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.