← catalogue

Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day · English · Gutenberg #50071 · 486,088 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Round about Bar-le-Duc
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Round about Bar-le-Duc

Author: Susanne R. Day


        
Release date: September 28, 2015 [eBook #50071]
                Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50071

Credits: Produced by Shaun Pinder, Les Galloway and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUND ABOUT BAR-LE-DUC ***

    ROUND ABOUT
    BAR-LE-DUC


    BY

    SUSANNE R. DAY
    AUTHOR OF "THE AMAZING PHILANTHROPISTS," ETC.


    London
    SKEFFINGTON & SON, LTD.
    34 SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C. 2
    PUBLISHERS TO HIS MAJESTY THE KING


    TO

    CAROL

    FOR WHOSE EYES
    THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN




PREFACE


TO CAROL

Dear, you asked me to write for you the story of my work and adventures
in France, and through all the agonising hours of incubation and
parturition you have given me your unfailing sympathy, encouragement
and help. You have even chastened me (it was a devastating hour!) for
my--and, I believe, for the book's--good, and when we discovered that
the original form--that of intimate personal letters written directly
to you--did not suit the subject matter, you acquiesced generously in a
change, the need for which I, at least, shall ever deplore.

And now that the last words have been written and Finis lies upon the
page, I know how short it all falls of my ideal and how unworthy it is
of your high hope of me. And yet I dare to offer it to you, knowing
that what is good in it is yours, deep delver that you are for the gold
that lies--somewhere--in every human heart.

Twenty months in the war zone ought, one would imagine, to have
provided me with countless hair-breadth escapes, thrills, and perhaps
even shockers with which to regale you, but the adventures are all
those of other people, an occasional flight to a cellar in a raid being
all we could claim of danger. And so, instead of being a book about
English women in France, it is mainly a book about French women in
their own country, and therein lies its chief, if not its only claim to
merit.

Humanness was the quality which above all others you asked for, and if
it possesses that I shall know it has not been written in vain.

  SUSANNE R. DAY.

  _London,
  January 1918._




  CONTENTS


 CHAP.                                       PAGE

    I. MAINLY INTRODUCTORY                     11

   II. EN ROUTE--SERMAIZE-LES-BAINS            16

  III. FIRST IMPRESSIONS                       29

   IV. À TRAVERS BAR-LE-DUC                    47

    V. SETTLING IN                             61

   VI. THE BASKET-MAKERS OF VAUX-LES-PALAMIES  73

  VII. IN WHICH WE PLAY TRUANT                 87

 VIII. THE MODERN CALVARY                     107

   IX. IN WHICH WE BECOME EMISSARIES OF LE
        BON DIEU                              125

    X. PRIESTS AND PEOPLE                     136

   XI. REPATRIÉES                             160

  XII. STORM-WRACK FROM VERDUN                179

 XIII. MORE STORM-WRACK                       198

  XIV. AIR RAIDS                              207

   XV. M. LE POILU                            223

       ENVOI                                  255




ROUND ABOUT BAR-LE-DUC




CHAPTER I

MAINLY INTRODUCTORY


Relief Work in the War Zone. It did sound exciting. No wonder I
volunteered, but, oh dear! great was the plenitude of my ignorance.
I vaguely understood that we were to distribute clothes and rabbits,
kitchen utensils, guano and other delectable necessaries to a stricken
people, but not that we were to wear a uniform and that the uniform
would be made "by post." If I had there might never have been a chapter
to write nor a tale to tell.

That uniform!--shall I ever forget it? Or the figure I cut when I
put it on? Of course, like any sensible female woman, I wanted to
have it made by my own tailor and in my own way. Strict adherence
to the general scheme, of course, with reasonable modification to
suit the individual. But Authority said NO. Only by one man and in
one place could that uniform be made. Frankly sceptical at first, I
am now a devout believer. For it was certainly unique; perhaps in
strict truth I ought to say that several specimens of it were unique.
There was one--but this is a modest tale told by a modest woman.
Stifle curiosity, and be content with knowing that the less cannot
contain the greater. And then let us go hence and ponder upon the
sweet reasonableness of man, or at least of one man who, when asked to
produce the uniform hats, replied, "But what for, Madam?"

"Well, to try on, of course."

"Try on? Why ever should you want to do that?"

Perhaps you won't believe this? But it is true.

Oh, the agonies of those last days of preparation, and the heartrending
impossibility of getting any really useful or practical information
about an outfit!

"Wear pyjamas, a mess-tin, and a water-bottle. And of course you must
have a sleeping-bag and a bath."

This was at least encouraging. Were we going to sleep _à la belle
étoile_, a heap of stones our pillow, our roof the sky? You can
imagine how I thrilled. But there was the bath. Even in France.... I
relinquished the stars with a sigh and realised that Authority was
talking learnedly about the uniform, talking swiftly, confidently,
assuredly, and as I listened conviction grew that once arrayed in it
every difficulty and danger would melt away, and the French nation
prostrate itself before my blushing feet in one concentrated desire to
pay homage and assist. One danger certainly melted away, but, alas! it
took Romance with it. As a moral life-belt that uniform has never been
equalled.

And then there was the kit-bag. Ye gods, I KNOW that villainous
thing was possessed of the devil. From the day I found it, lying a
discouraged heap upon my bedroom floor, to the day when it tucked
itself on board ship in direct defiance of my orders and invited the
Germans to come and torpedo it--which they promptly did--it never
ceased to annoy. It lost its key in Paris, and on arrival at Sermaize
declined to allow itself to be opened. It was dumped in my "bedroom"
(of which more later), the lock was forced, Sermaize settled itself to
slumber. I proceeded to unpack, plunged in a hand and drew forth--a
pair of blue serge trousers.

Wild yells for help brought Sermaize to my door. What the owner of the
trousers thought when his broken-locked bag was flung back upon him,
history does not relate. He had opened what he thought was HIS bag, so
possibly he was beyond speech. He was a shy young man and he had never
been in France before.

If the thing--the bag, I mean, not the shy young man--had been pretty
or artistic one might have forgiven it all its sins. Iniquity should
always be beautiful. But that bag was plain, _mais d'une laideur
effroyable_. Just for all the world like a monstrous obscene sausage,
green with putrefaction and decay. What I said when I tried to pack
is not fit for a young and modest ear. I planted it on its hind legs,
seized a pair of boots, tried to immure them in its depths, slipped and
fell into it head foremost. It was then the devil chuckled. I heard
him. He had been waiting, you see--he knew.

It is some consolation that a certain not-to-be-named friend
was not on the hotel steps as I stole forth that torrid June
morning. Every imp of the thousand that possess her would have
danced with glee. How she would have laughed: for there I was,
the not-to-be-tried-on-uniform-hat, a grotesque little inverted
pudding-bowl of a thing, perched like a fungoid growth on the top of my
head, the uniform itself hanging blanket-like about my shrinking form
(it was heavy enough for the arctic regions), a water-bottle which had
refused point-blank to go into the kit-bag hanging over one shoulder,
and a bulging brown knapsack jutting blasphemously from my back. What
a vision! Tartarin of Tarascon climbing the Alps with an ironmonger's
shop on his back fades ignominiously in comparison. But then I wasn't
just climbing commonplace tourist-haunted Alps. I was going "to the
Front." At least, so my family said when making pointed and highly
encouraging remarks about my will. That the "Front" in question was
twenty miles from a trench was a mere detail. Why go to the War Zone if
you don't swagger? I swaggered. Not much, you know--just the faintest
æsthetic suspicion of a swagger, and then.... Then Nemesis fell--fell
as I passed a mirror, and saw.... I crawled on all fours into France.

I crawled on all fours into Paris. Think of it, PARIS! No wonder French
women murmured, "Mais, Mademoiselle, vous êtes très devouée." I am a
modest woman (I have mentioned this before, but it bears repetition),
but whenever I thought of that uniform I believed them.

If Paris had not been at war she would probably have arrested me at the
Douane, and I should have deserved it. Fancy insulting her by wearing
such clothes, and on such a night--a clear, purple, perfect summer
night, when she lay like a fairy city caught in the silvery nets of the
moon. And yet there was a strange, ominous hush over it all. The city
lying quiet and, oh, so still! It seemed to be waiting, waiting, a cup
from which the wine had been poured upon the red floor of war.

Wandering along the deserted quays, wondering what the morrow would
bring.... What a night that was, the sheer exquisite beauty of it! The
Conciergerie dark against the sky, the gleaming path of the river, and
then the Louvre and the Tuileries all hushed to languorous, passionate
beauty in the arms of the moon.

Don't you love Paris, every stone of her? I do. But I was not allowed
to stay there. Inexorable Fate sent me the next morning in a taxi and
a state of excusable excitement to the Gare de l'Est, where, kit-bag,
mess-tin, water-bottle and all, I was immured in the Paris-Nancy
express and borne away through a morning of glittering sunshine to
Vitry-le-François, there to be deposited upon the platform and in the
arms of a grey-coated and becomingly-expectant young man.




CHAPTER II

EN ROUTE--SERMAIZE-LES-BAINS


I

Like Bartley Fallon of immortal memory, "if there's any ill luck at
all in the world, 'tis on meself it falls." Needless to say, I was
not allowed to remain in the arms of that nice young man; and indeed,
to give him his due, he showed no overwhelming desire to keep me
there. The embodiment of all Quakerly propriety, he conducted me with
befitting ceremony to the station just as the sun began to drop down
the long hills of the sky, and sent me forth once more, this time
with a ticket for Sermaize-les-Bains in my pocket. My proverbial luck
held good--that is to say, bad. The train was an OMNIBUS. Do you know
what that means? No? Then I shall tell you. It is the philosopher
of locomotion, the last thing in, the final triumph of, thoughtful,
leisurely progression. Its phlegm is sheerly imperturbable, its
serenity of that large-souled order which cataclysms cannot ruffle
nor revolutions disturb. A destination? It shrugs its shoulder. Yes,
somewhere, across illimitable continents, across incalculable æons of
time. The world is beautiful, haste the expression of a vulgar age. To
travel hopefully is to arrive. It hopes. Eventually, if God is good, it
arrives.

And so did we, after long consultative visits to small wayside
stations, and after much meditative meandering through sunset-coloured
lands. Arrived--ah, can you wonder at it?--with just a little catch
in our throats and a shamed mistiness of vision, for had we not seen,
there in that little clump of undergrowth outside the wood, a lonely
cross, fenced with a rustic paling, an old red mouldering _képi_
hanging on the point? And then in the field another ... and again
another ... mute, pitiful, inspiring witnesses of the grim tragedy of
war.

And then came Sermaize, once a thriving little town, a thing of streets
and HOMES, of warm firelit rooms where the great game of Life was
played out day by day, where the stakes were Love and Laughter, and
Success and Failure and Death, where men and women met, it might be on
such a night as this--a night to dream in and to love, a night when the
slow pulse of the Eternal Sea beat quietly upon the ear--met to tell
the age-old story while the world itself stood still to listen, and
out of the silence enchantment grew, and old standards and old values
passed away and a new Heaven and a new Earth were born.

Once a thing of streets and homes! Ah, there lies the real tragedy
of the ruined village. Bricks and mortar? Yes. You may tell the tale
to the last ultimate sou if you will, count it all up, mark it all
down in francs and centimes, tell me that here in one brief hour the
Germans did so much damage, destroyed so many thousand pounds worth of
property, ground such and such an ancient monument to useless powder,
but who can count the cost, or appraise the value of the things which
no money can buy, that only human lives can pay for?

One ruined village is exactly like every other ruined village you
may say with absolute truth, and yet be wrong. A freak of successful
destruction here, a fantastic failure there, may give a touch of
individuality, even a hint of the grotesque. That tall chimney, how
oddly it leans against the sky. That archway standing when everything
about it is rubble and dust. That bit of twisted iron-work, writhing
like an uncouth monster, that stairway climbing ridiculously into
space. Yes, they are all alike, these villages, and all heartrendingly
different. For each has its hidden story of broken lives to tell, of
human hopes and human ambitions dashed remorselessly to earth, of human
friendships severed, of human loves torn and bleeding, trampled under
the red heel of war. Lying there in the moonlight, Sermaize possessed
an awful dignity. In life it may have been sordid and commonplace, in
death, wrapped in the silver shroud of the moon, it was sublime.

As we passed through the broken piles of masonry and brick-and
iron-work every inch of the road throbbed with its history, the ruins
became infused with life and--was it phantasy? a trick of the night? of
the dream-compelling moon?--out of the dark shadows came the phantoms
of men and women and little children, their eyes wide with fear and
longing, their empty hands outstretched....

Home! They cried the word aloud, and the night was filled with their
crying.

And so we passed. Looking back now, I think the dominant emotion of
the moment was one of rage, of blind, impotent, ravening fury against
the senseless cruelty that could be guilty of such a thing. For the
destruction of Sermaize-les-Bains was not a grim necessity of war. It
was a sacrifice to the pride of the All-Highest.

In a heat that was sheerly tropical the battle had raged to and fro.
The Grande Place had been torn to atoms by the long-range German guns,
then came hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, and the Germans in
possession. The inhabitants, terrified, for the most part fled to the
woods. Some remained, but among them unfortunately not the Mayor. He
had gone away early in the morning. He was, perhaps, a simple-minded
person. He cannot have realised how inestimable a privilege it is to
receive a German Commandant in the "Town Hall" he has just blown to
infinitesimal fragments. It may even be--though it is difficult to
believe it--that, conscious of the privilege, he yet dared to despise
it. Whatever the reason the fact remains--he was not there. What an
insult to German pride, what a blow to German prestige! No wonder
the Commandant strode into the street and in a voice trembling with
righteous indignation gave the order, "Pillage and Fire."

Oh, it was a merry game that, and played to a magnificent finish. The
houses were stripped as human ghouls stripped the dead upon Napoleonic
battlefields; glass, china, furniture, pictures, silver, heirlooms
cherished through many a generation, it was a glorious harvest, and
what was not worth the gleaning was piled into heaps and burned.

There are certain pastilles, innocent-looking things like a man's coat
button, round and black, with a hole in the middle. They say the German
army came into France with strings of them round their necks, for in
the German army every contingency is provided for, every destructive
device supplied even to the last least ultimate detail. Its organisers
take no risks. They never throw the dice with Chance. Luck? They don't
believe in luck. They believe in efficiency and careful scientific
preparation, in clean-cut work, with no tags or loose ends of humanity
hanging from it. The human equation is merely a cog upon the machine,
and yet it is the one that is going to destroy them in the end.

So they brought their pastilles into France just as they brought
their expert packers to ensure the safe transit into Germany of all
perishable loot. And if ever you see some of those pastilles framed at
Selfridge's and ask yourself if they could really be effective--they
are so small, so very harmless-looking--remember Sermaize and the waste
of charred rubbish lying desolate under the moon. Some one--I think
Maurice Genevoix, in _Sous Verdun_--tells how, in the early days of
war, French soldiers were sometimes horrified to see a bullet-stricken
German suddenly catch fire, become a living torch, blazing, terrible.
At first they were quite unable to account for it. You see, they didn't
know about the pastilles then. Later, when they did, they understood.
I was told in Sermaize that a German aeroplane, flying low over the
roofs, sprayed them with petrol that day. If true, it was quite an
unnecessary waste of valuable material. The pastilles were more than
equal to the occasion. But so was the French hotel-keeper who, coming
back when the Germans had commenced their long march home, and finding
his house in desiccated fragments, promptly put up a rough wooden
shelter, and hung out his sign-board, "Café des Ruines!"


II

No one should go to Sermaize without paying a visit to M. le Curé. He
stayed with his people till his home was tumbling about his ears, and
even then he hung on, in the cellar. Driven out by fire, he collected
such fugitives as were at hand and helped them through the woods to a
place of safety. Of the events and incidents of that flight, of the
dramatic episodes of the bombardment and subsequent fighting--there
was a story of a French officer, for instance, who came tumbling into
the cellar demanding food and drink in the midst of all the hell, and
who devoured both, M. le Curé confessing that his own appetite at the
moment was not quite up to its usual form, howitzer shells being a poor
substitute for, shall we say, a gin-and-bitters?--it is not for me to
speak. He has told the tale himself elsewhere, and if in the telling he
has been half as witty, as epigrammatic, as vivid and as humorous as he
was when he lectured in the Common-room at Sermaize, then all I can say
is, buy the book even if you have to pawn your last pair of boots to
find the money for it.

A rare type, M. le Curé. An intellectual, once the owner and lover
(the terms are, unhappily, not always synonymous) of a fine library,
now in ashes, a man who could be generous even to an ungenerous
foe, and remind an audience--one member, at least, of which was no
Pacifist--that according to the German code the Mayor should have
remained in the town, and that he, M. le Curé, had been able to collect
no evidence of cruelty to, or outrage upon, an individual.

That lecture is one of the things that will live in my memory. For
the Curé was not possessed of a library of some two thousand volumes
for nothing, and whatever his Bishop's opinion may be on the subject,
I take leave to believe that Anatole France, De Maupassant, Verlaine
and Baudelaire jostled many a horrified divine upon the shelves. For
his style was what a sound knowledge of French literature had made it.
He could dare to be improper--oh, so deliciously, subtly improper! A
word, a tone, a gesture--a history. And his audience? Well, I mustn't
tell you about that, and perhaps the sense of utter incongruity was
born entirely of my own imagination. But to hear him describe how he
spent the night in a crowded railway-station waiting-room where many
things that should be decently hidden were revealed, and where he, a
respectable celibate divine, shared a pallet with dames of varying ages
and attractiveness ... and.... The veil just drawn aside fell down
again upon the scene, and English propriety came to its own with a
shudder.

Yes, if you are wise you will visit M. le Curé. And ask him to tell
you how he disguised himself as a drover, and how, when in defiance of
all authority he came back to Sermaize, he himself swept and cleaned
out the big room which the Germans had used as a hospital, and which
they had befouled and filthied, leaving vessels full of offal and
indescribable loathlinesses, where blood was thick on walls and floor;
a room that stank, putrid, abominable. It was German filth, and German
beastliness, and French women, their hearts still hot within them,
would not touch it.

And ask him to tell you how nearly he was killed by a shell which fell
on an outhouse in which he was taking shelter, and how he was called
up, and as a soldier of France was told to lead a horse to some
village whose name I have forgotten, and how he, who hardly knew one
end of a horse from another, led it, and on arriving at the village met
an irate officer.

"And what are you doing here?"

"I do not know."

"Your regiment?"

"I haven't one."

"And the horse?"

A shrug, what indeed of the horse?

Three days later he was wearing his cassock again.

Once, when escaping from Sermaize he was nearly shot by some French
soldiers. There were only a few of them, and their nerves had been
shattered. Nerves do give way sometimes when an avalanche sweeps over
them, and the Germans came into France like a thousand avalanches.
And so these poor wretches, separated from their regiment, fled. It
was probably the wisest thing they could do under the circumstances.
"Sauve qui peut." There are few cries more terrible than that. But a
village lay in the line of flight, and in the village there was good
red wine. It was a hot day, France was lost, Paris capitulating, and
man a thirsty animal. A corporal rescued M. le Curé when his back was
against the wall and rifles, describing wild circles, were threatening
him; finally, the nerveless ones went back to their regiment and fought
gloriously for France, and Paris did not capitulate after all.


III

With a howl of bitter anguish Tante Joséphine collapsed upon the
ground, and the earth shook. For Tante Joséphine was fat, and her
bones were buried beyond all hope of recovery under great pendulous
masses of quivering, perspiring flesh. And she had walked, _mais,
pensez donc!_--walked thousands of accursed miles through the woods,
she had tripped over roots, she had been hoisted over banks, she had
crashed like an avalanche down trenches and drains. She was no longer
a woman, she was a bath--behold the perspiration!--she was an ache,
_mon Dieu!_ not one, but five million villainous aches; she was a lurid
fire of profanity. For while she, Tante Joséphine, walked and fell and
"larded the green earth," Grandmère lay in the _brouette_ and refused
to be evicted. At first Tante Joséphine tried to get in too. Surely
the war which had worked so many miracles would transform her into a
telescope, but the war was unkind, and Pierre, _pauvre petit gosse!_
had been temporarily submerged in a sea of agitated fat from which he
had been rescued with difficulty. And Grandmère was only eighty-two,
whereas she, Tante Joséphine, was sixty.

All day long her eyes had turned to the _brouette_, and to Grandmère
lying back like a queen. No, she could bear it no longer. If she did
not ride she would die, or be taken by the Germans, and her blood
would be on Grandmère's head, and shadowed by remorse would be all
that selfish woman's days. The wood resounded with the bellowings, and
the green earth trembled because Tante Joséphine, as she sat on it,
trembled with wrath and fatigue and desolation and woe.

Grandmère stirred in the _brouette_. At eighty-two one is not so active
as one was at twenty, but one isn't old, _ma foi_! Père Bronchot was
old. He would be ninety-four at Toussaint, but she--oh, she could
still show that big soft thing of a Tante Joséphine what it was to be
a woman of France. She was always a weakling, was Joséphine, fit only
for pasturage. And so behold the quivering mountain ludicrously piling
itself upon the _brouette_, Pierre, a pensive look in his eye, standing
by the while. He staggered as he caught up the handles. The chariot
swayed ominously. The mountain became a volcano spurting forth fire.
The chariot steadied, and then very slowly resumed its way. Half a
kilomètre, three-quarters, a whole. Grandmère was strangely silent, for
at eighty-two one is not so young as one was at twenty, and kilomètres
grow strangely long as the years go by.

Tante Joséphine snored. Pierre ceased to push.

"Allons, Allons. Pierre, que veux-tu? Is it that the Germans shall
catch us and make of you a stew for their supper?" Tante Joséphine had
wakened up.

"I am tired."

"Ah, paresseux." The volcano became active again.

Pierre looked at Grandmère. How old she was! And why did she look so
white as she trailed her feet bravely through the wood?

"Grandmère is ill. She must ride!"

What Tante Joséphine said the woods have gathered to their breast.
Pierre became pensive, then he smiled. "Eh, bien. En route."

The kilomètre becomes very long when one is eighty-two, but Grandmère
was a daughter of France. Her head was high, her eye steadfast as she
plodded on, taking no notice of the way, never seeing the deep drain
that ran beside the path. But Pierre saw it. He must have, because he
saw everything. He was made that way. And that is why Tante Joséphine
has never been able to understand why she dreamed she was rolling down
a precipice with a railway train rolling on top of her, and wakened
to find herself deep in the soft mould at the bottom of the drain,
the _brouette_ reclining on--well, on the highest promontory of her
coast-line, while Pierre and Grandmère peered over the top with the
eyes of celestial explorers who look down suddenly into hell.

So and in such wise was the manner of their going. Of the return
Tante Joséphine does not speak. For a time they hid in the woods,
other good Sermaizians with them. How did they live? Ah, don't ask me
that! They existed, somehow, as birds and squirrels exist, perhaps,
and then one day they said they were going home. I am not at all sure
that the authorities wanted to have them there. For only a handful
of houses remained, and though many a cellar was still intact under
the ruins, cellars, considered as human habitation, may, without
undue exaggeration, be said to lack some of the advantages of modern
civilisation. How was Tante Joséphine, how were the stained and
battered scarecrows that accompanied her to provide for themselves
during the winter? Would broken bricks make bread? Would fire-eaten
iron-work make a blanket? Authority might protest, Sermaizians did not
care. They crept into the cellars that numbed them to the very marrow
on cold days, living like badgers and foxes in their dark, comfortless
holes, enduring bitter cold and terrible privation, lacking food and
clothes and fire and light, but telling themselves that they were at
home and sucking good comfort from the telling.

Needless to say, there weren't nearly enough cellars to go round,
and direful things might have happened but for a lucky accident.
Hidden in the woods about a mile from the town was an old Hydropathic
Establishment, known as La Source, which had escaped the general
destruction. Into it, regardless of its dirt and its bleak, excessive
discomfort swarmed some three hundred of the _sinistrés_, there to
huddle the long winter away.

As an example of its special attractions, let me tell you of one woman
who lived with her two children in a tiny room, the walls of which
streamed with damp, which had no fireplace, no heating possibilities of
any kind, and whose sole furniture consisted of a barrow and one thin
blanket.

From the point of view of the Relief worker an ideal case. Beautiful
misery, you know. It could hardly be surpassed.

A Society--a very modest Society; it has repeatedly warned me that
it dislikes publicity, so I heroically refrain from mentioning its
name[1]--swept down upon the ruins early in 1915, and taking possession
of one of the buildings at La Source, made the theatre its Common-room,
the billiard-room its bedroom, and a top-loft a general dumping-ground,
whose contents included a camp bed but no sheets, a tin basin and
jug, an apologetic towel and, let me think--I can't remember a
dressing-table or a mirror. It was a very modest Society, you remember,
and the sum of its vanity----? Well, it perpetrated the uniform. Let it
rest in peace.

 [1] It has, nevertheless, done work of inestimable value in France, in
 Serbia and in Russia.

Wherefore and because of which things a grey-clad apparition, moving
through the moonlight like some hideous spectre of woe, arrived that
warm June night at La Source, and was ushered into a room where
innumerable people were drinking cocoa, rushing about, talking--ye
gods, how they talked!--smoking.... I was more frightened than I have
ever been in my life. I am not used to crowds, and to my fevered
imagination every unit was a battalion. Then because I was hotter and
thirstier than a grain of sand in a sun-scorched desert, cocoa was
thrust upon me--_cocoa_! I drank it, loathing it, and wondered why
everybody seemed to be drinking out of the same mug.

Then a young man seized my kit-bag. "Come along." My hair began to
rise. I had been prepared for a great deal, but this.... I looked at
the young man, he looked at me. The situation, at all events, did not
lack piquancy! It was indeed a Sentimental Journey that I was making,
and Sterne.... But the inimitable episode was not to repeat itself. My
only room-mate was a bat.




CHAPTER III

FIRST IMPRESSIONS


I

Sermaize, however, was not to be the scene of my future labours. The
honour was reserved for Bar-le-Duc, the captital city of the Meuse,
the seat of a Prefecture, and proud manufacturer of a very special
jam, "Confitures de Bar-le-Duc." The mouth waters at the very thought
of it, but desire develops a limp when you have seen the initial
processes of manufacture; for these consist in the removal by means of
a finely-cut quill of every pip from every currant about to be boiled
in the sacrificial pan. As you go through the streets in July you see
white and crimson patches on the ground. They look disgustingly like
something that has been chewed and spumed forth again. They are the
discarded currant pips, for only the skin and pulp are made into jam.

This unpipping (have we any adequate translation for _épepiner_?), paid
for at the rate of about four sous a pound, is sometimes carried on
under the cleanliest of home conditions, but occasionally one sees a
group of women at work round a table that makes jam for the moment the
least appetising of comestibles. Nevertheless, if the good God ever
places a pot of Confiture de Bar-le-Duc upon your table, eat it; eat it
_à la Russe_ with a spoon--don't insult it with bread--and you will
become a god with nectar on your lips.

There were about four thousand refugees in Bar. That is why I was there
too. And before I had been ten minutes in the town a hard-voiced woman
said, "Would you please carry those _seaux hygiéniques_ (sanitary
pails) upstairs?" So much for my anticipatory thrills. If I ever go to
heaven I shall be put in the back garden.

_À la guerre, comme à la guerre._ I carried the pails--a work of
supererogation as it subsequently transpired, for they all had to be
brought down again promptly, so heavily were they in demand.

For the sanitation of Bar-le-Duc has yet to be born.[2] One can't call
arrangements that date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
sanitation, one can only call them self-advertisement. Until I went to
Bar I never knew that the air could be solid with smell. One might as
well walk up a sewer as up the Rue de l'Horloge on a hot day. Every
man, woman and child in the town ought to have died of diphtheria,
typhoid, septic poisoning, of a dozen gruesome diseases long ago. If
smells could kill, Bar would be as depopulated as the Dead Cities of
the Zuyder Zee. But the French seem to thrive on smells, though in all
fairness I must admit that once or twice a grumble reached me. But that
was when the cesspool under the window was discharging its contents
into the yard.

 [2] It is only fair to add that the whole question was under serious
 consideration when the war broke out, and made reform, for the moment,
 impossible.

The hard-voiced woman was hygienically mad. She imported a Sanitary
Inspector, an ironic anomaly, who used to blush apoplectically through
meals because she would discuss the undiscussable with him. "I hope you
are not squeamish? We don't mind these things here," she said to me.
"It is so stupid to be a prude."

Frankly, I could have slain that woman. She wasn't fit to live. The
climax came on a broiling day when we were all exhausted and not a
little sick from heat and smell. She pleasingly entertained us at
dinner with a graphic description of a tubercular hip which she had
been dressing. There was a manure heap outside the window of the sick
child's room. It crawled with flies. So did the room. So did the hip.

She went back to the native sphere she should never have left a
few days later, but in the meantime she had obsessed us all with a
firm belief in the value of the _seau hygiénique_. Every refugee
family should have one. Our first care must be to provide it. The
obsession drove us into strange difficulties, as, for example, once
in a neighbouring village where, trusting to my companion to keep the
kindly but inquisitive Curé who accompanied us too deeply engaged in
conversation to hear what I was saying, I asked the mother of a large
family if she would like us to give her one.

"Qu'est que c'est? What did you say?"

Gentle as my murmur had been, M. le Curé was down on me like a shot.
The woman who hesitates is lost. Anything is better than embarrassment.
I repeated the question.

"Ce n'est pas nécessaire. Il y a un jardin," was his electrifying
reply, and we filed out after him, with new ideas on French social
questions simmering in our heads.

More embarrassing still, though, was a visit to a dear old couple
living high up in a small room in a narrow fœtid street. Madame Legrand
was a dear, with a round chubby face and the brightest of blue eyes,
a complexion like a rosy apple and dimples like a girl's. She wore a
spotlessly white mob-cap with a coquettish little frill round it, and
she was just as clean and as fresh and as sonsy as if she had stepped
out of her little cottage to go to Mass. Her husband was a rather
picturesque creature, with a crimson cummerbund round his waist. He
had been a _garde-forêt_, and together they had saved and scraped,
living frugally and decently, putting money by every year until at last
they were able to buy a cottage and an acre or two of land. Then the
war came and the Germans, and the cottage was burnt, and the poor old
things fled to Bar-le-Duc, homeless and beggared, possessed of nothing
in all the world but just the clothes on their backs.

The _garde-forêt_ was talking to my companion. I broached the
all-important subject to Madame.

"Vous avez un seau hygiénique?" (I admit it was vilely put.)

"Mais oui, Mademoiselle. Voulez-vous ...?" Before I could stop her she
had flourished it out upon the floor. It seems there are no limits to
French hospitality, but there are to what even a commonplace English
woman can face with stoical calm. Lest worse befall we fled. Somehow
our sanitary researches lacked enthusiasm after that.


II

"Bar-le-Duc, an ancient and historical city of the Meuse, is
beautifully situated on the banks of the Ornain."

That, of course, is how I should have commenced Chapter III, and then,
with Baedekered solemnity, have described its streets, its canals, its
railway-station--a dull affair until a bomb blew its glass roof to
fragments; when it became quaintly skeletonic--its woods and hills, its
churches and its monuments.

Only I never do anything quite as I ought to, and my capacity for
getting into mischief is unlimited. I can't bear the level highways of
Life, cut like a Route Nationale straight from point to point, white,
steam-rollered, respectable, horrible. For me the by-ways and the
lanes, the hedges smelling of wild roses and woodbine, or a-fire with
berry and burning leaf, the cross-cuts leading you know not whither,
but delightfully sure to surprise you in the end. What if the surprise
is sometimes in a bog, in the mire, or in a thicket of furze? More
often than not it is in Fairyland.

And so grant me your indulgence if I wander a little, loitering in the
green meadows, plunging through the dim woods of experience. Especially
as I am going to be good now and explain Bar and the refugees.

As I told you, there were some four thousand of them, from the
Argonne, the Ardennes, Luxembourg, and many a frontier village such
as Longuyon or Longwy. And Bar received them coldly. It dubbed them,
without distinction of person, "ces sales émigrés," forgetting that
the dirt and squalor of their appearance was due to adversity and not
to any fault of their own. Forgetting, too, that it had very nearly
been _émigré_ itself. For the Germans came within five miles of it.
From the town shells could be seen bursting high up the valley; the
blaze of burning villages reddened the evening sky. Trains poured out
laden with terrified inhabitants fearing the worst, all the hospitals
were evacuated, and down the roads from the battle, from Mussey,
from Vassincourt, from Laimont and Révigny came the wounded, a long
procession of maimed and broken men. They lay in the streets, on
door-steps, in the station-yard, they fell, dying, by canal and river
bank. Kindly women, thrusting their own fear aside, ministered to them,
the cannon thundering at their very door. And with the wounded came the
refugees. What a procession that must have been. Women have told me of
it. Told me how, after days--even weeks--of semi-starvation, lying in
the open at night, exposed to rain and sun, often unable to get even a
drink of water (for to their eternal shame many a village locked its
wells, refusing to open them even for parched and wailing children),
they found themselves caught in the backwash of the battle. To all the
other horrors of flight was added this. Men, it might be their own
sons, or husbands, or brothers, blood-stained remnants of humanity
plodding wearily, desperately down the road, while in the fields and in
the ditches lay mangled, encarnadined things that the very sun itself
must have shuddered to look upon. Old feeble men and women fell out and
died by the way, a mother carried her dead baby for three nights and
three days, for there was no one to bury it, and the God of Life robed
himself in the trappings of Death as he gathered exhausted mother and
new-born babe in his arms.

And so they came to Bar. In the big dormitories of the Caserne Oudinot
straw was laid on the floor, and there they were lodged, some after a
night's rest to set wearily forth again, others to remain in the town,
for the tide had turned and the Germans were in retreat.

There must have been an unusually large number of houses to let in Bar
before the war; many, we know, had been condemned by the authorities,
and, truth to tell, I don't wonder at it. "House to let" did not imply,
as you might suppose, that it was untenanted, especially if the house
was in the rue des Grangettes, or rue Oudinot, rue de Véel, or rue
de l'Horloge. The tenants paid no rent. They had been in possession
for years, possibly centuries. They were as numerous as the sands of
the sea-shore, and they had all the _élan_, the _joie de vivre_, the
vivacity and the tactical genius of the French nation. They welcomed
the unhappy refugees--I was going to say vociferously, remembering the
soldier who, billeted in a Kerry village, complained that the fleas sat
up and barked at him.

The rooms, though dirty, unsanitary and swarming with the terror that
hoppeth in the noonday (there were other and even worse plagues as
well), were a shelter. The war would be over in three months, and
one would be going home again. In the meantime one could endure the
palliasse (a great sack filled with straw and laid on the floor, and on
which four, five, seven or even more people slept at night), one could
cower under the single blanket provided by the town, not undressing,
of course; that would be to perish. One could learn to share the
narrowest of quarters with nine, eleven, even fifteen other people;
one could tighten one's belt when hunger came--and it came very often
during those first hard months--but one could not endure the hostile
looks of the tradespeople, and the _sales émigrés_ spit at one in the
streets.

The refugees, however, had one good friend; monsieur C., an ex-mayor of
the town and a man whose "heart was open as day to melting charity,"
made their cause his own. And perhaps because of him, perhaps out of
its own good heart, the town, officially considered, did its best for
them. It gave them clean straw for their palliasses; it saw that no
room was without a stove; it established a market for them when it
discovered that the shopkeepers, exploiting misery, were scandalously
overcharging for their goods; it declined to take rent from mothers
with young families; and it appointed a doctor who gave medical
attention free.

All very good and helpful, but mere drops in the bucket of refugee
needs. You see the war had caught them unawares, and at first, no
doubt for wise military reasons, the authorities discouraged flight.
People who might have packed up necessaries and escaped in good order
found themselves driven like cattle through the country, the Germans
at their heels, the smallest of bundles clutched under their arms, and
the gendarmes shouting "Vîte, Vîte, Depêchez-vous, depêchez-vous," till
reason itself trembled in the balance.

Some, too, had remembered the war of _Soixante-Dix_, when the
Prussians, marching to victory, treated the civilians kindly. "They
passed through our village laughing and singing songs," old women have
told me. Some atrocities there were, even then; but, compared with
those of the present war, only the spasmodic outbursts of boyhood in a
rage.

Consequently, flight was often delayed till the last moment, delayed
till it was too late, and, caught by the tide, some found themselves
prisoners behind the lines. Those who got away saved practically
nothing. Sometimes a few family papers, sometimes the _bas de laine_,
the storehouse of their savings, sometimes a change of linen, most
often nothing at all.

"Mais rien, Mademoiselle. Je vous assure, rien du tout, du tout, du
tout. Pas ça," and with the familiar gesture a forefinger nail would
catch behind a front tooth and then click sharply outwards. When
talking to an excited Meusienne, it is well to be wary. One must not
stand too near, for she is sure to thrust her face close to your own,
and when the finger flies out it no longer answers to the helm. It
may end its unbridled career anywhere, and commit awful havoc in the
ending, for the nail of the Meusienne is not a nail, it is a talon.

No wonder the poor souls needed help. No wonder they besieged our door
when the news went forth that "Les Anglaises" had come to town and were
distributing clothes and utensils, chairs, _garde-mangers_ (small safes
in which to keep their food, the fly pest being sheerly horrible),
sheets, blankets--anything and everything that destitute humanity needs
and is grateful for. Their faith in us, after a few months of work,
became profound. They believed we could evolve anything, anywhere and
at a moment's notice. If stern necessity obliged us to refuse, they had
a touching way of saying, "Eh bien, ce sera pour une autre fois"[3]--a
politeness which extricated them gracefully from a difficult position,
but left us struggling in the net of circumstance and unaccountably
convinced that when they called again "our purse, our person, our
extremest means would lie all unlocked to their occasion."

 [3] "Oh, well, you will give it to me another time."


III

But these little amenities of relief only thrust themselves upon me
by degrees. At first, during the torrid summer weeks, everything was
so new and so strange there were no clean-cut outlines at all. Before
one impression had focused itself upon the mind another was claiming
place. My brain--if you could have examined it--must have looked like a
photographic plate exposed some dozens of times by a careless amateur.
From the general mistiness and blur only a few things stand out. The
stifling heat, the awful smells, the unending succession of weeping and
hysterical women, and last, but not least, _les puces_.

Did you ever hear the story of the Irish farmer who said he "did not
grudge them their bite and their sup, but what he could not stand was
the continule thramping"? Well, the thramping was maddening. I believe
I never paid a visit to a refugee in those days without becoming the
exercising ground for light cavalry. People sitting quietly in our
Common-room working at case-papers would suddenly dash away, to come
back some minutes later in rage and exasperation. The cavalry still
manœuvred. A mere patrol of two or three could be dealt with, but the
poor wretch who had a regiment nearly qualified for a lunatic asylum.

Every visit we paid renewed our afflictions, and the houses, old
and long untenanted, being so disgustingly dirty, we endured mental
agonies--in addition to physical ones--when we thought of the filth
from which the plague had come. Oddly enough, we did not suffer so much
the next summer, and we were mercifully spared the attentions of other
less active but even more horrible forms of entomological life.

You see, it was a rule--and as experience proved a very wise rule--of
our Society that no help should be given unless the applicant had been
visited and full particulars of his, or her, condition ascertained.
Roughly speaking, we found out where he had come from, his previous
occupation and station in life, the size of his farm if he had one and
the amount of his stock, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, rabbits,
etc.; we made notes on his housing conditions, tabulated the members of
his family, their ages and sex, their present employment and the amount
of wages earned. All of which took time.

Armed with a notebook and pencil, we would sally forth, to grope our
way up pitch-dark staircases, knock at innumerable doors, dash past the
murky corner where the cesspool lay--I know houses in which it is under
the stairs--and at last run the refugee to earth.

Then followed the usual routine. A chair--generally broken or minus a
back--or a stool dragged forth with an apology for its poverty: "Quand
on est émigrée, vous savez, Madame--ou Mademoiselle, je ne sais pas?"
and then the torrent. A word sufficed to unloose it. Only a fool would
try to stem it.

"Ah, Mademoiselle, you do not know what I have suffered."

So Madame would settle herself to the tale, and that was the moment
when ... when ... when doubt grew, then certainty, and "Half-a-league,
half-a-league, half-a-league onward" hammered an accompaniment on the
brain.

In the evening we sorted out our notes and made up our case papers.
These latter should yield rich harvest to the future historian if
they are preserved, and if the good God has endowed him with a sense
of humour. He could make such delicious "copy" from them. For the
individuality of the worker stamped itself upon the papers even
more legibly than the biography of the case. There are lots of gems
scattered through them, but the one I like best lies in the column
headed Medical Relief, and runs as follows--

 _Aug_. 26. Madame Guiot has pneumonia. Condition serious.

 _Aug_. 31. Madame quite comfortable.

 _Sept_. 2. Madame has died. (Nurse's initials appended.)

In the papers you may read that such and such a house is infested
with vermin; that Mademoiselle Wurtz is said, by the neighbours, to
drink; that Madame Dablainville is filthy and lives like a pig; that
the life of Madame Hache falls regrettably below accepted standards
of morality; and that Madame Bontemps, who probably never owned three
pocket-handkerchiefs in her life, declares that she lost sixty pairs
of handspun linen sheets, four dozen chemises, and pillow and bolster
cases innumerable when the Germans burnt her home.

You may also read how Mademoiselle Rose Perrotin was nursing a sick
father when the Boches took possession of her village; how the
Commandant ordered her to leave, and how she, with tears streaming
down her large fat face, begged to be allowed to remain. Her father
was dying. It was impossible to leave him. But German Commandants care
little for filial feelings. Mademoiselle Rose (a blossom withering
on its stem) had a figure like a monolith but a heart of gold. Even
though they shot her she would not go away. They did not shoot her.
They quietly placed her on the outskirts of the village and bade her
begone. Next day she crept back again. She prayed, she wept, she
implored, she entreated. When a monolith weeps even Emperors succumb.
So did the Commandant. A day, two days, passed, and then her father
died. They must have been very dreadful days, but worse was to follow.
No one would bury the dead Frenchman. She had to leave him lying
there--I gathered, however, that a grave was subsequently dug for him
in unconsecrated ground--and walk, and walk, and walk, mile after mile,
kilométre after kilométre, longing to weep, nay, to cascade tears;
but, "Figurez-vous, Mademoiselle. Ah, quelle misère. I had not got a
pocket-handkerchief!"

That a father should die, that is Fate, but that one should not have
a pocket-handkerchief!... She wept afresh because she had not been
able to weep then, and I believe that I shall carry to my grave
a vision of stout, monolithic, utterly prosaic Mademoiselle Rose
toiling across half a Department of France weeping because she had no
pocket-handkerchief in which to mourn for her honoured dead.

Or you may read of little André Moldinot, who was alone in the fields
when he saw the Germans coming, and who ran away, drifting he doesn't
know how to Bar-le-Duc, where he has remained in the care of kindly
people, hearing no news of his family, not knowing whether they are
alive or dead. Or of the old man, whose name I have forgotten--was it
Galzandat?--who fought with the English in the Crimea, and who lived
with fourteen other people (women and children) in a stifling hole in
the rue Polval. Or of that awful room in the street near the Canal
where thirty people ate and drank and slept and quarrelled a whole
winter through--a room unspeakable in its dirt and untidiness. Old rags
lay heaped on the floor, dirty crockery, potato, carrot and turnip
peelings littered the greasy table, big palliasses strewed the corners,
loathsome bedclothes crawling on them. On strings stretched from wall
to wall clothes were drying (one inmate was a washerwoman), an old
witch-like creature with matted, unkempt locks flitted about, and in
the far corner, on the day I went there, two priests were offering
ghostly counsel to a weeping woman.

Misery makes strange bedfellows, and the cyclone of war flung together
people who, in ordinary circumstances, would have been far removed from
one another's orbit. At first the good and the bad, the clean and the
dirty, the thrifty and the drunken herded together, too wretched to
complain, too crushed and despondent to hope for better things. But
gradually temperament asserted itself, and one by one, as opportunity
arose and their circumstances improved, the respectable ceased to
rub elbows with the dissolute, and they found quarters of their own
either through their own exertions or through the help of their
friends. Monsieur C. and Madame B. (wise, witty, kindly Madame B.) were
especially energetic in this respect.

So we soon began to feel comfortably assured that the tenants of
Maison Blanpain and of one or two other rookeries were the scum of the
refugee pool, idle, disreputable, swearing, undeserving vagabonds every
one. They took us in gloriously many a time, they fooled us to the top
of our sentimental bent--at first--but we could not have done without
them. For though Virtue may bathe the world in still, white light, it
is Vice that splashes the dancing colours over it.


IV

Yes, I suppose we were taken in at times!

On the outskirts of Bar, beyond the Faubourg Marbot, lies a wood called
the Bois de Maestricht. The way to it lies through a narrow winding
valley of great beauty, especially in the autumn when the fires of the
dying year are ablaze in wood and field. Just at the end of the road
where the woods crush down and engulf it is a long strip of meadow, a
nocturne in green and purple when the autumn crocus is in flower, and
in the woods are violets and wild strawberries, and long trails of
lesser periwinkle, ivy crimson and white, and hellebore and oxlips and
all sorts of delicious things, with, from just one point on one of the
countless uphill paths, a view of Bar, so exquisite, so ethereal it
almost seems like a glimpse of some far dream-silvered land.

And it was here, just on the edge of the wood, in a small rough shack,
that Madame Martin and her family took up their abode. The shack
consisted of one room, not long and certainly not wide, a slice of
which, rudely partitioned off, did duty as a cow-house. Here lived
Madame Martin and her husband, her granddaughter Alice, a small boy
suffering from a malady which caused severe abdominal distention, and
one or two other children. Le Père Battin, whose relationship was
obscure but presumably deeply-rooted in the family soil, shared the
cow-end with his beloved _vache_, a noble beast and, like himself, a
refugee.

Le Père Battin always averred that he had adopted the cow, it being
obviously an orphan, homeless and a beggar, but my own firm conviction
is that he stole it. It was a kindly cow and a generous, for it
proceeded speedily to enrich him with a calf which, unlike most refugee
babies, throve amazingly, and when I saw it took up so much space in
the narrow shed there was hardly room enough for its mother. How Le
Père Battin squeezed himself in as well is a pure wonder. But squeeze
he did, and when delicately suggesting that a gift of sheets from
"Les Anglaises" would completely assuage the miseries of his lot, he
showed me his bed. It was in the feeding-trough. One hurried glance was
enough. I no longer wondered why the first visitor to the Martin abode,
having unwisely settled down for a chat, spent the rest of the day and
the greater part of the night in fruitless chase. I did not settle
down. "It was fear, O Little Hunter, it was fear."

Nor did I give the sheets. The cow would have eaten them.

I remarked that the day was hot, and repaired to the garden (a
wilderness of weeds and despairing flowers), and there Madame
entertained me.

She was an ideal "case." Just the person whose photograph should be
sent to kindly, generous souls at home. She was small, active, rather
witty, a good talker, with darting brown eyes and a bewitching grin.
She wore a befrilled cap, and oh, she could flatter with her tongue!
A nice old soul in spite of the villainy with which Père Battin
subsequently charged her. Her first visitor--she who unfortunately sat
down--fell a victim on the spot. So did we all. Heaven had made Madame
that way. It was inevitable. So all the riches of our earth were poured
forth for her, and she devoured largely of our substance. Then the girl
Alice developed throat trouble and was ministered to by our nurse, and
she, I grieve to say, coming home one day from the Bois, hinted dark
things about Alice--things which made our righteous judgment to stand
on end. We continued to pet Madame Martin; we did everything we could
for her except eat her jam. Having seen the shack, and le Père Battin
and that one overcrowded room where flies in dense black swarms settled
on everything, where dogs scratched and where age-old dirt gathered
more dirt to its arms with the dawning of every day, that jam pot
contained so many possibilities, we felt that to eat its contents would
be sheer murder.

And so the autumn wore away and winter came, and then one day as I
was going through the valley to visit some woodcutters in the Bois, I
met le Père Battin driving home his cow. And he stopped me. Once when
speaking of the Emperor of Austria he had said, "Il est en train de
mourir? Bon. On a eu bien assez de ces lapins-là." (He is dying? Good.
We have had enough of such rabbits.)

A man who can discuss an Emperor in such terms is not lightly to be
passed by, but I stood as far from him as possible. I did not till then
believe that anybody could be as dirty as Father Battin and live.

But he thrust himself close, looking fearfully about him, sinking his
voice to a hoarse whisper.

"Did I know the truth about the Martins? That Alice had gone to
Révigny? There were soldiers there." He nodded sapiently. "But Alice
was la vraie Comtesse de----" He mentioned a hyphenated name. "Yes. It
was true. She was married. A young man, a fool. Mon Dieu, but a fool.
She might live in a shack in the Bois and her grandmother might be an
old peasant woman, but she was a Comtesse, wife of the Comte de----."

I took leave to suppose that Père Battin was mad.

But he was circumstantial. "Yes. Her husband had left her. An affair
of a few weeks. Every gendarme in the town knew. And Madame knew. Knew
and made money out of it. Many a good franc she had put in her pocket.
But the gendarmes were watching, and one day the old woman and Alice
would...." Again he murmured unprintable things.

"Monsieur, you are ridiculous." Alice Martin a Comtesse! No wonder I
laughed. But he insisted. He kept on repeating it.

"La vraie Comtesse de----" But now she was....

The dark sayings of the district nurse came back to my mind and I
wondered. But Père Battin was offensive to ear and eye. I wished
him _bonjour_, watching him trailing down the path, his _vache_
ruminatingly leading, and then went on my way to the wood.

An hour later Madame Martin came running down the hill to greet me. She
had seen me go by and waited. In her hand was a bunch of flowers, the
best, least discouraged from her untended garden.

"For Mademoiselle," she said, and as she held them out her smile
scattered gold dust upon my heart.

Now do you think le Père Battin's story was true?




CHAPTER IV

À TRAVERS BAR-LE-DUC


Whether it was or not, it has come rather too soon in my narrative, I
am afraid. It has carried me far away from the days when the quaint
individual charm of Bar-le-Duc began to assert itself, little by
little, slowly, but with such cumulative effect that in the end we grew
to love it.

Our work took us into every lane and street, but it was the Ville-Haute
that I loved best. I wish I could describe it to you as it lies on the
hill; wish I could take you up the steep narrow lane that leads to the
rue St Jean, and then into the rue de l'Armurier which bends like a
giant S and is so narrow you fancy you could touch the houses on either
side by stretching out your arms. Small boys tobogganed down it in
the great frost last year. It was rare sport for the small boys, but
disastrous to sober-minded propriety which occasionally found that it,
too, was tobogganing--but not on a tray--and with an absence of grace
and premeditation that were devastating in their results.

Indeed, the Ville-Haute was a death-trap during those weeks. There
were slides everywhere. The Place St Pierre was scarred with them,
the wonderful Place which, pear-shaped, wide at the top, narrowing to
its lower end, lies encircled in the arms of the rue des Dues de Bar
and of the rue des Grangettes. And at the top, commandingly in the
centre stands the church of St Pierre--once St Maze--where the famous
statue, the "Squelette," is now buried so many fathoms deep in sandbags
nothing can be seen of it at all. It is said that Mr. Edmund Gosse
once came to spend a night in Bar and was so bewitched by its beauty
he remained for several weeks, writing a charming little romance about
it in which the "Squelette" plays a prominent part. And, indeed, the
only way to know Bar is to live in it. It would be quite easy to tell
you of the Tour de l'Horloge standing on guard on the hill; of the
fifteenth-and sixteenth-century houses; of the Pont Nôtre Dame; of
the Canal des Usines which always reminded me of Bruges; of the river
winding through the Lower Town, tall poplars standing sentinel along
the banks; of the great canal that cuts a fine almost parallel to that
of the river and which, if only you followed it far enough, would bring
you at last to the Rhine; of winding Polval that is so exquisite in
snow and on a moonlit night, with its houses piled one above the other
like an old Italian town; or of the fine arched gate that leads to the
Place du Château and that led there when the stately Dukes of Bar held
court in the street that bears their name, and led there, too, when
Charles Stuart lived in the High Town and dreamed perhaps of a kingdom
beyond the seas. Of all these things and of the beautiful cloistered
sixteenth-century College in the rue Gilles de Trêves one might speak,
exhausting the mines of their adjectives and similes, but would you be
any closer to the soul of the town? I doubt it, and so I refrain from
description. For Bar depends for its beauty and its distinctive charm
on something more than mere outline. Colour, atmosphere, some ghostly
raiment of the past still clinging to its limbs, and over all the views
over the valley--yes, the soul is elusive and intangible; you will find
it most surely under the white rays of the moon.

The views are simply intoxicating, but if you want to see one of the
finest you must make the acquaintance of a certain Madame--Madame,
shall we say, Schneider? Any name will do if only it is Teutonic
enough. She loomed upon our horizon as the purveyor of corduroy
trousers. Oh, not for a profit. She, _bien entendu_, was a
philanthropist disposing of the salvage of a large shop, the owner of
which was a refugee. The trousers being much needed at the moment we
bought them, but many months afterwards she came with serge garments
that were not even remotely connected with a refugee, so I am prone to
believe that she was not quite so disinterested as she would have had
us believe.

To visit her you must climb to the Ville-Haute, and there in a house
panelled throughout (such woodwork--old, old, old--my very eyes water
at the thought of it), you will find a long low room with a wide window
springing like a balcony over the gulf that lies under the rue Chavé.
And from the window you can look far over the town which lies beneath
you, over the silver path of river and canal to the Côte Ste Catherine,
the steep hill, once a vineyard, that rises on the other side; you
can see the aviation ground, and you can follow the white ribbon of
road that runs past Naives to St Mihiel. And you can look up and down
the valley for miles--to Fains, to Mussey and beyond, on one hand to
Longeville, and Trouville on the other. And Marbot lies all unlocked
under your eyes, and Maestricht, and the beautiful hill over which, if
you are wise, you will one day walk to Resson.

From Place Tribel, from innumerable coigns of vantage, the view is
equally beautiful, though not, I think, quite so extensive. Which,
perhaps coupled with her aggressively Teutonic name, accounted for the
suspicious looks cast last winter upon Madame Schneider. A spy! Oh,
yes, a devout Catholic always at the Mass, but a spy. Did she not leave
Bar on the very morning of the big air raid, returning that night? And
didn't every one know that she signalled by means of lights movements
of troops and of aeroplanes to other spies hidden on the hill beyond
Naives? The preposterous story gained ground. Then one day we thrilled
to hear that Madame Schneider had been arrested. She disappeared for a
while--we never knew whether anything had been proved against her--and
then when we had forgotten all about her I met her in the Place St
Pierre. She was coming out of the church, but she bowed her head and
passed by.

Perhaps, after all this, you won't care to visit her? But then you
will go down to your grave sorrowing, because you will never see those
Boiseries, nor that view.

Other things beside the beauty of the town began to creep into
prominence too, of course, and among them the supreme patience and
courage of our refugee women. In circumstances that might have crushed
the strongest they fought gamely and with few exceptions conquered. I
take my hat off to the French nation. We know how its men can fight,
some day I hope the world will know how its women can endure. Remember
that they were given no separation allowances until January 1915, and
the allowance when it did come was a pittance. One franc twenty-five
centimes per day for each adult, fifty centimes a day for each child up
to the age of sixteen; or, roughly speaking, 1_s._ a day and 4½_d._
per day. What would our English women say to that? It barely sufficed
for food. Indeed, as time went on and prices rose I dare to say it did
not even suffice for food. The refugee woman, possessed of not one
stick of furniture--except in the case of farmers who were able to
bring away some household goods in their carts--of not one cup or plate
or jug or spoon, without needles, thread, or scissors, without even a
comb, and all too often without even a change of linen, had to manage
as best she could. That she did manage is the triumph of French thrift
and cleverness in turning everything to account. We heard of them
making _duvets_ by filling sacks with dried leaves; one woman actually
collected enough thistle-down for the purpose. They clung desperately
to their standards, they would trudge miles to the woods in order to
get a faggot for their fire, they took any and every kind of work that
offered, they refused to become submerged.

And gradually they began to assume individuality. Families and family
histories began to limn themselves on the brain as did the life of the
streets, things as well as people.

Some of these histories I must tell you later on; to-night, for some
odd reason, little Mademoiselle Froment is in my mind. She was not a
refugee, but I owe her a debt of eternal gratitude, for when I fled
to her immediately on arrival she condoled with me in my sartorial
afflictions and promptly made me garments in which without shame I
could worship the Goddess of Reason. Later on the uniform was chopped
up and re-made, becoming wearable, but never smart. Even French magic
could not accomplish that.

Poor little Mademoiselle Froment, so patient with all my ignorances,
my complete inability to understand the value of what she called "le
mouvement" of my gown, and my hurried dips into Bellows as she volubly
discursed of the fashions. Last summer when she was making me some more
clothes she was sad indeed. Her only and adored brother, who had passed
scatheless through the inferno at Verdun, was killed on the Somme.

"My hurried dips into Bellows." Does that mean anything, or does it
sound like transcendental nonsense? Bellows, by the way, is not a thing
to blow the fire with, it is a dictionary--a pocket dictionary worth
its weight in good red gold. And to my copy hangs a tale. Can you
endure a little autobiography?

During my week-end at Sermaize I heard more French than I had heard,
I suppose, in all my life before, or at least I heard new words in
such bewildering profusion that I really believe Bellows saved my
life. I carried him about, I referred to him at frequent intervals.
I flatter myself that with his aid I made myself intelligible even
when discussing the technique of agriculture and other such abstruse
subjects.

But it is Bellows' deplorable misfortune to look rather like a Prayer
Book, or a Bible. And so it befell that when I had been some weeks
at Bar a Sermaizian Relief Worker made anxious inquiries as to my
character. "She seems such an odd sort of person because, though she
reads her Bible ostentatiously in public, she smokes, and we once heard
her say...." After all, does it really matter what they heard me say?

After which confession of my sins I must tell you about the Temple,
the shrine of French Protestantism in Bar. There we stood up to
pray, and we sat down to sing the most lugubrious hymns it has ever
been my lot to listen to. The church is large, and the congregation
is small. On the hottest day in summer it struck chill, in winter
it was a refrigerator. The pastor, being _mobilisé_, his place was
generally taken by an earnest and I am sure devout being, who having
congratulated the present generation, the first time I went there,
upon having been chosen to defend the cause of justice and of truth,
proceeded to dwell with the most heartrending emphasis upon every
detail of the suffering and sorrow the war--the defence upon which
he congratulated us!--has caused. He spared us nothing. Not even the
shell-riven soldier with white face upturned questioningly to the
stars. Not even the fear-racked mother or wife to whom one day the
dreaded message comes. Then when he had reduced every one to abysmal
depression and many to silent pitiful tears, he cried, "Soyez des
optimistes," and seemed to think that the crying would suffice. Why?
Ah, don't ask me that! Perhaps the war is too big a thing for the
preachers to handle. The platitudes of years have been drowned by the
mutter of the guns and the long sad wail of broken, shattered humanity.

Yes, the Temple depressed me. Writing of it even now sends me into the
profundities. It was all so cheerless, so dreary. In spite of the drop
of Huguenot blood in my veins, the Temple and I are in nothing akin.

So let us away--away from the cold shadows and the cheerless creed,
from the joyless God and the altar where Beauty lies dead, out into
the boulevard where the trees are in leaf and the sun is shining, and
where you may see a regiment go by in its horizon blue, or a battery of
artillery with its camouflaged guns. Smoke is pouring from the chimney
of the regimental kitchen, how jolly it looks curling up against the
sky! and sitting by the driver of the third ammunition cart is a fox
terrier who knows so much about war he will be a field-marshal when he
lives again. Or we may see a team of woodcutters with the trunks of
mighty trees slung on axles with great chains and drawn tandemwise by
two or three horses, and hear the lame newsvendor at the corner near
l'église St Jean calling his "Le Gé, le Pay-Gé, et le Petit-Parisien."
Pronounce the g soft in Gé, of course, for it stands for _Le Journal_,
and Pay-Gé for _Le Petit Journal_, all of which, together with the
_Continental Daily Mail_, can be bought in Bar each day shortly after
one o'clock unless the trains happen to be running late. During the
Verdun rush they sometimes did not arrive at all.

A more musical cry, however, is that of the rabbit-skin man, "Peau
de li-è-vre, Peau de li-è-vre," with a delicious lilting cadence on
li-è-vre. I never discovered what he gave in exchange for the skins,
but it was certainly not money.

Or the Tambour may take up his position at the corner of the street,
the Tambour who swells with pride and civic dignity. A sharp tap-tap
on his drum, the crowd collects and then in a hoarse roar he shouts
his decree. It may concern mad dogs, or the water supply, or the day
on which the _allocation_ will be given to the _emigrés_, or it may
be instructions how to behave during an air raid. Whatever it is,
it is extremely difficult to make sense of it, as a motor-car and a
huge military lorry are sure to crash past as he roars. But nothing
disconcerts him. He shouts to his appointed end, and then with a
swaggering roll on his drum marches off to the next street-crossing.

If luck is with us as we prowl along we may see--and, oh, it is indeed
a vision!--our butcheress Marguerite dive into a neighbouring shop.
Dive in such a connection is a poetic license, for if a description
of Marguerite must begin in military phrase it must equally surely
end in architectural. If on the front there were two strong salients,
in the rear was a flying buttress. Marguerite--delicious irony of
nomenclature--was exceedingly short, her hair was black as a raven's
wing, her eyes were brown, and her cheeks, full-blown, were red as a
ripe, ripe cherry. Over the salients she wore vast tracts of white
apron plentifully besmeared with blood. So were her hands, so was her
shop. It was the goriest butchery I have ever seen. As "Madame" (I
shall tell you about her later on) did all our shopping, it was my
fortune to visit Marguerite but once a month. Had I been obliged to
visit her twice I should now be a vegetarian living on nuts.

Sometimes Marguerite cast aside the loathsome evidences of her trade
and donned a smart black costume and a velvet hat with feathers in
it. Then indeed she was the vision radiant, and never shall I forget
meeting her on the boulevard one day when a covey of Taubes were
bombing the town. Hearing something like a traction-engine snorting
behind me, I turned and beheld Marguerite, whose walk was a fat,
plethoric waddle, panting down the street. Every feather in her hat was
stiff with fright, her mouth was open, she was breathing like a man
under an anæsthetic, and--by the transcendental gods I swear it!--the
buttress was flying. Marguerite RAN.

But she has a soul, though you may not believe it. She must have, for
on the reeking offal-strewn table that adorns her shop she sets almost
daily a vase of flowers. Perhaps in spite of her offensive messiness
she doesn't really enjoy being a butcher.

During that first summer, although so near the Front, Bar was rather a
quiet place where soldiers--Territorials?--in all sorts of odd uniforms
drifted by (I once saw a man in a red cap, a khaki coat, blue trousers
and knee-high yellow boots), while civilians went placidly about
their affairs. Our flat was on the Boulevard de la Rochelle, and so
on the high road to Verdun and St Mihiel, a stroke of good luck that
sometimes interfered sadly with our work. For many a regiment went
marching by, sometimes with colours flying and bands playing, gay and
gallant, impertinent, jolly fellows with a quip for every petticoat in
the street and a lightly blown kiss for every face at a window. But
there were days when no light jest set the women giggling, days when
the marching men were beaten to the very earth with weariness, stained
with mud, bowed beneath their packs, eyes set straight in front of
them, seeing nothing but the interminable road, the road that led from
the trenches and--at last--to rest. Far away we could hear the ominous
mutter of the guns, now rising, now falling, now catching up earth and
air and sky into a wild clamour of sound. No need to ask why the men
did not look up as they went by, no need to wonder at the strained,
set faces. Perhaps in their ears as in ours there rang, high above the
dull heavy burden of the cannon-song, the thin chanting of the priests
who, so many desolate times a day, trod the road that leads to the
Garden of Sacrifice where sleep so many of the sons of France. Ah, I
can hear them now, and see the pitiful little processions winding down
from every quarter of the town, the priest mechanically chanting, a few
soldiers grouped round the coffin, a weeping woman or two following
close behind. Of late--since Verdun, I think--the tiny guard of honour
no longer treads the road, and the friendless soldier dying far from
home goes alone to his last resting-place upon the hill.

There the open graves are always waiting. The wooden black crosses
have spread far out over the hill-side, climbing up and across till no
one dare estimate their number. Five thousand, a grave-digger told us
long, long ago. Since then Verdun has written her name in blood across
the sky, Verdun impregnable because her rampart was the heart of the
manhood of France, Verdun supreme because the flower of that manhood
laid down their lives in order to keep her so.

Yes, the chanting of the priests brings an odd lump into one's throat,
but one day we saw a little ceremony that moved us more deeply still.

It was early morning, a strain of martial music rose on the air. We
hurried to the windows and saw a company of soldiers coming down the
boulevard. They passed our house, marched to the far end, halted,
and then turning, ranged themselves in a great semicircle beyond the
window. To say that their movements lacked the cleanness and precision
which an English regiment would have shown is to put the matter mildly.
Their business was to form three sides of a square. They formed it,
shuffling and dodging, elbowing, scraping their feet, falling into
their places by the Grace of God while a fat fussy officer skirmished
about for all the world like an agitated curate at a Sunday School
treat.

The fourth side of the square consisted of the pavement and a crowd of
women, children and lads, a crowd with a gap in the middle where, like
a rock rising above the waters of sympathy, stood two chairs on which
two soldiers, _mutilés de la guerre_, were sitting. Brave men both.
They had distinguished themselves in fight, and this morning France was
to do them honour.

An officer read aloud something we could not hear, and then a general
stepped forward and pinned the Croix de Guerre upon their breasts, and
colonels and staff officers shook them by the hand, and the band broke
into the Marseillaise and the watching crowd tried to raise a cheer.
But their voice died in their throat, no sound would come, for the
Song of the Guns was in their ears and out across the hills their own
men were fighting, to come home to them, perhaps, one day as these men
had come, or it might be never to come home at all. The cheer became a
sob, the voice of a stricken nation, of suffering heart-sick womanhood
waiting ... waiting.

So the band played a lively tune and the soldiers marched away,
the crowd melted silently about its daily work and for a time the
boulevard was deserted, deserted save for him who sat huddled into his
deep arm-chair, the Croix de Guerre upon his breast and the pitiless
sunlight streaming down upon the pavements he would never tread again.

A few weeks later the bands march by again. It is evening, and the
shadows are lengthening. We mingle with the crowd and see a tall, stern
man with aloof, inflexible, unsmiling face pass up and down the lines
of the guard of honour drawn up to receive him. A shorter, stouter man
is at his side.

"Vive Kitchenaire!"

The densely packed crowds take up the cry. "Vive l'Angleterre!" Ah, it
is God Save the King that the band is playing now. "Vive Kitchenaire."
Again the shout goes up. The short, stout man greets the crowd, and
a mighty roar responds. "Vive Joffre." He smiles, but his companion
never unbends. As the glorious Marseillaise thunders on the air, with
unseeing eyes and ears that surely do not hear he turns away, and the
dark passage of the house swallows him up.

"Vive Kitchenaire!"

The echoes have hardly died away when a tear-choked voice greets me.
"Ah, Mademoiselle, but the news is bad to-day." Tears are rolling down
the little Frenchwoman's face. So deep is her grief I fear a personal
loss. But she shakes her head. No, it is not that. She hands me a paper
and, stunned, I read the news. As I cross the street and turn towards
home the world seems shadowed. Sorrow has drawn her veils closely about
the town--sorrow for the man whom it trusted and whose privilege it had
been to honour.




CHAPTER V

SETTLING-IN


Our first duty on arriving in the town was to go to the Bureau de
Police and ask for a _permis de séjour_. We understood that without it
there would be short shrift and a shorter journey into a world which
has not yet been surveyed. So we sallied forth to the Bureau at break
of day, and there we interviewed an old _grognard_--the only really
grumpy person I met in France--who scowled at us and scolded us and
called the devil to witness that these English names are barbarous, the
chatter of monkeys, unintelligible to any civilised ear. We soothed
him with shaking knees; suppose he refused us permission to reside
in the town? And presently he melted. He never really liquified,
you know, there was always a crust; but once or twice on subsequent
occasions a drop, just a teeny, weeny drop of the milk of human
kindness oozed through. He demanded our photographs, and when he saw
my "finished-while-you-wait" his belief in our Simian ancestry took
indestructible form. The number of my photographs now scattered over
France on imposing documents is incalculable, and the number of times
I have had to howl my age into unsympathetic ears so great that all my
natural modesty in dealing with so delicate a subject has wilted away.

The _grognard_ dismissed us at length, feeling like the worm that
perisheth, and a fortnight or so later presented us with our _permis de
séjour_ (which warned us that any infringement of its regulations would
expose us to immediate arrest as spies), and with an esoteric document
called an _Extrait du Registre d'Immatriculation_ whose purpose in
history we were never able to determine. No one ever asked to see it,
no one ever asked to see our _permis de séjour_, in fact the gendarmes
of the town showed a reprehensible lack of interest in our proceedings.

In addition to these we were provided as time went on with a _carte
d'identité_, a permission to circulate on a bicycle in districts
specified, a permission to take photographs not of military interest,
and later on with a _carnet d'étranger_ which gripped us in a tight
fist, kept us at the end of a very short chain, and made us rue the day
we were born. And of course we had our passports as well.

Not being a cyclist, I used that particular permission when tramping
on the Sabbath beyond the confines of the town. Once a bright military
star tried to stop some one who followed my example. "It is a
permission to cycle. You are on foot," he argued.

"But the bicycle could not get here without me," she replied, and her
merciless logic dimmed his light.

As for me, I carried all my papers on all occasions that took me past
a sentry. It offended my freeborn British independence to be held up
by a blue-coated creature with a bayonet in his hand on a road that I
choose to grace with my presence, and so I took a mild revenge. The
stoutest sentry quailed before such evidence of rectitude, and indeed
we secretly believed that sheer curiosity prompted many a "Halte-là."

Once as I trudged a road far from Bar two gorgeous individuals mounted
on prancing chargers swept past me. A moment later they drew rein, and
with those eyes of seventh sense that are at the back of every woman's
head I knew they were studying my retreating form. A lunatic or a spy?
Surely only one or the other would wear that grey dress. A shout,
"Holà." I marched on. If French military police wish to accost me they
must observe at least a measure of propriety. Again the "Holà." My
shoulders crinkled. Would a bullet whiz between? A thunder of galloping
hoofs, a horse racing by in a cloud of dust, a swirl and a gendarme
majestically barring the way.

"Where are you going, Madame?"

Stifling a desire to ask what business it was of his, I replied
suavely--

"To Bar-le-Duc."

"Bar-le-Duc? But it is miles from here."

"Eh bien? What of it? On se promene."

"I must ask to see your papers."

Out they all came, a goodly bunch. He took them, appalled. He fingered
them; he stared.

"Madame is English?"

"But certainly? What did Monsieur suppose?"

The papers are thrust into my hand, he salutes, flicks his horse with a
spur, and I am alone on the undulating road with the woods just touched
by spring's soft wing, spreading all about me.

But this happened when sentries and bayonets had lost their terror.
There were days when we treated them with more respect. Familiarity
breeds contempt--when one knows that the bayonet is not sharpened.

Our papers in order, our heads no longer wobbling on our shoulders,
our next duty was to call on the _élite_ of the town. In France you
don't wait to be called upon, you call. It was nerve-racking work for
two miserable foreigners, one of whom had almost no French, while that
of the other abjectly deserted her in moments of perturbation. But we
survived it, perhaps because every one was out. Only at Madame B.'s
did we find people at home, and she--how she must have sighed when we
departed! We all laboured heavily in the vineyard, but fright, shyness,
the barrier of language prevented us--on that day at least--from
gathering much fruit. Exhausted, humbled to the dust, thinking of all
the brilliant things we might have said if only we could have taken
the invaluable Bellows with us, we crawled home to seek comfort in
a _brioche de Lorraine_ and a cup of China tea which we had to make
for ourselves, as "Madame" had not yet learned the method. In fact
there were many things she had not learned, and one of them was what
the English understand by the word rubbish. It was a subject on which
for many a day her views and ours unhappily rarely coincided. Once
we caught her in the Common-room, casting baleful eyes on cherished
treasures.

"Do you wish that I shall throw away these _ordures_, Mademoiselle?"
she asked.

ORDURES! Ye gods! A bucketful of gladioli and stocks and all sorts
of delicious things gathered in the curé's garden at Naives, and she
called them _ordures_. With a shriek we fell upon her and her broom.
Did she not know they were flowers? What devil of ignorance possessed
her that she should call them rubbish?

"Flowers! _bien entendu_, but what does one want with flowers in a
sitting-room? The petals fall, they are _des ordures_." Again the
insulting word.

"Don't you _like_ flowers, Madame?" we asked, and she turned resigned
eyes to ours. These English! Perhaps the good God who made them
understood them, but as for her, Odille Drouet ... With a shrug she
consigned us to the limbo of the inscrutable. A garden was the place
for flowers, why should we bring them into the house?

French logic. Why, indeed?

Madame never understood us, but I think she grew to tolerate us in the
end, and perhaps even to like us a little for our own queer sakes.
Once, when she had been with us for a few weeks, she exclaimed so
bitterly, "I wish I had never seen the English," we wondered what we
could possibly have done to offend her. Agitated inquiries relieved
our minds. We were merely a disagreeable incident of the war. If the
Germans had not pillaged France we would not have come to Bar-le-Duc.
Cause and effect linked us with the Boche in her mind, and I think she
never looked at us without seeing the Crown Prince leering over our
shoulder.

A woman of strange passivity of temper, a fatalist--like so many of
her countrymen--she had a face that Botticelli would have worshipped.
Masses of dark hair exquisitely neat were coiled on her head (why,
oh why, do our English women wear hats? Is not half a French woman's
attraction in the simple dignity of the uncovered head? I never
realised the vulgarising properties of hat till I lived in France), her
eyes were dark, her brows delicately pencilled, her features regular.
Gentleness, resignation, patience were all we saw in her. She had one
of the saddest faces I have ever seen.

No doubt she had good reason to be sad. Her husband, a well-to-do
farmer, died of consumption in the years before the war, and she who
now cooked and scrubbed and dusted and tidied for us once drove her own
buggy, once ruled a comfortable house and superintended the vagaries
of three servants. In her fine old cupboards were stores of handspun
linen sheets, sixty pairs at least, and ten or twelve dozen handspun,
handmade chemises. Six _lits montés_ testified to the luxury of her
home; on the walls hung rare pottery, Lunéville, Sarréguemin and the
like.

A _lit monté_ is a definite sign of affluence, and well it may be so.
The French understand at least two things thoroughly--sauces and beds.
Incidentally I believe that the French woman does not exist who cannot
make a good omelette. I saw one made once in five minutes over a smoky
wood fire, the pan poised scientifically on two or three crosswise
sticks. An English woman cooking on such an altar would have offered
us an imitation of chamois leather, charred, toughened and impregnated
with smoke. Madame the wife of the Mayor of Vavincourt offered us--dare
I describe it? Perhaps one day I shall write a sonnet to that omelette;
it must not be dishonoured in prose.

Yes, the French can cook, and they can make beds, and unless you have
stretched your wearied limbs in a real _lit monté_, unless you have
sunk fathoms deep in its downy nest and have felt the light, exquisite
warmth of the _duvet_ steal through your limbs, you have never known
what comfort is.

You gaze at it with awe when you see it first, wondering how you are to
get in. I know women who had to climb upon a chair every night in order
to scale the feathery heights. For my own part, being long of limb, I
found a flying leap the most graceful means of access, but there are
connoisseurs who recommend a short ladder.

Piled on the top of a palliasse and a mattress are a huge bed of
feathers, spotless sheets, a single blanket, a coverlet, and then the
crimson silk-covered _duvet_, over which is spread a canopy of lace.
The cost must be fabulous, though oddly enough no one ever mentioned
a probable price. But no refugee can speak of her lost _lits montés_
without tears.

Madame had six of them, and cattle in her byre, and horses in her
stable, and all the costly implements of a well-stocked farm. Yet for
months she lived with her little girl, her father, and her mother in a
single room in the Place de la Halle, a dark, narrow, grimy room that
no soap and water could clean. Her bed was a sack of straw laid upon
the ground, and--until the Society provided them--she had no sheets,
no pillow-cases, indeed I doubt if she even had a pillow. Her farm is
razed to the ground, and no doubt some fat unimaginative sausage-filled
Hausfrau sleeps under her sheets and cuddles contentedly under her
_duvet_ o' nights.

The little party of four were six weeks on the road to Bar from that
farm beyond Montfaucon, and during the whole time they never ate hot
food and rarely cooked food. No wonder Madame seldom laughed--those
weeks of haunting fear and present misery were never forgotten--no
wonder it was months before we shook her out of her settled apathy and
saw some life, some animation grow again in her quiet face.

If sometimes we felt inclined to shake her for other reasons than those
of humanity her caution was to blame. Never did she commit herself. To
every question inviting an opinion she returned the same exasperating
reply, "C'est comme vous voulez, Mademoiselle." I believe if we had
asked her to buy antelopes' tongues and kangaroos' tails for dinner she
would have replied equably, tonelessly, "C'est comme vous voulez."

Whether the point at issue was a warm winter jacket, or a table, or a
holiday on the Sabbath, or cabbage for dinner, the answer was always
the same. Once in a moment of excitement--but this was when she had got
used to us, and found we were not so awful as we looked--she exclaimed,
"Oh, mais taisez-vous, Mademoiselle," and we felt as if an earthquake
had riven the town.

Later she developed a quiet humour, but she always remained aloof.
Unlike Madame Philipot who succeeded her, she never showed the least
interest in the refugees who besieged our door. "C'est une dame." The
head insinuated through the door would be withdrawn and we left to
the joys of conjecture. The "lady" might be that ragged villain from
the rue Phulpin, wife of a shepherd, a drunken dissolute vagabond who
pawned her all for liquor, or it might be Madame B., while "C'est un
Monsieur" might conceal a General of Division, or the Service de Ville
claiming two francs for delivery of a parcel, in its cryptic folds.

She had no curiosity, vulgar or intellectual, that we could discover.
She was invariably patient, sweet-tempered, gentle of voice, courteous
of phrase. She came to her work punctually at seven; going home, unless
cataclysms happened, at twelve. If the cataclysms did occur, even
through no fault of our own, we felt as guilty as if we had murdered
babies in their sleep, Madame being an orderly soul who detested
irregularity. And punctually at half-past four she would come back
again, cook the dinner, wash up _la vaisselle_ and quietly disappear at
eight.

The manner of her going was characteristic.

French women seem to have a horror of being out alone after dark
(perhaps they have excellent reason for it, they know their countrymen
better than I do), and Madame was no exception to the rule. Perhaps she
was merely bowing her head to national code, the rigid _comme il faut_,
perhaps it was a question of temperament. Anyway the fact emerged,
Madame would not walk home alone. Who, then, should accompany her? Her
parents were old and nearly bedridden, she had no husband, brother, or
friend. The crazy English who careered about at all hours of the day
and night? We had our work to do.

Juliana was ordered to fetch her. This savouring of adventure and
responsibility fell in with Juliana's mood. She consented. Now she
was her mother's younger daughter and her age was twelve. Can you
understand the psychology of it? This is how I read it. A child was
safe on the soldier-frequented road, a mother with her child would not
be intercepted, but a good-looking woman alone--well, as the French
say, that was quite another _paire de bottines_.

What would have happened had Juliana declined the honour, I simply
dare not conjecture. For that damsel did precisely as she pleased. Her
mother's passivity, fatalism, call it what you will, was the mainspring
of all her relations with her children. "Que voulez-vous? She wishes
it." Or quite simply, "Juliana does not wish it," closed the door
against all remonstrance. Madame was a strong-willed woman, she never
yielded an iota to us, but her children ruled. When the elder girl,
aged fourteen and well-placed with a good family in Paris, came to Bar
for a fortnight and then refused to go back, Madame shrugged. Some one
in Paris may have been, indeed was, seriously inconvenienced, but "Que
voulez-vous?"

"Don't you wish her to go back, Madame?"

"But certainly. What should she do here? It is not fit for a young
girl, but que voul----" We fled.

Parental authority seems to be a negligible quantity in France. So far
as I could see children did very much as they liked, and were often
spoiled to the verge of objectionableness. Yet the steadfastness,
courage, thoughtfulness and whole-souled sanity of many a young
girl--or a child--would put older and wiser heads to shame.

A puzzling people, these French, who refute to-morrow nearly every
opinion they tempt you to formulate about them to-day.

If English women struggling with "chars" and "generals" knew the value
of a French _femme de ménage_ there would be a stampede across the
Channel in search of her. She does your marketing much more cheaply
than you could do it yourself, she keeps her accounts neatly, she is
punctual, scrupulously honest, dependable and trustworthy. She may
not be clean with British cleanness, her dusting may be superficial
(her own phrase, "passer un torchon," aptly describes it), but she
understands comfort, and in nearly twenty months' experience of her I
never knew a dinner spoiled or a dish unpalatably served.

Of course it is arguable that Madame was not a _femme de ménage_, nor
of the servant class at all. Granted! But there were others. There was
the _bonne à tout faire_ (general servant) of the old curé at N. who
ruled him with a rod of iron and cooked him dinners fit for a king.
And there was Eugénie, the Abbé B.'s Eugénie, who, loving him with a
dog-like devotion, was his counsellor and his friend. She corrected
him for his good when she thought he needed it, but she mothered and
cared for him in his exile from his loved village--French trenches run
through it to-day--as only a single-minded woman could.

Yes, Madame--whether ours or some one else's--is a treasure, and we
guarded ours as the apple of our eye. There were moments when we
positively cringed before her, so afraid were we that she might leave
us; for she hated cooking, hers having always been the life of the
fields, and though no self-respecting Frenchwoman regards herself as
a servant or as a menial, there must have been many hours when the
cruelty of her position bit deep. Nevertheless she bore with us for
a year, and then the air raids began. And the air raids shattered
the nerves of Juliana--a brave little soul, but delicate (we feared
tainted with her father's malady); and flight in the night to the
nearest cellar, unfortunately some distance away, brought the shadow
of Death too close to the home. So the elders counselled flight.
Juliana begged to be taken away. Madame wished to remain. The matter
hung in uncertainty for some days, then eight alarms and two raids in
twenty-four hours settled it.

The alarms began on Friday morning; on Saturday Madame told us that
the old people would stay in Bar no longer and she had applied for the
necessary papers. They were going south to the Ain on the morrow. Not
a word of regret or apology for leaving us at a moment's notice, or
for giving us no time in which to replace her. Why apologise since she
could neither alter nor prevent? She went through no wish of her own,
went at midday, just walked out as she had done every day for a year,
but came back next morning to say good-bye and ask us to store some
odds and ends. When she had a settled address would we send them on?

So she went away, and our memory of her is of one who never fought
circumstances, never wrestled with Fate. When the storms beat upon her,
when rude winds blew, she bowed her head and allowed them to carry her
where they listed. I think the spring of her life must have broken
on that August day when she turned her cattle out on the fields and,
closing the door behind her, walked out of her house for ever.




CHAPTER VI

THE BASKET-MAKERS OF VAUX-LES-PALAMIES


The long hot days of summer pursued their stifling way, yet were all
too short for the work we had in hand. There were families to be
visited, case-papers to be written up, card-indexes to be filled in,
and bales to be unpacked. There were clothes to be sorted, there were
people in their hundreds to be fitted with coats and trousers and
shirts and underlinen and skirts and blouses, and the thousand and one
things to be coped with in the Clothes-room. When Satan visits Relief
workers he always lives in the Clothes-room. And there he takes a
malicious delight in turning the contents of the shelves upside down
and in hiding from view the outfit you chose so carefully yesterday
evening for Madame Hougelot, or Madame Collignon, so that when you come
to look for it in the morning, lo! it is gone. And Madame is waiting
with her six children on the stairs, and the hall is a whirlpool of
slowly-circling humanity, who want everything under the sun and much
that is above it.

Truly the way of the Relief worker is hard. But it has its
compensations. You live for a month, for instance, on one exquisite
episode. You are giving a party; you have invited some fifteen hundred
guests. You spread them out over several days, _bien entendu_, and
in the generosity of your heart you decide that each shall have a
present. You sit at the receipt of custom, issuing your cards with the
name of each guest written thereon, and to you comes Madame Ponnain.
(That is not her real name, but it serves.) Yes, she is a refugee and
she has two children. She would like three cards. _Bon._ You inscribe
her name, you gaze at her questioningly.

"There is Georgette, she has two years."

_Bon._ Georgette is inscribed.

And then?

Madame hesitates. There is the baby.

_Bon._ His are?

"Eh bien, il n'est pas encore au monde."

You suggest that the unborn cannot ...

"Mais mademoiselle--si il y a des étrennes (gifts)?"

Perhaps, perhaps; one doesn't know. The Ponnains were a people of much
discrimination. He might arrive in time. _Quel dommage_, then, if he
had no ticket!

He discriminated.

He gets his ticket, and you register anew your homage to French
foresightfulness and thrift.

And then you go back to the Clothes-room. You climb over mountains of
petticoats and chemises, all of the same size and all made to fit a
child of three. There are thousands of them, they obsess you. You dream
at night that you are smothering under a hill of petticoats while irate
refugees, whose children are all over five and half-naked, hurl the
chemises and--other things at you, uttering round French maledictions
in ear-splitting tones. You wade through the wretched things, you eat
them, sleep them; your brain reels, you say things about work-parties
which, if published, would cause an explosion, and the Pope would
excommunicate you and the Foreign Office hand you your passports. You
write frantic letters to headquarters, then you grow cold, waxing
sarcastic. You hint that marriage as an institution existed in France
before 1912, and that the first baby was not born in that year of
blindfold peace. And you add a rider to the effect that many, indeed
most, of your cherished _émigrées_ are not slum-dwellers fighting for
rags at a jumble sale, but respectable people who don't go about in
ragged trousers or with splashes of brown or yellow paint on a blue
serge dress. Then you are conscience-stricken, for some of the bales
have been packed by Sanity, and the contents collected by Reason. There
are many white crows in the flock.

A ring at the door interrupts, perhaps happily, your epistolary
labours. It is the Service de Ville, a surly person but faithful. He
has six bales. They are immense. You go down, you try to roll one up
the stairs. Your comrade in labour is four feet six and weighs seven
stone. The bale weighs--or seems to weigh--a ton. Sisyphus is not
more impotent than you. Then an angel appears. It is Madame. "I heard
the efforts," she remarks, and indeed our puffings and pantings and
blowings and swearings must have been audible almost at the Front.
She puts her solid shoulder under the bale. It floats lightly up the
stairs. Then you begin to unpack. It is dirty work, and destroys the
whiteness of your hands. Never mind. Remember _les pauvres émigrées_,
and that we are _si devouée_, you know.

Everything under heaven has, I verily believe, come at one time or
another out of our bales--except live stock and joints of beef.
Concertinas in senile decay, mandolines without keys, guitars without
strings, jam leaking over a velvet gown, tons of old newspapers
and magazines--all English, of course, and subsequently sold as
waste-paper, hats that have braved many a battle and breeze, boots
without soles, ball dresses, satin slippers (what DO people think
refugees need in the War Zone?), greasy articles of apparel, the mere
handling of which makes our fingers shine, dirty underlinen, single
socks and stockings, married socks that are like the Irishman's
shirt--made of holes, another hundred dozen of petticoats for children
aged three, and once--how we laughed over it!--a red velvet dress that
I swear had been filched from an organ-grinder's monkey, and with it a
pair of-of--well, you know. They were made of blue serge, and when held
out at width stretched all across the Common-room. The biggest Mynheer
that ever smoked a pipe by the Zuyder Zee would have been lost in them,
and as they were neither male nor female, only some sort "of giddy
harumphrodite" could have worn them.

Sometimes we fell upon stale cough lozenges, on mouldering biscuits,
on dried fruits, on chocolate, on chewing-gum, on moth-eaten bearskin
rugs, or on a brilliant yellow satin coverlet with LOVE in large green
capitals on it. The tale is unending, but it was not all tragic. There
were many days when our hearts sang in gladness, when good, useful,
sensible things emerged from the bales and we fitted our people out in
style.

But all the rubbish in the world must have been dumped upon France
in the last two years. Never has there been such a sweeping out of
cupboards, such a rummaging of dust-bins. The hobble skirts that
submerged us at one period nearly drove us into an early grave. Picture
us, with a skirt in hand. It is twenty-seven inches round the tail,
perhaps twenty-three round the waist. And Madame, who waits with such
touching confidence in the discrimination of Les Anglaises, tells you
that she is _forte_. As you look at her you believe it. It is half a
day's journey to walk round her. You pace the wide circle thoughtfully,
you make rapid calculations, you give it up. The thing simply cannot
be done. And you send up a wild prayer that before ever there comes
another war French women of the fields will take to artificial means
of restraining their figures. As it is, like Marguerite, many of them
occupy vast continents of space when they take their walks abroad. And
when they stand on the staircase, smiling deprecatingly at you, and you
have nothing that will fit....

And when it does fit it is blue, or green, and they have a passion for
black. Something discreet. Something they can go to Mass in. I often
wonder why they worship their God in such dolorous guise. Something,
too, they can mourn in. So many are _en deuil_. Once a woman who came
for clothes demanded black, refusing a good coat because it was blue.
The cousin of her husband had died five months before, and never had
she been able to mourn him. If the English would give her _un peu de
deuil_? She waited weeks. She got it and went forth smiling happily
upon an appreciative world, ready to mourn at last.

The weather is stifling, the Clothes-room an inferno. The last visitor
for the morning has been sent contentedly away--she may come back
to-morrow, though, and tell us that the dress of Madeleine does not
fit, and may she have one the same as that which Madame Charton got?
Now the dress of Madame Charton's Marie was new and of good serge,
whereas that of Madeleine was slightly worn and of light summer
material. But then Marie had an old petticoat, whereas Madeleine had a
new one. But this concession to equality finds no favour in the eyes
of Madeleine's mother. She has looked upon the serge and lusted after
it. We suggest that a tuck, a little arrangement.... She goes away. And
in the house in rue Paradis there is lamentation, and Marie, I grieve
to say, lifts up her shrill treble and crows. It is one of the minor
tragedies of life. Alas, that there are so many!

But as Madame the mother of Madeleine departs, we know nothing of the
reckoning that waits us on the morrow. We only know that we promised
to go and see the Basket-makers to-day, that time is flying, and haste
suicidal with the thermometer at steaming-point.

"Madame, we are going out. We cannot see any one else."

_Bon._ Madame is a Cerberus. She will write down the names of callers
and so ease our minds while we are away.

We fling on our hats, we arm ourselves with pencil and notebook, and
wend our way up the Avenue du Château to the rue des Ducs de Bar. It is
well to choose this route sometimes, though it is longer than that of
the rue St. Jean, for it goes past the old gateway and shows you the
view over the rue de Véel. It is wise to look down on the rue de Véel;
it is rather foolhardy to walk in it. For motor-lorries whiz through it
at a murderous speed, garbage makes meteoric flights from windows, the
drainage screams to Heaven, every house is a tenement house, most of
them are foul and vermin-ridden, and all are packed with refugees.

Well, perhaps not quite all. Even the rue de Véel has its bright
particular spots, one of them being the house, set a little back from
the street, in which Pétain, "On-les-aura Pétain," lived during the
battle of Verdun. The street lies in a deep hollow, with cultivated
hills rising steeply above it. Higher up there are woods on the far
side, while above the sweeping Avenue du Château the houses are piled
one above the other in tumbled, picturesque confusion.

Once in the rue des Ducs we go straight to No. 49, through a
double-winged door into a courtyard, up a flight of worn steps into a
wee narrow lobby, rather dark and noisome, and then, if any one cries
_Entrez_! in response to our knock, into a great wide room.

That some one would cry it is certain, for the room is a human hive.
It swarms with people. Short, thickset, sturdy, rather heavily-built
people, whose beauty is not their strong point, but whose honesty is.
And another, for they have many, is their industry; and yet another,
dear to the heart of the Relief worker, is their gratitude for any
little help or sympathy that may be given them.

And, poor souls, they did need help. Think of it! One room the factory,
dining-room, bedroom, smoking-room, sitting-room of forty people. Some
old, some young. Women, girls and men.

It appalled you as you went in. On one side, down all its length, and
also along the top palliasses were laid on the floor, so close they
almost touched. Piled neatly on these were scanty rugs or blankets.
No sheets or linen of any kind until our Society provided them. There
was only one bed--a gift from the Society--and in that sat a little
old woman bolt upright. Her skin was the colour of old parchment, it
was seamed and lined and criss-crossed with wrinkles, for she was over
eighty years of age. But her spirit was still young. She could enjoy a
little joke.

"Yes, I remember the war of Soixante-dix," she said, "but it was not
like this. Ma fois, non! Les Prussiens--oh, they were good to us." Her
eyes twinkled. "They lived in our house. They were like children."

"Madame, Madame! Confess now that 'vous avez fait la coquette' with
those Prussians."

Whereupon she cackled a big, "Ho, ho! Écoutez ce qu'elle dit!" and a
shrivelled finger poked me facetiously in the ribs.

But if the Basket-makers made friends with the Germans in those far-off
days, they hate them now. Hate them with bitter, deadly hatred. "Ah,
les barbares! les sauvages! les rosses!" Madame Walfard would cry, her
face inflamed with anger. Her mother, badly wounded by a shell, had
become paralysed, so there is perhaps some excuse for her venom.

But for the most part they are too busy to waste time in revilings. The
little old woman is the only idle person in the room. Squatting on low
stools under the windows--there are four or five set in the length of
the wall--the rest work unceasingly, small basins of water, sheaves
of osier, tools, finished baskets, and piles of osier-ends strewn all
about them. Down the middle of the room runs a long table, littered
with mugs, bowls, cooking utensils, odds and ends of every description.
There is only one stove, a small one, utterly inadequate for the size
of the room. On it all their cooking has to be done. I used to wonder
if they ever quarrelled.

As time went on and I came to know them better, Madame Malhomme
and Madame Jacquemot told me many a tale of their life in
Vaux-les-Palamies, of the opening days of war and of their subsequent
flight from their village. Madame Malhomme, daughter of the little old
lady who had once dared to flirt with a Prussian, lived in the big room
in the rue Des Ducs for nearly a year. Then Madame B. established her
and her family in a little house about half a mile from the town, where
they had nothing to trouble them save the depredations of an occasional
rat, a negligible nuisance compared with the (in more senses than one)
overcrowded condition of No. 49. For that historic mansion had gathered
innumerable inmates to its breast during the long years of emptiness
and decay. And these inmates made the Basket-makers' lives a burden to
them.

The cold, too, was penetrating, it ate through their scanty clothes,
it bit through flesh to the very bone. The stove was an irony, a tiny
flame in a frozen desert. Every one was perished, Madame Malhomme not
least of all, for, seeing her daughter shivering, she stripped off her
only petticoat and forced her to put it on.

At night they lay in their clothes under their miserable blankets.
(Bar-le-Duc is not a very large nor a very rich town, and in giving
what it did to such numbers of people it showed itself generous indeed.
In ordinary times its population is not more, and is probably less,
than 17,000, so an influx of 4000 destitute refugees taxed it heavily.)

The unavoidable publicities of their existence filled the women with
shame and dismay. Sleeping "comme des bêtes sur la paille,"[4] or, more
often still, lying awake staring out into the unfriendly dark, what
dreams, what memories must have been theirs! How often they must have
seen the village, its cosy little homes, each with its garden basking
in the sun, the river flowing by, and the great osier beds that were
the pride of them all.

 [4] Like beasts, on straw.

They seem to have lived very much to themselves, these sturdy artisans,
rarely leaving their valley, and intermarrying to an unusual extent.
You find the same names cropping up again and again: Jacquemot, Riot,
or Malhomme. Like Quakers, every one seemed to be the cousin of every
one else. And they were well-to-do. It is safe to presume that there
was no poverty in the village. Their baskets were justly famous
throughout France, and the average family wage was about £3 a week.
In addition they had the produce of their garden, the inevitable pig
being fattened for the high destiny of the _soupe au lard_, rabbits and
poultry. If Heaven denied them the gift of physical beauty it had not
been niggardly in other respects. Best of all, it gave them the gift
of labour. In the spring pruning and tending the osier, then cutting
it, and piling it into great stacks which had to be saturated with
water every day during the hot weather, planting and digging in their
gardens, looking after the rabbits and the pig, and in winter plying
their trade. Life moved serenely and contentedly in Vaux-les-Palamies
until the dark angel of destruction passed over it and brushed it with
his wings.

The Basket-makers don't like the Boche; indeed, they entertain a
reasonable prejudice against him. He foisted himself upon them, making
their lives a burden to them; he was coarse, brutal and overbearing,
he no more considered their feelings than he would those of a rotten
cabbage-stalk thrown out upon the refuse-heap of a German town. He
stayed with them for a week. When he went away he bequeathed them a
prolific legacy. Madame Malhomme will tell you of it if you ask her--at
least she will when she knows you well. She is not proud of it.

"Ah, qu'ils sont sales, ces Boches," she says with a shudder. She
bought insecticide, she was afraid to look her neighbours in the face.
It did not occur to her at first that her troubles were not personal
and individual. Then one day she screwed up her courage and asked the
question. The answers were all in the affirmative. No one was without.

So when news came that the Boche was returning, Vaux-les-Palamies
girded up its loins and fled. Shells were falling on the village, so
they dared not spend time in extensive packings; in fact, they made
little if any attempt to pack at all. Madame's sister-in-law was
wounded in the shoulder, and the wound, untended for days, began to
crawl. Her description of it does not remind you of a rose-scented
garden. It was thrust on me as a privilege. So was a view of the
shoulder. The latter was no longer crawling. It was exquisitely white
and clean, but it had a hole in it into which a child might drive its
fist.

And so after much tribulation they found themselves in Bar-le-Duc, and
theirs was the only instance that came under our notice of a village
emigrating _en masse_, and settling itself tribally into its new
quarters. Even the Mayor came with them, and it was he who eventually
succeeded in getting a supply of osier and putting them into touch with
a market again. But their activities are sadly restricted, and they
make none of their famous baskets _de fantaisie_ now, the osier being
dear and much of it bad, so their profit is very, very small.

I was in Bar for some months before I met Madame Jacquemot. And then
it was Madame B. who introduced me to her. Her mother, an old lady
of eighty-two, had been in hospital; was now rather better, and back
again with her family in the rue Maréchale. Would the Society give her
sheets? As the dispenser of other people's bounty I graciously opined
that it would, and calling on Madame Jacquemot, told her so. Her mother
was startlingly like the old lady at No. 49, small, thin, wiry, and
bird-like in her movements. She had had shingles, poor soul, and talked
of the _ceinture de feu_ which had scorched her weary little body.
She talked of the Germans too. Ah, then you should have seen her! How
her eyes flashed! She would straighten herself and all her tiny frame
would become infused with a majesty, a dignity that transfigured her.
Once a German soldier demanded something of her, and when she told
him quite truthfully that she had not got it, he doubled his fist and
dealt her a staggering blow on the breast. And she was such a little
scrap of humanity, just an old, old woman with a brave, tender heart
and the cleanest and honestest of souls. She got her sheets and a
good warm shawl--I am afraid we took very special trouble with that
_paquet_, choosing the best of our little gifts for her--and soon
afterwards I went to see her again. As we sat in the dusky room while
Madame Jacquemot told stories, describing the method of cultivating
the osier, showing how the baskets are made, the old lady began to
cough and "hem" and make fluttering movements with her hands. Madame
Jacquemot, thickset and broad-beamed like most of her people--she had
a fleshy nose and blue eyes, I remember, hair turning grey, a pallid,
rather unhealthy complexion and a humorous mouth--got up, and going to
an inner room returned almost immediately with a quaintly-shaped basket
in her hands. The old lady took it from her and held it out to me.

"It is for you," she said. "And when you go home to England you will
tell people that it was made for you by an old woman of eighty-two,
a refugee, who was ill and in hospital for months. I chose the osier
specially, there is not a bad bit in the basket. And it is long, long
since I have made a basket. I haven't made one since we left home. But
I wanted to make one for you because you have been kind to us."

I have that basket now; I shall keep it always and think of the feeble
fingers that twined the osier, fingers that were never to twine it
again, for the gallant spirit that fought so gamely was growing more
and more weary. The old bear transplanting badly, they yearn for their
chimney corner and the familiar things that are all their world. The
long exile from her beloved village told upon her heart, joy fell from
her and, saddened and desolate, she slipped quietly away.

"She just fluttered away like a little bird," her daughter said, and I
was glad to know she had not suffered at the last.

"Ah, if only I could see the village again," she would often say. "If
only I might be buried there. To die here, among strangers.... Ah,
mademoiselle, do you think the war will soon be over? Si seulement...."
To die and be buried among her own people. To die at home. It was
all she asked for, all she had left to wish for in the world. She
would look at me with imploring, trustful eyes. Les Anglaises, they
must know. Surely I could tell her? And in the autumn one would say,
"It will be over in the spring," and in the winter cry, "Ah yes, in
the summer." But spring came and summer followed, and still the guns
reverberated across the hills, and winter came and the Harvest of Death
was still in the reaping.

Surely God must have His own Roll of Honour for those who have fallen
in the war, and many a humble name that the world has never heard of
will be written on it in letters of gold.




CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH WE PLAY TRUANT


I

Without wishing in the least to malign my fellow-men, I am minded to
declare that a vast percentage of them are hypocrites. Not that they
know it or would believe you if you told them so. Your true _poseur_
imposes acutely on himself, believing implicitly in his own deceptions;
but the discerning mind is ever swift to catch an attitude, and never
more so than when it is struck before the Mirror of Charity.

Consequently, when people tell me they go to the War Zone in singleness
of purpose, anxious only to succour the stricken, I take leave to be
incredulous. The thing is impossible. Every one who isn't a slug likes
to go to the War Zone, every one who isn't an animated suet-pudding
wants to see a battlefield, or a devastated village, or a trench, or a
dug-out, and we all want _souvenirs de la guerre_, shell cases, bits
of bomb or shrapnel, the head of the Crown Prince on a charger, or the
helmet of a Death's Head Hussar. And do we not all love adventure,
and variety--unless fear has made imbeciles of us, and the chance
of distinguishing ourselves, of winning the Legion of Honour in a
shell-swept village, or the Croix de Guerre under the iron rain of a
Taube?

I believe we do, though few of us confess it. We prefer to look
superior, to pretend we "care nothing for all that," and so I cry,
"Hypocrites! Search your hearts for your motives and you will find them
as complex as the machinery that keeps you alive."

Search mine for my motive and you will find it compounded of many
simples, but of their nature and composition it is not for me to speak.
Has it not been written that I am a modest woman?

And methinks indifferent honest. That is why I am going to tell you
about Villers-aux-Vents. You must not labour under a delusion that life
was all hard work and no play in the War Zone.

It was no high-souled purpose that led us to Villers. It was just
curiosity, common curiosity. Later on we spent a night (Saturday night,
of course) at Greux, and visited the shrine of Jeanne D'Arc at Domremy,
but that was not out of curiosity. It was hero-worship coupled with a
passion for historical research.

And we planned to go to Toul and Nancy. Now when people make plans they
should carry them out. The gods rarely send the dish of opportunity
round a second time, and when the _Carnet d'Étranger_ chained us body
and soul to _l'autorité compétente militaire_ there was no second time.
The dish had gone by; it would never come again.

Wherefore I am wrath with the gods, and still more wrath with myself,
for I have not seen Nancy, and I have not seen Toul, and if the old
_grognard_ had been in good humour I might even have gone to Verdun.
Maddening, isn't it? Especially as then, when our work was only, so to
speak, getting into its stride, we might have virtuously spared the
time. Later on when it increased, and when we bowed to a _Directrice_
who has found the secret of perpetual motion, we worked Saturday,
Sundays and all sometimes; but in 1915 we were not yet super-normal
men. We could still enjoy a holiday. And so we decided to go to
Villers-aux-Vents. To go before winter had snatched the gold mantle
from the limbs of autumn, to go while yet the sun was high and the long
day stretched before us, languorous, beautiful.

And the manner of our going was thus, by train to Révigny at 7.20 a.m.,
and then on foot over the road.

Now it is written that if you get into a westward-bound omnibus train
at Bar-le-Duc, in fulness of time you will arrive at Révigny. The
train will be packed with soldiers, so of course you travel first-or
second-class, thereby incurring a small measure of seclusion and a
larger one of boredom. In Class Three it is never dull. You may be
offered cakes or a hunk of bread which has entered into unwilling
alliance with sausage, you may be invited to drink the health of the
Allies in rank red wine, or you may be offered a faithful heart,
lifelong adoration and an income of five sous a day. Or (but for this
you must keep your ears wide open, for the train makes _un bruit
infernale_, and speech is a rapid, vivacious, eager thing in France)
you may hear tales of the war, episodes of the trenches, comments upon
the method of the Boche, things many of them hardly fit for publication
but drawn naked and quivering from the wells of life.

Unless he has been refreshing a vigorous thirst, the poilu is rarely
unmanageable. He is the cheekiest thing in the universe, he has a
twinkle in his eye that can set a whole street aflame, and he is filled
with an accommodating desire to go with you just as far as you please.
Nevertheless, he can take a hint quicker than any man I know, and his
genius in extricating himself from a difficult situation is that of the
inspired tactician.

Madame B., pursuing her philanthropic way, came out of a shop one day
to find a spruce poilu comfortably ensconced in her carriage. With arms
folded and legs crossed he surveyed the world with conquering eyes.

"I am coming for a drive with you," he remarked genially, and his smile
was the smile of a seductive angel, his assurance that of a king.

"Au contraire," replied Madame B. (the poilu was not for her, as for
us, an undiscovered country bristling with possibilities of adventure),
and his abdication was the most graceful recorded in history.

Now, I wouldn't advise you to accept every offer of companionship you
get from a poilu, but you may accept some. More than one tedious mile
of road is starred for me with memories of childlike, simple souls,
burning with curiosity about all things English, and above all about
the independent female bipeds who have no apparent fear of man, God
or devil, nor even--_bien entendu_--of that most captivating of all
created things, the blue-coated, trench-helmeted French soldier.

"You march well, Mademoiselle; you would make a fine soldier." Thus a
voice behind me as I swung homewards down the hill one chilly evening.
A sense of humour disarms me on these occasions. One day, no doubt, it
will lead me into serious trouble. I didn't wither him. One soon learns
when east winds should blow, and when the sun, metaphorically speaking,
may shine. We walked amicably into Bar together, and before we parted
he told me all about the little wife who was waiting for him in Paris,
and the fat baby who was _tout-à fait le portrait de son père_.

So ponder long and carefully before you choose your carriage, but if
your ponderings are as long as this digression you will never get to
Révigny. Even an omnibus train starts some time, and generally when you
least expect it.

At Mussey if you crane your head out of the window you may see two
wounded German prisoners, white-faced, mud-caked wretches who provoke
no comment. At Révigny you will see soldiers (if I told you how many
pass through in a day the Censor would order me to be immersed in a vat
of official ink); and you will see ruins. The Town Hall is an eyeless
skeleton leering down the road, the Grande Place--there is no Grande
Place, there is only a scattered confusion of fire-charred stones and
desiccated brick.

It was rather foggy that Sunday morning and the town looked used up.
Not an attractive place in its palmiest days we decided as we slung our
luncheon bags over our shoulders and set out for Villers. Away to the
left we could see Brabant-le-Roi, and it was there some weeks later
that I assisted at the incineration of a pig. He lay by the roadside
in a frame of blazing straw. Flames lapped his ponderous flanks, and
swept across his broad back, blue smoke curled around him, an odour of
roasting pig hung in the air. A crowd of women and soldiers stood like
devotees about a shrine. The flames leaped, and fell. Then came men
who lifted him up and laid him on a stretcher. In his neck there was
a gaping wound, and out of the fire that refined him he was no longer
an Olympian sacrifice, he was mouldering pig, dead pig, black pig,
nauseating, horrible. I turned to fly, but a voice detained me.

"Madame Bontemps will be killing to-morrow. If Mademoiselle would like
to see?"

But "to-morrow" Mademoiselle was happily far on her way to Troyes,
and the swan-song of Madame Bontemps' _gros cochon_ fell on more
appreciative ears.

However, on that Sunday morning in September there was no pig, and our
"satiable curiosity" led us far from poor battered Brabant. Our road
was to the right and "uphill all the way." The apple trees on the Route
Nationale were crusted with ripe red fruit, but we resisted temptation,
our only loot being a shell-case which we discovered in a field, which
was exceedingly heavy and with which we weighted ourselves for the sake
of an enthusiastic youngster at home. My arm still aches when I think
of that shell-case, for by this time the sun had burst out, it was
torridly hot, the apple trees gave very little shade, and our too, too
solid flesh was busily resolving itself into a dew.

However, we persevered, the object of our pilgrimage being a square
hole dug in a sunny orchard on the brow of the hill above Villers.
Some rude earthen steps gave access to it, the roof was supported by
two heavy beams, and the floor and sides were lined with carved panels
wrenched from priceless old _armoires_ taken from the village. It is
known as the Crown Prince's Funk Hole, and the story goes that from
its shelter he ordered, and subsequently watched, the destruction
of the village. The dug-out, a makeshift affair, the Crown Prince's
tenancy being of short duration, is well placed. The hill falls away
behind it, running at right angles to the opening there is a thick
hedge, trees shelter it, the line of a rough trench or two, now filled
in, runs protectingly on its flank. The fighting in this region was
open, a war of movement lasting only a few days, so trench lines are
not very plentiful. Just opposite the mouth of the dug-out there is a
fenced-in cross, a red _képi_ hangs on the point, a laurel wreath tied
with tri-coloured ribbon is suspended from the arms. "An unknown French
soldier." Did he fall there in the rush of battle, or did he creep up
hoping to get one clean neat shot at the Prince of Robbers and so put
him out of action for ever?

As for Villers itself, it was wiped out of existence. One house, and
only one, remains, and even that is battered. One might speculate a
little on the psychology of houses. The pleasant fire-cracker pastilles
that wrought so much havoc elsewhere were impotent here. The Germans
flung in one after another, we were told, using every incendiary device
at their disposal, but that house refused to burn. There it stands
triumphantly in its tattered garden, not far from the church, and when
I saw it an old woman with a reaping-hook in her hand was standing by
the hedge watching me with curious eyes. We had separated, my companion
and I, farther down the long village street, she to meditate among the
ruins, I to mourn over the shattered belfry-tower, the bell hurled to
the ground, the splintered windows, the littered ruined interior. In
the cemetery were many soldiers' graves; on one inscribed, "Two unknown
German officers," some one had scribbled "À bas les Boches," the only
instance that came to my knowledge of the desecration of a German
grave. And even here contrition followed fast upon the heels of anger,
and heavy scrawlings did their best to obliterate the bitter little
phrase. The French--in the Marne at least--have been scrupulous in
their reverence for the German dead, the graves are fenced in just as
French graves are, and the name whenever possible printed on the cross.
I suppose that even the soppiest sentimentalist would not ask that they
should be decorated with flowers?

As I left the graveyard and looked back at the desolation that once was
Villers, but where even now wooden houses were springing hopefully from
the ground, the old woman with the reaping-hook spoke to me. My dress
betrayed me; she knew without asking that I was British. And, as is the
way with these French peasants, she fell easily and naturally into her
story. I wish I could tell it to you just as she told it to me, but I
know I shall never find her simple dignity of phrase, or her native
instinct for the _mot juste_. However, such as it is you shall have it,
and if it please you not, skip. That refuge is always open to the bored
or tired reader.


II

Old Madame Pierrot was disturbed in spirit. She could see the flames
leaping above burning villages across the plain, the earth shook with
the menace of the guns, the storm was rising, every moment brought the
waves of the encroaching sea nearer to her home. Yet people said that
Villers was safe. The Germans could never get so far as that, they
would be turned back long before they reached the hill. She was alone
in her comfortable two-storied house (the house she had built only a
few years before, and which had a fine yard behind it closed in by
spacious stables, cow-houses and barns), and she was sadly in need of
advice. She had no desire whatever to make the personal acquaintance
of any German invader. Even the honour of receiving the Crown Prince
made no appeal to her soul. She had heard something of his arch little
ways and his tigerish playfulness, and though she could hardly suppose
that he would favour a woman of her dried and lean years with special
attention, she reasonably feared that she might be called on to assist
at one of his festivals. And an Imperial degenerate will do that in
public which decent women are ashamed to talk about, much less to
witness. So Madame was perturbed in soul. The battle raged through the
woods and over the plain, it crept nearer ... nearer....

"Madame, Madame, come. Is it that you wish the Germans to get you?" A
wagon was drawn up at the door, in it were friends who lived higher up
the street. "Come with us to Laimont. You will be safer there."

So they called to her and put an end to her doubt. Snatching up a
basket, she stuffed into it all the money she had in the house,
various family papers and documents, and then, just as she was, in her
felt-soled slippers with her white befrilled cap on her head, in her
cotton dress without even a shawl to cover her, she clambered into the
wagon and set out. Laimont was only a few miles away; indeed, I think
you can see the church spire and the roofs of the houses from the
hill. There the wagon halted. In a few hours the Germans would be gone,
and then one could go peaceably home again. But time winged away, the
battle raged more fiercely than ever, soon perhaps Laimont itself would
be involved and see hand-to-hand fighting in its streets.

Laimont! Madame was _desolée_. _Où aller?_ Farther south, farther east?
The Germans were everywhere. And _voyager comme ça_ in her old felt
slippers, in her working clothes, without wrap or cloak to cover her?
Impossible. The wagon must wait. There was still time. _Ces salauds_
would not reach Laimont yet. Why, look! Villers itself was free. There
was no fire, no smoke rising on the hill. Her friends would wait while
she went back _au grand galop_ to put on her boots, and her bonnet and
her Sunday clothes. "Hé, mon Dieu, it is not in the petticoat of the
fields that one runs over France."

Away she went, her friends promising to wait for her. Laden down by
the shell, we who were lusty and strong found the road from Villers
to Laimont unendingly long, yet no grisly fears gnawed at our
heart-strings, no sobs rose chokingly to be thrust back again ... and
yet again. Nor had we the hill to climb, and no shells were bursting
just ahead. So what can it have been for Madame? But she pressed on;
old, tired and, oh, so dismayed, she panted up the steep hill that
curls into the village, and walked right into the arms of the Crown
Prince's men. In a trice she was a prisoner, one of eighty, some
of whom were soldiers, the rest civilians, who, like herself, had
committed the egregious folly of being born west of the Rhine, and were
now about to suffer for it.

What particular crime Villers-aux-Vents had committed to merit
destruction I cannot tell. Perhaps it never committed any. The Crown
Prince was not always a minister of Justice promulgating sentence
upon crime. He was more often a Nero loving a good red blaze for its
own sake, or it may be an æsthete of emotion, a super-sensualist of
cruelty, or just a devil hot from the stones of hell.

Whatever the reason, Villers was doomed. Out came the pastilles and
the petrol-sprayers: the most determined destruction was carried on.
Not only were the houses themselves destroyed but the outhouses, the
stables, solid brick and mortar constructions running back to a depth
of several feet. And I gathered that the usual pillage inaugurated the
reign of fire.

Of this, however, Madame knew nothing. She and her seventy-nine
companions in misery were marched away to the north, mile after mile to
Stenay, and if you look at the map you will see that the distance is
not small, it was a march of several days.

Madame, as I have told you, was old, and her slippers had soles of
felt, and so the time came when her feet were torn and bleeding, and
when, famished and exhausted, she could no longer keep step with her
guards. Her pace became slower and slower. Ah, God, what was that? Only
the butt-end of a rifle falling heavily across her back. She nerved
herself for another effort, staggered on to falter once more. Again the
persuasion of the rifle. Again the shrewd, cruel blow, and a bayonet
flashing under her eyes.

A diet of black bread three times a day does not encourage one to take
violent exercise, but black bread was all that they got, and I think
the rifle-butts worked very hard during that long weary march.

On arrival they were herded into a church and then into a prison, where
they were brutally treated at first, but subsequently, when French
people were put in charge, found life a little less intolerable. And
later on some residents still living in the town were kind to her, but
during all the months--some eight or nine--that she was imprisoned
there she had no dress but the one, nothing to change into, nothing to
keep out the sharp winter cold.

Madame Walfard the basket-maker told me some gruesome tales about
Stenay, and what happened there, but this is not a book of atrocities.
Perhaps it ought to be, perhaps every one who is in a position to do
so should cry aloud the story in a clear clarion call to the civilised
world, but--isn't the story known? Can anything I have to say add a
fraction of a grain of weight to the evidence already collected? Is
the world even now so immature in its judgment that it supposes that
the men who sacked Louvain, the men who violated Belgium behaved
like gallant gentlemen in the sunnier land of France? Do we not know
all of us that, added to the deliberate German method, there was the
lasciviousness of drunkenness? That the Germans poured into one of the
richest wine-growing countries in the world during one of the hottest
months of the year, that their thirst at all times is a mighty one, and
when excited by the frenzy of battle it was unassuageable? They drank,
and they drank again. They rioted in cellars containing thousands of
bottles of good wine, and they emerged no longer men but demons, whose
officers laughed to see them come forth, sure now that no lingering
spark of human or divine fire would hold them back from frightfulness.

Of course we know it was so, and therefore I am not going to dilate
upon horrors. Let the kharma of the Germans be their witness and their
judge. Only this in fairness should be told--that the behaviour of the
men varied greatly in different regiments. "It all depended upon the
Commandant," summed up one narrator, "and the first armies were the
worst."

"And the Crown Prince's army?" I asked; "what of that?"

He shrugged. What can be expected from the followers of such a leader?
Their exploits put mediæval mercenaries to shame.

Stenay must find another historian; but even while I refuse to become
the chronicler of atrocities, every line I write rises up to confute
me. For was not the very invasion of France an "atrocity"? Is the word
so circumscribed in its meaning that it contains only arson, murder
and rape? Does not the refinement of suffering inflicted upon every
refugee, upon every homeless _sinistré_, upon the basket-makers of
Vaux-les-Palamies as upon Madame Lassanne, and poor old creatures
like the Leblans fall within it too, and would not the Germans stand
convicted before the Tribunal of such narratives even if the gross sins
of the uncivilised beast had never been laid at their door?

Madame Pierrot told me nothing about Stenay--perhaps she saw nothing
but the inside of her prison walls--but she told me a great deal about
the kindness of the Swiss when she crossed the frontier one happy day,
and the joy-bells were ringing in her heart. They gave her food and
drink, they overwhelmed her with sympathy, they offered her clothes.
But Madame said no. She was a _propriétaire_, she had good land in
Villers.

"Keep the clothes for others, they will need them more than I. In my
house at Villers-aux-Vents there are _armoires_ full of linen and
underclothing, everything that I need. I can wait."

I often wonder whether realisation came to her at Révigny, or whether,
all ignorant of the tragedy, she walked blithely up the hill, the
joy-bells ringing their Te Deum in her heart, her thoughts flitting
happily from room to room, from _armoire_ to _armoire_, conning over
again the treasures she had been parted from so long. Did she know only
as she turned the last sharp bend in the road and saw the village dead
at her feet? Ah, whether she knew as she trudged over the much-loved
road, or whether knowledge came only with sight, what a home-coming was
that! She found the answer to the eternal question, "What shall we find
when we return?" ... How many equally poignant answers still lie hidden
in the womb of time to be brought forth in anguish when at last the day
of restoration comes?


III

Even the longest story must come to an end some time, and so did Madame
Pierrot's. Conscience, tugging wildly at the strings of memory, spoke
to me of my lost comrade; the instinct of hospitality asserted itself
in Madame's soul. We were strangers, we must see the sights. Would I go
with her to her "house," and to the dug-out of the Crown Prince? Yes?
_Bon. Allons._ And away we trotted to gather up the lost one among
the ruins, to inspect the dug-out, to eat delicious little plums which
Madame gathered for us in the orchard, and finally to be seized by
the pangs of a righteous hunger which simply shrieked for food. Where
should we eat? Madame mourned over her brick and rubble. If we had come
before the war she would have given us a _déjeuner_ fit for a king.
A good soup, an omelette, _des confitures_, a cheese of the country,
coffee, but now? "Regardez, Mademoiselle. Ah que c'est triste. Il n'y
a rien du tout, du tout, du tout." And indeed there was nothing but a
mound of material that might have been mistaken for road rubbish.

Eventually she found a stone bench in the yard, and there we munched
our sandwiches while she flitted away, to come back presently with
bunches of green grapes, sweet enough but very small. The vine had not
been tended for a year, it was running wild. They were not what _ces
dames_ should be given, but if we would accept them? We would have
taken prussic acid from her just then, I believe, but fortunately it
did not occur to her to offer it. She cut us dahlias from her ragged
garden (once loved and carefully tended), and hearing that one of us
was a connoisseur in shell-cases, bits of old iron and other gruesome
relics, rooted about until she found another shell-case, with which
upon our backs we staggered over to Laimont.

And now let me hereby solemnly declare that if any one ever dares to
tell me that the French are inhospitable I will smite him with a great
and deadly smiting. I am not trying to suggest that they clasped us in
their arms and showered riches upon us within an hour of our meeting.
They showed a measure of sanity and caution in all their ways. They
waited to see what manner of men we were before they flung wide their
doors, but once the doors were wide the measure of their generosity was
only limited by the extent of our need.

Was it advice, an introduction to an influential person, a string
pulled here, a barrier broken down there, Madame B. and Madame D. were
always at our service. Gifts of fruit and flowers came constantly
to our door, our _bidons_ were miraculously filled with paraffin
in a famine which we, being foolish virgins, had not foreseen, or,
foreseeing, had not guarded against, and once in the heavy frost, when
wood was unobtainable in the town and the supply ordered from Sermaize
was over-long in coming, our lives were saved by a bag of oak blocks
which scented the house, and _boulets_ that made the stove glow with
magnificent ardour. In every difficulty we turned to Madame B. She
helped us out of many an _impasse_, and whether we asked her to buy
dolls in Paris or, by persuading a General and his Staff that without
our timely aid France could never win the war, to reconcile an Army
Corps to our erratic activities in its midst, she never failed us. When
two of our party planned a week-end shopping expedition to Nancy, it
was Madame B. who discovered that the inhabitants of that much-harassed
town were leading frozen lives in their cellars, and if she was
sometimes electrifyingly candid in her criticism, she was equally
unstinted in her praise. Madame D., with her old-world courtesy, was no
less hospitable, and many a frantic S.O.S. brought her at top speed to
our door.

From Monsieur C., who used to assure us that we dispensed our gifts
with a _délicatesse_ that was _parfait_, and Madame K. showering
baskets of luscious raspberries, to the poorest refugee who begged
us to drink a glass of wine with her, or who deeply regretted her
inability to make some little return for the help we had given her,
they outvied one another in refuting the age-old libel on the character
of the French.

"But," cries some acidulated critic, "you would have us believe that
the poilu is a blue-winged angel, and the civilian too perfect to
live." Far from it. The poilu is only a man, the civilian only human,
and I have yet to learn that either--be he man or human--is perfect any
more than he, or his equivalent is perfect even in this perfect English
island in the sea. There are soldiers who.... There are civilians
who....

I guess the devil doesn't inject original sin into them with a
two-pronged hypodermic syringe any more than he injects it into us. The
good and the evil sprout up together, or are they the spiritual Siamese
twin that is born of every one of us to be a perpetual confusion to our
minds, a bewilderment to our bodies and a most difficult progeny to
rear at the best of times? For as surely as you encourage one of the
twins the other sets up a roar, sometimes they howl together, sometimes
one stuffs his fist down the other's throat. And the bad one is hard
to kill, and the good one has a tendency to rickets. No wonder it is a
funny muddle of a world.

And the French have their twin too, only theirs say _la-la_ and ours
say damn, and if they keep an over-sharp eye on the sous, do we turn
our noses up at excess profits?

Of course some of them are greedy, perhaps greedier on the whole
than we are. Would any English village lock its wells when thirsty
children wailed at its door? I know an Irish one would not. But the
French are thrifty, and the majority of them would live comfortably on
what a British family wastes. They work hard too. They are incredibly
industrious, perhaps because they have to be.

France has not yet been inoculated with the virus of philanthropy,
an escape on which she may possibly be congratulated. The country
is not covered with a network of charitable societies overlapping
and criss-crossing like railway lines at a junction, nor have French
women of birth, independent means and superfluous energy our genius
for managing other people's affairs so well there is no time to look
after our own. The deserving poor run no risk of being pauperised,
the undeserving don't keep secretaries, committees and tribes of
enthusiastic females labouring heavily at their heels. The French
family in difficulties has to depend on its own resources, its own
wit, its own initiative and energy, and when I think of the way our
refugees dug themselves in in Bar-le-Duc, and scratched and scraped,
and hammered and battered at that inhospitable soil till they forced a
living from its breast, my faith in philanthropy and the helping hand
begins to wane.

Of course there are hard cases, where a little intelligent human
sympathy would transform suffering and sorrow into contentment and joy,
cases that send me flying remorsefully back to the altar of organised
charity with an offering in outstretched hand, but above all these,
over all the agony of war the stern independence of French character
has ridden supreme.

So let their faults speak for themselves. Who am I that I should
expose them to a pitiless world? Have I not faults of my own? See how
I have kept poor Madame Pierrot gathering dahlias in her garden, and
my comrade in adventure eating grapes upon a very stony seat. So long
that now there is no time to tell you how we walked to Laimont and
investigated more ruins there, and then how we walked to Mussey where
we comfortably missed our train, and how a Good Samaritan directed
us to a house, and how in the house we found a little old lady whose
son had been missing since August 1914, and who pathetically wondered
whether we could get news of him, and how a _sauf-conduit_ had to be
coaxed from the Mayor, and the little old lady's horse harnessed to a
car, and how two chairs were planted in the car and we superficially
planted on the chairs, and how the old lady and a brigand clambered
on to the board in front, and how we drove down to Bar as the sun was
setting. Nor can I tell you how nearly we were run into by a motor-car,
nor how the old lady explained that the brigand was _malheureusement_
nearly blind, and that she, still more _malheureusement_, was rather
deaf, nor how we prayed as we clung desperately to the chairs which
slid and wobbled and rocked and oscillated, and rattled our bones while
all the military motor-cars in France sought our extermination.

Nor can I tell you how at a dangerous crossing the brigand drew up
his steed, and set up a wail because he had forgotten his cigarettes,
nor how one escapading female produced State Express which made him
splutter and cough, and nearly wreck us in the ditch (though English
tobacco is not nearly so strong as French), nor how we came at last
to Bar-le-Duc, nor how the old lady demanded a ridiculously small fee
for the journey, nor how I lost a glove, and the sentries eyed us with
suspicion, and the brigand who was blind and _la patronne_ who was deaf
drove away in the fading light to Mussey, the aroma of State Express
trailing out behind them, and the old horse plodding wearily in the
dust.




CHAPTER VIII

THE MODERN CALVARY


I

One day, not long after our visit to the battlefield, our composure was
riven to its very foundations by an invitation to play croquet in the
garden of Madame G. Could we spare an hour from our so arduous toil?
For her it would be a pleasure so great, the English they love "le
sport," they play all the games, we would show her the English way.
Monsieur her husband he adored croquet, but never, never could he find
any one to play with him. Madame, a little swarthy woman who always
dressed in rusty black, clasped her shiny kid gloves together and gazed
at us beseechingly. The Arbiter of our destinies decided that we must
go. There is always _l'Entente_, you know, it should be encouraged at
all hazards, a sentiment which meets with my fullest approval when the
hazard does not happen to be mine.

Madame yearned that we should throw ourselves into "le sport" at four,
but the devil of malice, who sits so persistently on my shoulder,
arranged that I should be the only one free at that hour. The others
promised to come at half-past four.

"But, my dear women," I cried, "I haven't played croquet for ages."

"Never mind. Hit something, do anything. But go."

I went. I was ushered into a tiny and stuffy parlour, and there for
twenty interminable, brain-racking minutes I confronted Madame G. Then
an old lady in a bath-robe sidled into the room, and we all confronted
one another for ten minutes more. Madame G. may be a devil of a fellow
with a croquet-mallet in her hand, but small talk is not her strong
point. Neither is it mine, for the matter of that, when I am slowly
suffocating in a foreign land. However, we finally adjourned to the
garden. Where, oh where was the croquet ground? Where, oh where were my
faithless companions? Where, oh where was tea? A quarter to five rang
out from the tower of Nôtre Dame, and here was I marooned on a French
grass plot adorned with trees, real trees, apple trees, plum trees, an
enterprising pergola, several flower-beds and, Heaven help me! croquet
hoops--hoops that had just happened, all anyhow, no two looking in the
same direction. In direct line of fire rose a tall birch tree. I gazed
at it in despair. A niblick, or a lofter, or a crane might get a ball
over it, but a croquet mallet?... Circumvention was impossible. There
were three bunkers.

"It is like your English croquet grounds?" Madame asked. "We play all
the Sundays----"

"Ah, yes, through the Looking-glass," I murmured, and she responded--

"Plaît-il?"

I hastily congratulated her on the condition of her fruit trees.

Five o'clock. What I thought of the faithless was by now so sulphuric,
blue flames must have been leaping out of me. Five-fifteen. A Sail!
The Arbiter, full of apologies, which did nothing to soften the steely
reproval in my eye. Then Madame disappeared. At five-thirty she came
back again accompanied by delinquent number two. She held a hurried
consultation with the bath-robe, then melted again into the void.

"Can I go?" I signalled to the Arbiter. She shook a vigorous head. The
rattle of tea-cups was coming from afar. At a quarter to six Madame
announced tea. It was served in the dining-room. We all sat round a
square table very solemnly--it was evidently the moment of Madame's
life; there was no milk, we were expected to use rum--or was it
gin?--instead. Anyway I know it was white, and one of us tried it, and
I know ... well, politeness conquered, but she has been a confirmed
teetotaller ever since.

At six-five Madame was weeping as she recounted a tale she had read in
the paper a day or so before, and six-twenty-five we came away.

"And we never played croquet after all. But you will come again when
Monsieur mon mari is here, for Les Anglaises they love 'le sport.'"

But we never went back. Perhaps the tree-tops frightened us, or perhaps
we were becoming too much engrossed in sport of another kind. You see,
M. le Curé of N. came to visit us the next day, and soon after that
Madame Lassanne inscribed her name on our books. Which shall I tell
you about first? Madame Lassanne, who was a friend of Madame Drouet,
and actually succeeded in making her talk for quite a long time on the
stairs one day? I think so.

Perhaps to-morrow I shall tell you of M. Le Curé.

You see, it was really Madame Lassanne who first brought home to me
what war means to the civil population in an invaded district. One
guessed it all in a dim way before, of course, every imaginative person
does, but not in the way in which pain, desolation of spirit, agony of
soul, poignant anxiety drive their roots deep down into Life; nor does
one realise how small a thing is human life, how negligible man when
compared with the great god of War.

A French medical officer once said to me, "Mademoiselle, in war les
civiles n'ont pas le droit d'être malade," and I dared to reply,
"Monsieur, ils n'ont guère le droit de vivre." And he assented, for he
knew, knew that to a great extent it was true, only too pitiably true.
For the great military machine which exists in order that an unshakable
bulwark may be set up between the invader and the civilians whom he
would crush is, in its turn, and in order to keep that bulwark firm,
obliged to crush them himself. In the War Zone (it is not too much to
say it) the civilian is an incubus, an impediment, a most infernal
nuisance. He gets so confoundedly in the way. And he is swept out of
it as ruthlessly as a hospital matron sweeps dust out of her wards.
That he is confused and bewildered, thoroughly _désorienté_, that he
may be sick or feeble, that his wife may be about to give birth to a
child, that his house is in ashes and that he, once prosperous, is now
a destitute pauper, that his children trail pitifully in the dust,
footsore, frightened, terror-haunted to the very verge of insanity,
all these things from the military point of view matter nothing. And
it must be so. They dare not matter. If they did, energies devoted to
keeping that human bulwark in the trenches fit and sound might be
diverted into other channels, and the effort to ameliorate and save
become the hand of destruction, ruining all in order to save a little.

Think of one village. There are thousands, and any one will do. Anxiety
and apprehension have lain over it for days, but the inhabitants go
about their work, eat, sleep, "carry on" much as usual. Night comes. It
is pitch dark. The world is swathed in a murky shroud. At two o'clock
loud hammering is heard, the gendarmes are going from house to house
beating upon the doors. "Get up, get up; in half an hour you must be
gone." Dazed with sleep, riven with fear, grief slowly closing her icy
fingers upon their hearts, they stumble from their beds and throw on a
few clothes. They look round the rooms filled with things nearly every
one of which has a history, things of no intrinsic value, but endeared
to them by long association, and it may be by memory of days when Love
and Youth went hand in hand to the Gates of Romance and they opened
wide at their touch. Things, too, that no money can buy: old _armoires_
wonderfully carved, old china, old pottery, handed down from father to
son, from mother to child for generations.

What would one choose in such a moment as that?

"You can take nothing but what you can carry." Nothing. The children
clutch at hand and skirt. How can Marie and Germaine and Jean and
Robert walk fifteen or twenty kilomètres to safety?

The prudent snatch at their family papers, thrust a little food into a
bag and go out into the night. Others gather up useless rubbish because
it lies under their hand. The gendarmes are growing impatient. They
round up their human flock as a dog rounds up his sheep. Shells are
beginning to fall here and there. Some one has been killed--a child.
Then a woman. There are cries, a long moan of pain. But the refugees
must hurry on.

"Vîte, vîte, depêchez-vous." They stumble down the roads, going they
know not whither, following the lanes, the woods, even the fields, for
the main road must be kept clear for the army. Hunger, thirst, the
torment of an August day must be endured, exhaustion must be combated.
Death hovers over them. He stoops and touches now one, now another
with his wings, and quietly they slip down upon the parched and baking
earth, for they are old and weary, and rest is sweet after the long
burden of the day.

But even this is not all. One may believe that at first, engulfed by
the instinct of self-preservation, tossed by the whirlwind from one
emotion to another and into the lowest pit of physical pain, the mind
is too confused, too stunned to realise the full significance of all
that is happening.

But once in their new quarters, with the long days stretching out ahead
and the dark night behind, in wretchedness, in bitter poverty, ah! then
Thoughts, Memories, Regrets and Infinite Lonelinesses throng upon them,
and little by little realisation comes and at last they KNOW.

Know that the broken threads of life can never be taken up again in the
old good way. "On était si heureux là-bas."[5] How often I have heard
that said! "On vivait tout doucement. On n'était pas riche, ma fois,
but _we had enough_!" Poignant words those, in Refugee-land.

 [5] We were so happy!

Added to the haunting dread of the future there is always the
ghost-filled dream of the past. Women who have spoken with steady
composure of the loss of thousands of francs, of the ruin of
businesses built up through years of patient industry and hard work,
of farms--rich, productive, well-stocked--- laid waste and bare,
have broken down and sobbed pitifully when speaking of some trivial
intrinsically-valueless possession. How our hearts twine themselves
round these ridiculous little things, what colour, what meaning they
lend to life!

To lose them, ah, yes! that is bad enough; but to know that hands
stained with blood will snatch at them and turn them over, and that
eyes still bestial with lust will appraise their value.... That is
where the sharpest sting lies. The man or woman whose house is effaced
by a shell is happy indeed compared with those who have seen the
Germans come, who have watched the pillage and the looting and the
sacrilege of all they hold most dear.

But the _émigré's_ cup must hold even greater sorrows and anxieties
than these. "C'est un vrai Calvaire que nous souffrons, Mademoiselle."
So they will tell you, and it is heartbreakingly true. Crucified upon
the iron cross of German ambition, they pray daily that the cup may be
taken from them, but the mocking god of War still holds it to their
lips. They must drink it even to the very dregs.

For not always could all the members of a family get away together.
It has been the fate of many to remain behind, to become prisoners in
the shadowed land behind the trenches, at the mercy of a merciless
foe. Between them and their relatives in uninvaded France no direct
communication can be established. An impenetrable shutter is drawn
down between. Only at rare intervals news can come, and that is when
a soldier son or father or other near relative becomes a prisoner of
war in Germany. A French woman in the _pays envahi_ may write to a
prisoner in Germany, and he to her. He may also write to his friends in
the free world beyond. And so it sometimes happens that news trickles
through, but very rarely. The risk is tremendous, detection heavily
punished. Only oblique reference can be indulged in, and when one has
heard nothing for months, perhaps years, how meagre and unsatisfying
that must be. Do we in England realise what it means? I know I did not
before I met Madame Lassanne, and only very inadequately as I sat in
the kitchen of the Ferme du Popey and listened to her story.


II

She was the daughter of one farmer, the wife of another and successful
one, the richest in their district, so people said. When the war broke
out her husband was mobilised, she with her three children, a girl of
four, a boy of two and a month-old baby, remaining at the farm with
her father and mother. A few days, perhaps a week or two passed, then
danger threatened. Harnessing their horses to the big farm wagons, she
and the old man packed them with _literie_, _duvets_, furniture, food,
clothes, everything they could find room for, and prepared to leave the
village. But the gendarmes forbade it. I suppose the road was needed
for military purposes: heavy farm wagons might delay the passage of the
troops. Throughout the whole of one day they waited. Still the barrier
was not withdrawn. Shells began to rain on the village; first one
house, then another caught fire.

"You may go." The order came at last. The children, with their
grandmother and an aunt of the Lassannes, were placed in the wagons and
the little procession set out; but they were not destined to go far
that day. At the next village the barrier fell again. Believing that
the Germans were following close behind, they held hasty consultation,
as the result of which the old women decided to walk on with the
children, leaving M. Breda and Madame to follow as soon as the way was
clear.

So the horses and wagons were put into a stable, and Madame and her
father sat down to wait. The slow hours ticked away, a shell screamed
overhead, another, then another. Soon they were falling in torrents
on the little street. Houses began to crash down, the stable caught
fire, the four horses and the wagons were burned to a cinder. Then the
house in which the refugees had sheltered was struck. They escaped by a
miracle, crawling on hands and knees. So terrific was the bombardment
they dared not go down the road. A barrage of shell-fire played over
it. With some dozens of others as miserable as themselves they lay all
night in a furrow in a beet-field, Madame trembling in her father's
arms, for shells were falling incessantly on the field and all around
them. At dawn the hurricane ceased, and they crept away. The road was
open now, they were on foot. They walked fast, then faster, hoping
every minute to overtake the children. The old women surely could not
have gone very far. But mile after mile was conquered and no news
of them could be found. No sentries had seen them, no gendarme had
watched them go by. They asked every one they met on the road, at first
hopefully, then, as fear grew, with clutching hands and fevered eyes.
But the answer was always the same. They had not passed that way.
Chance, Fate, call it what you will, brought Madame and the old man
to Bar-le-Duc, and there, soon after her arrival, she heard that her
husband had been wounded in the earliest of the fighting and was now
a prisoner in Germany. A prisoner and ill. Day after day dragged by.
She found employment on the farm near the town, she made inquiries,
exhausted every channel of information, but no trace of the children
could be found.

And her husband, writing from Germany, demanded news of them! He did
not know that the farm was demolished, and that she was beggared. He
asked for parcels, for comforts. She sent them to him, by what supreme
effort of self-denial only she and the God she prayed to know. And she
wrote him little notes, gay, brave little notes. She told him all about
the children--how fat and how strong they were.... And Marie--ah, Marie
was growing tall--so tall.... And Roger was able to talk now....

God only knows what it cost her to write those letters; God only knows
with what agony she forced her tears back to their source lest one,
falling on the paper, betray her. She went about her work white-faced
and worn, hungering for the news that never came, and autumn faded
into winter and spring was born and blossomed into summer, and then,
and then only, did the shutter lift and a tiny ray of light come
through.

Confused and frightened, the old women, burdened with the children, had
lost their way in the darkness and wandered back into the German lines.
They were now prisoners in Carignan (near the frontier); they managed
to smuggle a letter through. The baby was dead. There was no milk to be
had, so it died of starvation. Madame Breda had been offered freedom.
If she wished she would be sent back into France through Switzerland.
But the children's names were not on the list of those selected for
repatriation.

"Could they go with her?"

"No."

"Eh bien, j'y reste."

The shutter snapped down again, the veil enclosed them, and Madame
resigned herself to the long, weary waiting.

Was it any wonder that such stories as this--and there were all too
many of them--filled us with hatred of everything German? In those
first months of personal contact with war we were always at white heat,
consumed with rage and indignation, and for my own part, at least,
desirous of nothing less than the extermination of kultur and every
exponent of it. As I walked home through the quiet afternoon, dark
thoughts filled my mind. What a monster one can be! What longing for
vengeance even the mildest of us can cherish! I thought of another
village not far from that of Madame Lassanne's home, from which three
hundred people had been driven into virtual slavery. Nearly all were
old--over sixty, some few were boys and girls of fourteen, sixteen,
eighteen, and of the old, eighty died in the first six months.

It was a long time now since any news had come through, and those who
waited had almost given up hope of seeing their loved ones again.

And we were impotent. With an effort I shook off despondency. I would
go and see Madame Leblan and rest a while in her garden. She was lonely
and loved a little visit. It would amuse her to hear about the Curé and
our visit to N.; any gossip would serve to drive away her memories. "Ça
change les idées," she would say. "It is not well to sit and brood."

Neither is it well to walk and brood; yet here was I, foolish virgin
that I was, brooding like a moulting hen. Taking myself firmly in hand,
I turned down the rue de L'Étoile and opened the garden gate.


III

Madame was only a poor peasant woman, but she had once been very
beautiful, and the old face was handsome still. The aquiline features
are well-modelled, the large blue eyes clear and steady, flashing now
with a fine pride, now with delicious humour; the head is well poised,
she is essentially dignified; there are times when she has the air of a
queen.

Her husband is tall and thin, with a drooping moustache, and in
accordance with prevailing custom he keeps his hat on in the house, and
he is seventy-two and she is seventy, and when I saw her first she was
in her quaint little garden sitting under the shade of a mirabelle tree
with an ancient dame to whom only Rembrandt could have done justice.
Like Madame, she was short and broad, and without being handsome, she
was just bonny. She had jolly little eyes and a chubby, dimpled face,
and wore a spotlessly white and befrilled cap with strings that tied
under her chin and made you rather want to kiss her. She was just a
little _coquette_ in her appearance, and she must have been born in
prehistoric times, for she was "la tante de Madame Leblan." She didn't
live in the little cottage, she had a room just across the way, and
there I would see her sitting in the sun on a fine day as I turned in
at the garden gate.

Of course we went down before her, and gave her of our best, for
she was an irresistible old thing, who could coax you into cyclonic
generosity. She would come trotting over to see us with a small basket
on her arm, and having waited till the crowd that besieged our morning
hours had melted away, would come upstairs looking so innocent and
so picturesque our hearts were as water before her. And then out of
the basket would come apples, or pears, or walnuts, with a honeyed
phrase, the little vivid eyes searching our own. Refusal was out of the
question, we were in the toils, knowing that for Madame we were the sun
in the heavens, the down on the wings of the Angel of Life; knowing,
too, that surely as she turned away would come the tactful hint, the
murmured need. And though periodically we swore that she should have no
more, she rarely went empty away.

At last, because of the equality of things, we hardened our hearts.
She returned with walnuts. Our thanks being meticulously verbal, she
retreated thoughtfully, to reappear a few days later with three pears
and a remote _malaise_ that successfully defied diagnosis. We knew she
had her eyes on medical comforts, eggs, _bons_ for meat, etc., so the
_malaise_ deceived no one, while a cold gift of aspirin tabloids nearly
destroyed her faith in humanity.

And all the time she was "rich"! No wonder she was _coquette_, she
could afford to be, for she had small _rentes_, and money laid by, and
had saved all her papers and her bank-book. So Madame Leblan, who had
left home with exactly twenty-seven francs in her pocket, told me, but
not, loyally enough, until she was sure that our gifts to La Tante had
ceased.

She herself never asked for anything, save once, and that was for a
_paletot_ for Monsieur. In spite of his three-score-years-and-twelve,
in spite of the severe attack of internal hæmorrhage from which he was
recovering, he went to work every morning at six, returning at six
at night. Hard manual toil it was, too, much too hard for a man of
his years. How Madame fretted over him! How she scraped and saved to
buy him little comforts. And he did need that coat badly. I think I
shall never forget her face when she saw the warm Cardigan jacket the
Society provided for him. Her eyes filled with tears, she flushed like
a girl, she looked radiantly beautiful and then, with the most gracious
diffidence in the world, "You will permit me?" she said, and drew my
face down to hers.

There was something about that old creature that made me feel ashamed.
What one did was so pitifully little, but she made it seem like a gift
of star-flowers bathed in the dews of heaven. It was her unconquerable
sense of humour that attracted me to her, I suppose. French wit playing
over the fields of life with an indomitable spirit that would not be
broken.

When she was a girl her father used to say to her, "You sing too much,
some day you will cry," but though the tears did come she never lost
her gaiety of heart. When she married she was very poor; Monsieur's
father had been foolish, loving wine, and they had to make their own
way in the world, but she held her head high and did her best for her
boys. It should never be said of them that they were educated at the
cow's tail (à la queue des bêtes). Her pride came to her aid, and
perhaps much of her instinctive good breeding too. _Le fils_ in the
Garde Republicaine in Paris has much of his mother's manner.

Leaving the cottage was a terrible wrench. They packed a few
odds-and-ends into a bundle, and she tidied everything, saying farewell
to the little treasures they had collected in forty-odd years. Silently
they locked the doors behind them, her eyes dry, the catastrophe too
big for tears. But in the garden Monsieur paused. "Les bêtes," he said;
"we mustn't leave them to starve. Open the cow-house door and let them
go free." As she turned to obey him her feet faltered, the world swam
in a mist of tears. She thrust the key blindly into his hands and
stumbled like a drunken woman down the road.

Then for six weeks they trudged together. They slept in fields, in the
woods, under carts, in barns, they were drenched with rain and with
dew, they were often hungry and thirsty and cold. But they struggled
on until they came to Vavincourt, and there the owner of the little
house in Bar met them, and seeing what manner of people they were, lent
it to them rent free on condition that they looked after the garden.
How grateful Madame was, but how intensely she longed for home! How
wistfully she turned her eyes northward across the hills! How often the
question, When? trembled half spoken on her lips! What mattered it that
home was a ruin and she penniless? Just to be in the valley again, to
see the sun gleaming on the river.

To help the time to pass less sluggishly by we had invented a little
tale, a tale of which I was the unworthy heroine, and the hero an
unknown millionaire. The millionaire with gold _jusqu'au plafond_, who
was obligingly waiting for me beyond the sea, and who would come some
day and lay his heart, his hand, and his gold-mine at my feet. And
then a _petit palais_ would spring miraculously from that much-loved
rubbish-heap at Véry, and one day as Madame and _le patron_ stood by
the door, they would see a great aeroplane skimming through the sky, it
would swoop and settle, and from it would leap the millionaire and his
blushing bride. And Madame would lead them in and give them wine and
coffee and a salad and _saucissons de Lorraine_, which are better and
more delicious than any other _saucissons_ in all the wide world.

Only a foolish little story, but when one is old and one's heart is
weary it is good to be foolish at times, good to spin the sun-kissed
webs, good to leave the dark chamber of despair and stray with timid
feet over the gleaming meadows of hope.

Her greeting rarely varied. "Je vous croyais morte," a reproach for the
supposed infrequency of my visits. She cried it now, though scarcely a
week had sped since I saw her last, and then with mysterious winks and
nods she hobbled into the house, to return a few minutes later with two
or three bunches of grapes and some fine pears. "Pendant la guerre
tous les scellés sont levés,"[6] she laughed, but I knew she had not
robbed her benefactor. The fruit she kept _en cachette_ for us, she and
M. Leblan deprived themselves of, nor could any remonstrance on our
part stay her.

 [6] During the war all seals are broken.

"Where is your basket?" She had ordered me to bring one on my next
visit, yet here was I, most perplexingly without. But the fruit must be
carried home. She had no basket, no paper. _Méchante_ that I was, to
come without that basket. Had not she, Madame, commanded it? In vain I
refused the gift. She was inexorable.

"Ah, I have it." She seized me with delighted hands, and it was then
that the uniform earned my bitterest reproach, for into its pockets,
whose size suggested that they were originally intended to hold the
guano and rabbits of agricultural relief, went the pears. One might as
well argue with a megatherium as with Madame when her mind was made
up. So I had to stand in the kitchen growing bulkier and bulkier, with
knobs and hillocks and boulders and tussocks sprouting all over me,
feeling like a fatted calf, and longing for kindly darkness to swallow
me up. Subsequently I slunk home by unfrequented ways, every yard of
which seemed to be adorned with a gendarme taking notes. I am convinced
that I escaped arrest and decapitation only by a miracle, and that
every dog in the town bayed at my heels.

My agonies, needless to say, met with scant sympathy from my
companions. They accused me of flirting with M. Leblan, even while they
dug greedy teeth into the pears, an accusation it was difficult to
refute when he called at the house one evening and, hearing that I was
out, refused to leave a message, but turned up later and demanded an
interview with such an air of mystery Madame came to call me fluttering
so we thought the President of the Republic must be at the door.

Still more difficult was it to refute when Monsieur had gone away,
leaving me transfixed on the stairs with two huge bottles of mirabelle
plums in my hands. I never dared to tell the three villains who made
life such a happy thing on the Boulevard de la Rochelle that Monsieur
was wont to say that if only he were twenty years younger he ... he....
Can you guess what he?...

Madame did. She knew, and used to tease me about it. She is one of the
few people in the world who know that I still can blush! Do you? No?
Ah, but then you have never seen Monsieur! You have never heard him say
what he ... what he ... well, you know what he....

There were no dark thoughts in my mind as I sped circuitously
homewards, skimming down a by-street every time a gendarme loomed in
view; I was thinking of Madame and of the twinkle in her eyes when she
talked of _le patron_, and of the long day spent at N., the story of
which had helped to drive away for the moment the most persistent of
her _idées noires_.




CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH WE BECOME EMISSARIES OF LE BON DIEU


Now the coming of M. le Curé was in this wise.

We were making up _paquets_ in the Clothes-room, we were grimy,
dishevelled and hot, we were in no mood for visitors, we were pining
for tea, and yet Madame insinuated her head round the door and
announced, "M. le Curé de N." She would have announced the Czar of
Russia, or President Wilson, or General Joffre, or the dustman in
exactly the same emotionless tones, and with as little consideration
for our feelings.

"You go."

"No. You."

The tug of war ended, as such tugs generally do, in our going together,
smoothing hair that flew on end, flinging overalls into a corner
and praying hastily that the Curé might be an unobservant man. He
was. There was only one vision in the world for him; the air, the
atmosphere, life itself were but mirrors reflecting it; but conceding
that it was a large one, we found some excuse for his egoism. Large?
Massive. He was some inches over six feet in height and his soutane
described a wide arc in advance. His hands were thick and cushiony, you
felt yours sink into their pneumatic fastnesses as you greeted him; he
had a huge head, very little hair, a long heavy jowl, small eyes, and
he breathed fatly, thickly. His voice was slightly smothered. Many
years ago he had retired from his ministry, living at N. because he
owned property there, but the war, which called all priests of military
age and fitness to the colours, drew him from his life of ease and put
the two villages, N. and R., under his spiritual charge. His gestures
were large and commanding, he exuded benevolence--the benevolence of a
despot. There would be no divided authority in the Curé's kingdom. It
was not a matter for surprise to hear that he was not on speaking terms
with his mayor, it would have been a matter for surprise if, had he
been Pope, he had ever relinquished his temporal power.

He wasted little time on the usual preliminaries, plunging directly
into his subject. At N. and R. there were refugees, _pauvres victimes
de la guerre dans la grande misère_, sleeping on straw _comme des
bêtes_, cold, half-clothed, in need of every necessary. He had heard
of us, of our generosity (he called us "mes bonnes dames," with just a
hint of condescension in his manner), he wished us to visit his people.
Wished? He commanded. He implied, by an art I had not thought him
capable of, that we were yearning to visit them, that our days would be
storm-tossed, our nights sleepless unless we brought them relief. From
mendicant, he transformed himself into benefactor, bestowing on us an
opportunity which--it is due to our reputation to suggest--we craved.

It was well that our inclination jumped with his desire, for he was
quite capable of picking us up, one under each arm, and marching off
with us to N., had we refused. But how refuse in face of such splendid
faith in our goodwill, and under a shower of compliments that set us
blushing to the tips of our toes? We punctuated the flood or shower
with murmurs of, "C'est un plaisir," or, "On ne demande pas mieux." We
felt like lumbering elephants as we tried to turn aside his flattery,
but he merely waved a benediction and swept on. We would go to N. next
Wednesday; he, Monsieur, would meet us, and conduct us personally over
the village. He would tell us who were the good Catholics--not that he
wished to deprive the careless or sinful of our help; still, it would
be as well for us to know. We read "preferential treatment" on this
sign-post, and carefully reserved our opinion. When the visits were
over, we would go to his house and eat an _œuf à la coque_ with him,
and some _confitures_. His modest establishment ... a gesture indicated
an ascetic régime, the bare necessities of life, but if we would
accept?...

"With pleasure, if Monsieur was sure it would not inconvenience him."

"Mes bonnes dames," he replied grandly, "rien ne me dérange dans le
service du bon Dieu."[7]

 [7] Nothing inconveniences me when it is in the service of God.

Of course it rained on Wednesday--rained quietly, hopelessly,
despairingly, but persistently. Nevertheless we set out, chiefly--so
great was Monsieur's faith in us--because it did not seem possible
to remain at home. We put on the oilskins which, with the uniform,
we had been led to understand would save our lives in France, but
the sou'westers we did not wear. There are limits. And when later
on we saw a worker clad in both, we did not know which to admire
most, the courage which enabled her to wear them, or the utter lack
of imagination which prevented her from realising their devastating
effect.

So we left the sou'westers on the pegs from which they were never
taken, and arrived at N. in black shiny oilskins that stood out stiffly
like boards from our figures, and were almost as comfortable to wear.
We were splashed with mud, and we dripped audibly on the Curé's
beautiful parquet floor.

We wished to begin at once? _Bon. Allons._ He, the Curé, had prepared
a list, the name of every refugee was inscribed on it. Oh, yes, he
understood _parfaitement_, that to make _paquets_ we must know the age
and sex of every individual. All was prepared. We would see how perfect
the arrangements were.

No doubt from his point of view they were perfect, but from ours
chaotic. We climbed the village street, he like a frigate in full sail,
his wide cloak gathered about him, leading the way, we like two rather
disreputable punts towing along behind. You know what happened at the
first house--that illuminating episode of the _seau hygiénique_? Worse,
oh, much worse was to befall us later! He discussed the possibilities
of family crockery with a bluntness that was conducive to apoplexy, he
left nothing to the imagination; perhaps he thought the Britishers had
no imagination.

In fact, his methods were sheerly cyclonic. Never had we visited in
such a whirl. Carried along in his wake, we were tossed like small
boats upon a wind-tormented sea; we had no time to make notes, we had
no time to ask questions, and when we had finished we had scarcely one
clear idea in our minds as to the state, social position, profession,
income, or need of those we had visited. Not a personal note (we who
made copious personal notes), not a detail (we who had a passion
for detail), only a blurred memory of general misery, or rooms
behind cow-houses and stables, through the filthy, manure-soddened
straw of which we had to pick our way, or rooms without glass in the
window-frames, of dark, noisome holes where human beings herded, of
sacks of straw laid on the floor, of rags for bedding, of human misery
in its acutest, most wretched form. The Curé talked of evil landlords
who exploited these unfortunate people, "Mais Dieu les punira," he
added unctuously. We wondered if the prophecy brought consolation to
the refugees. And above all the welter of swiftly-changing impressions,
I can see even now, in a dark room lighted only by or through the
chimney-shaft, a room filled with smoke that choked and blinded us,
a small child, perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty-four months old, who
doubled her fists into her eyes and laid her head on her grandmother's
shoulder, refusing to look up.

"She has been like that since the bombardment," her mother explained.

When the priest raised the little head the child wailed, a long, thin,
almost inhuman wail; when her grandmother put her down she lay on the
floor, her eyes crushed against her fists.

"She will not look at the light, nor open her eyes."

"How long has she been like this, Madame?"

"Since we left home. The village was shelled; it frightened her."

"We will ask our _infirmière_ to look after her," we promised, knowing
that the nurse in question had successfully treated a boy in Sermaize
who had been unable to open his eyes since the bombardment of the town.
And some weeks later we heard that the baby was better.

Into every house the Curé made his way, much as Justice Shallow might
have done. In every house he reeled off a set piece about the good
English who had come to succour France in her distress, about our
devotion, our courage, our wealth, our generosity. He asked every woman
what she needed. "Trois couvertures? Bon. Mettons trois. Un seau? Bon,
mettons un seau. Sheets? Put down two pairs."

We put down everything except what we most desired to know, the names
and ages of the half-clothed children--that he gave us no opportunity
of doing, was there not always the list?--we saw the Society being
steered rapidly towards bankruptcy, but, mesmerised by his twinkling
eyes, we promised all he required. Then he, who had been sitting on the
only chair, would rise up, and having told the pleased but bewildered
lady of the house that we were emissaries of Le bon Dieu, would stalk
out, leaving us to wonder, as we followed him, whether Madame ever
asked why the good God chose such strange-looking messengers. The
oilskins were possessed of no celestial grace--I subsequently gave mine
to a refugee.

Luncheon! The good Curé stopped dead in his tracks. The _œuf à la
coque_ was calling. Back we trailed, still dripping, still muddy, even
more earthly and less celestial than before, back to the house that had
such a delicious old garden, and where fat rabbits grew daily fatter
in their cages. The table was spread in a panelled room hung with
exquisite old potteries. Seated solemnly, the Curé trying to conceal
himself behind a vast napkin, the end of which he tucked under his
collar, to us entered the _bonne_ carrying six boiled eggs in a bowl.
Being sufficiently hungry, we each ate two; they were more or less
liquid, so Monsieur tilted up the egg-shell and drank his down with
gulping noises, while we laboured unsatisfyingly with a spoon. Then
came the _bonne_ with a dish of grilled rabbit (it was delicious); we
ate rabbit. Then came a large dish of beans; we ate beans. We were
sending out wireless messages by this, but no relief ship appeared on
the horizon. The priest groaned over the smallness of our appetites,
and shovelling large masses of beans into his mouth, explained that
it is sinful to drink too much because the effects are demoralising,
depraving, bringing ruin on others, but one may eat as much or more
than one wants or likes, as a superfluity of food does no harm. A
little physical discomfort, perhaps, but that passes. Injury to the
spirit? None.

Then he commented on the strides Roman Catholicism was making in
England, the most influential people were being converted--we thought
he must be apologising to himself for his country's alliance with a
people of heretical creed, but later on I realised that this idea is
very prevalent among the priests of the district. An old man at Behonne
congratulated me on the same good tendency. It had not occurred to
him that I was of another faith, so there was an awkward moment when
I--as in honour bound--admitted the error, but he glided over it with
characteristic politeness, and our interview ended as amicably as it
began.

At N. we volunteered the information that I was Irish, which shed balm
on the Curé's perturbed soul. Though not of the right way of thinking,
one of us came of a nation that was. That, at least, was something, and
a compliment to the evangelising Irish saints of mediæval times--had
not one of them settled in the district, teaching the people and
bringing the Gospel-light into paths shadowed by infidelity?--steered
us round what might have been an awkward corner.

The beans finished, there came a cheese of the country, rich and creamy
and good. We ate cheese, but we no longer looked at each other. The
cheese finished, in came a massive cherry tart; we ate tart, then we
drank coffee, and then Monsieur, rising from the table, opened the
door, stood in the hall and said ---- No. I think I had better not tell
you what he said, nor where he waved us to. If ever you go to N. and
have a meal with him you will find out for yourself. During lunch one
of us admired his really very beautiful plates. "You shall have one,"
he said, and taking two from the wall, offered us our choice. Of course
we refused, and the relief we read in his eye as he hung them up again
in no way diminished our appreciation of his action.

Then we paid more visits, and yet more, and more, and finally, the rain
having cleared, we walked home again in a balmy evening down the wide
road under the communal fruit trees, where the woods which clothed the
hill-side were to look like wonderful tapestry later on, when autumn
had woven her mantle of russet and red, and dull dark crimson, and
sober green, and browns of rich, light-haunted shades and flung it over
the trees. Walked home soberly, as befitted those who had dined with a
gourmand; walked home expectantly, for was not the list, the careful,
exhaustive, all-comprehensive list of the Curé to follow on the morrow?

It was and it did, and with it came the following letter which we
perused with infinite delight. How, oh, how could he say that the miry,
inarticulate bipeds who trotted dog-like at his heels did their work
_avec élicatesse_? How, oh, how aver that we did it under his "modest"
guidance?

Yet he said it. Read and believe.

  "Mesdames, et excellentes dames,

 "J'ai l'honneur de vous offrir l'hommage de mes sentiments les plus
 reconnaissantes et les plus devoués pour tout le bien que vous faites
 autour de vous avec tant de délicatesse et de générosité. Je prie Dieu
 de vous benir, vous et tous les membres de vos chères families, de
 donner la victoire aux vaillantes armées de l'Angleterre, de Russie,
 et de France et n'y avons nous pas le droit car vous et nous nous
 representons bien la civilisation, l'honneur et la vraie religion. Je
 vous envoie ci-joint la liste (bien mal faite) des pauvres émigrés
 que vous avez visités sous ma modeste direction. Il en est qui manque
 de linge et pour les vieux qui out besoin de vêtements on pourra leur
 donner l'étoffe, ils se changeraient de la confection ce qui je crois
 serait meilleur.

 "Veuillez me croire votre tout devoué."

The list was by no means all comprehensive, it was not careful, it was
indeed _bien mal faite_, and it exhausted nothing but our patience. Our
own demented notes were the best we had to work upon, and so it befell
that one day some soldiers drove a vast wagon to our door and in it
we piled, not the neat _paquets_ of our dreams, but blankets, sheets,
men's clothes, women's clothes, children's clothes, _seaux_ and other
needful things and sent them off to N., where they were dumped in a
room, and where an hour or two later, under conditions that would have
appalled the stoutest, we fitted garments on some three hundred people,
while M. le Curé smiled wide approval and presented every _émigré_
child in the village with a cap, a bonnet or a hat filched from our
scanty store.

And then because the sun was shining and several batteries of
_soixante-quinze_ were _en repos_ in the village, we went off to
inspect them. The guns were well hidden from questing Taubes under
orchard trees, the men were washing at the fountain, or eating a
savoury stew round the camp kitchen, or flirting desperately with the
women. They showed us how to load and how to train a gun, and then the
priest, whom they evidently liked, for he had a kindly "Hé, mon brave,
ça va bien?" or an affectionate fat-finger-tap on the shoulder for
them all, bore us off to visit an artillery officer who had been doing
wonderful things with a _crapouillot_. We found him in a beautiful
garden in which, on a small patch of grass, squatted the _crapouillot_,
a torpedo fired from a frame fixed in the ground. Alluding to some
special bomb under discussion, the lieutenant said, "It isn't much, but
this--oh, this has killed a lot of Boches."

He helped to perfect it, so he knew. We left him gazing affectionately
at it, a fine specimen of French manhood, tall and slender, but
strongly made, with clear humorous eyes, and breeding in every line of
him.

I often wonder whether he and his _crapouillot_ are still killing "lots
of Boches," and whether he ever exclaims as did a woman who saw them
breaking over the frontier in 1914, "What a people! They are like ants:
the more of them you kill, the more there are."

We would have liked to linger in the sunny flower-encrusted garden, but
R. awaited us. There with consummate skill we evaded M. le Curé, and
did our visiting under no guidance but our own. A quaint little village
is R., deep enbosomed in swelling uplands, with woods all about it,
but, like N., stricken by neglect and poverty. The inhabitants of both
seemed rough and somewhat degraded, a much lower type than the majority
of our refugees, but perhaps they were only poor and discouraged. The
war has set so many strange seals upon us, we may no longer judge by
the old standards, no longer draw conclusions with the light, careless
assumption of infallibility of old.




CHAPTER X

PRIESTS AND PEOPLE


I

Having tasted the delights of a mild vagabondage, we now turned our
thoughts to other villages, modestly supposing that by degrees we could
"do" the Meuse. (Had we but known it the whole of France lay before us,
refugees everywhere, and every refugee in need). Having requisitioned a
motor-car we planned tours, but first we investigated Behonne on foot.
It lies on the hill above the aviation ground, so let no man ask why it
came first in our affections.

I suppose it would be impolitic to say how many sheds there were, or
how many aeroplanes we used to see squatting like great winged beetles
on the ground, and then rising so lightly, so delicately, spiralling
higher and higher, and then darting away with swift wing far into the
shimmering blue.

Although Behonne is at the top of a hill, it has managed to tuck
itself into a hollow--so many French villages have this burrowing
tendency--and all you can see of it as you approach is the top of the
church spire rising like a funny candle-extinguisher above the ridge
of the hill. The village itself is dull and uninteresting, but the
surrounding country beautiful beyond measure, especially when the corn
is ripening in the sun; the refugees for the most part not necessitous,
having driven from home in their farm carts, magnificently throned on
feather beds and _duvets_, with other household goods.

Two houses, however, made a lasting impression. In one, in a room in
the centre of which was a well (boarded over of course), lived a woman,
her two children, and an old man in no way related to them. The walls
were rotting, in many places straw had been stuffed in to fill fissures
and holes, the ceiling was broken, enterprising chunks of it making
occasional excursions to the floor below, and one window was "glazed"
with paper. The doors, through which rats gnawed an occasional way,
were ill-fitting; in bad weather th

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/50071