All the night before I had wakened at intervals to heavy cannonading
and the sharp cracking of _mitrailleuse_. We were well behind the
line, but the wind was coming from the direction of the battlefield.
The start was made from in front of General Foch's headquarters. He
himself put me in the car, and bowed an _au revoir_.
"You will see," he said, "the French soldier in the field, and you
will see him cheerful and well. You will find him full also of
invincible courage and resolution."
And all that he had said, I found. I found the French soldiers smiling
and cheerful and ruddy in the most wretched of billets. I found them
firing at the enemy, still cheerful, but with a coolness of courage
that made my own shaking nerves steady themselves.
Today, when that very part of the line I visited is, as was expected
when I was there, bearing the brunt of the German attack in the most
furious fighting of the war, I wonder, of those French soldiers who
crowded round to see the first woman they had beheld for months, how
many are lying on that muddy battlefield? What has happened on that
road, guarded by buried quick-firers, that stretched to the German
trenches beyond the poplar trees? Did the "rabbit trap" do its work?
Only for a time, I think, for was it not there that the Germans broke
through? Did the Germans find and silence that concealed battery of
seventy-five-millimetre guns under its imitation hedge? Who was in the
tree lookout as the enemy swarmed across, and did he get away?
Except for the constant road repairing there was little to see during
the first part of the journey.
Pages:
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218