The Marne: A Tale of the War

Troy and Jacks perched on a packing-box, and talked a little with their neighbours; but presently they were interrupted by the noise of a motor stopping outside. There was a stir at the mouth of the cavern, and a girl said eagerly: "Here she comes!"

Instantly the cellar woke up. The soldiers' faces grew young again, they flattened themselves laughingly against the walls near the entrance, the door above was cautiously opened, and a girl in a long blue cloak appeared at the head of the stairs.

"Well, boys—you see I managed it!" she cried; and Troy recognized the piercing accents and azure gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick.

"She managed it!" the whole cellar roared as one man, drowning her answer in a cheer. And, "Of course I did!" she continued, laughing and nodding right and left as she made her triumphant way down the lane of khaki, to what, at her appearance, had somehow promptly become the stage at the farther end of a packed theatre. The elderly Y.M.C.A. official who accompanied her puffed out his chest like a general and blinked knowingly behind his gold eye-glasses.

Troy's first movement had been one of impatience. He hated all that Miss Warlick personified, and hated it most of all on this sacred soil, and at this fateful moment, with the iron wings of doom clanging so close above their heads. But it would have been almost impossible to fight his way out through the crowd that had closed in behind her—and he stayed.

The cheering subsided, she gained her improvised platform—a door laid on some biscuit-boxes—and the recitation began.

She gave them all sorts of things, ranging from grave to gay, and extracting from the sentimental numbers a peculiarly piercing effect that hurt Troy like the twinge of a dental instrument. And her audience loved it all, indiscriminately and voraciously, with souls hungry for the home-flavour and long nurtured on what Troy called "cereal-fiction." One had to admit that Miss Warlick knew her public, and could play on every chord.

It might have been funny if it had not been so infinitely touching. They were all so young, so serious, so far from home, and bound on a quest so glorious! And there overhead, just above them, brooded and clanged the black wings of their doom.... Troy's mockery was softened to tenderness, and he felt, under the hard shell of his youthful omniscience, the stir of all the things to which the others were unconsciously responding.

"And now, by special request, Miss Warlick is going to say a few words," the elderly eye-glassed officer importantly announced.

Ah, what a pity! If only she had ended on that last jolly chorus, so full of artless laughter and tears! Troy remembered her dissertations on the steamer, and winced at a fresh display of such fatuity in such a scene.

She had let the cloak slip from her shoulders, and stepped to the edge of her unsteady stage. Her eyes burned large in a face grown suddenly grave.... For a moment she reminded him again of Sophy Wicks.

"Only a few words, really," she began apologetically; and the cellar started a cheer of protest.

"No—not that kind. Something different...." She paused long enough to let the silence prepare them: sharp little artist that she was! Then she leaned forward. "This is what I want to say. I've come from the French front—pretty near the edge. They're dying there, boys—dying by thousands, now, this minute.... But that's not it—I know: you want me to cut it out—and I'm going to.... But this is why I began that way; because it was my first sight of—things of that sort. And I had to tell you–"

She stopped, pale, her pretty mouth twitching.

"What I really wanted to say is this. Since I came to Europe, nearly a year ago, I've got to know the country they're dying for—and I understand why they mean to go on and on dying—if they have to—till there isn't one of them left.

"Boys—I know France now—and she's worth it! Don't you make any mistake!

"I have to laugh now when I remember what I thought of France when I landed. My! How d'you suppose she'd got on so long without us? Done a few things too—poor little toddler! Well—it was time we took her by the hand, and showed her how to behave. And I wasn't the only one either; I guess most of us thought we'd have to teach her her letters. Maybe some of you boys right here felt that way too?"

A guilty laugh, and loud applause.

"Thought so," said Miss Warlick, smiling.

"Well," she continued, "there wasn't hardly anything I wasn't ready to teach them. On the steamer coming out with us there was a lot of those Amb'lance boys. My! How I gassed to them. I said the French had got to be taught how to love their mothers—I said they hadn't any home-feeling—and didn't love children the way we do. I've been round among them some since then, in the hospitals, and I've seen fellows lying there shot 'most to death, and their little old mothers in white caps arriving from 'way off at the other end of France. Well, those fellows know how to see their mothers coming even if they're blind, and how to hug 'em even if their arms are off.... And the children—the way they go on about the children! Ever seen a French soldier yet that didn't have a photograph of a baby stowed away somewhere in his dirty uniform? I never have. I tell you, they're white! And they're fighting as only people can who feel that way about mothers and babies. The way we're going to fight; and maybe we'll prove it to 'em sooner than any of us think....

"Anyhow, I wanted to get this off my chest to-night; not for you, only for myself. I didn't want to have a shell get me before I'd said 'Veever la France!' before all of you.

"See here, boys—the Marcellaze!"

She snatched a flag from the wall, drawing herself up to heroic height; and the whole cellar joined her in a roar.

X

The next morning Jacks dragged Troy out of bed by the feet. The room was still dark, and through the square of the low window glittered a bunch of stars.

"Hurry call to Montmirail—step lively!" Jacks ordered, his voice thick with sleep.

All the old names; with every turn of the wheel they seemed to be drawing nearer and nearer to the ravaged spot of earth where Paul Gantier slept his faithful sleep. Strange if, to-day of all days, Troy should again stand by his friend's grave.

They pushed along eastward under the last stars, the roll of the cannon crashing through the quiet dawn. The birds flew up with frightened cries from the trees along the roadside; rooks cawed their warning from clump to clump, and gathered in the sky in dark triangles flying before the danger.

The east began to redden through the dust-haze of the cloudless air. As they advanced the road became more and more crowded, and the ambulance was caught in the usual dense traffic of the front: artillery, field-kitchens, motor-trucks, horse-wagons, hay-carts packed with refugees, and popping motor-cycles zigzagging through the tangle of vehicles. The movement seemed more feverish and uncertain than usual, and now and then the road was jammed, and curses, shouts and the crack of heavy whips sounded against the incessant cannonade that hung its iron curtain above the hills to the north-east. The faces of soldiers and officers were unshaved sallow drawn with fatigue and anxiety. Women crouched sobbing on their piled-up baggage, and here and there, by the roadside, a little country cart had broken down, and the occupants sat on the bank watching the confusion like impassive lookers-on.

Suddenly, in the thickest of the struggle, a heavy lorry smashed into Troy's ambulance, and he felt the unmistakable wrench of the steering-gear. The car shook like a careening boat, and then righted herself and stopped.

"Oh, hell!" shouted Jacks in a fury. The two lads jumped down, and in a few minutes they saw that they were stranded beyond remedy. Tears of anger rushed into Troy's eyes. On this day of days he was not even to accomplish his own humble job!

Another ambulance of their own formation overtook them, and it was agreed that Jacks, who was the sharper of the two, was to get a lift to the nearest town, and try to bring back a spare part, or, failing that, pick up some sort of a car in which they could continue their work.

Troy was left by the roadside. Hour after hour he sat there waiting and cursing his fate. When would Jacks be back again? Not at all, most likely; it was ten to one he would be caught on the way and turned on to some more pressing job. He knew, and Troy knew, that their ambulance was for the time being a hopeless wreck, and would probably have to stick ignominiously in its ditch till some one could go and fetch a spare part from Paris. And meanwhile, what might not be happening nearer by?

The rumble and thump of the cannonade grew more intense; a violent engagement was evidently going on not far off. Troy pulled out his map and tried to calculate how far he was from the front; but the front, at that point, was a wavering and incalculable line. He had an idea that the fighting was much nearer than he or Jacks had imagined. The place at which they had broken down must be about fifteen miles from the Marne. But could it be possible that the Germans had crossed the Marne?

Troy grew hungry, and thrust his hand in his pocket to pull out a sandwich. With it came a letter of his mother's, carried off in haste when he left Paris the previous morning. He re-read it with a mournful smile. "Of course we all know the Allies must win; but the preparations here seem so slow and blundering; and the Germans are still so strong...." (Thump, thump, the artillery echoed: "Strong!") And just at the end of the letter, again; "I do wonder if you'll run across Sophy...."

He lit a cigarette, and shut his eyes and thought. The sight of Miss Warlick had made Sophy Wicks's presence singularly vivid to him: he had fallen asleep thinking of her the night before. How like her to have taken a course at the Presbyterian Hospital without letting any one know! He wondered that he had not suspected, under her mocking indifference, an ardour as deep as his own, and he was ashamed of having judged her as others had, when, for so long, the thought of her had been his torment and his joy. Where was she now, he wondered? Probably in some hospital in the south or the centre: the authorities did not let beginners get near the front, though, of course, it was what all the girls were mad for.... Well, Sophy would do her work wherever it was assigned to her: he did not see her intriguing for a showy post.

Troy began to marvel again at the spell of France—his France! Here was a girl who had certainly not come in quest of vulgar excitement, as so many did: Sophy had always kept herself scornfully aloof from the pretty ghouls who danced and picnicked on the ruins of the world. He knew that her motives, so jealously concealed, must have been as pure and urgent as his own. France, which she hardly knew, had merely guessed at through the golden blur of a six weeks' midsummer trip, France had drawn her with an irresistible pressure; and the moment she had felt herself free she had come. "Whither thou goest will I go, thy people shall be my people...." Yes, France was the Naomi-country that had but to beckon, and her children rose and came....

Troy was exceedingly tired: he stretched himself on the dusty bank, and the noise of the road-traffic began to blend with the cannonade in his whirling brain. Suddenly he fancied the Germans were upon him. He thought he heard the peppering volley of machine-guns, shouts, screams, rifle-shots close at hand....

He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

What he had heard was the cracking of whips and the shouting of carters urging tired farm-horses along. Down a by-road to his left a stream of haggard country people was pouring from the direction of the Marne. This time only a few were in the carts: the greater number were flying on their feet, the women carrying their babies, the old people bent under preposterous bundles, blankets, garden utensils, cages with rabbits, an agricultural prize framed and glazed, a wax wedding-wreath under a broken globe. Sick and infirm people were dragged and shoved along by the older children: a goitred idiot sat in a wheel-barrow pushed by a girl, and laughed and pulled its tongue....

In among the throng Troy began to see the torn blue uniforms of wounded soldiers limping on bandaged legs.... Others too, not wounded, elderly haggard territorials, with powder-black faces, bristling beards, and the horror of the shell-roar in their eyes.... One of them stopped near Troy, and in a thick voice begged for a drink … just a drop of anything, for Gods sake. Others followed, pleading for food and drink. "Gas, gas …" a young artilleryman gasped at him through distorted lips.... The Germans were over the Marne, they told him, the Germans were coming. It was hell back there, no one could stand it.

Troy ransacked the ambulance, found water, brandy, biscuits, condensed milk, and set up an impromptu canteen. But the people who had clustered about him were pushed forward by others crying: "Are you mad to stay here? The Germans are coming!"—and in a feeble panic they pressed on.

One old man, trembling with fatigue, and dragging a shaking brittle old woman, had spied the stretcher beds inside the ambulance, and without asking leave scrambled in and pulled his wife after him. They fell like logs on to the grey blankets, and a livid territorial with a bandaged arm drenched in blood crawled in after them and sank on the floor. The rest of the crowd had surged by.

As he was helping the wounded soldier to settle himself in the ambulance, Troy heard a new sound down the road. It was a deep continuous rumble, the rhythmic growl of a long train of army-trucks. The way must have been cleared to let them by, for there was no break or faltering in the ever-deepening roar of their approach.

A cloud of dust rolled ahead, growing in volume with the growing noise; now the first trucks were in sight, huge square olive-brown motor-trucks stacked high with scores and scores of rosy soldiers. Troy jumped to his feet with a shout. It was an American regiment being rushed to the front!

The refugees and the worn-out blue soldiers fell back before the triumphant advance, and a weak shout went up. The rosy soldiers shouted back, but their faces were grave and set. It was clear that they knew where they were going, and to what work they had been so hurriedly summoned.

"It's hell back there!" a wounded territorial called out, pointing backward over his bandaged shoulder, and another cried: "Vive l'Amérique!"

"Vive la France!" shouted the truckful abreast of Troy, and the same cry burst from his own lungs. A few miles off the battle of the Marne was being fought again, and here were his own brothers rushing forward to help! He felt that his greatest hour had struck.

One of the trucks had halted for a minute just in front of him, marking time, and the lads leaning over its side had seen him, and were calling out friendly college calls.

"Come along and help!" cried one, as the truck got under way again.

Troy glanced at his broken-down motor; then his eye lit on a rifle lying close by in the dust of the roadside. He supposed it belonged to the wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance.

He caught up the rifle, scrambled up over the side with the soldier's help, and was engulfed among his brothers. Furtively he had pulled the ambulance badge from his collar … but a moment later he understood the uselessness of the precaution. All that mattered to any one just then was that he was one more rifle for the front.

XI

On the way he tried to call up half-remembered snatches of military lore.

If only he did not disgrace them by a blunder!

He had talked enough to soldiers, French and American, in the last year: he recalled odd bits of professional wisdom, but he was too excited to piece them together. He was not in the least afraid of being afraid, but his heart sank at the dread of doing something stupid, inopportune, idiotic. His envy of the youths beside him turned to veneration. They had all been in the front line, and knew its vocabulary, its dangers and its dodges.

All he could do was to watch and imitate....

Presently they were all tumbled out of the motors and drawn up by the roadside. An officer bawled unintelligible orders, and the men executed mysterious movements in obedience.

Troy crept close to the nearest soldier, and copied his gestures awkwardly—but no one noticed. Night had fallen, and he was thankful for the darkness. Perhaps by to-morrow morning he would have picked up a few of their tricks. Meanwhile, apparently, all he had to do was to march, march, march, at a sort of break-neck trot that the others took as lightly as one skims the earth in a dream. If it had not been for his pumping heart and his aching bursting feet, Troy at moments would have thought it was a dream....

Rank by rank they pressed forward in the night toward a sky-line torn with intermittent flame.

"We're going toward a battle," Troy sang to himself, "toward a battle, toward a battle...." But the words meant no more to him than the doggerel the soldier was chanting at his elbow.

They were in a wood, slipping forward cautiously, beating their way through the under-growth. The night had grown cloudy, but now and then the clouds broke, and a knot of stars clung to a branch like swarming bees.

At length a halt was called in a clearing, and then the group to which Troy had attached himself was ordered forward. He did not understand the order, but seeing the men moving he followed, like a mascot dog trotting after its company, and they began to beat their way onward, still more cautiously, in little crawling lines of three or four. It reminded Troy of "playing Indian" in his infancy.

"Careful … watch out for 'em …" the soldier next to him whispered, clutching his arm at a noise in the underbrush; and Troy's heart jerked back violently, though his legs were still pressing forward.

They were here, then: they might be close by in the blackness, behind the next tree-hole, in the next clump of bushes—the destroyers of France, old M. Gantier's murderers, the enemy to whom Paul Gantier had given his life! These thoughts slipped confusedly through Troy's mind, scarcely brushing it with a chill wing. His main feeling was one of a base physical fear, and of a newly-awakened moral energy which had the fear by the throat and held it down with shaking hands. Which of the two would conquer, how many yards farther would the resolute Troy drag on the limp coward through this murderous wood? That was the one thing that mattered....

At length they dropped down into a kind of rocky hollow overhung with bushes, and lay there, finger on trigger, hardly breathing. "Sleep a bit if you can—you look beat," whispered the friendly soldier.

Sleep!

Troy's mind was whirling like a machine in a factory blazing with lights. His thoughts rushed back over the miles he had travelled since he had caught up the rifle by the roadside.

"My God!" he suddenly thought, "what am I doing here, anyhow? I'm a deserter."

Yes: that was the name he would go by if ever his story became known. And how should it not become known? He had deserted—deserted not only his job, and his ambulance, and Jacks, who might come back at any moment—it was a dead certainty to him now that Jacks would come back—but also (incredible perfidy!) the poor worn-out old couple and the wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance. He, Troy Belknap, United States Army Ambulance driver, and sworn servant of France, had deserted three sick and helpless people who, if things continued to go badly, would almost certainly fall into the hands of the Germans.... It was too horrible to think of, and so, after a minute or two, he ceased to think of it—at least with the surface of his mind.

"If it's a court-martial it's a court-martial," he reflected; and began to stretch his ears again for the sound of men slipping up in the darkness through the bushes....

But he was really horribly tired, and in the midst of the tension the blaze of lights in his head went out, and he fell into a half-conscious doze. When he started into full consciousness again the men were stirring, and he became aware that the sergeant was calling for volunteers.

Volunteers for what? He didn't know and was afraid to ask. But it became clear to him that the one chance to wash his guilt away (was that funny old-fashioned phrase a quotation, and where did it come from?) was to offer himself for the job, whatever it might be.

The decision once taken, he became instantly calm, happy and alert. He observed the gesture made by the other volunteers and imitated it. It was too dark for the sergeant to distinguish one man from another, and without comment he let Troy fall into the line of men who were creeping up out of the hollow.

The awful cannonade had ceased, and as they crawled along single file between the trees the before-dawn twitter of birds rained down on them like dew, and the woods smelt like the woods at home.

They came to the end of the trees, and guessed that the dark wavering wall ahead was the edge of a wheat-field. Some one whispered that the Marne was just beyond the wheat-field, and that the red flares they saw must be over Château-Thierry.

The momentary stillness laid a reassuring touch on Troy's nerves, and he slipped along adroitly at the tail of the line, alert but cool. Far off the red flares still flecked the darkness, but they did not frighten him. He said to himself: "People are always afraid in their first battle. I'm not the least afraid, so I suppose this is not a battle" … and at the same moment there was a small shrieking explosion followed by a horrible rattle of projectiles that seemed to spring up out of the wheat at their feet.

The men dropped on their bellies and crawled away from it, and Troy crawled after, sweating with fear. He had not looked back, but he knew that some of the men must be lying where they had dropped, and suddenly it occurred to him that it was his business to go and see....

Was it, though? Or would that be disobeying orders again?

The Ambulance driver's instinct awoke in him, and he did not stop to consider, but turned and crawled back, straight back to the place that the horrible explosion had come from. The firing had stopped, but in the thin darkness he saw a body lying in front of him in the flattened wheat. He looked in the direction from which he had come, and saw that the sergeant and the rest of the men were disappearing to the right; then he ramped forward again, forward and forward, till he touched the arm of the motionless man and whispered: "Hi, kid, it's me...."

He tried to rouse the wounded man, to pull him forward, to tow him like a barge along the beaten path in the wheat. But the man groaned and resisted. He was evidently in great pain, and Troy, whom a year's experience in ambulance work had enlightened, understood that he must either be carried away or left where he was.

To carry him it was necessary to stand up, and the night was growing transparent, and the wheat was not more than waist high.

Troy raised his head an inch or two and looked about him. In the east, beyond the wheat, a pallor was creeping upward, drowning the last stars. Any one standing up would be distinctly visible against that pallor. With a sense of horror and reluctance and dismay he lifted the wounded man and stood up. As he did so he felt a small tap on his back, between the shoulders, as if some one had touched him from behind. He half turned to see who it was, and doubled up, slipping down with the wounded soldier in his arms.

XII

Troy, burning with fever, lay on a hospital bed.

He was not very clear where the hospital was, nor how he had got there; and he did not greatly care. All that was left of clearness in his brain was filled with the bitter sense of his failure. He had abandoned his job to plunge into battle, and before he had seen a German or fired a shot he found himself ignominiously laid by the heels in a strange place full of benevolent-looking hypocrites whose least touch hurt him a million times more than the German bullet.

It was all a stupid agitating muddle, in the midst of which he tried in vain to discover what had become of Jacks, what had happened to the ambulance, and whether the old people and the wounded territorial had been heard of. He insisted particularly on the latter point to the cruel shaved faces that were always stooping over him, but they seemed unable to give him a clear answer—or else their cruelty prompted them to withhold what they knew. He groaned and tossed and got no comfort, till, suddenly opening his eyes, he found Jacks sitting by his bed.