The Glory of the Coming. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
of the archway, to be fed and cared for and then sent along in the first empty truck that came by going toward Soissons.
In this group of newcomers was an elderly little man in a worn high hat and a long frock coat with facings of white dust upon its shiny seams, who looked as though he might be the mayor of some inconsequential village. He carried two bulging valises and a huge umbrella. With him was his wife, and she had in one hand a cage housing two frightened canaries and under the other arm a fat grey tabby cat which blinked its slitted eyes contentedly.
The most pitiable figure of them all to my way of thinking was an old woman – yes, a very old woman – she must have been all of eighty. Alongside one of the buildings I came upon her sitting in a huddle of her most treasured possessions. She was bent forward, with her gnarled hands folded in the lap of her dress, which was silk and shiny, for naturally when she fled from her home she had put on her back the best that she owned. Under the cope of a queer little old black bonnet with faded purple cloth flowers upon it her scanty hair lay in thin neat folds, as white and as soft as silk floss. Her feet in stiff, new, black shoes showed beneath her broad skirts. Her face, caving in about the mouth where her teeth were gone and all crosshatched with wrinkles, was a sweet, kindly, most gentle old face – the kind of face that we like to think our dead-and-gone grandmothers must have had.
She sat there ever so patiently in the soft sunlight, waiting for the truck which would carry her away to some strange place among stranger folk. When I drew near to her, wishing with all my heart that I knew enough of her tongue to express to her some of the thoughts I was thinking, she looked up at me and smiled a friendly little smile, and then raising her hands in a gesture of resignation dropped them again in her lap. But it was only with her lips that she smiled, for all the time her chin was quivering and her faded old blue eyes were brimming with a sorrow that was past telling in words.
She still sat there as we got into our car and drove off toward the battle. Looking back, the last thing I saw before we rounded the corner of the wall was her small black shape vivid in the sunshine. And I told myself that if I were an artist seeking to put upon canvas an image that would typify and sum up the spirit of embattled France to-day I would not paint a picture of a wounded boy soldier; nor yet one of a winged angel form bearing a naked sword; nor yet one of the full-throated cock of France, crowing his proud defiance. I would paint a picture of that brave little old withered woman, with the lips that smiled and the chin that quivered the while she smiled.
CHAPTER VII. AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT
WHEN the last preceding chapter of mine ended I had reached a point in the narrative where our little party of four, travelling in our own little tin flivverette, were just leaving Blérincourt, being bound still farther west and aiming, if our abiding luck held out, to reach the front of the Front – which, I may add, we did.
To be exact we were leaving not one Blérincourt but three. First, Blérincourt, the town, with its huddle of villagers’ homes, housing at this moment only French troopers and exhausted refugees; second, Blérincourt, the castle, a mouldering relic of a great house, testifying by its massive empty walls and its tottering ruin of a gateway to the fury which laid hold on the peasants of these parts in the days of the Terror; and, third, Blérincourt, the model colony of model cottages, which for us held the most personal interest, since it was here the American women of the American Fund for French Wounded had during the previous nine months centred their activities relating to the repopulating of districts in the Aisne country, now for the second time evacuated and given over again to the savage malice of the boche.
Behind us as we swung into the main highway lay this grouped composition of the wrecked château, the tiny old houses of weathered grey stone and the little frame domiciles, smart and glistening with fresh paint and fresh varnishing. Before us, within a space of time and distance to be spanned by not more than half an hour of steady riding, was somewhere the problematical doorway through which we hoped to pass into the forward lines of that battle which the historians of the future, I dare say, will call merely the Great Battle, knowing their readers require no added phraseology to distinguish it from the lesser engagements of this war – or in fact of any war.
We did not ask our way of any whom we met, either of those going ahead of us or those coming back in counter streams. To begin with, we deemed it inexpedient to halt long enough to give to any person in authority a chance for questioning the validity of our present mission, since, as I already have explained, we carried no passes qualifying us to traverse this area; and besides there was no need to ask. The route was marked for us by signs and sounds without number, plainer than any mileposts could have been: By the columns of Frenchmen hurrying up to reenforce the decimated British who until now, at odds of one to five, had borne the buffets of the tremendous German onslaught; by the never-ending, never-slackening roar of the heavy guns; by the cloud of dust and powder, forming a wall against two sides of the horizon, which mounted upward to mingle its hazes with the hazes of the soft spring afternoon; by the thin trickling lines of light casualty cases, “walking wounded,” in the vernacular of the Medical Corps – meaning by that men who, having had first-aid bandages applied to their hurts at forward casualty stations, were tramping rearward to find accommodations for themselves at field hospitals miles away.
At once we were in a maze of traffic to be likened to the conditions commonly prevalent on lower Fifth Avenue in the height of the Christmas-shopping season, but with two distinctions: Here on this chalk-white highroad the movement, nearly all of it, was in one direction; and instead of omnibuses, delivery vans, carriages and private automobiles, this vast caravansary was made up of soldiers afoot, soldiers mounted and soldiers riding; of batteries, horse drawn and motor drawn; of pontoon bridges in segments; of wagon trains, baggage trains, provision trains and munition trains; of field telephone, field telegraph and field wireless outfits upon wheels; of all the transportable impedimenta and all the myriad items of movable machinery pertaining to the largest army that has crossed a corner of France since the days of the first great invasion more than three and a half years before.
There were ambulances past counting; there were big covered camions in numbers sufficient to fit out a thousand circuses; there were horses and donkeys and mules of all the known sizes and colours; there were so many human shapes in uniforms of horizon blue that the eye grew weary and the brain rebelled at the task of trying, even approximately, to compute estimates of the total strength of the man power here focussed.
Through all this, weaving in and out, our impudent little black bug of a car scuttled along, with its puny horn honking a constant and insolent demand for clear passage. At a faster gait than anything in sight except the cruising aëroplanes above, we progressed upon our way, with none to halt us and none to turn us back. Where the dust hung especially thick at a crossroads set in the midst of the wide plain we almost struck three pedestrians who seemingly did not heed our hooted warning or take notice of it until we were right upon them. As they jumped nimbly for the ditch we could see that all these had staff markings at their throats, and that one, the eldest of the three, a stoutish gentleman with a short grizzled beard, wore three stars in a triangle upon his collar. Tin Lizzie had almost achieved the distinction for herself of having run down a major general of France.
We did not stop, though, to offer apologies or explanations. With rare sagacity our driver threw her wide open and darted into the fog, to take temporary shelter behind a huge supply wagon, which vehicle we followed for a while after the fashion of a new-foaled colt trailing its dam.
Proofs began to multiply that we were nearing the zone of live combat. Until now the only British soldiers we had seen were slightly wounded men bound afoot for the rear. All at once we found ourselves passing half a company of khaki-clad Britishers who travelled across a field over a course parallel to the one we were taking and who disappeared in a hazel copse beyond. Rifle firing could be heard somewhere on the far side of the thicket. At a barked command from an officer who clattered up on horseback a battery of those doughty little seventy-fives, which the French cherish so highly, and with such just cause, was leaving the road and taking station in a green meadow where the timid little wild flowers of a mild March showed purple and yellow in the rutted and trampled grass.
With marvellous haste the thing was accomplished almost instantly. The first gun of the five squatted in the field with its nozzle slanting toward the northwest, and behind