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.