The white flame of France

Front matter

Class JJ Book._

Copyright N ..

CCHRiGlIT DEPOSIT.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. A Road in France 3

II. The Gateway to France .... 13

CHAPTER I A Road in France

A French soldier named this book, a little Zouave whom I met on a lonely road in the war zone. He made me feel as I never had before, the fire and glory in that watchword of the French people : " Vive la France! " Something had gone wrong with the military car in which I had been taken to a certain hospital, very near the trenches. The chauffeur accepted this difficulty in the uncomplaining way in which the French now accept all ills, trivial or tragic. While he tinkered, a hunched, patient figure in horizon blue, I wandered up and down the roadside.

Ah, the roads of France, — how poignant is the change in them ! What a freight of gay life they carried, such a short time since! Four years ago most of the inhabitants of France could have boasted of the happiness of having no story. Now not a man, woman or child but represents a drama; scarcely a face but shelters a tragedy. It is a bitter thing that a people so simply happy as the French, so ready to ripple into joy, into responsiveness, should have to bear not only the daily shock, but the long grinding pressure of this war. How many of them have lost the very earth they once knew, towns, villages, forests, like those fabled cities of old that crumbled into the black waters about Land's End. Civilians come creeping back to a heap of ruins that was once a fair plain full of homes, and they cannot tell on what spot were the houses that were the background to their happy living. The priest cannot find the site of his church. The farmer looks on a loathsome sea of tumbled earth-waves, incapable of full tillage for a long time to come, and he asks, " Is that the land that once bore my harvests? " But the roads of France, — how we tourists loved to peer out of the windows to look at them as the train swept by! How we loved to unroll them under the swift wheels of a motor-car! Green-bordered and neat, flashing with charm or whimsicality, or serene in suggestions of peace and plenty, — oh, never was there anything more symbolic of the joy of common, simple living than those roads of France !

And even now, changed as they are, they are not sad. Never that! The people of France have taken their tragedy as a hero takes his wounds, as a saint takes his martyrdom, as a mother takes the daily exaction of service she is glad to give for love's sake. Seeing their high spirit, we who were once tourists of France, and are now her eternal lovers, can but walk over the

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roads with the same resolution the French people show.

Not sad, then, the roads; but no longer symbolic of a gay, peace-loving people. As I wandered along that Aisne road, looking at some abandoned trenches, now already green again and harmless as ditches, I tried to forget the war or at least to believe that some day all the wounds of France will be healed, like those raw gashes of earth where, such a short time since, good men died and " climbed quickly to God."

But the road would not let me forget the war. Along it came, first of all some wagons bearing materials for repairing the trenches, — stakes and trench-mats, and logs. Then came two or three " kitchens," their square tops shining, smoke coming from their stove-pipes. They look competent and fussy, reminding one somehow of a capable, energetic housewife who cannot give service without a strong flavor of egotism. After an interval came a group of civilians in black. They looked curiously at the stranger, bowing, gravely smiling. There is not much laughter now in France.

More wagons, this time loaded with ammunition. Following came a big gun, drawn by eight mules, and covered with cunning splashes of brown and green camouflage. The driver was looking upward, and I followed his gaze to see, high in the air, a German Taube. Sinister, ominous, it soared and spied, a dreadful bird. And then swinging up the road with crisp, marching feet came two companies of men in horizon-blue. I forgot the menace of the Taube, for they were marching up to the first-line trenches.

Who of us has not at some time stood in a crowded railway station, or on some great street through which pours the epic of a nation, and been struck with certain wonder that all these people should be nothing to him, nor he to them, that these people know sorrow and love, suffering and remorse and peace and hope, like himself, but they are eternally strangers to him, are already flowing away from him forever.

But whosoever has such a feeling to-day, as he sees a company of soldiers march by, touches not sentiment but tragedy, touches, too, the sublimity of courage and self-sacrifice. We smile at the soldier; we say " au 'voir" but in our hearts we say good-bye, and we know that if he comes back it will be as a gift. Of those men in horizon-blue, some were walking their last along this fair road. Boys, who had never yet made a real choice, a real decision, never known the shy, wondering happiness of a girl's love, were looking their last on the green and gold of the world, their lives never to be fully unrolled on this side of that last outpost beyond which no sentry can stay any of us.

Those men in horizon-blue contrasted sharply with the men in khaki whom I had seen in England a short time before, Colonials, as it happened, tall, broad, pink-cheeked, their clothes of good cloth, well cut; they had looked as if on

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parade. The uniforms of the French soldiers were made of shoddy cloth, badly cut, badly sewn, quick to stain and fade and soak in moisture. Their faces were sallow, unshaven; in repose they were even haunted, old. Men who are twentyeight look forty, and men who are forty seem sixty. They bear an invisible burden, such as the English and we Americans need not bear. Men in khaki know that no matter what happens to them, their land is safe; but the Frenchmen know that France is deeply wounded, for generations to come.

On they marched, smiling and waving as I called " Bon chance! " to them, calling back to me, " Merely Madame" and " Vive I'Amerique! " The horizon-blue of their uniforms spread over the road, splendid waves which the enemy would breast in vain. Before the war, certain countries suggested colors to me: green for Ireland, and golden for Italy ; crude red for Turkey, and royal purple for Palestine. If I had thought of France in such terms, it would have been as opalescent, a color shimmering and variable. But now, forever, it will be horizon-blue, noble, beautiful, the symbol for deathless courage, for endurance, for patience, for dignity, for a stern, high spirituality.

They had gone ; the road was still and lonely, for the sounds of the cheering had died down, and I was seeing only the brave, strained faces from which all the youth had been seared away. Presently, behind me, I heard a sound of whistling, gay, boyish. It was a strain of " Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre." I turned. There swinging down a path was a little Zouave soldier. His crimson cap and red-embroidered coat made a vivid note against the green background, contrasted almost violently with the horizon-blue of which my mind and soul were full. On he came, happy, spontaneous, making me think of a scarlet tanager, of a cardinal bird, of a figure in a Christmas pantomime, of many gay and happy things, none of them associated with war. He felt my welcome and my invitation, for he sat down on the bank with me and we became friends.

People in the war zone very quickly make short cuts to friendship in these swift days. They shear away conventions, put aside reticences, climb over the barriers that the world erects for social protection. In this world of war, the soul may walk uncovered, for only what is real counts now. So this little Zouave soldier and I talked freely.

" You are happy? " I said.

"Oh, but yes," he returned; "I am on my permission. The cottage where my mother lives is across the fields, half a mile. But she did not expect me, no; she is gone to my aunt's for the day. So I am going after her. First she will weep with joy to see me; then she will laugh; then she will weep again because of losing an hour or two of my permission"

" Oh, but don't stay here, then," I said, " much as I want to talk to you — "

A ROAD IN FRANCE

He unslung a loaf of bread from his pack.

" Oh, but I must eat," he said, with that reverence for the digestive processes which all France shows; " but yes, my mother will understand that. So, if madame permits, I will eat."

Madame permitted, and asked,

" Then this is your home ? You were born here?"

He found his bottle of wine, before he replied, with a sly laugh,

"Ah, no; my mother happened to be visiting here when the Germans made war. Madame would never guess where I was born. In that part of Alsace which the Germans hold ! But yes ! And I was mobilized in the German army. Ah, yes, I and many other young men, loyal to France.

" See, then, madame, we were born of parents who had once known French citizenship. We spoke the language in our homes. And on the streets, when we played our games, we spoke French; if a gendarme came up, we spoke German. We used to talk of what we would do if a war broke out. For we knew that Germany was only waiting to eat up more of our France.

" Well, then, madame, we were mobilized. I was just seventeen, no more. Men of forty-five were taken, too. The Germans wanted to spend all the blood of the Alsatians, first, and save their own men. That is like them. They do not think we are citizens; we are conquered subjects. But no one protested. It would have done no good, and, besides, we knew what we were going to do, we Alsatians ! So they took us, and put us in the German lines, and we waited our opportunity. The shells came over and killed some of us — French shells. Then one night our chance came.

" Eighty of us, that night, crawled on our hands and knees through the German lines. Do you realize what that means, madame, — the first discovery, and all of us would have been dead men ! What if a pistol dropped! What if even a heel clicked sharply on a pebble! Such straining muscles, such an anguish of listening, such fear lest we cough or sneeze ! We took the German patrol prisoners. Me, I was glad not to kill them; they were men we had eaten with. We tied up their mouths and took away their weapons and made them crawl before us.

" It was I, madame, — I, who had the honor of hailing the French patrol, of telling them who we were, of fixing their faith in us. It was I, little Jean-Baptiste, who stood at the head of the eighty in headquarters and answered the questions of the officers. It was I who could tell them exactly how many kilometres from the front line lay the storehouse of ammunition, for I had gauged that. They took us to Paris; you will understand, madame, that they had to be careful, for some Alsatians are not loyal to France. Spies are everywhere.

" But if madame were to look up my record now she would not find me registered in the army

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as Jean Baptiste thus-and-so from German Alsace. Ah, no ; for if that were so, and I were ever taken prisoner by the Germans, I should be shot as a traitor. For, do you see, madame, we are changed from sector to sector. Some day some of us may be holding the trenches in French Alsace, and may be taken prisoner in a raid. The French government gave me a new surname, and registered me as from Paris. That has been done for all of the eighty. Me, as you see, they put in a Zouave regiment. When our Alsace all belongs to us again, we shall take back our own names. I shall lead my mother to our little house, and I shall say,

" ' Here, Mama, here is your French home that your Jean-Baptiste gave his blood for.' "

" May the day come soon," I said. " Do you know, Jean-Baptiste, as you came along the path, I had just been looking at the men in blue, and you seemed like a bit of living fire."

Jean-Baptiste sprang to his feet.

" I am fire," he cried, " I, and others like me. I am the fire of France ! So are the men in blue; there are blue flames, madame, and yellow. The men from Morocco and Tunis, they are yellow fire. And we are all burning for France, madame ! Vive la France! Anyone who loves her is for her a tongue of flame. Vive, vive la France! "

I had heard that slogan before, thrilled to it, but never as now. That little ugly soldier in red, with his unshaven face alight, his dark eyes

ii gleaming, was for me a torch, was France. The colors, blue, red, yellow, fused for me into the white flame of France.

And I knew that she would live ! — that behind that prayer, that vow, lies a blazing spirit of pure devotion. That little soldier's pulsing cry, " Vive la France!" gave me courage, taught me that for all that France is martyred, for all that her veins are bleeding, she can never be a forlorn country. Never, because in every true heart in France, in every home, simple or stately, there burns a white flame dedicated to France. The country is one great altar dedicated to patriotism. The fire will burn forever, because it is the spirit of France. France shall live, indeed!

Chapter II

MY little Zouave friend, Jean-Baptiste, was the first and only person in France to ask me why I had come.

I said, truly enough, " To see, and to write, and, where I can, to help."

Yet, saying that, I knew a sense of shame, a feeling that I had no right to be in France, unless I could be sure of bringing to France many, many times what I should cost her in food and transportation. To his question as to how I had come I could have replied,

" I got on a ship in New York, and landed in England, and then I went to Havre, and to Paris, and after that to the war zone."

But that would not have explained at all. If at that point Jean-Baptiste had not finished his bread and wine, and if I had not remembered his waiting mother, perhaps we should have talked, and I should have told him of the home in the Marne country that kept calling me from the moment war was declared. But Jean-Baptiste's meal was over, and the patient chauffeur crawled resignedly from under the gray military motor to say that at last madame could proceed.

So we left Jean-Baptiste, a scarlet flame, swing- 13 ing down the road to the woman who loved him, and who would receive him as one born again. And as we drove farther and farther away from the sound of bombardment, I thought of that home in the Marne region that had taken me back to France, just as definitely as did the good ship Finland.

I had no strong emotional association with that home, — a cool stone farmhouse, standing on a hillside. I liked the Marne country, because it supplied the ideal combination of beautiful landscape with prosperous homes. Village after village with big churches and little houses, quaint courtyards, stone fountains, and cheerful, interested people whose friendly smiles made of one an honored guest. Before the door of this farmhouse were two green poplars that made me think of green fire, so rich they were in beauty and force and fervor. But mainly I was pleased because the house contained so many happy people : madame, the practical and confident; her husband, the least degree henpecked; four big sons, very obedient to their competent mother; one little son, conspiring for disobedience with his indulgent father; one big daughter, so beautiful it caught one's breath, and as docile and sweet as she was beautiful; one little daughter, piquant and fiery and spoiled. Rosy-cheeked, healthy people they were, who shrieked a protest when I opened my windows of a cold night, and who considered more than one bath a week an affectation. I have sat with them in their dining-room, which gave a good view of the sloping fields in which they all worked, and have listened to madame gaily boasting of the dowries she would be able to give her daughters and of the fine matches she contemplated for her sons. Each year her ambitions grew, and various girls, once considered very desirable, were mentally rejected as not good enough. I have seen that family in their friendly intercourse with their neighbors. I have heard them at their prayers, when the beads of their rosaries slipped through their fingers, soft as whispers, and their murmuring voices mingled with the winds outside my windows.

I wanted to know that they were safe, because they stood to me as a sort of symbol of the simple, common living of all France; because, if they were safe, I could believe that some day peace and content would come back to France. When the Germans began to roll over France in a gray, noisome flood of force and theft, burning and rapine, I could see it, because I knew the look of the land as one knows a beloved face and because I could see the Lecontier family, running away, as if they were the thieves, or else standing to face who knows what. And the picture seemed unbelievable; no written account, however vivid, could make me really certain that the most brutal war of all the ages had come, that we, safe on our side of the Atlantic, were not merely stifling in a dread nightmare.

is

Once aboard the Finland, the civilian atmosphere of America quite disappeared and we had entered the first stretch of the vista that led to war. There was another writer, with England as his objective, not France. There were two young men, going over to drive ambulances. There was a Belgian officer, crossing by way of England to his company. There were Englishmen returning home to enlist; others back from missions and errands of sorts, all intending to help in the cause of the Allies. There were the mothers and wives and daughters of Canadian officers, eager to keep as close as they could to the men they loved.

From the first, this sea voyage was like no other any of us had ever taken. We had broken off abruptly from America, where scarcely anyone actually realized the war, and, journeying between sea and sky, our minds were being swept bare, as it were, ready for the impressions of life determined by war, and war only. It was chiefly of the war that we talked. As the days passed there were a few of us who spoke of our concerns in America as if they did not belong to us any more; some day they might be reassumed after strange adventuring. Meantime, since lives cannot be suspended, we built up a background of shipboard living. The passengers showed each other their particular types of life-saving waist-coats, capable of being puffed out with buoying air, and with neat pockets for flasks of brandy.

In the staterooms our life-belts were placed where we could easily get them, and stewards hovered about to show us how to put them on, and to relate to us stories of how they had seen this or that Norwegian or Dutch vessel submarined off the coast of Ireland. On deck every day there was fire-drill and boat-drill among the crew, and whoever feared the menace of floating mines might have feared the frailty of some of those sailors, — sallow and dissipated and consumptive most of them looked. Doubtless, the best of their kind had already enlisted. I was sure we should not meet misadventure; nevertheless, I was glad that the lifeboat to which I had been assigned was to be manned by the strongest and soberest looking of the sailors. I selected, as my bit of precious human salvage, a little girl who weighed about the same as my elder godson Martin. If I could lift Martin in and out of a bathtub, and carry him on my back up and down stairs, I was sure I could climb down a long slippery ladder into a lifeboat with that blue-eyed Canadian child about my neck.

And all the time, as we ploughed our blue way towards England, it was not that land I was seeing, but France, opalescent and lovely, the Marne valley with its red-roofed villages, huddling cosily at the feet of the hills, and its long strips of sloping fields, — France, the Marne valley, and the little home of the Lecontiers, perhaps safe, with madame waiting at the doorway to welcome me,

i7 pretending to remember me, whether she did or not; and perhaps not safe, only a wreck of stones and splintered trees. It was that which I saw, rather than the little Canadian children racing up and down the decks, or the Belgian officer, conducting a concentrated flirtation with the prettiest woman on board, or the inscrutable grass widow, pretending to be interested in the English lawyer who was so slow and dull, so dreadfully the-yearbefore-last in all his processes, that we marvelled at the lady's fortitude.

When we got into the mine and submarine zone a certain increased tensity of feeling was obvious. People laughed a little more than usual, or talked a degree more jerkily, or flitted restlessly from topic to topic. The lifeboats were swung out over the sides of the ship, and we took to staring at them as if we had never seen them before. The ship was more than ever brightly illuminated, especially the incandescent flag picked out on both sides, for this was in the days before we were in the war, before the most ruthless submarining had begun, and when American passenger ships courted publicity, advertised their nationality. Nervous passengers wore their life-belts all night, and the mother of my little Canadian protege decided that, in case of a submarine, she would prefer to have a man save her child rather than me. The officers became more indefinite in their replies to questions, and the stewards had an uncomfortable way of offering assurance of safety as if they did not wholly believe what they said, but did wholly relish the situation.

Two melting summer nights, star-sown; two mellow days, with passengers dressed in unduly warm clothes, gazing over the sea in search of periscopes and those barrel-marked, death-dealing mines. Then the first land, changing from gray to pink. It made us forget possible danger, reminded us that our eyes were sea weary. We gazed at it hungrily, feasting on lighthouses and farms, until presently it all grew familiar, and we went below to finish our final packing. Green slopes and towns; the harbor outside of Liverpool, the slow entrance, when we passed a battleship, destroyer and merchant vessels, painted black. Then the dock, where we saw our first men in khaki, and some men in bright blue, who were convalescent soldiers. How quietly they stood on the dock, and yet what dread action they had seen! What sights and feelings they knew that they could never tell us, and never make us understand if they did tell us. A strange dock, this, changed from its civilian coloring by the uniforms.

Below, then, to be quizzed by the alien-inspectors. Two long tables, and officers with weapons and stern faces. I was well supplied with letters, and, though an American citizen, I was British born, and still I had a guilty feeling as if maybe I had come over to embarrass England and France. Echoes floated out to us of stiff examinations and the inscrutable grass widow forgot her reticence and expressed herself in no uncertain terms about the absurdity of such grilling. The English faces remained unmoved, — but I should have liked to warn her!

My turn; my passport scrutinized, my "to whom it may concern " letters read. Then question upon question, in which it was easy to read the fact that spies had been taken in England who had apparently come over to write articles in favor of the Allies. How long did I wish to stay? And why had I come? And what was I going to write? I told them my father had been a Canadian officer, and that 1 had Irish cousins leading companies at Gallipoli and on the Somme. That caused a little softening. More softening when I showed some letters from my Irish relatives, bemoaning the Sinn Fein rebellion, and most of all when, by chance, there slipped from a flap of my hand-bag a crumpled bit of paper. It was a statement to the effect that the Saturday Evening Post was enclosing a substantial check for a story entitled, " You Can Always Bluff 'Em." The size of that check should have convinced them that some editors thought I was fit to write alone. But no ; it was the chance the title gave the chief officer to make a joke.

" If you 're not all right," he said, " you can't bluff us. Haw, haw, haw! "

" Ha ! ha ! ha ! " said I gaily, for I knew that joke had passed me.

I am afraid that officer thought, by my appreciation of his words, that he had made a great impression upon me. And indeed he had! He was so much funnier than he dreamed !

Passed I was, and with the conviction that when we Americans got into the war we should do well to take example by the British thoroughness in guarding against spies. The other correspondent joined me, his dark eyes smiling; he had been thoroughly grilled, he said, but he had told them he did n't expect, through his writings, to put a dent in the British empire. We said good-bye, then, to the Finland, and wished good luck to the officers and stewards. Ashore, next, before the customs officers. My man was Irish.

" You Ve no cigars or cigarettes ma'am, of course? " he said.

" Just a few for the soldiers," I murmured.

He looked at me stonily, and then winked.

" I did n't hear what you said, ma'am. You have no cigars or cigarettes? "

" There might be a broken handful," I replied.

" Nothing dutiable," he said, smearing grimy white chalk on the cleanest portion of my trunk, " but the next time you cross, ma'am, let someone else do your packing, if you have n't the conscience to stretch the truth, like, for the sake of the soldier boys smoking this London trash they sell you."

The hotel then, and dinner, the late comers from the ship reporting that the grass widow had not been allowed to land, and would have to go back, three days hence, on the Finland, to America. We expressed our opinion of the English lawyer who had not tried to help her. Then a group of us set out for the police station to show our passports and register. We felt our way along pitch-black streets, moving slowly among groups of soldiers and civilians. So often a soldier walked with a girl, their arms entwined; they were snatching their happiness under the ribs of death, and what puritan would have been harsh enough to wish they had had more regard for convention? At the police station the inspector roundly scolded us because we had not come sooner.

That night I dreamed not of England and of the dusky gold of the men in khaki, but of the valley of the Marne, and of soldiers in horizon-blue, marching past the farmhouse where the Lecontiers lived, — if, indeed, they still lived ! And all next morning, when we journeyed down to London, I kept seeing not the walls of Chester, or green English fields, or little rows of factory houses, or rich rear gardens of little village homes; but I saw France. England was brave, superb, — but France was calling me.

No land has a monopoly of bravery. The Germans are brave, who go out with their officers sheltering behind them, and die for love of their fatherland — fed on lies and hatred. No country can be braver than England. Her sailors sweep the seas ; her women and old men do the bulk of the civilian labor; and the men in khaki " carryon " at the front; so many of them sedentary men who used to be in offices and behind counters, whose greatest and only adventure in life was to make ends meet from week to week; whose chief triumph was to beat the next-door neighbor at flower raising. The men who work and live and die together at the front, gentles and simples, prove to us of what great stuff poor little man is made.