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?