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The World Decision

R >> Robert Herrick >> The World Decision




Hucksters' carts lined the side streets about the Marché Saint-Honoré
as usual, and I could not see that prices of food had risen abnormally
in spite of complaints in the newspapers and the discussion about
cold storage in the Chamber of Deputies. Restaurant portions were
parsimonious and prices high as usual, but the hotels made specially
low rates, "_pendant la guerre,_" which the English took advantage of
in large numbers. The Latin Quarter seemed harder hit by the war than
other quarters, emptier, as at the end of a long vacation; around the
Arch there was a subdued movement as between seasons. The people were
there, but did not show themselves. One went to a simple dinner _à la
guerre_ at an early hour. All, even purely fashionable persons, were
too much occupied by grave realities and duties to make an effort for
forms and ceremonies. Life suddenly had become terribly uncomplex, even
for the sophisticated. In these surface ways living in Paris was like
going back a century or so to a society much less highly geared than
the one we are accustomed to. I liked it.

* * * * *

Even at its busiest hours Paris gave a peculiar sense of emptiness,
hard to account for when all about men and women and vehicles were
moving, when it was best to look carefully before crossing the streets.
It could not be due wholly to the absence of men and the diminution of
business--there was at least half of the ordinary volume of movement.
Nor was it altogether a cessation of that soft roar of traffic which
ordinarily enveloped Paris day and night. It was not exactly like Paris
on Sunday--except in the rue de la Paix--as I remembered Paris Sundays.
No, it was something quite new--the physical expression of that inner
silence, of that tenacity of mute will which I read in all the faces
that passed me. Paris was living within, or beyond--_là-bas_, all along
those hundreds of miles of earth walls from Flanders to the Vosges,
where for nine months their men had faced the invader.

Most of the women one met were in black, almost every one wearing some
sort of mourning, for there was scarcely a family in France that had
not already paid its toll of life, many several times over. But the
faces of these women in black were calm and dry-eyed: there were few
outward signs of grief other than the mourning clothes, just an enduring
silence. "The time for our mourning is not yet," a Frenchman said whose
immediate family circle had given seven of its members. With some, one
felt, the time for weeping would never come: they had transmuted their
personal woe into devotion to others....

There was little loitering and gazing in at shop windows, few shoppers
in the empty stores these days. Everybody seemed to have something
important that must be done at once and had best be done in sober
silence. Even the wounded had lost the habit of telling their troubles.
Doctors and nurses related as one of the interesting phenomena in the
hospitals this dislike of talking about what they had been through,
even among the common soldiers. Most likely their experiences had been
too horrible for gossip. There was a conspiracy of silence, a tacit
recognition of the futility of words, and almost never a complaint!
One day a soldier walked a block to give me a direction, and in reply
to my inquiry pointed to his lower jaw where a deep wound was hidden
in a thick beard. "A ball," he said simply. It was the second wound
he had received, and that night he was going back to his _dépôt_. For
they went back again and again into that hell so close to this peaceful
Paris, and what happened there was too bad for words. It must be
endured in silence.

There were not many troops on the streets,--at least French soldiers
and officers; there was a surprising number of English of all branches
of the service and a few Belgians. The French were either at the front
or in their _dépôts_ outside the city. On the Fourteenth of July, when
the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the _Marseillaise_, were
brought to the Invalides, a few companies of city guards on horseback
and of colonial troops in soiled uniforms formed the escort down the
Champs Élysées behind the ancient gun carriage that bore the poet's ashes.
There were many wounded soldiers, hopelessly crippled or convalescing, in
the theaters, at the cafés, and on the streets. As the weeks passed they
seemed to become more numerous, though the authorities had taken pains to
keep Paris comparatively empty of the wounded. One met them hobbling down
the Élysées under the shade of the chestnut trees, in the metro, at the
cafés, the legless and armless, also the more horrible ones whose faces
had been shot awry. They were so young, so white-faced, with life's long
road ahead to be traveled, thus handicapped! There was something wistful
often in their silent eyes.

To cope with the grist of wounded, the mass of refugees and destitute,
Paris was filled with relief organizations. The sign of some "_oeuvre_"
decorated every other building of any size, it seemed. Apart from the
numerous hospitals, there were hostels for the refugee women and
children, who earlier in the war had poured into Paris from the north
and east, workrooms for making garments, distributing agencies, etc.
All civilian Paris had turned itself into one vast relief organization
to do what it could to stanch the wounds of France. Of the relief and
hospital side of Paris I have the space to say little: much has been
written of it by those more competent than I. But in passing I cannot
refrain from my word of gratitude to those generous Americans who by
their acts and their gifts have put in splendid relief the timid
inanities of our official diplomacy. While the President has been
exchanging futile words with the Barbarian over the murders on the
Lusitania, to the bewilderment and contempt of the French nation,
the American Ambulance at Neuilly has offered splendid testimony
to the real feelings of the vast majority of true Americans, also
an excellent example of the generous American way of doing things.
That great hospital, as well as the American Clearing-House and the
individual efforts of many American men and women working in numberless
organizations, encourage a citizen from our rich republic to hold up
his head in spite of German-American disloyalty, gambling in munitions
stocks, and official timidity.

* * * * *

Already the French had realized the necessity of creating agencies
for bringing back into a life of activity and service the large
numbers of seriously wounded--to find for them suitable labor and
to reëducate their crippled faculties so that they could support
themselves and take heart once more. Schools were started for the
blind and the deaf, of whom the war has made a fearful number. I
remember meeting one of these pupils, a young officer, blind, with
one arm gone, and wounded in the face. On his breast was the Service
Cross and the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was led into the room
by his wife, a young school teacher from Algeria, who had given up
her position and come to Paris to nurse her fiancé back to life and
hope. He was being taught telegraphy by an American teacher of the
blind.

In such ways the people of Paris kept themselves from eating their
hearts out in grief and anxiety.

* * * * *

At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the day's _communiqué_ was
given out from the War Office, little groups gathered in front of
the windows of certain shops where the official report was posted.
They would scan the usually colorless lines in silence and turn away,
as though saying to themselves,--"Not to-day--then to-morrow!" The
newsless newspapers abounded in something perhaps more heartening
than favorable reports from the front--an endless chronicle of bravery
and devotion, of valor, heroism, and chivalry in the trench. That is
what fed the anxious hearts of the waiting people, details of the large,
heroic picture that France was creating so near at hand, _là-bas_.

There were few occasions for popular gatherings. The taste for
"demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic
crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of
the "_grands blessés_" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at
last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic
sight which I witnessed by accident--the arrival of one of the long
trains from the front bringing back the first "_permissionnaires_"
those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after
nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great
throng of women and children were kept back by rope and police, until
at the appearance of the uniformed men at the exit they surged forward
and sought out each her own man. There were little laughs and sobs and
kisses under the flaring gas lamps of the station yard until the last
_poilu_ had been claimed, and the crowd melted away into Paris.

* * * * *

Across the street from my hotel there was an elementary school; several
times each day a buzz of children's voices rose from the leafy yard
into which they were let out for their recess. Again the thin chorus of
children's voices came from the schoolroom. It seemed the one completely
natural thing in Paris, the one living thing unconscious of the war. Yet
even the school children were learning history in a way they will never
forget. In one of the provincial schools visited by an inspector, all
the pupils rose as a crippled child hobbled into the schoolroom. "He
suffered from the Germans," the teacher explained. "His mates always
rise when he appears." A French mother walking with her little boy in
one of the parks met a legless soldier, and turning to her child she
said sternly, as if to teach an unforgettable lesson,--"Do you see that
legless man? The _Boches_ did that--remember it!" In these ways the new
generation is learning its history, and it is not likely to forget it
for many years to come.

* * * * *

At dawn and dusk in Paris one was likely to hear the familiar buzz
of the aeroplane, and looking aloft could detect a dark spot in the
clear June sky--one of the aerial guard that keeps perpetual watch
over Paris. Sometimes when I came home at night through the dark
streets I could see the silver beams of their searchlights sweeping
like a friendly comet through the heavens, or watch the dimmed lamp
glowing like a red Mars among the lower stars, rising and falling
from space to space. Often I was awakened in the gray dawn by the
persistent hum of this winged sentry and looked down from my balcony
into the misty city beneath, securely sleeping, thanks to the incessant
watchfulness of these "eyes of Paris." The aviator would make wide
circles above the silent city, then swiftly turn back toward Issy and
breakfast. Thanks to the activity of the aerial guard the Zeppelins
have done very little damage in Paris and latterly have made no
attempts to sneak down on the city. It is too risky. They have succeeded
in killing some peaceable folk near the Gare du Nord, in dropping one
bomb on Notre Dame, I believe,--for which they have less excuse than
even for Louvain or Rheims,--and in making a big hole close to the
Trocadero. This after all the vaunted terrors of the Zeppelins! What
they have done, what they could do at the best is of the nature of
petty damage and occasional murder. Instead of terrorizing the Parisians
the Zeppelin raids have merely roused a vivid sense of sportsmanship
and curiosity among them--at first they had a real _réclame!_

Day by day as I lived in Paris the city took on more of its ordinary
activities and aspects. More people flowed by along the boulevards or
sat at the tables in front of the cafés, more shops opened--even the
great dressmaking establishments began to operate in an attempt to
restore commercial circulation. More transients flitted through the
city. There were more people of a Sunday in the Bois and at Vincennes.
Considering that less than a year before the national government had
left Paris, together with a million of its people, also that the
battle-line had remained all these months almost within hearing, it
was marvelous how quietly much of the ordinary machinery of life had
been set running again. Yet Paris was not the same. It was a Paris
almost wholly stripped to the outward eye of that parasitic luxury with
which it has catered to the self-indulgent of the world. Paris--as had
been the case with Italy--had returned under the stress of its tragedy
to its best self--a suffering, tense, deeply earnest self. If the nation
conquers--and there is not a Frenchman who believes any other solution
possible--victory will be of the highest significance to the race. It
will fix in the French people another character wrought in suffering--a
deeper, nobler, purer character than her enemies, or her friends for that
matter, have believed her to possess. Paris will never again become so
totally submerged in the business of providing international frivolities.
She has lived too long in the face of death.




II


_The Wounds of France_

The wounds of France are still bleeding. The trench wall still lies
for four hundred miles across the fair face of the country from the
Vosges to the North Sea, and the invader rules some of her richest
provinces, in all an area equal to something less than a tenth of
the whole.

The wounds have already begun to heal in the marvelous manner of
nature: already life has begun again in the valley of the Marne;
the vineyards and grainfields run close up to the front trenches.
Yet even where the scar has covered the wound it is plain enough to
see how deep that wound has been. The scorched and bruised valley of
the Marne, the ruined villages of Champagne and Artois, have been
described many times by visiting journalists, yet it is worth while
to record once more some of the outstanding features of this rape
of France.

* * * * *

To begin with Senlis, which is one of the nearest points to Paris
reached by the German cyclone in September, 1914. There are fewer
older towns in France than Senlis, thirty miles or so northeast of
Paris, the center of the old "Island of France." Once a Roman camp
whose stout masonry walls can still be seen for considerable distances,
it had a mediaeval castle, and, until the greater grandeur of Beauvais
stole the honor, was a bishopric with a lovely small Gothic cathedral.
Its lofty gray spire dominates the green fields and thick woods in the
midst of which Senlis sleeps away the modern day. There are other
curious and beautiful examples of Gothic building in Senlis: indeed,
just here, the experts find the first workings of the principles of
pure Gothic architecture, transforming the round-arched, thick-walled
Norman building. If for nothing more Senlis would have amply earned its
right to live always as the birthplace of French Gothic.

What happened to Senlis when the German troops visited it can be
seen at a glance to-day. From the railroad station at one end of
the town to the green fields beyond the hospital on the Chantilly
road at the other end, a black swath of burned and ruined buildings
is the memento. These houses and stores were not shelled: they were
burned methodically. The Germans arrived late in the afternoon of
the 2d of September, in that state of nervous excitement and hysterical
fear of _francs-tirailleurs_ that characterized them from the time
they passed Liége. The Mayor of Senlis, an old man over seventy, was
made to understand that he would be held responsible for the conduct
of the citizens, and was ordered to have water and lights turned on
in the town and a dinner for the German staff prepared at the chief
hotel. While he was busy with these commands,--most of the inhabitants
had fled that morning,--shots were exchanged in the lower end of the
town between the Germans and the retreating French. Thereupon the usual
order to burn and destroy was given, and the buildings along the main
thoroughfare were set on fire. The mayor and six other citizens,
gathered haphazard on the streets, were taken to a field outside the
town and shot. There were other moving and significant incidents in
the occupation of Senlis which are well authenticated, characteristic
of the German method, but need not be repeated here.

The older part of the town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately
escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black
scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance
of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and
foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by
comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial.
The murder of the Mayor of Senlis was not a large crime in the German
scale. But the whole is nicely typical: Senlis is the kindergarten
lesson in the German method of making war.

* * * * *

As every one knows, the Germans breaking into France at Namur and
Mons came on with unexampled rapidity from the north and east toward
the south and west, circled somewhat to the west as they neared Paris,
and then the 5th of September recoiled under the shock of the French
offensive. For the better part of a week two millions of men struggled
on a thousand different battlefields from Nancy and Verdun on the east
to Coulommiers, Meaux, and Amiens on the south and west. This was the
great battle of the Marne, which checked the German invasion. The
pressure of this human cyclone, in general from northeast to southwest,
was more intense in some places than others. One of the bloodiest storm
centers lay east and west from the town of Vitry-le-François--from
Sermaize-les-Bains on the east to Fère-le-Champenoise, Montmirail, and
Esternay on the west. For fifty miles there in the heart of Champagne
the path of the cyclone can be traced by the blackened villages, the
gutted churches, the countless crosses in the midst of green fields.

One thinks of Champagne as a land of vineyards, but here in the
center and south of the fertile province there are few vines, mostly
fields of ripening wheat, green alfalfa, or beets--long undulating
swales of rich fields, cut by little copses of thick woods and by
white poplar-lined highways as everywhere in France. It has peculiarly
that smiling and gracious air of _la douce France_--gently sloping
fields and woods and little gray stone villages each with its small
church ornamented by the square tower and spire of Champenoise Gothic.
And it was here that the blast struck hardest, along the little streams,
in the thick copses, up and down the straight roads whose deep ditches
lent themselves to entrenchment, and in almost every village and
crossroads hamlet.

It is a country of few towns, of many small villages, farm and manor
houses. The buildings cluster in the hollows or about the crossroads,
and sometimes they escaped the storm because the shells exchanged
from hill to hill went quite over their roofs; again, as was the
case with Huiron just outside Vitry or with Maurupt near by, they
could not escape because they were perched on hills, and they were
almost completely razed by the fierce fire that raked them for days.
Sometimes they escaped shell and machine gun to be burned to the
ground vengefully with incendiary bombs, as at Sermaize-les-Bains,
where of nine hundred buildings less than forty were left standing
after the Germans retreated. These instances are the saddest of all
because so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses
in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly
scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled
or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be
seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-François,--Favresse,
Blesmes, Écrinnes, Thiéblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,--with acre upon
acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps
of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered trees--and
graves, everywhere soldiers' graves.

The churches suffered most, probably because they were used for
temporary defense. At Huiron the upper half of the thirteenth-century
Gothic church had been shaved off--in the ten-foot deep mass of débris
lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Écrinnes near
by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving
the front and spire intact. At Maurupt the whole edifice, which commanded
the rolling countryside for miles, was riddled from end to end. Again,
I would enter an apparently sound building to find a pile of rubbish in
the nave, a gaping hole in the roof. And the same thing was true about
Bar-le-Duc to the east and Meaux to the west. It is safe to say that in
a fifty-mile wide stretch from Nancy to the English Channel not one
village in ten has escaped the scourge.

* * * * *

I speak of the churches because of their irreplaceable
beauty, the human tenderness of their relation with the earth.
But even more poignant, perhaps, were the wrecks of little country
homes--the stacks of ruined farm machinery, the gutted barns, the
burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after
the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I
remember, all but seven had been devastated--by incendiary fire.
Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable--the "legitimate" wrack of
war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one
case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If
it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent
or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes
war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate.

The inhabitants of these ruins had come back in many instances--where
else had they to go? Swept up before the blast of the cyclone, they had
fled south over the fields and hard white roads, then crept back a few
days after the cyclone had passed to find their homes pillaged, burned,
their villages blackened scars on the earth. But they stayed there! The
English Society of Friends has given some money with which to put up
wooden huts, on which old men and Belgian refugees were working when I
passed that way. There is a French charity that tries to outfit these
new homes in the devastated districts, one of the numberless efforts of
the French to put their national house in order. But for all that charity
can do, the lot of these villagers is a bitter one: their strong men have
gone to the front; old men, women, and children are left to scratch the
fields, and exist miserably in the cellars, underneath bits of corrugated
iron roof, in tiny wooden huts. But they have planted their potatoes, in
the ruins in some cases, and have taken up sturdily the struggle of
existence in the wreck of their old homes. The children play among the
crumbling walls, the women go barefoot to the public well for water. The
fields have been sown and harvested somehow. Until the Germans can kill
off the French peasant women, they can never hope to conquer France.

Compared with the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere
pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet
the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that
bill which France expects to present some day. The old châteaux that
were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads of plunder that
went back to German cities, the emptied cellars and ransacked houses
have fed the fire of disgust and loathing which the French feel for
their foe. Yet they should not begrudge the invader the extraordinary
quantity of good wine which he consumed on his raid, because the
victory of the Marne was doubtless won in part by the aid of the
champagne bottle!

* * * * *

When I passed through the Marne valley the fields were being harvested
for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the
harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers' _képi_,
who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant.
The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had
yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ruins
of the villages one might have forgotten the fact of war were it not for
the graves. Here and there the corner of some wood where a battery had
been placed was mowed as if cut by a giant reaper. The tall poplars
along the roadsides had been ripped and torn as by a violent storm. Some
hillsides were scarred with ripples from burrowing shells, and hastily
made trenches had not yet been ploughed completely under. But over the
undulating golden fields it would be difficult to trace the course of
the tempest were it not for the crosses above the graves, thousands upon
thousands of them,--singly, in clumps, in long lines where the dead
bodies had been brought out of the copses and buried side by side in
trenches, or where at a crossroads a little cemetery had been made to
receive the dead of the vicinity.

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