle features, to which the wisely arranged lights lend just the right effect, and which warmth and animation are commencing to unpowder. A pretty thing is a pretty woman! Her gestures follow her stories, quite as, to the peals of her laughter, responds the sparkling of the big diamond on her little white hand.

"Fabienne," I say, "play something!"

She rises, obedient, and goes to the piano. Her supple body, while she is walking, flows in the long pure lines which repeat themselves as from an inexhaustible source. She plays the famous air of Moussorgski which Litvine sang so well. She sings without art, but in a clear and correct voice whose middle register is really beautiful. My eyes are fixed on her shadowed neck, which commences her nudeness. Ah! How can we be so silly as to reproach woman with her dormant animality? Have we not made her like that? And need we drag her into these pretentious stories of men, these heavy and tragic affairs in which it was our part to have foreseen and to have known how to escape? No! Let her preserve for our return her calm and her serene beauty. Here are a piano and flowers. . . . The table beside us is set. Daylight has not abandoned Earth. Sing, sing, my creature!

But as she reaches the last measures, and as her head turns, while her fingers, on the keys, let fall the last harmonies, I draw near and say:

"Fabienne!"

She faces round, divines, rises, hesitates. I hold her arms: she takes fright, implores, grieves, weakens, and already, as I bear her off, I feel her poor thralled flesh which dedicates itself. . . .

And now we are peacefully dining, and prattling on good-naturedly. The confidences of the flesh do so simplify relations! Everything we say amuses me, and my fork seems very light in my hand. We are joking spontaneously—I, already detached, like one upon the point of parting; she marvellously adaptable, like those who live only in the present.

Also the clock is racing on. Already anxious about the time, I absently pluck grapes from the bunch. I see black visions of railroad-trains instead of the luxurious course before me. I await the end of a long story that Fabienne is telling me in a caressing voice. Ah, now!

"Good-by, Fabio!"

"Oh, so soon!" she cries, really wounded.-

Her eyes are big and moist. She sighs as she offers me her narrow little head that I take in my open hands and bring to my lips as a fruit.

"You'll write to me?"

"Naturally."

Her brows gather for an instant.

"The war has lasted many, many months," says she. "All the same, when one stops to think, the time has passed pretty fast."

"Ah, my dear, that," I say with fervor, "that is the best thing any one has said about it yet!"

Entering the motor which waited for me below, I see her. She waves to me from her bright window. It is true, all the same, that women have lost some of their importance!

The air enters by the open window and its freshness on my eyes already dims the pictures of this fleeting evening. During this brief motor trip, at least, I should like to devote a friendly thought to the pleasures I am leaving behind. But the stem present conflicts with such a desire.

At this hour Paris is as dark as a village. I don't knowthe names of this quarter very well. The shaded street-lamps throw strange crepe-like shadows on the houses as we pass them. ... Is this la Villette, or Pantin? I do not know.

At last, the city gate, a long boulevard, a region strange to me. It has been raining. It is raining still, even. My vehicle stops at Bourget, at the little cafe where the convoys are dining. I find Bossard, who was waiting for me here. He shows me the way. From the station of Bourget-Echange, where we are we must go to recover at Bourget-triage the wagon Px50712, which is ours. We walk into the rails, run against signal-wires, slide on the screening that the rain has made so slippery. Bossard curses. I follow him, docile. And it rains on the horses, on the soaked wagon-tops.

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Px50712 is part of a train into the last wagon of which we enter. Tired of Bossard, tired of Bourget, I wrap myself in my rug and stretch out on the greasy floor. I make haste to put myself out of range of these lamps, these engines, this complex network of trackage, my head heavy with impressions. But even in this corner of black night I cannot pull myself together. I am all expectation and fatigue.

Long hours pass. At Chalons I must descend and rejoin Bossard in a train full of men on leave. I seat myself next to some murmuring soldiers. A laugh in a neighboring compartment finds no echo. But a dispute that has just started up runs on, begins all over, and will never finish.

THE men are talking together. What vigor! These peasants,, these workmen, are real soldiers now. But in listening to them I divine little by little the cause of their heavy dejection, unlooked-for in men I know so well, and not to be explained merely by fear of the life they are returning to and regret for what they are leaving behind. No, these men came back from the front with the delicious idea that they were going to cry out their distress, get rid of their storedup complaints, and tell all about the mud, the blood, the horror, the torture. . . . But they have been petted and feted. Paris has shown them its enthusiasm, has applauded their prowess, has recounted their legend to them. Flattered, they have, little by little, told the story expected of them. The heroic role prepared in advance by other people's imaginations, they have played it without really taking it in. And now, in this gloomy train that is bringing them back to their misery, they realize that they have told nothing of the things they had to tell.

Again a change of cars, and we must pack ourselves in, the best we can, in a long, unlighted train, whose locomotive even has all its fires screened; then off again, slowly, till we get down at last in a pitch-dark station. There I lie down till dawn in a shadowy waiting-room, where stretched-out men are sleeping. Others are talking in a low voice. The cannon, very distant, sounds faintly in the ear.

NOW I am walking over the plain whose first undulations even have been ploughed with shells. The soil is sown with old iron. Calmly I walk in the silence, but a brand-new shell-hole, that I find in my path, gives me an unexpected uneasiness, and makes me quicken my pace. And suddenly a shell bursting on my left makes me hit it up even faster. Here are the former first lines. I progress with difficulty, tired out. Strands of detached wire stick up in the air like stumps that stir in the breeze—the agonized pulsing of a nightmare vegetation! A pine-wood opposite shows no more than skeletons of trees.

And here are the first corpses.

The Germans are ugly, earthy. The soiled green of their uniforms accentuates their lividity. A panic still to be read in their attitudes and their features has grouped them here, in piles, like clusters of the damned. Dead horses stretch toward the sky their rigid legs, like monstrous wooden playthings. And then the little men in blue, hugging the soil with knotted hands that bespeak the despair of feeling themselves dying here before reaching their goal: poses of children who have flung themselves on their faces to sob their hearts out. The white spots all about arc their letters, the dear trifles that never left them, and that have been scattered by those who have already rifled their pockets and, as. robbers are shot on sight, they are quick at their work and shamelessly discard papers, photographs, post-cards, just where they happen to find them!

At present, before these ugly sights, I recover my unfeeling heart, my deadened heart of the habitue. I cross one by one all the circles of this hell which will all winter surround me. But I must make faster progress. Come, be quick! Let's run !

Panting, I throw myself flat on the rough ground. A rumbling clatter, whose pitch rises as it passes overhead, shatters my nerves, stops my very breath.

It's over. My throat relaxes. I gulp a great swallow of air, and set out again at a good clip.

Let us hope that this frightful war will soon be over. Ah! Paris-

Extract from the "Official Journal of the French Republic" (Orders of the Day) :

Vernier, Maurice, Corporal of the-th Regiment of Infantry. Already cited. Was gravely wounded on November 3rd at the moment when, armed with bombs, he was leading his men to an attack on an enemy trench. Has succumbed to his wounds.