a little village called montignies st. christophe
we passed through it late in the afternoon—this little belgian town called montignies st. christophe—just twenty-four hours behind a dust-colored german column. i am going to try now to tell how it looked to us.
i am inclined to think i passed this way a year before, or a little less, though i cannot be quite certain as to that. traveling 'cross country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage.
of this much, though, i am sure: if i did not pass through this little town of montignies st. christophe then, at least i passed through fifty like it—each a single line of gray houses strung, like beads on a cord, along a white, straight road, with fields behind and elms in front; each with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its drinking trough, its priest in[pg 14] black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings of saber and belt and shoulder straps.
i rather imagine i tried to think up something funny to say about the shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that time i was supposed to be writing humorous articles on european travel.
but now something had happened to montignies st. christophe to lift it out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other unimportant villages in this upper lefthand corner of the map of europe. the war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a side-slap.
we came to it just before dusk. all day we had been hurrying along, trying to catch up with the german rear guard; but the germans moved faster than we did, even though they fought as they went. they had gone round the southern part of belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping it in with tight bands of steel. belgium—or this part of it—was all barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the germans were already across the line, beating down the sod of france with their pelting feet.
besides we had stopped often, for there was so much to see and to hear. there was the hour we spent at merbes-le-chateau, where[pg 15] the english had been; and the hour we spent at la bussière, on the river sambre, where a fight had been fought two days earlier; but merbes-le-chateau is another story and so is la bussière. just after la bussière we came to a tiny village named neuville and halted while the local jack-of-all-trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.
as we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a red cross painted on its side over the letters of a baker's sign, went up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. at that the women in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands in their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the sibilant sound of their voices ran up and down the line of houses in a long, quavering hiss.
the wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded french soldier who had been found in the woods beyond the river. he was one of the last to be found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two nights he had been lying helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and his wounds raw. on each of those two nights it had rained, and rained hard.
just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.[pg 16] we had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less distinctly, about noontime. thereafter, for a while, there had been a lull in the firing; but now it was constant—a steady, sustained boom-boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound. for three days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the french frontier. therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the lash of a long whip, and hurried along.
there were five of us, all americans. the two who rode on bicycles pedaled ahead as outriders, and the remaining three followed on behind with the horse and the dogcart. we had bought the outfit that morning and we were to lose it that night. the horse was an aged mare, with high withers, and galls on her shoulders and fetlocks unshorn, after the fashion of belgian horses; and the dogcart was a venerable ruin, which creaked a great protest at every turn of the warped wheels on the axle. we had been able to buy the two—the mare and the cart—only because the german soldiers had not thought them worth the taking.
in this order, then, we proceeded. pretty soon the mare grew so weary she could hardly lift her shaggy old legs; so, footsore as we were, we who rode dismounted and trudged[pg 17] on, taking turns at dragging her forward by the bit. i presume we went ahead thus for an hour or more, along an interminable straight road and past miles of the checkered light and dark green fields which in harvest time make a great backgammon board of this whole country of belgium.
the road was empty of natives—empty, too, of german wagon trains; and these seemed to us curious things, because there had until then been hardly a minute of the day when we were not passing soldiers or meeting refugees.
almost without warning we came on this little village called montignies st. christophe. a six-armed signboard at a crossroads told us its name—a rather impressive name ordinarily for a place of perhaps twenty houses, all told. but now tragedy had given it distinction; had painted that straggling frontier hamlet over with such colors that the picture of it is going to live in my memory as long as i do live. at the upper end of the single street, like an outpost, stood an old chateau, the seat, no doubt, of the local gentry, with a small park of beeches and elms round it; and here, right at the park entrance, we had our first intimation that there had been a fight. the gate stood ajar between its chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a french cavalry officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on the collar and cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree. beneath the[pg 18] tree were a sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire; and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all ready for the pot or the pan. looking on past these things we saw much scattered dunnage: frenchmen's knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards, fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered with slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on their tops—which proved them to be french canteens—tumbled straw, odd shoes with their lacings undone, a toptilted service shelter of canvas; all the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently disturbed.
as i think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the clumped trees of the chateau grounds. we were desperately weary, to begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the wake of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.
now, all of a sudden, i became aware that this town had been literally shot to bits. from our side—that is to say, from the north and likewise from the west—the germans had shelled it. from the south, plainly, the french had answered. the village, in between, had caught the full force and fury of the contending fires. probably the inhabitants had[pg 19] warning; probably they fled when the german skirmishers surprised that outpost of frenchmen camping in the park. one imagined them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage patches. but they had left their belongings behind, all their small petty gearings and garnishings, to be wrecked in the wrenching and racking apart of their homes.
a railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street. shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the crossties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like rows of snaggled teeth. other shells, dropping in the road, had so wrought with the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six feet deep.
every house in sight had been hit again and again and again. one house would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back to the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves. another house would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potter's door. the doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes all gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered emptily like eye-sockets without eyes.
so it went. two of the houses had caught[pg 20] fire and the interiors were quite burned away. a sodden smell of burned things came from the still smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.
our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted. if she had had energy enough i reckon she would have shied about and run back the way she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses—a big gray and a roan—with their stark legs sticking out across the road. the gray was shot through and through in three places. the right fore hoof of the roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about it, suggesting a natural malformation. dead only a few hours, their carcasses already had begun to swell. the skin on their bellies was as tight as a drumhead.
we forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses. beyond them the road was a litter. knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots, pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere. the deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things. the dropped caps and the abandoned knapsacks were always french caps and french knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after the mêlée.
the germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the french had fallen back—or at least so we deduced from the looks of[pg 21] things. in the débris was no object that bespoke german workmanship or german ownership. this rather puzzled us until we learned that the germans, as tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it a hard-and-fast rule to gather up their own belongings after every engagement, great or small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to give the enemy an idea of their losses.
we went by the church. its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small flag—the tricolor of france—still fluttered from a window where some one had stuck it. we went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a sign over its door—a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx. and through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a table. we went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn i picked up the short jacket of a french trooper, so new and fresh from the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled. the figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have belonged to the eighteenth cavalry regiment. behind the barn we found a whole pile of new knapsacks—the flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the french infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so substantial as the heavy sacks of the germans, which are all bound with straps and covered on the back side with undressed red bullock's hide.
[pg 22]
until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human being. the place fairly ached with emptiness. cats sat on the doorsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard imprisoned beasts lowing dismally. cows were there, with agonized udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no dogs. we already had remarked this fact—that in every desolated village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-looking belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters. and it was so in montignies st. christophe.
on a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf—a breastwork the french probably had erected before the fight and which the germans had kicked half down—i counted three cats, seated side by side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
it was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at us through a break in the wall. he called out to her in french, but she never answered—only continued to watch him from behind her shelter. he started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having spoken a word. she was the only living person we saw in that town.
[pg 23]
just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon—a furniture dealer's wagon—from some larger community, which had been impressed by the belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service. a jaded team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft. one man led the near horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon. all three of them had red cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.
the wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends. overhauling it we saw that it contained two dead soldiers—french foot-soldiers. the bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed. their feet somehow were caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about to glide backward and out of the wagon.
the blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc, encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly. the other's head was canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face. it was a young face—we could tell that much, even through the mask of caked mud on the drab-white skin—and it might once have been a comely face. it was not comely now.
[pg 24]
peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had been partly shot or shorn away—the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an abominable thing to look on. these two had been men the day before. now they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back we saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of neglected sugar beets.
we stopped and watched. the wagon bumped through the beet patch to where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug. the diggers were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a painting by millet. their spades were speared upright into the mound of fresh earth. behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky line.
we saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon. we saw them slide into the shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling in the hole.
not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us. there was one detached house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the field where the burial took place. it had a shield on its front wall bearing the belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs house.[pg 25] a glance at our map showed us that at this point the french boundary came up in a v-shaped point almost to the road. had the gravediggers picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their trench, those two dead frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their own country.
the sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise through the elm-tree aisles along our route. just as it disappeared we met a string of refugees—men, women and children—all afoot, all bearing pitiably small bundles. they limped along silently in a straggling procession. none of them was weeping; none of them apparently had been weeping. during the past ten days i had seen thousands of such refugees, and i had yet to hear one of them cry out or complain or protest.
these who passed us now were like that. their heavy peasant faces expressed dumb bewilderment—nothing else. they went on up the road into the gathering dusk as we went down, and almost at once the sound of their clunking tread died out behind us. without knowing certainly, we nevertheless imagined they were the dwellers of montignies st. christophe going back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.
an hour later we passed through the back lines of the german camp and entered the town of beaumont, to find that the general[pg 26] staff of a german army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main force of the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well beyond the frontier. france was invaded.
