Winning a Cause: World War Stories. Inez Bigwood
and of generations to come will stand in future days with bared heads before that monument and pay tribute.
[Illustration: The religious and military tribute paid to the first Americans to fall in battle, at Bathelmont, November 4, 1917. General Bordeaux, in the name of the French army, bade "farewell to all that was mortal of the three heroes." At this point in the funeral, notice that the American soldiers in the background are standing at "parade rest."]
FOUR SOLDIERS
THE BOCHE
The boche was chiefly what his masters made him.
He was planned and turned out according to specifications. His leaders and his enemies always knew just what he would do under any given circumstances, and he himself always knew just what he would do. He would do what he was ordered to do, if he understood the order and had been taught how to execute it; otherwise he would do nothing but stare helplessly. He was a machine built to order, according to plans and specifications.
"In critical moments the boche waited for direction instead of relying on himself. He could not vary a hairbreadth from an order given, even when the variation would have brought success. He was part of a machine army, a cog in a mechanism which needed a push to make it move; his actions must be dictated or he could not act; his very thoughts were disciplined and uniformed."
To the boche there was no chivalry in war. He fought as the barbarians would have fought, if they had had all his knowledge and equipment, but were still uncivilized. Women and children never called forth his pity or his mercy. He would defile and destroy a church or a cathedral with greater pleasure than he would a peasant's hut.
To him there were no laws of war. War meant to fight, to conquer, to kill, to gain the end by any means whatever. Dropping bombs on defenseless women and children and on Red Cross hospitals; torpedoing merchant ships without warning and sending all the passengers, even neutrals or friends, to death, or worse, in open boats far from land; firing on stretcher-bearers and nurses; using poison gas and liquid fire; poisoning wells and spreading disease germs; all are forbidden to civilized races by the laws of war. The boche regularly perpetrated them all and committed other atrocities much worse. He hoped to frighten the world by his cruelty and brutality, by making every man, woman, and child among his enemies believe that each boche was an unconquerable giant possessed of a devil.
To the boche war was simply a robbery, and he was one of a robber band. On the land, he was a brigand, on the sea, a pirate. He went about his business with no more mercy and chivalry than a New York gunman or a Paris apache. To him war was a business, an unlawful business to be sure, but, he believed, a profitable one. He went at it, therefore, as he had at manufacturing and commerce in the days of peace. He sought to do bigger things than any one else and to gain an advantage by any means, fair or foul. Why should he think about being fair or humane? He was a thief, not a judge.
And yet let it be recorded that while nearly all boches acted like brutes instead of men, there were some who were different and who showed the highest type of courage and died bravely as soldiers may die.
THE POILU
The soldier of France, the poilu, is a crusader. He is fighting to defend France, his great mother, in whose defense, centuries ago, the invisible powers called and sustained Jeanne d'Arc. In his love of country there is something almost religious, like that of the Mohammedan for Mecca and Medina. To serve France, to fight for her, to die for her—and every French soldier expects to die in battle—is a privilege as well as a duty. He fights for his country as an Englishman fights for his home. With the Englishman, his home comes first and is nearest and dearest; with the Frenchman, his country.
Philip Gibbs, who has written from day to day, from the trenches and the battlefields, letters that will never be forgotten because of their beauty and truth, says of the French poilu:—
"Yet if the English reader imagines that because this thread of sentiment runs through the character of France there is a softness in the qualities of French soldiers, he does not know the truth. Those men whom I saw at the front and behind the fighting lines were as hard in moral and spiritual strength as in physical endurance. It was this very hardness which impressed me even in the beginning of the war, when I did not know the soldiers of France as well as I do now. After a few weeks in the field these men, who had been laborers and mechanics, clerks and journalists, artists and poets, shop assistants and railway porters, hotel waiters, and young aristocrats of Paris, were toned down to the quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on them—the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours—and tested by long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in retreat against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those rearguard actions, and by their first experience of indescribable horrors, among dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood which I found sublime. They were bronzed and dirty and hairy, but they had the look of knighthood, with a calm light shining in their eyes and with resolute lips. They had no gayety in those days, when France was in gravest peril, and they did not find any kind of fun in this war. Out of their baptism of fire they had come with scorched souls, knowing the murderous quality of the business to which they were apprenticed, but though they did not hide their loathing of it, nor the fears which had assailed them, nor their passionate anger against the people who had thrust this thing upon them, they showed no sign of weakness. They were willing to die for France, though they hated death, and in spite of the first great rush of the German legions, they had a fine intellectual contempt of that army, which seemed to me then unjustified, though they were right, as history now shows. Man against man, in courage and cunning they were better than the Germans, gun against gun they were better, in cavalry charge and in bayonet charge they were better, and in equal number irresistible."
THE TOMMY
John Masefield, the English writer, says, "St. George did not go out against the dragon like that divine calm youth in Carpaccio's picture, nor like that divine calm man in Donatello's statue. He went out, I think, after some taste of defeat knowing that it was going to be bad, and that the dragon would breathe fire, and that very likely his spear would break, and that he wouldn't see his children again, and people would call him a fool. He went out, I think, as the battalions of our men went out, a little trembling and a little sick and not knowing much about it, except that it had to be done, and then stood up to the dragon in the mud of that far land and waited for him to come on."
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