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.