“Oui. C’est pour la France.”
The French captain turned away and I could see that he pitied those comrades of his as we went over cratered earth to the village of Neuville St.-Vaast.
“Poor fellows,” he said, presently. “Not even a cup of hot coffee! … That is war! Blood and misery. Glory, yes—afterward! But at what a price!”
So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once with a fine church, old in history, a schoolhouse, a town hall, many little streets of comfortable houses under the shelter of the friendly old hill of Vimy, and within easy walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish heap mingled with unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies’ perambulators, bits of dead bodies, and shattered farm-carts.
Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a heavy burden lay under a blood-soaked blanket.
“It is a bad wound?” asked the captain.
The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and uncovered a face, waxen, the color of death. It was the face of a handsome man with a pointed beard, breathing snuffily through his nose.
“He may live as far as the dressing station,” said one of the Frenchmen. “It was a trench-mortar which blew a hole in his body just now, over there.”
The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sandbags at the end of a street of ruin.
Two other men walked slowly toward us with a queer, hobbling gait. Both of them were wounded in the legs, and had tied rags round their wounds tightly. They looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as they passed, with brooding eyes.
“The German trench-mortars are very evil,” said the captain.
We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sandbags to look at the German lines cut into the lower slopes of Vimy, and thrust out by communication trenches to the edge of the village in which we walked. A boy officer came up out of a hole and saluted the captain, who stepped back and said, in an emotional way:
“Tiens! C’est toi, Edouard?”
“Oui, mon Capitaine.”
The boy had a fine, delicate, Latin face, with dark eyes and long, black eyelashes.
“You are a lieutenant, then? How does it go, Edouard?”
“It does not go,” answered the boy like that French sergeant in Ablain St.-Nazaire. “This is a bad place. I lose my men every day. There were three killed yesterday, and six wounded. Today already there are two killed and ten wounded.”
Something broke in his voice.
“Ce n’est pas bon du tout, du tout!” (“It is not good at all, at all!”)
The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to cheer him.
“Courage, mon vieux!”
The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in deep, greasy mud. Sharp stabs of flame vomited out of the slopes of Vimy. There was the high, long-drawn scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette. Batteries of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their shells cut through the air above us like scythes. The cauldron in this pit of war was being stirred up. Another wounded poilu was carried past us, covered by a bloody blanket like the other one. From slimy sandbags and wet ruins came the sickening stench of human corruption. A boot with some pulp inside protruded from a mud-bank where I stood, and there was a human head, without eyes or nose, black, and rotting in the puddle of a shell-hole. Those were relics of a battle on May 9th, a year before, when swarms of boys, of the ’16 class, boys of eighteen, the flower of French youth, rushed forward from the crossroads at La Targette, a few hundred yards away, to capture these ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They captured them, and it cost them seven thousand in killed and wounded—at least three thousand dead. They fought like young demons through the flaming streets. They fell in heaps under the German barrage-fire. Machine-guns cut them down as though they were ripe corn under the sickle. But these French boys broke the Prussian Guard that day.
Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing below earth at the Labyrinth—sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German saphead, by frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight with their teeth and hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sandbags. So for something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the Labyrinth, until in February of ’16 they went away after greeting our khaki men who came into their old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in disused trenches below Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down and uncovered them.
XIV
It was then, in that February of ’15, that the city of Arras passed for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of wounded (three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets where their laughter and music were
