The Idiot
I
The change was not affected without whispering. The spirit both of the troops who were going back of the lines to rest and of those who had zigzagged up through two miles of communication trenches to take their places was excellent.
“What is the name of this country?” asked one of the new comers.
“If it had a name, that is all that remains. We are somewhere in Picardy. The English are off there not very far. Their cannon have different voices from ours. Good Luck!”
His gray, faded uniform seemed to melt into the night. The New Comer stepped on to the firing platform and poked his head over the parapet. A comrade pulled at his trousers leg.
“Come down, Idiot,” he said, “Fritz is only twelve yards away.”
The Idiot came down, sniffing the night air luxuriously.
“We are somewhere in Picardy,” he said. “I know without being told. It is like going home.”
A sergeant approached, his body twisted sideways because the trench was too narrow for his shoulders.
“Have you a watch?”
The Idiot had.
Under his coat, so that the enemy should not perceive the glow, the sergeant flashed his electric torch and compared the watches.
“Yours leads by a minute,” he said. “The advance will be at four o’clock. there will be hot coffee at three. Good luck.”
He passed on, and the comrades drew a little closer together. The sergeant’s words had made the Idiot very happy.
“In less than two hours!” he said.
“I thought there was something in the wind,” said Paul Guitry.
“If we advanced only three kilometers,” said the Idiot, “the village in which I was born would be French again. But there will be great changes.”
“You were born at Champ-de-Fer?”
“It is directly opposite us.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I feel it,” said the Idiot. “Wherever I have been stationed I have felt it. Sometimes I have asked an officer to look for Champ-de-Fer on his field map, and when he has done so, I have pointed, and said ‘Is it in that direction?’ and always I have been right.”
“Did your family remain in the village?”
“I don’t know. But I think so, for from the hour of the mobilization until now, I have not heard from them.”
“Since the hour of the mobilization,” said Paul Guitry, “much water has flowed under the bridges. I had just been married. My wife is in Paris. I have a little son now. I saw them when I had my eight days’ leave. And it seems that again I am to be a father. It is very wonderful.”
“I was going to be married,” said the Idiot simply.
There was a short silence.
“If I had known,” said Paul Guitry, “I would not have boasted of my own happiness.”
“I am not the only French soldier who has not heard from his sweetheart since the mobilization,” said the Idiot. “It has been hard,” he said, “but by thinking of all the others, I have been able to endure.”
“She remained there at Champ-de-Fer?”
“She must have, or else she would have written to me.”
Paul Guitry could not find anything to say.
“Soon,” said the Idiot, “we shall be in Champ-de-Fer, and they will tell me what has become of her.”
“She will tell you herself,” said Paul Guitry with a heartiness which he did not feel. The Idiot shrugged his shoulders.
“We have loved each other,” he said, “even since we were little children. Do you know why I am called the Idiot? It is because I do not go with women, when I have the chance. But I don’t mind. They cannot say that I am not a real man, for I have the military medal and I have been mentioned twice in the orders of the day.”
To Paul Guitry, a confirmed sinner as opportunity offered, the Idiot’s statement contained much psychic meat.
“It must be,” he said, “that purity tempts some men, just as impurity tempts others.”
“It is even simpler,” said the Idiot; but he did not explain. And there was a long silence.
Now and then Paul Guitry glanced at his companion’s profile, for the night was no longer inky black. It was a simple direct young face, not handsome, but full of dignity and kindness; the line of the jaw had a certain sternness, and the wide and delicately molded nostril indicated courage and daring.
Paul Guitry thought of his wife and of his little son, of his eight days’ leave, and of its consequences. He tried to imagine how he would feel, if for two years his wife had been in the hands of the Germans. Without meaning to, he spoke his thought aloud:
“Long since,” he said, “I should have gone mad.”
The Idiot nodded.
“They say,” he said, “that in fifty years all this will be forgotten; and that we French will feel friendly toward the Germans.”
He laughed softly, a laugh so cold, that Paul Guitry felt as if ice water had suddenly been spilled on his spine.
“Hell,” he went on, “has no tortures which French men, and women, and little children have not suffered. You say that if you had been in my boots you must long since have gone mad? well, it is because I have been able to think of all the others who are in my boots that I have kept my sanity. It has not been easy. It is not as if my imagination alone had been tortured. Just as I have the sense that my village is there—” he pointed with his sensitive hand, “so I have the sense of what has happened there. I KNOW that she is alive,” he concluded, “and that she would rather be dead.”
There was another silence. The Idiot’s nostrils dilated and he sniffed once or twice.
“The coffee is coming,” he said. “Listen. If I am killed in the advance, find her, will you—Jeanne Bergère? And say what you can to comfort her. It doesn’t matter what has happened, her love for me is like the North Star—fixed. When she knows that I am dead she will wish to kill herself. You must prevent that. You must show her how she can help France. Aha!—The cannon!”
From several miles in the rear there rose suddenly a thudding percussive cataract of sound. The earth trembled like some frightened animal that has been driven into a corner.
The Idiot leaped to his feet, his eyes joyously alight.
“It is the voice of God,” he cried.
If indeed it was the voice of God, that other great voice which is of Hell, made no answer. The German guns were unaccountably silent.
On the stroke of four, the earth still trembling with the incessant concussions of the guns, the French scrambled out of their trenches and went forward. But no sudden blast of lead and iron challenged their temerity. A few shells, but all from field pieces, fired perfunctorily as it were, fell near them and occasionally among them. It looked as if Fritz wasn’t going to fight.
The wire guarding the first line of German trenches had been so torn and disrupted by the French cannon, that only here and there an ugly strand remained to be cut. The trench was empty.
“The Boche,” said Paul Guitry, “has left nothing but his smell.”
Rumor spread swiftly through the lines. “We are not to be opposed. Fritz has been withdrawn in the night. His lines are too long. He is straightening out his salients. It is the beginning of the end.”
There was good humor and elation. There was also a feeling of admiration for the way in which Fritz had managed to retreat without being detected.
The country over which the troops advanced was a rolling desert, blasted, twisted, swept clear of all vegetation. What the Germans could not destroy they had carried away with them. There remained only frazzled stumps of trees, dead bodies and ruined engines of war.
Paul Guitry and the Idiot came at last to the summit of a little hill. Beyond and below at the end of a long sweep of tortured and ruined fields could be seen picturesquely grouped a few walls of houses and one bold arch of an ancient bridge.
The Idiot blinked stupidly. Then he laughed a short, ugly laugh.
“I had counted on seeing the church steeple. But of course they would have destroyed that.”
“Is it Champ-de-Fer?” asked Guitry.
At that moment a dark and sudden smoke, as from ignited chemicals began to pour upward from the ruined village.
“It was,” said the Idiot, and once more the word was passed to go forward.
II
They did not know what was going on in the world. They had been ordered into the cellars of the village, and told to remain there for twenty-four hours. They had no thought but to obey.
Into the same cellar with Jeanne Bergère had been herded four old women, two old men, and a little boy whom a German surgeon (the day the champagne had been discovered buried in the Notary’s garden) had strapped to a board and—vivisected.
Twenty-three of the twenty-four hours had passed (one of the old men had a Waterbury watch) but only the little boy complained of hunger and thirst. He wanted to drink from the well in the corner of the cellar; but they would not let him. The well had supplied good drinking water since the days of Julius Caesar, but shortly after entering the cellar one of the old women had drunk from it, and shortly afterward had died in great torment. The little boy kept saying:
“But maybe it wasn’t the water which killed Madame Pigeon. Only let me try it and then we shall know for sure.”
But they would not let him drink.
“It is not agreeable to live,” said one of the old men, “but it is necessary. We are of those who will be called upon to testify. The terms of peace will be written by soft-hearted statesmen; we who have suffered must be on hand. We must be on hand to see that the Boche gets his deserts.”
Jeanne Bergère spoke in a low unimpassioned voice:
“What would you do to them, father,” she asked, “if you were God?”
“I do not know,” said the old man. “For I have experience only of those things which give them pleasure. Those who delight in peculiar pleasures are perhaps immune to ordinary pains….”
“Surely,” interrupted the little boy, “it was not the water that killed Madame Pigeon.”
“How peaceful she looks,” said the old man. “You would say the stone face of a saint from the façade of a cathedral.”
“It may be,” said Jeanne Bergère, “that already God has opened His mind to her, and that she knows of that vengeance, which we with our small minds are not able to invent.”
“I can only think of what they have done to us,” said the old man. “It does not seem as if there was anything left for us to do to them. Vengeance which does not give the Avenger pleasure is a poor sort of vengeance. Madame Simon…”
The old woman in question turned a pair of sheeny eyes towards the speaker.
“Would it give you any particular pleasure to cut the breasts off an old German woman?”
With a trembling hand Madame Simon flattened the bosom of her dress to show that there was nothing beneath.
“It would give me no pleasure,” she said, “but I shall show my scars to the President.”
“An eye for an eye—a tooth for a tooth,” said the old man. “That is the ancient law. But it does not work. There is no justice in exchanging a German eye and a French. French eyes see beauty in everything. To the German eye the sense of beauty has been denied. You cannot compare a beast and a man. In the old days, when there were wolves, it was the custom of the naive people of those days to torture a wolf if they caught one. They put him to death with the same refinements which were requisitioned for human criminals. This meant nothing to the wolf. The mere fact that he had been caught was what tortured him. And so I think it will be with the Germans when they find that they have failed. They have built up their power on the absurd hypothesis that they are men. Their punishment will be in discovering that they never were anything but low animals and never could be.”
“That is too deep for me,” said the other man. “They tied my daughter to her bed, and afterward they set fire to her mattress.”
“I wish,” said Jeanne Bergère, “that they had set fire to my mattress.”
A violent concussion shook the cellar to its foundations. Even the face of the thirsty little boy brightened.
“It is one of ours,” he said.
“To eradicate the lice which feed upon the Germans and the foul smells which emanate from their bodies there is nothing so effective as high explosives,” said the old man. He looked at his watch and said:
“We have half an hour more.”
At the end of that time, he climbed the cellar stair, pushed open the door, and looked out. Partly in the bright sunlight and partly in the deep shadows, he resembled a painting by Rembrandt.
“I see no one,” he said. “There is a lot of smoke.”
His eyes became suddenly wide open, fixed, round with a kind of celestial astonishment. This his old French heart stopped beating, and he fell to the foot of the stair. His companions thought that he must have been shot. They dared not move.
But it was no bullet or fragment of far-blown shell that had laid the old man low. He had seen in the smoke that whirled down the village street, a little soldier in the uniform of France. Pure unadulterated joy had struck him dead.
Five minutes passed, and no one had moved except the little boy. With furtive glances and trembling hands he had crept to the old well in the corner and drunk a cup of the poisoned water. Then he crept back to his place.
The second old man now rose, drew a deep breath and climbed the cellar stair. For a time he stood blinking, and mouthing his scattered teeth. He was trying to speak and could not.
“What is it?” they called up to him. “What has happened?”
He did not answer. He made inarticulate sounds, and suddenly with incredible speed, darted forward into the smoke and the sunlight.
A little hand cold and wet crept into Jeanne Bergère’s. She was vexed. She wished to go out of the cellar with the others; but the little hand clung to her so tightly that she could not free herself.
Except for the old woman who had drunk from the well, and the old man, all in a heap at the foot of the cellar stair, they were alone. She and the little boy.
“It is true,” said the little boy, “at least I think it is true about the water…when…nobody was looking…. Please, please stay with me, Jeanne Bergère.”
“You drank when it was forbidden? That was very naughty, Charlie…. Good God, what am I saying—you poor baby—you poor baby.” She snatched him into her arms, and held him with a kind of tigerish ferocity.
“It hurts,” said Charlie. “It hurts. It hurts me all over. It hurts worse all the time.”
“I will go for help,” she said. “Wait.”
“Please do not go away.”
“You want to die?”
The child nodded.
“If I grow up, I should not be a man,” he said. “You know what the doctor did to me?”
“I know,” she said briefly, “but you shan’t die if I can help it.”
She could not help it. A few minutes after she had gone, his back strongly arched became rigid. His jaws locked and he died in the attitude of a wrestler making a bridge.
The village street was full of smoke and Frenchmen. These were methodically fighting the fires and hunting the ruins for Germans. Jeanne Bergère seized one of the little soldiers by the elbow.
“Come quickly,” she said, “there is a child poisoned!”
The Idiot turned, and she would have fallen if he had not caught her. She tore herself loose from his arms with a kind of ferocity.
“Come! Come!” she cried, and she ran like a frightened animal back to the cellar door, the Idiot close behind her.
The Idiot knelt by the dead child, and after feeling in vain for any pulsation, straightened up and said:
“He is dead.”
“He drank from the well,” said Jeanne. “We told him that it was poisoned. But he was so thirsty.”
They tried to straighten the little boy, but could not. The Idiot rose to his feet, and looked at her for the first time. He must have made some motion with his hands, for she cried suddenly:
“Don’t! You mustn’t touch me!”
“We have always loved each other,” he said simply.
“You don’t understand.”
“What have you been through? I understand. Kiss me.”
She held him at arm’s length.
“Listen,” she said. “The old people would not leave the village,—your father and mother…so I stayed. At that time it was still supposed that the Germans were human beings…”
“And my father and mother?” asked the Idiot.
“Some of the people went into the street to see the Germans enter the village. But we watched from a window in your father’s house…. They were Uhlans, who came first. They were so drunk that they could hardly sit on their horses. Their lieutenant took a sudden fancy to Marie Lebrun, but when he tried to kiss her, she slapped his face…. That seemed to sober him…. Old man Lebrun had leapt forward to protect his daughter.
“‘Are you her father?’” asked the Lieutenant.
“‘Yes,’” said the old man.
“‘Bind him,’” said the lieutenant, and then he gave an order and some men went into the house and came out dragging a mattress…. They dragged it into the middle of the street…. They held old man Lebrun so that he had to see everything…for some hours, as many as wanted to…. Then the lieutenant stepped forward and shot her through the head, and then he shot her father…. Your father and mother hid me in the cellar of their house, as well as they could…. But from the Germans nothing remains long hidden…. Your father and mother tried to defend me…tied them to their bed…and…set fire to the house.”
The Idiot’s granite-gray face showed no new emotion.
“And you?”
She shook her head violently.
“What you cannot imagine,” she said. “I have forgotten…. There have been so many…. No street-walker has ever been through what I have been through…. There’s nothing more to say…I wanted to live…to bear witness against them…. For you and me everything is finished…”
“Almost,” said the Idiot. “You talk as if you no longer loved me.”
The granite-gray of his face had softened into the ruddy, sun-burned coloring of a healthy young soldier, long in the field, and she could not resist the strong arms that he opened to her.
“They have not touched your soul,” said the Idiot.
[signed] Gouverneur Morris
Memories of Whitman and Lincoln
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d”
—W. W.
Lilacs shall bloom for Walt Whitman And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
Spring hangs in the dew of the dooryards These memories—these memories—
They hang in the dew for the bard who fetched A sprig of them once for his brother When he lay cold and dead….
And forever now when America leans in the dooryard And over the hills Spring dances, Smell of lilacs and sight of lilacs shall bring to her heart these brothers….
Lilacs shall bloom for Walt Whitman And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
Who are the shadow-forms crowding the night?
What shadows of men?
The stilled star-night is high with these brooding spirits—
Their shoulders rise on the Earth-rim, and they are great presences in heaven—
They move through the stars like outlined winds in young-leaved maples.
Lilacs bloom for Walt Whitman And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
Deeply the nation throbs with a world’s anguish—
But it sleeps, and I on the housetops Commune with souls long dead who guard our land at midnight, A strength in each hushed heart—
I seem to hear the Atlantic moaning on our shores with the plaint of the dying And rolling on our shores with the rumble of battle….
I seem to see my country growing golden toward California, And, as fields of daisies, a people, with slumbering up-turned faces Leaned over by Two Brothers, And the greatness that is gone.
Lilacs bloom for Walt Whitman
And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
Spring runs over the land,
A young girl, light-footed, eager…
For I hear a song that is faint and sweet with first love,
Out of the West, fresh with the grass and the timber,
But dreamily soothing the sleepers…
I listen: I drink it deep.
Softly the Spring sings,
Softly and clearly:
“I open lilacs for the beloved,
Lilacs for the lost, the dead.
And, see, for the living, I bring sweet strawberry blossoms,
And I bring buttercups, and I bring to the woods anemones and blue bells…
I open lilacs for the beloved,
And when my fluttering garment drifts through dusty cities,
And blows on hills, and brushes the inland sea,
Over you, sleepers, over you, tired sleepers,
A fragrant memory falls…
I open love in the shut heart,
I open lilacs for the beloved.”
Lilacs bloom for Walt Whitman
And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
Was that the Spring that sang, opening locked hearts,
And is remembrance mine?
For I know these two great shadows in the spacious night,
Shadows folding America close between them,
Close to the heart…
And I know how my own lost youth grew up blessedly in their spirit,
And how the morning song of the might bard
Sent me out from my dreams to the living America,
To the chanting seas, to the piney hills, down the railroad vistas,
Out into the streets of Manhattan when the whistles blew at seven,
Down to the mills of Pittsburgh and the rude faces of labor…
And I know how the grave great music of that other,
Music in which lost armies sang requiems,
And the vision of that gaunt, that great and solemn figure,
And the graven face, the deep eyes, the mouth,
O human-hearted brother,
Dedicated anew my undevoted heart
to America, my land.
Lilacs bloom for Walt Whitman
And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
Now in this hour I was suppliant for these two brothers,
And I said: Your land has need:
Half-awakened and blindly we grope in the great world….
What strength may we take from our Past, What promise hold for our future?
And the one brother leaned and whispered:
“I put my strength in a book,
And in that book my love…
This, with my love, I give to America…”
And the other brother leaned and murmured:
“I put my strength in a life,
And in that life my love,
This, with my love, I give to America.”
Lilacs bloom for Walt Whitman
And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
Then my heart sang out: This strength shall be our strength:
Yea, when the great hour comes, and the sleepers wake and are hurled back,
And creep down into themselves
There shall they find Walt Whitman
And there, Abraham Lincoln.
O Spring, go over this land with much singing
And open the lilacs everywhere,
Open them out with the old-time fragrance
Making a people remember that something has been forgotten,
Something is hidden deep—strange memories—strange memories—
Of him that brought a sprig of the purple cluster
To him that was mourned of all…
And so they are linked together
While yet America lives…
While yet America lives, my heart,
Lilacs shall bloom for Walt Whitman
And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln.
[signed] James Oppenheim
Bred to the Sea
Ye who are bred to the sea, sons of the sons of seamen,
In what faith do ye sail? By what creed do ye hold?
Little we know of faiths, and we leave the creeds to the parsons.
But we ‘bide by the law of the sea which our father made of old.
Where is that sea law writ for mariners and for captains,
That they may know the law by which they sail the sea?
We never saw it writ for sailormen or for masters;
But ’tis laid with the keel of the ship. What would you have?
Let be.
Ye who went down tot he sea in ships and perished aforetime,
In what faith did ye sail? In what creed did ye die?
What is that law to which your lives were forfeit?
What do ye teach your sons that they may not deny?
We kept the faith of our breed. We died in the creed of seamen,
As our sons, too, shall die: the sea will have its way.
The law which bade us sail with death in smack and whaler,
In tall ship and in open boat, is the seaman’s law to-day.
The master shall rule his crew. The crew shall obey the master.
Ye shall work your ship while she fleets and ye can stand.
Though ye starve, and freeze, and drown, shipmate shall stand
by shipmate.
Ye shall ‘bide by this law of seafaring folk, though ye never
come to land.
Ye shall hold your lives in trust for those who need your succor:
A flash of fire by night, a loom of smoke by day,
A rag to an oar shall be to you the symbol
Of your faith, of your creed, of the law which sailormen obey.
Ye shall not count the odds, ye shall not weigh the danger,
When life is to be saved from storm, from fire, from thirst.
Ye shall not leave your foe adrift and helpless;
And when the boats go overside, ’t is, “Women and children
first.”
We kept this faith of our breed. We died in this creed of seamen.
We sealed our creed with our lives. It shall endure alway.
The law which bade us sail with death in smack and whaler,
In tall ship and in open boat, is the seaman’s law to-day.
[signed] James W. Pryor.
Our Defenders
Across the fields of waving wheat
And leagues of golden corn
The fragrance of the wild-rose bloom
And elder-flower is borne;
But earth’s appealing loveliness
We do but half surmise,
For oh, the blur of battle-fields
Is ever in our eyes.
The robin-red-breast and the wren,
We cannot harken these
For dreadful thunder of the guns
That echoes overseas;
And evermore our vision turns
To those who follow far
The bright white light of Liberty
Through the red fires of war.
Our thoughts are with the hero souls
And hero hearts of gold
Who keep Old Glory’s hallowed stars
Untarnished as of old;
Who join their hands with hero hands
In hero lands to save
The fearless forehead of the free
The shameful brand of slave.
And through these days of strife and death,
We know they shall not fail,
That Freedom shall not pass from earth
Nor tyranny prevail;
Yea, those that now in anguish bow,
We know that soon or late
They shall be lifted from beneath
The iron heel of hate.
O brave defenders of the free,
For you our tears of pride!
Lo, every drop of blood you shed
Our hearts have sanctified!
And through these days of strife and death,
These weary night-times through,
Our spirits watch with yours, our love
It hovers over you.
[signed] Evaleen Stein