THE MODERN CALVARY
I
One day, not long after our visit to the battlefield, our composure was
riven to its very foundations by an invitation to play croquet in the
garden of Madame G. Could we spare an hour from our so arduous toil?
For her it would be a pleasure so great, the English they love "le
sport," they play all the games, we would show her the English way.
Monsieur her husband he adored croquet, but never, never could he find
any one to play with him. Madame, a little swarthy woman who always
dressed in rusty black, clasped her shiny kid gloves together and gazed
at us beseechingly. The Arbiter of our destinies decided that we must
go. There is always _l'Entente_, you know, it should be encouraged at
all hazards, a sentiment which meets with my fullest approval when the
hazard does not happen to be mine.
Madame yearned that we should throw ourselves into "le sport" at four,
but the devil of malice, who sits so persistently on my shoulder,
arranged that I should be the only one free at that hour. The others
promised to come at half-past four.
"But, my dear women," I cried, "I haven't played croquet for ages."
"Never mind. Hit something, do anything. But go."
I went. I was ushered into a tiny and stuffy parlour, and there for
twenty interminable, brain-racking minutes I confronted Madame G. Then
an old lady in a bath-robe sidled into the room, and we all confronted
one another for ten minutes more. Madame G. may be a devil of a fellow
with a croquet-mallet in her hand, but small talk is not her strong
point. Neither is it mine, for the matter of that, when I am slowly
suffocating in a foreign land. However, we finally adjourned to the
garden. Where, oh where was the croquet ground? Where, oh where were my
faithless companions? Where, oh where was tea? A quarter to five rang
out from the tower of Nôtre Dame, and here was I marooned on a French
grass plot adorned with trees, real trees, apple trees, plum trees, an
enterprising pergola, several flower-beds and, Heaven help me! croquet
hoops--hoops that had just happened, all anyhow, no two looking in the
same direction. In direct line of fire rose a tall birch tree. I gazed
at it in despair. A niblick, or a lofter, or a crane might get a ball
over it, but a croquet mallet?... Circumvention was impossible. There
were three bunkers.
"It is like your English croquet grounds?" Madame asked. "We play all
the Sundays----"
"Ah, yes, through the Looking-glass," I murmured, and she responded--
"Plaît-il?"
I hastily congratulated her on the condition of her fruit trees.
Five o'clock. What I thought of the faithless was by now so sulphuric,
blue flames must have been leaping out of me. Five-fifteen. A Sail!
The Arbiter, full of apologies, which did nothing to soften the steely
reproval in my eye. Then Madame disappeared. At five-thirty she came
back again accompanied by delinquent number two. She held a hurried
consultation with the bath-robe, then melted again into the void.
"Can I go?" I signalled to the Arbiter. She shook a vigorous head. The
rattle of tea-cups was coming from afar. At a quarter to six Madame
announced tea. It was served in the dining-room. We all sat round a
square table very solemnly--it was evidently the moment of Madame's
life; there was no milk, we were expected to use rum--or was it
gin?--instead. Anyway I know it was white, and one of us tried it, and
I know ... well, politeness conquered, but she has been a confirmed
teetotaller ever since.
At six-five Madame was weeping as she recounted a tale she had read in
the paper a day or so before, and six-twenty-five we came away.
"And we never played croquet after all. But you will come again when
Monsieur mon mari is here, for Les Anglaises they love 'le sport.'"
But we never went back. Perhaps the tree-tops frightened us, or perhaps
we were becoming too much engrossed in sport of another kind. You see,
M. le Curé of N. came to visit us the next day, and soon after that
Madame Lassanne inscribed her name on our books. Which shall I tell
you about first? Madame Lassanne, who was a friend of Madame Drouet,
and actually succeeded in making her talk for quite a long time on the
stairs one day? I think so.
Perhaps to-morrow I shall tell you of M. Le Curé.
You see, it was really Madame Lassanne who first brought home to me
what war means to the civil population in an invaded district. One
guessed it all in a dim way before, of course, every imaginative person
does, but not in the way in which pain, desolation of spirit, agony of
soul, poignant anxiety drive their roots deep down into Life; nor does
one realise how small a thing is human life, how negligible man when
compared with the great god of War.
A French medical officer once said to me, "Mademoiselle, in war les
civiles n'ont pas le droit d'être malade," and I dared to reply,
"Monsieur, ils n'ont guère le droit de vivre." And he assented, for he
knew, knew that to a great extent it was true, only too pitiably true.
For the great military machine which exists in order that an unshakable
bulwark may be set up between the invader and the civilians whom he
would crush is, in its turn, and in order to keep that bulwark firm,
obliged to crush them himself. In the War Zone (it is not too much to
say it) the civilian is an incubus, an impediment, a most infernal
nuisance. He gets so confoundedly in the way. And he is swept out of
it as ruthlessly as a hospital matron sweeps dust out of her wards.
That he is confused and bewildered, thoroughly _désorienté_, that he
may be sick or feeble, that his wife may be about to give birth to a
child, that his house is in ashes and that he, once prosperous, is now
a destitute pauper, that his children trail pitifully in the dust,
footsore, frightened, terror-haunted to the very verge of insanity,
all these things from the military point of view matter nothing. And
it must be so. They dare not matter. If they did, energies devoted to
keeping that human bulwark in the trenches fit and sound might be
diverted into other channels, and the effort to ameliorate and save
become the hand of destruction, ruining all in order to save a little.
Think of one village. There are thousands, and any one will do. Anxiety
and apprehension have lain over it for days, but the inhabitants go
about their work, eat, sleep, "carry on" much as usual. Night comes. It
is pitch dark. The world is swathed in a murky shroud. At two o'clock
loud hammering is heard, the gendarmes are going from house to house
beating upon the doors. "Get up, get up; in half an hour you must be
gone." Dazed with sleep, riven with fear, grief slowly closing her icy
fingers upon their hearts, they stumble from their beds and throw on a
few clothes. They look round the rooms filled with things nearly every
one of which has a history, things of no intrinsic value, but endeared
to them by long association, and it may be by memory of days when Love
and Youth went hand in hand to the Gates of Romance and they opened
wide at their touch. Things, too, that no money can buy: old _armoires_
wonderfully carved, old china, old pottery, handed down from father to
son, from mother to child for generations.
What would one choose in such a moment as that?
"You can take nothing but what you can carry." Nothing. The children
clutch at hand and skirt. How can Marie and Germaine and Jean and
Robert walk fifteen or twenty kilomètres to safety?
The prudent snatch at their family papers, thrust a little food into a
bag and go out into the night. Others gather up useless rubbish because
it lies under their hand. The gendarmes are growing impatient. They
round up their human flock as a dog rounds up his sheep. Shells are
beginning to fall here and there. Some one has been killed--a child.
Then a woman. There are cries, a long moan of pain. But the refugees
must hurry on.
"Vîte, vîte, depêchez-vous." They stumble down the roads, going they
know not whither, following the lanes, the woods, even the fields, for
the main road must be kept clear for the army. Hunger, thirst, the
torment of an August day must be endured, exhaustion must be combated.
Death hovers over them. He stoops and touches now one, now another
with his wings, and quietly they slip down upon the parched and baking
earth, for they are old and weary, and rest is sweet after the long
burden of the day.
But even this is not all. One may believe that at first, engulfed by
the instinct of self-preservation, tossed by the whirlwind from one
emotion to another and into the lowest pit of physical pain, the mind
is too confused, too stunned to realise the full significance of all
that is happening.
But once in their new quarters, with the long days stretching out ahead
and the dark night behind, in wretchedness, in bitter poverty, ah! then
Thoughts, Memories, Regrets and Infinite Lonelinesses throng upon them,
and little by little realisation comes and at last they KNOW.
Know that the broken threads of life can never be taken up again in the
old good way. "On était si heureux là-bas."[5] How often I have heard
that said! "On vivait tout doucement. On n'était pas riche, ma fois,
but _we had enough_!" Poignant words those, in Refugee-land.
[5] We were so happy!
Added to the haunting dread of the future there is always the
ghost-filled dream of the past. Women who have spoken with steady
composure of the loss of thousands of francs, of the ruin of
businesses built up through years of patient industry and hard work,
of farms--rich, productive, well-stocked--- laid waste and bare,
have broken down and sobbed pitifully when speaking of some trivial
intrinsically-valueless possession. How our hearts twine themselves
round these ridiculous little things, what colour, what meaning they
lend to life!
To lose them, ah, yes! that is bad enough; but to know that hands
stained with blood will snatch at them and turn them over, and that
eyes still bestial with lust will appraise their value.... That is
where the sharpest sting lies. The man or woman whose house is effaced
by a shell is happy indeed compared with those who have seen the
Germans come, who have watched the pillage and the looting and the
sacrilege of all they hold most dear.
But the _émigré's_ cup must hold even greater sorrows and anxieties
than these. "C'est un vrai Calvaire que nous souffrons, Mademoiselle."
So they will tell you, and it is heartbreakingly true. Crucified upon
the iron cross of German ambition, they pray daily that the cup may be
taken from them, but the mocking god of War still holds it to their
lips. They must drink it even to the very dregs.
For not always could all the members of a family get away together.
It has been the fate of many to remain behind, to become prisoners in
the shadowed land behind the trenches, at the mercy of a merciless
foe. Between them and their relatives in uninvaded France no direct
communication can be established. An impenetrable shutter is drawn
down between. Only at rare intervals news can come, and that is when
a soldier son or father or other near relative becomes a prisoner of
war in Germany. A French woman in the _pays envahi_ may write to a
prisoner in Germany, and he to her. He may also write to his friends in
the free world beyond. And so it sometimes happens that news trickles
through, but very rarely. The risk is tremendous, detection heavily
punished. Only oblique reference can be indulged in, and when one has
heard nothing for months, perhaps years, how meagre and unsatisfying
that must be. Do we in England realise what it means? I know I did not
before I met Madame Lassanne, and only very inadequately as I sat in
the kitchen of the Ferme du Popey and listened to her story.
II
She was the daughter of one farmer, the wife of another and successful
one, the richest in their district, so people said. When the war broke
out her husband was mobilised, she with her three children, a girl of
four, a boy of two and a month-old baby, remaining at the farm with
her father and mother. A few days, perhaps a week or two passed, then
danger threatened. Harnessing their horses to the big farm wagons, she
and the old man packed them with _literie_, _duvets_, furniture, food,
clothes, everything they could find room for, and prepared to leave the
village. But the gendarmes forbade it. I suppose the road was needed
for military purposes: heavy farm wagons might delay the passage of the
troops. Throughout the whole of one day they waited. Still the barrier
was not withdrawn. Shells began to rain on the village; first one
house, then another caught fire.
"You may go." The order came at last. The children, with their
grandmother and an aunt of the Lassannes, were placed in the wagons and
the little procession set out; but they were not destined to go far
that day. At the next village the barrier fell again. Believing that
the Germans were following close behind, they held hasty consultation,
as the result of which the old women decided to walk on with the
children, leaving M. Breda and Madame to follow as soon as the way was
clear.
So the horses and wagons were put into a stable, and Madame and her
father sat down to wait. The slow hours ticked away, a shell screamed
overhead, another, then another. Soon they were falling in torrents
on the little street. Houses began to crash down, the stable caught
fire, the four horses and the wagons were burned to a cinder. Then the
house in which the refugees had sheltered was struck. They escaped by a
miracle, crawling on hands and knees. So terrific was the bombardment
they dared not go down the road. A barrage of shell-fire played over
it. With some dozens of others as miserable as themselves they lay all
night in a furrow in a beet-field, Madame trembling in her father's
arms, for shells were falling incessantly on the field and all around
them. At dawn the hurricane ceased, and they crept away. The road was
open now, they were on foot. They walked fast, then faster, hoping
every minute to overtake the children. The old women surely could not
have gone very far. But mile after mile was conquered and no news
of them could be found. No sentries had seen them, no gendarme had
watched them go by. They asked every one they met on the road, at first
hopefully, then, as fear grew, with clutching hands and fevered eyes.
But the answer was always the same. They had not passed that way.
Chance, Fate, call it what you will, brought Madame and the old man
to Bar-le-Duc, and there, soon after her arrival, she heard that her
husband had been wounded in the earliest of the fighting and was now
a prisoner in Germany. A prisoner and ill. Day after day dragged by.
She found employment on the farm near the town, she made inquiries,
exhausted every channel of information, but no trace of the children
could be found.
And her husband, writing from Germany, demanded news of them! He did
not know that the farm was demolished, and that she was beggared. He
asked for parcels, for comforts. She sent them to him, by what supreme
effort of self-denial only she and the God she prayed to know. And she
wrote him little notes, gay, brave little notes. She told him all about
the children--how fat and how strong they were.... And Marie--ah, Marie
was growing tall--so tall.... And Roger was able to talk now....
God only knows what it cost her to write those letters; God only knows
with what agony she forced her tears back to their source lest one,
falling on the paper, betray her. She went about her work white-faced
and worn, hungering for the news that never came, and autumn faded
into winter and spring was born and blossomed into summer, and then,
and then only, did the shutter lift and a tiny ray of light come
through.
Confused and frightened, the old women, burdened with the children, had
lost their way in the darkness and wandered back into the German lines.
They were now prisoners in Carignan (near the frontier); they managed
to smuggle a letter through. The baby was dead. There was no milk to be
had, so it died of starvation. Madame Breda had been offered freedom.
If she wished she would be sent back into France through Switzerland.
But the children's names were not on the list of those selected for
repatriation.
"Could they go with her?"
"No."
"Eh bien, j'y reste."
The shutter snapped down again, the veil enclosed them, and Madame
resigned herself to the long, weary waiting.
Was it any wonder that such stories as this--and there were all too
many of them--filled us with hatred of everything German? In those
first months of personal contact with war we were always at white heat,
consumed with rage and indignation, and for my own part, at least,
desirous of nothing less than the extermination of kultur and every
exponent of it. As I walked home through the quiet afternoon, dark
thoughts filled my mind. What a monster one can be! What longing for
vengeance even the mildest of us can cherish! I thought of another
village not far from that of Madame Lassanne's home, from which three
hundred people had been driven into virtual slavery. Nearly all were
old--over sixty, some few were boys and girls of fourteen, sixteen,
eighteen, and of the old, eighty died in the first six months.
It was a long time now since any news had come through, and those who
waited had almost given up hope of seeing their loved ones again.
And we were impotent. With an effort I shook off despondency. I would
go and see Madame Leblan and rest a while in her garden. She was lonely
and loved a little visit. It would amuse her to hear about the Curé and
our visit to N.; any gossip would serve to drive away her memories. "Ça
change les idées," she would say. "It is not well to sit and brood."
Neither is it well to walk and brood; yet here was I, foolish virgin
that I was, brooding like a moulting hen. Taking myself firmly in hand,
I turned down the rue de L'Étoile and opened the garden gate.
III
Madame was only a poor peasant woman, but she had once been very
beautiful, and the old face was handsome still. The aquiline features
are well-modelled, the large blue eyes clear and steady, flashing now
with a fine pride, now with delicious humour; the head is well poised,
she is essentially dignified; there are times when she has the air of a
queen.
Her husband is tall and thin, with a drooping moustache, and in
accordance with prevailing custom he keeps his hat on in the house, and
he is seventy-two and she is seventy, and when I saw her first she was
in her quaint little garden sitting under the shade of a mirabelle tree
with an ancient dame to whom only Rembrandt could have done justice.
Like Madame, she was short and broad, and without being handsome, she
was just bonny. She had jolly little eyes and a chubby, dimpled face,
and wore a spotlessly white and befrilled cap with strings that tied
under her chin and made you rather want to kiss her. She was just a
little _coquette_ in her appearance, and she must have been born in
prehistoric times, for she was "la tante de Madame Leblan." She didn't
live in the little cottage, she had a room just across the way, and
there I would see her sitting in the sun on a fine day as I turned in
at the garden gate.
Of course we went down before her, and gave her of our best, for
she was an irresistible old thing, who could coax you into cyclonic
generosity. She would come trotting over to see us with a small basket
on her arm, and having waited till the crowd that besieged our morning
hours had melted away, would come upstairs looking so innocent and
so picturesque our hearts were as water before her. And then out of
the basket would come apples, or pears, or walnuts, with a honeyed
phrase, the little vivid eyes searching our own. Refusal was out of the
question, we were in the toils, knowing that for Madame we were the sun
in the heavens, the down on the wings of the Angel of Life; knowing,
too, that surely as she turned away would come the tactful hint, the
murmured need. And though periodically we swore that she should have no
more, she rarely went empty away.
At last, because of the equality of things, we hardened our hearts.
She returned with walnuts. Our thanks being meticulously verbal, she
retreated thoughtfully, to reappear a few days later with three pears
and a remote _malaise_ that successfully defied diagnosis. We knew she
had her eyes on medical comforts, eggs, _bons_ for meat, etc., so the
_malaise_ deceived no one, while a cold gift of aspirin tabloids nearly
destroyed her faith in humanity.
And all the time she was "rich"! No wonder she was _coquette_, she
could afford to be, for she had small _rentes_, and money laid by, and
had saved all her papers and her bank-book. So Madame Leblan, who had
left home with exactly twenty-seven francs in her pocket, told me, but
not, loyally enough, until she was sure that our gifts to La Tante had
ceased.
She herself never asked for anything, save once, and that was for a
_paletot_ for Monsieur. In spite of his three-score-years-and-twelve,
in spite of the severe attack of internal hæmorrhage from which he was
recovering, he went to work every morning at six, returning at six
at night. Hard manual toil it was, too, much too hard for a man of
his years. How Madame fretted over him! How she scraped and saved to
buy him little comforts. And he did need that coat badly. I think I
shall never forget her face when she saw the warm Cardigan jacket the
Society provided for him. Her eyes filled with tears, she flushed like
a girl, she looked radiantly beautiful and then, with the most gracious
diffidence in the world, "You will permit me?" she said, and drew my
face down to hers.
There was something about that old creature that made me feel ashamed.
What one did was so pitifully little, but she made it seem like a gift
of star-flowers bathed in the dews of heaven. It was her unconquerable
sense of humour that attracted me to her, I suppose. French wit playing
over the fields of life with an indomitable spirit that would not be
broken.
When she was a girl her father used to say to her, "You sing too much,
some day you will cry," but though the tears did come she never lost
her gaiety of heart. When she married she was very poor; Monsieur's
father had been foolish, loving wine, and they had to make their own
way in the world, but she held her head high and did her best for her
boys. It should never be said of them that they were educated at the
cow's tail (à la queue des bêtes). Her pride came to her aid, and
perhaps much of her instinctive good breeding too. _Le fils_ in the
Garde Republicaine in Paris has much of his mother's manner.
Leaving the cottage was a terrible wrench. They packed a few
odds-and-ends into a bundle, and she tidied everything, saying farewell
to the little treasures they had collected in forty-odd years. Silently
they locked the doors behind them, her eyes dry, the catastrophe too
big for tears. But in the garden Monsieur paused. "Les bêtes," he said;
"we mustn't leave them to starve. Open the cow-house door and let them
go free." As she turned to obey him her feet faltered, the world swam
in a mist of tears. She thrust the key blindly into his hands and
stumbled like a drunken woman down the road.
Then for six weeks they trudged together. They slept in fields, in the
woods, under carts, in barns, they were drenched with rain and with
dew, they were often hungry and thirsty and cold. But they struggled
on until they came to Vavincourt, and there the owner of the little
house in Bar met them, and seeing what manner of people they were, lent
it to them rent free on condition that they looked after the garden.
How grateful Madame was, but how intensely she longed for home! How
wistfully she turned her eyes northward across the hills! How often the
question, When? trembled half spoken on her lips! What mattered it that
home was a ruin and she penniless? Just to be in the valley again, to
see the sun gleaming on the river.
To help the time to pass less sluggishly by we had invented a little
tale, a tale of which I was the unworthy heroine, and the hero an
unknown millionaire. The millionaire with gold _jusqu'au plafond_, who
was obligingly waiting for me beyond the sea, and who would come some
day and lay his heart, his hand, and his gold-mine at my feet. And
then a _petit palais_ would spring miraculously from that much-loved
rubbish-heap at Véry, and one day as Madame and _le patron_ stood by
the door, they would see a great aeroplane skimming through the sky, it
would swoop and settle, and from it would leap the millionaire and his
blushing bride. And Madame would lead them in and give them wine and
coffee and a salad and _saucissons de Lorraine_, which are better and
more delicious than any other _saucissons_ in all the wide world.
Only a foolish little story, but when one is old and one's heart is
weary it is good to be foolish at times, good to spin the sun-kissed
webs, good to leave the dark chamber of despair and stray with timid
feet over the gleaming meadows of hope.
Her greeting rarely varied. "Je vous croyais morte," a reproach for the
supposed infrequency of my visits. She cried it now, though scarcely a
week had sped since I saw her last, and then with mysterious winks and
nods she hobbled into the house, to return a few minutes later with two
or three bunches of grapes and some fine pears. "Pendant la guerre
tous les scellés sont levés,"[6] she laughed, but I knew she had not
robbed her benefactor. The fruit she kept _en cachette_ for us, she and
M. Leblan deprived themselves of, nor could any remonstrance on our
part stay her.
[6] During the war all seals are broken.
"Where is your basket?" She had ordered me to bring one on my next
visit, yet here was I, most perplexingly without. But the fruit must be
carried home. She had no basket, no paper. _Méchante_ that I was, to
come without that basket. Had not she, Madame, commanded it? In vain I
refused the gift. She was inexorable.
"Ah, I have it." She seized me with delighted hands, and it was then
that the uniform earned my bitterest reproach, for into its pockets,
whose size suggested that they were originally intended to hold the
guano and rabbits of agricultural relief, went the pears. One might as
well argue with a megatherium as with Madame when her mind was made
up. So I had to stand in the kitchen growing bulkier and bulkier, with
knobs and hillocks and boulders and tussocks sprouting all over me,
feeling like a fatted calf, and longing for kindly darkness to swallow
me up. Subsequently I slunk home by unfrequented ways, every yard of
which seemed to be adorned with a gendarme taking notes. I am convinced
that I escaped arrest and decapitation only by a miracle, and that
every dog in the town bayed at my heels.
My agonies, needless to say, met with scant sympathy from my
companions. They accused me of flirting with M. Leblan, even while they
dug greedy teeth into the pears, an accusation it was difficult to
refute when he called at the house one evening and, hearing that I was
out, refused to leave a message, but turned up later and demanded an
interview with such an air of mystery Madame came to call me fluttering
so we thought the President of the Republic must be at the door.
Still more difficult was it to refute when Monsieur had gone away,
leaving me transfixed on the stairs with two huge bottles of mirabelle
plums in my hands. I never dared to tell the three villains who made
life such a happy thing on the Boulevard de la Rochelle that Monsieur
was wont to say that if only he were twenty years younger he ... he....
Can you guess what he?...
Madame did. She knew, and used to tease me about it. She is one of the
few people in the world who know that I still can blush! Do you? No?
Ah, but then you have never seen Monsieur! You have never heard him say
what he ... what he ... well, you know what he....
There were no dark thoughts in my mind as I sped circuitously
homewards, skimming down a by-street every time a gendarme loomed in
view; I was thinking of Madame and of the twinkle in her eyes when she
talked of _le patron_, and of the long day spent at N., the story of
which had helped to drive away for the moment the most persistent of
her _idées noires_.