War's Dark Frame/The Advance
CHAPTER XXI
THE ADVANCE
THE grey and crimson tints of all these phases colour Europe too morbidly. There is no escape. When, on my way back to America, I reached Bordeaux, the gay southern city seemed at first to offer with a smile just that cvasion which every one who sees the war with an intimate understanding must narrowly crave. German prisoners, working in the fields and on the roads in the outskirts, were, to be sure, a reminder; but they appeared to have borrowed something from the warm, bland countryside to which they had been transplanted. Their faces were without anger or regret. They seemed happier than the free men condemned to the trenches.
In Bordeaux itself there were fewer uniforms than one sees to the north and less of the eternal military display in shop windows. There was a much heralded theatrical production that night, and, announced for Sunday, an open air performance of “Samson and Delilah."
But almost immediately the black war shadow showed itself. There was uncertainty as to when the boat would sail; a promise, ever more clearly defined, of an extended delay; a sense of lurking danger at the mouth of the Garonne.
And the next morning, when I stepped from my hotel, I heard the throaty music of bugles, and I saw march past thousands of Senegalese, just landed and about to entrain for the front. Beneath red fezzes their black and childish faces shown with the heat. They swung along with a naïve pride. One questioned if they foresaw anything of the facts.
America, with its lights and its careless pleasure-seeking, attained a visionary quality. Was it possible such a place actually existed? At first one was happy at the prospect of that refuge, but the bugles continued, blaring the truth of this war, and one became ashamed, reading in such a state a vital wrong which sooner or later would have to be paid for.
As the gangway from pier to ship in New York had shown itself to be the threshold of war, so, too, it was apparent, would it prove itself the only exit. For on the boat, sitting in the steamer chair next to mine, occupying a seat at the same table, was a young fellow from Brooklyn, decorated with Croix de Guerre the Medaille Militaire.
He moved about only infrequently because of the artificial leg to which he failed to accustom himself.
I tried to sound the impulse that had urged him to leave a broker's office to enlist in the Foreign Legion. He could only express it in this way: "I wanted a look in at the last war."
One sought to vindicate his anxiety and his optimism.
Morcover, he was very modest about his medals.
There were other soldiers who had been decorated—either French-Americans on permission, or poor devils like the boy from the Foreign Legion, cast into the vast and pitiful slag heap of war.
There was a wrinkled Canadian-Belgian in the steerage.
"I am fifty-six," he lamented. "I have been wounded three times, but each time I have gone back to the trenches. Now because they say my lungs are weakened they won't let me fight any more. That is absurd. And it was I who destroyed the bridge at Termonde. The fuse had been cut, and the Boches were coming across, firing their machine guns from behind shields of mattresses. I crawled along inside a metal cask to the point where the fuse had been cut. And I lighted the broken end. Pouf! You should have heard that! You should have seen that!"
He lifted the medal of St. George which was pinned to his rough tunic.
“The King himself," he said proudly, “placed that there, and there are few who have won it."
So through the tiresome voyage there was no escape. Then one afternoon we steamed into New York harbour, and I saw a city that seemed proud of an incomprehensible ignorance of the meaning of war.
The dusk thickened and lights flashed in a strange extravagance. Through the streets, as I drove uptown, passed laughing men and women, in and out of restaurants, into theatres and dance halls. It was like a city, uninstructed in reality.
After a time the sense of wrong vanished. One watched these men and women with a quick sympathy, limiting the period of their carelessness. For a question had survived through the months in Europe:
How long before we, too, will be at war?"
As I drove on the question drifted inevitably into a statement, brutal and unescapable:
“We, too, will be at war. It will not be long."
THE END