In Paris the popular appellation for a German is "boche." Not once at the front did I hear this word used by officers or men. They deplore it, just as they deplore many things that happen in Paris. Every officer I talked to declared the Germans were a brave, strong enemy; they waste no time calling them names.
"They are wonderful, but we will beat them," was the way one officer summed up the general feeling.
Another illustration of the French officer at the front: The City of Vermelles of 10,000 inhabitants was captured from the Germans after fifty-four days' fighting. It was taken literally from house to house, the French engineers sapping and mining the Germans out of every stronghold, destroying every single house, incidentally forever upsetting my own one-time idea that the French are a frivolous people. So determined were they to retake this town that they fought in the streets with artillery at a distance of twenty-one feet, probably the shortest range artillery duel in the history of the world.
The Germans before the final evacuation buried hundreds of their own dead. Every yard in the city was filled with little crosses--the ground was so trampled that the mounds of graves were crushed down level with the ground--and on the crosses are printed the names with the number of the German regiments. At the base of every cross there rests either a crucifix or a statue of the Virgin or a wreath of artificial flowers, all looted from the French graveyard.
With the German graves are French graves made afterward. I walked through this ruined city where, aside from the soldiery, the only sign of life I saw was a gaunt, prowling cat. With me past these hundreds of graves walked half a dozen French officers. They did not pause to read inscriptions; they did not comment on the loot and pillage of the graveyard; they scarcely looked even at the graves, but they kept constantly raising their hands to their caps in salute regardless of whether the cross numbered a French or a German life destroyed.
We were driving along back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, spilling the baby into the mud. Terrible wails arose, and the soldiers stiffened to attention. Then, seeing the accident, the entire company broke ranks and rescued the infant. They wiped the dirt from its face and restored it to its mother in the cart.