Edith Wharton
The Marne: A Tale of the War
III
Then came the Marne, and suddenly the foreigners caught in Paris by the German advance became heroes—or mostly heroines—who had stayed to reassure their beloved city in her hour of need.
"We all owe so much to Paris," murmured Mrs. Belknap, in lovely convalescent clothes, from her sofa-corner. "I'm sure we can none of us ever cease to be thankful for this chance of showing it...."
She had sold her staterooms to a compatriot who happened to be in England, and was now cabling home to suggest to Mr. Belknap that she should spend the winter in France and take a job on a war charity. She was not strong enough for nursing, but she thought it would be delightful to take convalescent officers for drives in the Bois in the noiseless motor. "Troy would love it too," she cabled.
Mr. Belknap, however, was unmoved by these arguments. "Future too doubtful," he cabled back. "Insist on your sailing. Staterooms November tenth paid for. Troy must return to school."
"Future too doubtful" impressed Mrs. Belknap more than "Insist," though she made a larger use of the latter word in explaining to her friends why, after all, she was obliged to give up her projected war work. Meanwhile, having quite recovered, she rose from her cushions, donned a nurse's garb, poured tea once or twice at a fashionable hospital, and, on the strength of this effort, obtained permission to carry supplies (in her own motor) to the devastated regions. Troy of course went with her, and thus had his first glimpse of war.
Fresh in his mind was a delicious July day at Rheims with his tutor, and the memory of every detail noted on the way, along the green windings of the Marne, by Meaux, Montmirail and Epernay. Now, traversing the same towns, he seemed to be looking into murdered faces, vacant and stony. Where he had seen the sociable gossiping life of the narrow streets, young men lounging at the blacksmith's, blue-sleeved carters sitting in the wine-shops while their horses shook off the flies in the hot sunshine of the village square, black-pinafored children coming home from school, the fat curé stopping to talk to little old ladies under the church porch, girls with sleek hair calling to each other from the doorways of the shops, and women in sunburnt gingham bending over the village wash-trough or leaning on their rakes among the hayricks—where all this had been, now only a few incalculably old people sat in the doorways and looked with bewildered eyes at strange soldiers fulfilling the familiar tasks.
This was what war did! It emptied towns of their inhabitants as it emptied veins of their blood; it killed houses and lands as well as men. Out there, a few miles beyond the sunny vineyards and the low hills, men were dying at that very moment by hundreds, by thousands—and their motionless young bodies must have the same unnatural look as these wan ruins, these gutted houses and sterile fields.... War meant Death, Death, Death—Death everywhere and to everything.
By a special favour, the staff-officer who accompanied them managed to extend their trip to the ruined château of Mondement, the pivot on which the battle had turned. He had himself been in the thick of the fight, and standing before the shattered walls of the old house he explained the struggle for the spur of Mondement: the advance of the grey masses across the plain, their capture of the ridge that barred the road to Paris; then the impetuous rush of General Humbert's infantry, repulsed, returning, repulsed again, and again attacking; the hand-to-hand fighting in court and gardens; the French infantry's last irresistible dash, the batteries rattling up, getting into place on the ridge, and flinging back the grey battalions from the hillside into the marshes.
Mrs. Belknap smiled and exclaimed, with vague comments and a wandering glance (for the officer, carried away by his subject, had forgotten her and become technical); while Troy, his map spread on the top of a shot-riddled wall, followed every word and gesture with eyes that absorbed at the same time all the details of the immortal landscape.
The Marne—this was the actual setting of the battle of the Marne! This happy temperate landscape, with its sheltering woods, its friendly fields and downs flowing away to a mild sky, had looked on at the most awful conflict in history. Scenes of anguish and heroism that ought to have had some Titanic background of cliff and chasm had unrolled themselves among harmless fields, and along wood-roads where wild strawberries grew and children cut hazel-switches to drive home their geese. A name of glory and woe was attached to every copse and hollow, and to each grey steeple above the village roofs....
Troy listened, his heart beating higher at each exploit, till he forgot the horror of war, and thought only of its splendours. Oh, to have been there too! To have had even the smallest share in those great hours! To be able to say, as this young man could say: "Yes, I was in the battle of the Marne"; to be able to break off, and step back a yard or two, correcting one's self critically: "No … it was here the General stood when I told him our batteries had got through …" or: "This is the very spot where the first seventy-five was trained on the valley. I can see the swathes it cut in the Bavarians as they swarmed up at us a third and fourth time...."
Troy suddenly remembered a bit of Henry V. that M. Gantier had been fond of quoting:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accurst they were not here,
And hold their manhood cheap, when any speaks
That fought with us....
Ah, yes—ah, yes—to have been in the battle of the Marne!
On the way back, below the crest of the hill, the motor stopped at the village church and the officer jumped down. "Some of our men are buried here," he said.
Mrs. Belknap, with a murmur of sympathy, caught up the bunch of roses she had gathered in the ravaged garden of the château, and they picked their way among the smashed and slanting stones of the cemetery to a corner behind the church where wooden crosses marked a row of fresh graves. Half-faded flowers in bottles were thrust into the loose earth, and a few tin wreaths hung on the arms of the crosses.
Some of the graves bore only the date of the battle, with "Pour la France," or "Priez pour lui"; but on others names and numbers had been roughly burnt into the crosses.
Suddenly Troy stopped short with a cry.
"What is it?" his mother asked. She had walked ahead of him to the parapet overhanging the valley, and forgetting her roses she leaned against the low cemetery wall while the officer took up his story.
Troy made no answer. Mrs. Belknap stood with her back to him, and he did not ask her to turn. He did not want her, or any one else, to read the name he had just read; of a sudden there had been revealed to him the deep secretiveness of sorrow. But he stole up to her and drew the flowers from her hand, while she continued, with vague inattentive murmurs, to follow the officer's explanations. She took no notice of Troy, and he went back to the grave and laid the roses on it.
On the cross he had read: "September 12, 1914. Paul Gantier, —th Chasseurs à pied."
"Oh, poor fellows … poor fellows. Yes, that's right, Troy; put the roses on their graves," Mrs. Belknap assented approvingly, as she picked her way back to the motor.
IV
The 10th of November came, and they sailed.
The week in the steamer was intolerable, not only because they were packed like herrings, and Troy (who had never known discomfort before) had to share his narrow cabin with two young German-Americans full of open brag about the Fatherland; but also because of the same eternally renewed anecdotes among the genuine Americans about the perils and discomforts they had undergone, and the general disturbance of their plans.
Most of the passengers were in ardent sympathy with the Allies, and hung anxiously on the meagre wirelesses; but a flat-faced professor with lank hair, having announced that "there were two sides to every case," immediately raised up a following of unnoticed ladies, who "couldn't believe all that was said of the Germans" and hoped that America would never be "drawn in"; while, even among the right-minded, there subsisted a vague feeling that war was an avoidable thing, which one had only to reprobate enough to prevent its recurrence.
They found New York—Mrs. Belknap's New York—buzzing with war-charities, yet apparently unaware of the war. That at least was Troy's impression during the twenty-four hours before he was packed off to school to catch up with his interrupted studies.
At school he heard the same incessant war-talk, and found the same fundamental unawareness of the meaning of the war. At first the boys were very keen to hear his story, but he described what he had seen so often—and especially his haunting impressions of the Marne—that they named him "Marny Belknap," and finally asked him to cut it out.
The masters were mostly frankly for the Allies, but the Rector had given out that neutrality was the attitude approved by the Government, and therefore a patriotic duty; and one Sunday after chapel he gave a little talk to explain why the President thought it right to try to keep his people out of the dreadful struggle. The words duty and responsibility and fortunate privilege recurred often in this address, and it struck Troy as odd that the lesson of the day happened to be the story of the Good Samaritan.
When he went home for the Christmas holidays everybody was sending toys and sugar-plums to the Belgian war-orphans, with little notes from "Happy American children" requesting to have their gifts acknowledged.
"It makes us so happy to help," beaming young women declared with a kind of ghoulish glee, doing up parcels, planning war-tableaux and charity dances, rushing to "propaganda" lectures given by handsome French officers, and keeping up a kind of continuous picnic on the ruins of civilization.
Mr. and Mrs. Belknap had inevitably been affected by the surrounding atmosphere.
"The tragedy of it—the tragedy—no one can tell who hasn't seen it and been through it," Mrs. Belknap would begin, looking down her long dinner-table between the orchids and the candelabra; and the pretty women and prosperous men would interrupt their talk, and listen for a moment, half absently, with spurts of easy indignation that faded out again as they heard the story oftener.
After all, Mrs. Belknap wasn't the only person who had seen a battlefield! Lots and lots more were pouring home all the time with fresh tales of tragedy: the Marne had become—in a way—an old story. People wanted something newer … different....
And then, why hadn't Joffre followed up the offensive? The Germans were wonderful soldiers after all.... Yes, but such beasts … sheer devils.... Here was Mr. So-and-so, just back from Belgium—such horrible stories—really unrepeatable! "Don't you want to come and hear them, my dear? Dine with us to-morrow; he's promised to come unless he's summoned to Washington. But do come anyhow; the Jim Cottages are going to dance after dinner...."
In time Mrs. Belknap, finding herself hopelessly out-storied, out-charitied, out-adventured, began insensibly to take a calmer and more distant view of the war. What was the use of trying to keep up her own enthusiasm when that of her audience had flagged? Wherever she went she was sure to meet other ladies who had arrived from France much more recently, and had done and seen much more than she had. One after another she saw them received with the same eagerness—"Of course we all know about the marvellous things you've been doing in France—your wonderful war-work"—then, like herself, they were superseded by some later arrival, who had been nearer the front, or had raised more money, or had had an audience of the Queen of the Belgians, or an autograph letter from Lord Kitchener. No one was listened to for long, and the most eagerly-sought-for were like the figures in a movy-show, forever breathlessly whisking past to make way for others.
Mr. Belknap had always been less eloquent about the war than his wife; but somehow Troy had fancied he felt it more deeply. Gradually, however, he too seemed to accept the situation as a matter of course, and Troy, coming home for the Easter holidays, found at the family table a large sonorous personage—a Senator, just back from Europe—who, after rolling out vague praises of France and England, began insidiously to hint that it was a pity to see such wasted heroism, such suicidal determination on the part of the Allies to resist all offers of peace from an enemy so obviously their superior.
"She wouldn't be if America came in!" Troy blurted out, reddening at the sound of his voice.
"America?" some one playfully interjected; and the Senator laughed, and said something about geographical immunity. "They can't touch us. This isn't our war, young man."
"It may be by the time I'm grown up," Troy persisted, burning redder.
"Well," returned the Senator good-humouredly, "you'll have to hurry, for the economists all say it can't last more than a year longer. Lord Reading told me–"
"There's been misery enough, in all conscience," sighed a lady, playing with her pearls; and Mr. Belknap added gravely: "By the time Troy grows up I hope wars and war-talk will be over for good and all."
"Oh, well—at his age every fellow wants to go out and kill something," remarked one of his uncles sympathetically.
Troy shuddered at the well-meant words. To go out and kill something! They thought he regarded the war as a sport, just as they regarded it as a moving-picture show! As if any one who had had even a glimpse of it could ever again think with joy of killing! His boy's mind was sorely exercised to define the urgent emotions with which it laboured. To save France—that was the clear duty of the world, as he saw it. But none of these kindly careless people about him knew what he meant when he said "France." Bits of M. Gantier's talk came back to him, embodying that meaning.
"Whatever happens, keep your mind keen and clear: open as many windows on the universe as you can...." To Troy, France had been the biggest of those windows.
The young tutor had never declaimed about his country; he had simply told her story and embodied her ideals in his own impatient, questioning and yet ardent spirit. "Le monde est aux enthousiastes," he had once quoted; and he had shown Troy how France had always been alive in every fibre, and how her inexhaustible vitality had been perpetually nourished on criticism, analysis and dissatisfaction. "Self-satisfaction is death," he had said; "France is the phœnix-country always rising from the ashes of her recognized mistakes."
Troy felt what a wonderful help it must be to have that long rich past in one's blood. Every stone that France had carved, every song she had sung, every new idea she had struck out, every beauty she had created in her thousand fruitful years, was a tie between her and her children. These things were more glorious than her battles, for it was because of them that all civilization was bound up in her, and that nothing that concerned her could concern her only.