Part 10

"Are they coming?" grinned a sailor. "Let them come. We are ready."

We learned to know many of the Fusiliers Marins and to grow fond of them. How else could it be when we went and got them, sick and wounded, dying and dead, two, six, ten of them a day, for many weeks, and brought them in to the Red Cross post for a dressing, and then on to the hospital? I remember a young man in our ambulance. His right foot was shot away, and the leg above was wounded. He lay unmurmuring for all the tossing of the road over the long miles of the ride. We lifted him from the stretcher, which he had wet with his blood, into the white cot in "Hall 15" of Zuydcoote Hospital. The wound and the journey had gone deeply into his vitality. As he touched the bed, his control ebbed, and he became violently sick at the stomach. I stooped to carry back the empty stretcher. He saw I was going away, and said, "Thank you." I knew I should not see him again, not even if I came early next day.

There is one unfading impression made on me by those wounded. If I call it good nature, I have given only one element in it. It is more than that: it is a dash of fun. They smile, they wink, they accept a light for their cigarette. It is not stoicism at all. Stoicism is a grim holding on, the jaws clenched, the spirit dark, but enduring. This is a thing of wings. They will know I am not making light of their pain in writing these words. I am only saying that they make light of it. The judgment of men who are soon to die is like the judgment of little children. It does not tolerate foolish words. Of all the ways of showing you care that they suffer there is nothing half so good as the gift of tobacco. As long as I had any money to spend, I spent it on packages of cigarettes.

When the Marin officers found out we were the same people that had worked with them at Melle five months before, they invited my wife and three other nurses to luncheon in a Nieuport cellar. Their eye brightens at sight of a woman, but she is as safe with them as with a cowboy or a Quaker. The guests were led down into a basement, an eighteen foot room, six feet high. The sailors had covered the floor and papered the walls with red carpet. A tiny oil stove added to the warmth of that blazing carpet. More than twenty officers and doctors crowded into the room, and took seats at the table, lighted by two lamps. There were a dozen plates of patisserie, a choice of tea, coffee, or chocolate, all hot, white and red wine, and then champagne. An orderly lifted in a little wooden yacht, bark-rigged, fourteen inches long, with white painted sails. A nurse spilled champagne over the tiny ship, till it was drenched, and christened. The chief doctor made a speech of thanks. Then the ship went around the table, and each guest wrote her name on the sails. The party climbed out into the garden, where the shells were going high overhead like snowballs. In amongst the blackened flowers, a 16-inch shell had left a hole of fifty feet diameter. One could have dropped two motor cars into the cavity.

Who but Marins would have devised a celebration for us on July 4? The commandant, the captain, and a brace of lieutenants opened eleven bottles of champagne in the Cafe du Sport at Coxyde in honor of our violation of neutrality. It was little enough we were doing for those men, but they were moved to graceful speech. We were hard put to it, because one had to tell them that much of the giving for a hundred years had been from France to us, and our showing in this war is hardly the equal of the aid they sent us when we were invaded by Hessian troops and a German king.

Marins whom we know have the swift gratitude of simple natures, not too highly civilized to show when they are pleased. After we had sent a batch of their wounded by hospital train from Adinkerke, the two sailors, who had helped us, invited my American friend and me into the estaminet across the road from the station, and bought us drinks for an hour. We had been good to their mates, so they wanted to be good to us.

When we lived in barraquement, just back of the admiral's house, our cook was a Marin with a knack at omelettes. If we had to work through the night, going into black Nieuport, and down the ten-mile road to Zuydcoote, returning weary at midnight, a brave supper was laid out for us of canned meats, wines, and jellies--all set with the touch of one who cared. It was no hasty, slapped-down affair. We were carrying his comrades, and he was helping us to do it.

It was an officer of a quite other regiment who, one time when we were off duty, asked us to carry him to his post in the Dunes. We made the run for him, and, as he jumped from the car, he offered us a franc. Marins pay back in friendship. The Red Cross station to which we reported, Poste de Secours des Marins, was conducted by Monsieur le Docteur Rolland, and Monsieur Le Doze. Our workers were standing guests at their officers' mess. The little sawed-off sailor in the Villa Marie where I was billetted made coffee for two of us each morning.

Our friends have the faults of young men, flushed with life. They are scornful of feeble folk, of men who grow tired, who think twice before dying. They laugh at middle age. The sentries amuse them, the elderly chaps who duck into their caves when a few shells are sailing overhead. They have no charity for frail nerves. They hate races who don't rally to a man when the enemy is hitting the trail. They must wait for age to gain pity, and the Bretons will never grow old. They are killed too fast. And yet, as soon as I say that, I remember their rough pity for their hurt comrades. They are as busy as a hospital nurse in laying a blanket and swinging the stretcher for one of their own who has been "pinked." They have a hovering concern. I have had twenty come to the ambulance to help shove in a "blesse," and say good-by to him, and wave to him as long as the road left him in their sight. The wounded man, unless his back bound him down, would lift his head from the stretcher, to give back their greetings. It was an eager exchange between the whole men and the injured one. They don't believe they can be broken till the thing comes, and there is curiosity to see just what has befallen one like themselves.

When it came my time to say good-by, my sailor friend, who had often stopped by my car to tell me that all was going well, ran over to share in the excitement. I told him I was leaving, and he gave me a smile of deep-understanding amusement. Tired so soon? That smile carried a live consciousness of untapped power, of the record he and his comrades had made. It showed a disregard of my personal feelings, of all adult human weakness. That was the picture I carried away from the Nieuport line--the smiling boy with his wounded arm, alert after his year of war, and more than a little scornful of one who had grown weary in conditions so prosperous for young men.

I rode away from him, past the Coxyde encampment of his comrades. There they were as I had often seen them, with the peddlers cluttering their camp--candy men, banana women; a fringe of basket merchants about their grim barracks; a dozen peasants squatting with baskets of cigarettes, fruit, vegetables, foolish, bright trinkets. And over them bent the boys, dozens of them in blue blouses, stooping down to pick up trays, fingering red apples and shining charms, chaffing, dickering, shoving one another, the old loves of their childhood still tangled in their being.

So when I am talking about the sailors as if they were heroes, suddenly something gay comes romping in. I see them again, as I have so often seen them in the dunes of Flanders, and what I see is a race of children.

"Don't forget we are only little ones," they say. "We don't die; we are just at play."

"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"

Where does the comfort of the trenches lie? What solace do the soldiers find for a weary life of unemployment and for sudden death? Of course, they find it in the age-old things that have always sufficed, or, if these things do not here altogether suffice, at least they help. For a certain few out of every hundred men, religion avails. Some of our dying men were glad of the last rites. Some wore their Catholic emblems. The quiet devout men continued faithful as they had been at home. Art is playing the true part it plays at all times of fundamental need. The men busy themselves with music, with carving, and drawing. Security and luxury destroy art, for it is no longer a necessity when a man is stuffed with foods, and his fat body whirled in hot compartments from point to point of a tame world. But when he tumbles in from a gusty night out of a trenchful of mud, with the patter from slivers of shell, then he turns to song and color, odd tricks with the knife, and the tales of an ancient adventure. After our group had brought food and clothing to a regiment, I remember the pride with which one of the privates presented to our head nurse a sculptured group, done in mud of the Yser.

But the greatest thing in the world to soldiers is plain comradeship. That is where they take their comfort. And the expression of that comradeship is most often found in the social smoke. The meager happiness of fighting-men is more closely interwoven with tobacco than with any other single thing. To rob them of that would be to leave them poor indeed. It would reduce their morale. It would depress their cheery patience. The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each one of several needs. It is the medium by which the average man maintains normality at an abnormal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves, to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco connects a man with the human race, and his own past life. It gives him a little thing to do in a big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of sharp pain. It brings back his cafe evenings, when black horror is reaching out for him.

If you have weathered around the world a bit, you know how everywhere strange situations turn into places for plain men to feel at home. Sailors on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out, sit around in the evening glow and take a pipe and a chat with the same homely accustomedness, as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle and at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the millions of average men have done to war. They have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible thing, and given it a monotony and regularity of its own. They have smoked away its fighting tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to let mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit. Apparently there is nothing hellish enough to flatten the human spirit. Not all the sprinkled shells and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys of the front line. In this work of lifting clear of horror, tobacco has been a friend to the soldiers of the Great War.

"I wouldn't know a good cigarette if I saw it," said Geoffrey Gilling, after a year of ambulance work at Fumes and Coxyde. He had given up all that makes the life of an upper-class Englishman pleasant, and I think that the deprivation of high-grade smoking material was a severe item in his sacrifice.

Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours each day in a filthy room in a noisy wine-shop, waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The dreariness of it made B---- petulant and T---- mournfully silent, and finally left me melancholy. But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out for his big can of naval tobacco, slipped to him by the sailors at Dunkirk when the commissariat officer wasn't looking, and would light his short stocky pipe, shaped very much like himself, and then we were all off together on a jaunt around the world. He had driven nearly all known "makes" of motor-car over most of the map, apparently about one car to each country. Twelve months of bad roads in a shelled district had left him full of talk, as soon as he was well lit.

Up at Nieuport, last northern stand of the Allied line, a walking merchant would call each day, a basket around his throat, and in the hamper chocolate, fruit, and tobacco. A muddy, unshaven Brittany sailor, out of his few sous a week, bought us cigars. The less men have, the more generous they are. That is an old saying, but it drove home to me when I had poor men do me courtesy day by day for five months. As we motored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the night, we passed hundreds of silent men trudging through the mud of the gutter. They were troops that had been relieved who were marching back for a rest. As soon as they came out of the zone where no sound can be made and no light shown, we saw here and there down the invisible ranks the sudden flare of a match, and then the glow in the cup of the hand, as the man prepared to cheer himself.

A more somber and lonely watch even than that of these French sailors was the vigil kept by our good Belgian friend, Commandant Gilson, in the shattered village of Pervyse. With his old Maltese cat, he prowled through the wrecked place till two and three of the morning, waiting for Germans to cross the flooded fields. For him cigarettes were an endless chain that went through his life. From the expiring stub he lit his fresh smoke, as if he were maintaining a vestal flame. He kept puffing till the live butt singed his upturned mustache. He squinted his eyes to escape the ascending smoke.

Always the cigarette for him and for the other men. Our cellar of nurses in Pervyse kept a stock of pipes and of cigarettes ready for tired soldiers off duty. The pipes remained as intact as a collection in a museum. The cigarettes never equaled the demand. We once took out a carful of supplies to 300 Belgian soldiers. We gave them their choice of cigarettes or smoking tobacco, and about 250 of them selected cigarettes. That barrack vote gives the popularity of the cigarette among men of French blood. Some cigars, some pipes, but everywhere the shorter smoke. Tobacco and pipe exhaust precious pocket room. The cigarette is portable. Cigars break and peel in the kneading motion of walking and crouching. But the cigarette is protected in its little box. And yet, rather than lose a smoke, a soldier will carry one lonesome cigarette, rained on and limp and fraying at the end, drag it from the depths of a kit, dry it out, and have a go. For, after all, it isn't for theoretical advantages over larger, longer smokes he likes it, but because it is fitted to his temperament. It is a French and Belgian smoke, short-lived and of a light touch, as dear to memory and liking as the wines of La Champagne.

Twice, in dramatic setting, I have seen tobacco intervene to give men a release from overstrained nerves. Once it was at a skirmish. Behind a street defense, crouched thirty Belgian soldiers. Shrapnel began to burst over us, and the bullets tumbled on the cobbles. With each puff of the shrapnel, like a paper bag exploding, releasing a handful of white smoke, the men flattened against the walls and dove into the open doors. The sound of shrapnel is the same sound as hailstones, a crisp crackle as they strike and bounce. We ran and picked them up. They were blunted by smiting on the paving. Any one of them would have plowed into soft flesh and found the bone and shattered it. They seem harmless because they make so little noise. They don't scream and wail and thunder. Our guns, back on the hillocks of the Ghent road, grew louder and more frequent. Each minute now was cut into by a roar, or a fainter rumble. The battle was on. Our barricaded street was a pocket in the storm, like the center of a typhoon.

Yonder we could see the canal, fifty feet away, at the foot of our street. On the farther side behind the river front houses lay the Germans, ready to sally out and charge. It would be all right if they came quickly. But a few hours of waiting for them on an empty stomach, and having them disappoint us, was wearing. We wished they would hurry and have it over with, or else go away for good. Civilians stumbling and bleeding went past us.

And that was how the morning went by, heavy footed, unrelieved, with a sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror. It was peaceful, in a way, but, at the heart of the calm, a menace. So we overlaid the tension with casual petty acts. We made an informal pool of our resources in tobacco, each man sharing with his neighbor, till nearly every one of us was puffing away, and deciding there was nothing to this German attack, after all. A smoke makes just the difference between sticking it out or acting the coward's part.

Each one of us in a lifetime has a day of days, when external event is lively, and our inner mood dances to the tune. Some of us will perhaps always feel that we spent our day on October 21, 1914. For we were allowed to go into a town that fell in that one afternoon and to come out again alive. It was the afternoon when Dixmude was leveled from a fair upstanding city to a heap of scorched brick and crumbled plaster. The enemy guns from over the Yser were accurate on its houses.

We received our first taste of the dread to come, while we were yet a little way out. In the road ahead of us, a shell had just splashed an artillery convoy. Four horses, the driver, and the splintered wood of the wagon were all worked together into one pulp, so that our car skidded on it. We entered the falling town of Dixmude. It was a thick mess into which we rode, with hot smoke and fine masonry dust blowing into the eyes. Houses around us crumpled up at one blast, and then shot a thick brown cloud of dust, and out of the cloud a high central flame that leaped and spread. With the wailing of shells in the air, every few seconds, the thud and thunder of their impact, the scattering of the shattered metal, it was one of the hot, thorough bombardments of the war. It cleared the town of troops, after tearing their ranks. But it left wounded men in the cellar of the Hotel de Ville. The Grand Place and the Hotel were the center of the fire. Here we had to wait fifteen minutes, while the wounded were made ready for our two cars. It was then we turned to tobacco as to a friend. I remember the easement that came when I found I had cigars in my waistcoat pocket. The act of lighting a cigar, and pulling at it briskly, was a relief.

There was a second of time when we could hear a shell, about to burst close, before it struck. It came, sharpening its nose on the air, making a shrill whistle with a moan in it, that gathered volume as it neared. There was a menace in the sound. It seemed to approach in a vast enveloping mass that can't be escaped, filling all out-doors, and sure to find you. It was as if the all-including sound were the missile itself, with no hiding place offered. And yet the shell is generally a little three-or-four inch thing, like a flower-pot, hurtling through the scenery. But bruised nerves refuse to listen to reason, and again and again I ducked as I heard that high wail, believing I was about to be struck.