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Vol. 92

SEPTEMBER, 1916

No. 5

IN

The Magazines of the Trenches

By GELETT BURGESS

Author of "Are You a Bromide?" etc

N the dining-room of a village inn, dingy and dim, two officers sat one rainy afternoon smoking at a map-strewn table. It was November 28, 1914, “somewhere in France." I may mention confidentially that it was in Champagne, only three kilometers from the front line of trenches; that one man was BrigadierGeneral Nodaillac, and the other was that Lieutenant-Colonel Paty du Clam who became famous at the trial of Dreyfus. He was in command of the 17th Regiment of Territorials.

"Colonel," said the general, "it looks to me as if we were in the trenches here for some time. There 'll be no great advance until spring, anyway. Don't you think the men need cheering up a bit? It strikes me that it might be a good idea to give 'em a little fun, something to talk about except mud and blood and Germans; put 'em in good humor, you know; prevent their fretting too much about home." Pulling at his mustache thoughtfully, he added: "I wonder if we could n't find some one to get up a little paper of some sort print it on the mimeograph, say, at the surgeon-major's headquarters -comic journal, you know. I hear they started one in the 18th a couple of weeks ago, and it's a great success."

Said the colonel, enthusiastically: "Holy blue! General, I know the very

man!

Literary chap, too, a Parisian. You know, Reboux!"

"Good! Put him on the job at once; tell him to be as funny as he can." And the general turned to his orderly, who had just entered and saluted.

As three haughty German officers with monocles, prisoners of war, were escorted in to be interrogated, Colonel Paty du Clam threw on his cloak and went out into the rain. Between lines of shattered walls, mere shells of houses, blackened, broken, like decayed teeth, with the fallen bricks neatly piled in rows on the narrow sidewalk; past roofed-in corners, desolate kitchens where old women and old men, and even children, too, seemingly as old, still managed to exist and smile; down the little crooked, cobbled street, crowded, noisy with automobiles, trucks, auto-buses, bicyclists, horses, and soldiers,-soldiers everywhere, going and coming,-ambulances, horse-shoers clinking at anvils, pedIdlers of wine, brave little laundresses, he walked till, just outside the village, in the great square courtyard of an abandoned farm, now the regimental hospital, full of wounded, he found a soldier with a Red Cross badge on his arm. This smallish, clean-bearded, brown-eyed man was Paul Reboux, secretary to the surgeon-major. A few months earlier he had been known as the author of a famous book of paro

Copyright, 1916, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

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A typical page by Marcel Jeanjean, the comic artist of "Le Canard Poilu"

dies, "A la manière de-," and as the ," and as the literary critic of "Le Journal." At present he was opening a wooden case of medicines with a German bayonet.

Here, with the incessant thunder of the

artillery in their ears, no uncommon sight there to see the earth half a mile away suddenly jump up in big fountains, -the project for the new publication was discussed. And that night, after the des

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par suite d'inextricables erreurs. d'administration, en avait mange ..... Et ce n'étaient partout que devils et lamentations, car la guerre, que est un bien, grand fleas, a quelquefois des répercussions inattendues et terribles meine dans ses plus petits details....... Quant aux rats, l'approche du Printemps scable ranimer leurs ardeurs et ce ne sont, dans tous les cous, dans tous les trous, dans les fentes des pierres et les fissures des murailles, an pied des arbres, le long des haies, au milieu des granges. sur les toitures, entre les tuiles, dans les cheminess, sur les fenêtres, autour des portes sclatants, cavalcades joyenses, bals tournoyants et sarabandes éffrences chaque soir, du hand de notre paille, avec des sourires attendris, es chers bruits familiers dont les viuels dératiseurs ont failli nous priver à jamais

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A page of "Le Lapin à Plumes," the illustrated supplement of "Le Canard Poilu " The text and sketches, by Marcel Jeanjean, tell the story of some Red-Cross rat-chasers who poured rat-poison in every conceivable place and succeeded in killing everything but the rats

perately wounded had been treated, and mere trifles such as broken arms and legs had been hustled away in ambulances

bumping to the rear, Paul Reboux sat down on a shoe-box and tried to be witty. By candle-light he began to write, all

alone, the first number of "L'Echo des Tranchées."

Next day, at odd moments, he copied his compositions on wax stencil-paper for the mimeograph, designed and lettered a fancy title, and little by little filled two closely written sheets. It was not long before he was pressing over his jokes and pleasantries the same roller that only that afternoon had printed off the surgeon's reports of dead and wounded and missing.

Early next morning a priest in spectacles appeared, but no such priest as you ever saw-a priest in faded, blood-stained, mud-worn uniform of what had once been blue and red; for this was before the shoddy "horizon blue." To his back was strapped a package containing a few hundred copies of the new journal, and he gaily bicycled to the trenches.

Just behind the firing-line the soaking reserves, huddling over their little fires in the rain, seized the papers as Parisians mob a news-kiosk on the boulevard at four o'clock when a battle is raging. Grinning, one by one they withdrew to their dugouts and shelters to sit down and roar over the quips and puns of their newly discovered merry-maker.

Then forward went the newsboy-soldier-priest with the rest of the edition, entering the long, narrow boyaux, weaving in and out through the labyrinth of trenches, each marked with a facetious name; stooping at "Sardine Street" to avoid German sharp-shooters, spattered with earth as a big shell exploded at "Without-Fear Cross-Roads," passing solitary sentinels at unexpected corners, turning right, turning left, picking his way over the slippery foot-boards of "The Boulevard de la Gaiété," crouching back against slimy clay walls to let stretcherbearers pass with their groaning burdens. in the narrow "Street of Pretty Girls," through mud and blood and puddles, clear to the first line.

Here sat men playing cards or stretched out asleep under the roofs of logs and earth, or stood ready with rifles and fieldglasses at the loopholes, or listened with telephones at their ears. And here the

men of the 17th read and re-read the new paper, laughed, quoted, criticized; then folded it carefully away to be sent home to their wives.

It was a brave little number, that first single sheet of foolscap, breathing the life of the trenches. It began with a short article entitled "At the Front," telling how glorious that term would be to future generations. There was a characteristically Rabelaisian quotation from Rabelais -Reboux had n't yet got quite into his. stride and a description of the trenches. regarded as a system of little villages. "So much good humor [in the naming of the streets] under shell-fire," the editor remarked, "is a form of smiling heroism." Then followed an essay on Teutonic pastimes, with special reference to the brutality of dueling in German universities. There were skits on the kaiser, of course; for no trench journal is complete without a reference to Guillaume, the Kronprinz, K.K. bread, and Kultur; and there was other Gallic wit not easily translatable into our more-restrained tongue.

The next issue was of four pages, and thereafter the paper was published about every ten days, except during the Battle of Champagne. "The Echo of the Trenches" was a hit from the start. But Paul Reboux was not satisfied with his success till he had made the man at the front feel that those at home were thinking and praying and working for him. The result was a journalistic victory. In that "limographed" paper of a few hundred circulation there began to appear the most brilliant names of all France. Mme. Bartet, the popular comédienne of the Comédie Française, contributed a stirring article, so did the famous Marcelle Tinayre. Brieux wrote for it, and Henri de Régnier and Alfred Capus and Paul Deschanel, president of the Chamber of Deputies. More academicians volunteered-Théodore Botrel, Paul Hervieu, Gabriel Hanotaux, Edmond Rostand.

But even these names did not satisfy the editor of "The Echo of the Trenches," and so one day he made bold to write to the president of the republic himself. On

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