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HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Publishers New York
THE DAY OF GLORY
BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON THE EDGE 3
FRANCE’S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 39
LOURDES 89
SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 105
“IT IS RATHER FOR US TO BE HERE DEDICATED” 133
THE DAY OF GLORY 139
THE DAY OF GLORY
ON THE EDGE
As far as Jeanne’s personal life was concerned, what little was left of
it ebbed and flowed to the daily rhythm of the mail. She felt it begin
to sink lower with the fatigue of preparing and serving the lunch for
the six noisy children, always too hungry for the small portions, so
that at the last she divided most of her own part among them. It ebbed
lower and lower during the long hours of the afternoon when she strove
desperately to keep the little ones cheerful and occupied and at the
same time to mend and bake and darn and clean and iron and carry ashes
out and coal in; her long slim pianist’s fingers reddened and roughened
till they bled, because cold cream was far too costly a luxury. It sank
to its stagnant lowest during the tired end of the day when the younger
children, fretful with too much indoors, disputed and quarreled; and
when, as she prepared the evening meal, she tried to help the older
ones with their Latin declensions and Greek verbs so that they might
be worthy sons of their father. And oh, the nights, the long nights,
when she woke again and again, dreaming that she saw André wounded,
dreaming that some one called to her in a loud voice that he had been
killed at the head of his men.
But after midnight she felt the turn of the tide. In less than twelve
hours there might be a letter. She dozed, woke to make the round of the
children’s beds to be sure that they were covered, and noted that it
was three o’clock. In seven hours she might have news again. She slept,
and woke to hear the church clock clang out five, and knew that if she
could but live through five hours more--
In the morning, the countless minor agitations; the early rising in
the cold; the smoky kindling of the fire; the hurried expedition for
the milk through the empty streets, dripping with the clammy fog of
the region; the tumultuous awakening of the children, some noisily
good-natured, some noisily bad-tempered; the preparation of the meager
breakfast in the intervals of buttoning up blouses and smoothing
tousled hair; then, as school time approached, the gradual crescendo
of all the noise and confusion into the climax of the scampering
departure of the three older ones, blue-nosed and shivering in their
worn, insufficient wraps; the gradual decrescendo as she dressed the
thin, white bodies of the younger ones, and strove to invent some game
for them which would keep them active and yet allow her to do the
morning housework--all these tossing, restless waves were the merest
surface agitation. Beneath their irregular, capricious rhythm she
felt physically the steady, upward swelling of her expectation as the
clock-hands swung towards ten.
Till then she knew nothing, nothing of what might have happened during
the portentous night behind her, for every night, like every day, was
portentous. There was no calamity which was impossible. The last four
years had proved that. Anything might have happened since the last news
had come in from the outer world--anything, that is, except the end of
the war. That alone had come to seem impossible.
And yet, in spite of that great flooding tide of her expectancy, when
the ring at the door finally came, it always gave Jeanne an instant’s
violent shock. Her heart flared up like a torch with hope and fear, its
reflection flickering on her thin cheeks as she hurried to the front of
the house and, her delicate work-worn hands shaking, opened the door on
Fate.
First her eye leaped to see that there was not the official-looking
letter without a stamp which she had received so many times in her bad
dreams, the letter from his captain announcing that sous-Lieutenant
Bruneau--no, it had not come yet. She had another day’s respite.
She could breathe again, she could return the white-haired postman’s
“Bonjour, Madame Bruneau.”
Next, even on the days when there was a letter from André, she tore
open the Paris newspaper and read in one glance the last communiqué.
After this her hands stopped shaking. No, there was no specially bad
news. No horror of a new offensive had begun. Then she could even smile
faintly back at the tired old face before her and say, in answer to
his inquiry, “Oh yes, all pretty well, thank you. My own are standing
the winter pretty well. But my brother’s children, they have never
really recovered from the nervous shock of that dreadful experience of
bombardment, when they lost their parents, you know. Of course none of
the six are as plump or as rosy as I would like to have them--Michel is
growing so fast.”
“You ought to thank God, Madame Bruneau, that they are too young. There
are worse things than being thin and white.”
“Yes, yes, Monsieur Larcade,” she apologized hastily for her unmerited
good fortune compared to his, “what news from your sons?”
“Still no news from Salonique. A letter this morning from Jules’s
surgeon. They are not sure whether he will ever be able to walk again.
The wound was so deep--an injury to the spine.”
A wordless gesture of sympathy from her, a weary shifting of his heavy
letter bag, and he went on to the next door, behind which another
woman waited, her hands shaking; and beyond that another one, and then
another.
If it was to be a good day, if there had been a letter from André,
she opened it hurriedly and read it all in one look, even though the
children clung clamoring to her skirts, even though the fire smoked and
threatened to go out. Then she set it carefully in the bosom of her
dress and put on the faded caps and patched wraps and darned mittens to
take the children out for their outing, while she did her marketing.
They were too small to leave alone, even for half an hour.
During the painful experience which her marketing always was, she felt
warmed and sustained by the letter tucked inside her dress. Everything
cost more than the month before, twice as much as the year before when
her income was the same minute sum as now.
But André was alive and unhurt.
She looked longingly at the beefsteak which the older boys needed so
much, her own children, and bought instead the small piece of coarse
pork which must make a stew for them all, those other children of her
blood whom the war had thrown on her hands.
But she had a letter from her husband in her bosom.
She priced the cauliflowers, sighed, and bought potatoes, and less of
them than she had hoped to have, the price having gone up again. She
was horrified to find that rice cost more than it had, an impossible
sum per pound, even the broken, poor-quality grade. She would try
macaroni as a substitute. There _was_ no macaroni, the woman clerk
informed her. There was none at all, at any price. Jeanne turned
to another item on her list. The doctor had said that the children
absolutely must have more fruit in their diet--_fruit_! Well, perhaps
she might be able to manage prunes. They were the cheapest fruit--or
they had been. “Prunes, Madame Bruneau? They are only for the rich.”
She named a price which made Jeanne gasp.
She calculated the amount she would need for one portion each for her
big family. It was out of the question. She was really aghast, and
appealed desperately to the woman clerk, “What do _you_ do?” she asked.
“We do without,” answered the other woman briefly.
“But your children? Growing children can’t be in good health without
_some_ fruit.”
“They’re not in good health,” answered the other grimly. “My Marthe has
eczema, and the doctor says that Henri is just ripe for tuberculosis.”
Her voice died.
Jeanne closed her eyes during the instant’s silence which followed.
The woman clerk shoved aimlessly at the sack of dry beans which stood
between them.
Then they both drew a long breath and began to add up together the cost
of Jeanne’s purchases. She took out her pocketbook, paid soberly, and
went on to the baker’s.
Here a girl weighed out for her with scrupulous care the exact amount
of bread allowed for the family, and took the bread tickets along
with the money in return. At the sight and smell of the fresh-baked
bread the children began their babbling, begging, clamorous demand
which Jeanne dreaded almost more than anything else. She winced away
from this daily pain, crying out, trying hastily to stop them before
the tears came, “No, no, my darlings, you can’t have any now. No,
Jacqueline, _don’t_ tease auntie! Annette dearie, you know if mother
lets you have any now there will be just that much less for you at
lunch and dinner. You _know_ I can’t give you any of what belongs to
the others.” She was imploring them not to ask her for the food she
could not give them. Anything but that! The daily repetition of this
poignant little scene was intolerable. If she could only leave them
at home, could only spare them that daily ordeal of the visit to the
bakeshop where their poor little heads were turned at the sight and
odor of all that food. Not to have _bread_ to give them!
She was almost on her knees before their shrill, insistent demands when
she felt her husband’s letter crackle against her breast, and stopped
short. She was on the edge of losing her head, like men after too long
shell fire when they walk dazedly straight into danger. She knew better
than this! The tragic manner would never do for little children who
cannot live and thrive save in gaiety and lightness of heart. She was
only making a bad matter worse.
She summoned all her strength, put her hand on the letter in her bosom,
and burst resolutely into a hearty laugh. “Oh, children, just see that
funny picture of the little kitten. He’s chasing his tail, do you see,
round and round and round. Annette, do you know how he feels! See, I’ll
hang this string down your back, and you try to catch it by turning
around quickly. See, the faster you turn the faster it gets away from
you. Maurice wants to try? Well, we’ll just hurry home, and I will give
you a piece of old red curtain cord and you _each_ can have a tail and
be a little kitten. And when the big ones get back from school you can
show them how to chase tails. Won’t they laugh?”
They were safe in the street by this time, the bakeshop forgotten, the
loaf in the basket hidden, the children looking up, laughing through
their tears at Jeanne, breathless, pouring all her vitality into her
cheerful face and bright voice, so that there was not enough left to
keep her knees from shaking under her.
Back to the house quickly, lest the wretched war coal, half black
stones, smoking sullenly in the cook-stove, should go out in their
absence. The invention of the curtain-cord tails was still valid, even
after the pork had been put on to cook with the potatoes. The children
were still playing, still unexacting. Jeanne would have time to read
her letter.
She put the paper-thin potato parings to cook in an old kettle for
their three hens, who occasionally presented them with a priceless
fresh egg; and, wiping her cold, wet, potato-stained hands (was it
possible that those hands had ever played Beethoven and Debussy?), took
her treasure out of her bosom and unfolded the double sheet, warm still
from the warmth of her body.
This time she read it slowly, taking in, absorbing to the last cell of
her consciousness, every one of those words, written by candlelight,
underground, to the thunder of shells exploding over the _abri_. They
were plain, homely words enough, rambling, unstudied familiar phrases,
such as husband and wife write to each other when they have shared
their daily life for many years and still try to go on sharing what may
be left to them of days in common.
It had rained, as usual, all day long, but the new trench boots had
kept his feet almost dry. Yet he was ashamed of the price she must
have paid for them--she, straining every nerve to buy food to keep
the children well. He was a man, a grown-up, and the war had done for
them forever. Let him shift as best he could. Everything ought to go
to the children, there would be little enough. But they must have the
best chance we could give them. Whoever else was responsible for the
war certainly the children had nothing to do with it. And they must
be the torch bearers. Did she remember how he had always wondered why
no musician had ever composed music on that theme? He could conceive
such a noble symphonic poem called “The Torch Bearers.” He had wondered
all day if the coal had finally arrived at Méru. It went beyond his
imagination how she could manage at all, the days when the coal supply
was so low. In their little underground _abri_ they had a stove--yes, a
real stove. It had been left there by some American ambulance men who
had used the _abri_ before them. So they were really warm, part of the
time, and occasionally almost dry. But the wood they were burning--it
made him sick. It was what his men tore out from the ruined village
houses near which the trenches ran. Of course it could never be used
for houses again, but when you know what it is to have a home of your
own, and how it grows to be a part of you, it is not much fun to put
parts of other people’s houses into your stove. No, he did not need
any new socks. He did not need _any_thing; she need not go on trying
to slip in some new luxury for him out of her impossibly small budget.
Did she remember that poor Dury, the youngest of his men? He had been
shot yesterday; a stray ball, not meant for anybody in particular--such
a silly way to be killed. And now there was the letter to write to his
mother. Heavens, how he dreaded writing the letters to the parents
of men who died or disappeared! He hoped little Maurice’s throat was
better. What a sickly child that poor kid was! He was evidently one who
would have to be nursed along all through his childhood, and since the
war had killed his parents, it fell to his poor aunt to do the job. And
then--“Now, see here, Jeanne darling, don’t kill yourself over that
little boy because you feel so guilty at not loving him more. He’s not
a lovable kid. His own mother, poor nervous thing, never could keep
from snapping at him, and you know your brother cared enough sight more
for Jacqueline than for him. Don’t you blame yourself. Take it easy!”
Jeanne laid the letter down with a little exclamation, half a laugh.
How ever did André know she did not love the little nephew who reminded
her so of the sister-in-law she had never been able to love? She had
not thought that anybody could guess that the child to whom she was
always the gentlest was the one--and here was André, quite casually
as usual, walking into her most secret places! How he knew her! How
he knew the meaning of her smallest gesture, the turn of her most
carefully worded phrase! How near he was to her! How there was no
corner of her life where he did not come and go, at ease, and how she
welcomed him in, how she rejoiced to feel him thus pervading the poor,
hurried, barren inner life of her, which had bloomed so richly when
they had lived it together. How _married_ they were! That was, after
all, an achievement, to have wrested that glory from so horrible a
thing as life had come to be. Let the heavens fall, she had known what
it was to be one with a noble human soul.
She stood up, her thin face glowing, her tired eyes shining, as they
always were after reading André’s letter. It was the only moment of the
day when she felt herself wholly alive.
This was the high tide of her daily life, poor, scanty trickle of life
it was, even at its best, compared to the fathomless deep surge of the
fullness of the days before the war, days when it had seemed natural
that André should be there always, that they should profoundly live
together, that there should be some leisure, and some music mixed with
their work, and warm rooms and clothes and food as simply as there was
air to breathe.
A whiff of acrid coal smoke in her face, a wailing cry from Maurice who
had pinched his finger, a warning half-hour stroke from the kitchen
clock--she came back to the present with a start and strove loyally to
use for that present the little renewal of strength which came from a
momentary vision of the past. She changed the drafts of the stove,
stirred the stew and, gathering the weeping child up in her tired arms,
began to make a funny nonsense song, purporting to be sung by the hurt
finger. Her voice was obliged to pass through a knot in her throat, but
it came out bravely, and in a moment the children were laughing again,
their thin faces turned toward hers like little pale flowers toward the
sun.
Then there was the table to set, of course in the kitchen, since there
was no coal for another fire in the cold house. How Jeanne suffered
from this suffocating necessity to do everything in one small room! It
made an intolerable trial of every smallest process of the everyday
life, to prepare food, and eat it, and play, and wash, and study, and
bathe the children, and dress and undress them--they were like pigs in
a sty, she often thought, working feverishly to keep a little order
and decency in the room which seemed to her fastidious senses to reek
stiflingly of the effluvia of too-concentrated human life.
As she worked she felt, like an inward bleeding, the slow ebbing of
her forces. The good moment of the day had come and gone. There was
nothing to look forward to now till the mail of the next morning.
And this was a good day, one of the best, when there had been
no special activity on the front, when the daily letter from
André arrived on time. But what of the days when the communiqué
announced laconically, “Heavy artillery fire between Fresnes and
Villers-Raignault”? (André was stationed at Fresnes.) Or worse, when
the great offensives began, when all personal letters from the front
were stopped, when day after day the communiqué announced: “Violent
fighting all along the Champagne front.”
The feeble, tired old postman, shuffling on his rounds, was a very
snake-crowned horror to the dry-eyed women, waiting and hoping and
dreading to see him come. Always there were cases of hysteria at such
times; old Madame Vielé, who shrieked out suddenly in the market-place
that she had seen her son fall dead before her; Marguerite Lemaire,
who, returning from Paris on the night train, had found her husband in
the compartment with her, had kissed him, held his hand, wept on his
breast--and suddenly she was alone, with the train rushing on through
the darkness to Méru, where she was met by the news of his death.
At such times Jeanne braced her shivering limbs and throbbing nerves
to steady rigidity and bore her burden as though she had the strength
of eternity in her heart. Scraps of phrases from André’s letters came
before her eyes, as voices speak to tranced saints. As she worked she
saw, written before her, “Whoever is responsible for the war, the
children are not.” Or again, “We are all evil creatures, God knows,
and our motives must be mixed in this war because they are mixed in
everything else. But with whatever of virtue there is in me, I am
fighting for what I think best fit to survive in the world I wish my
children to inhabit.” Or again, for her own comfort, “Dearest darling
Jeanne, the very powers of hell cannot take away from me the ten years
of supreme happiness you have given me.”
The days went by, one, two, three, four, five, with no letters, with
no words at all beyond the steady advance of the Germans. The nights
went by, the long, long nights, not black and empty, but filled with
dreadful lightning visions of what might be happening, even at that
instant, as she lay in her bed. Jeanne felt no fatigue, no hunger, no
consciousness of her body at all, at such times. It happened once,
after one of these long, numb days, that she cut her hand deeply, and
did not know she had done it till she saw the smears of blood on her
skirt. Her first thought was that it was the only skirt she possessed
and that she must not spoil it with her blood, because there was no
money to buy another.
It was that very evening, after she had tied up the wound on her hand
and was beginning to undress the younger children, interrupting herself
frequently to help Jacques with his Latin, that she heard the front
door of the house open and shut.
She went as cold as ice. Her heart stopped beating, her hair stirred
itself on her head. It had come. Some one had brought a telegram with
the bad news.
She put the children on one side, quietly, opened the kitchen door,
and stepped out into the cold twilight of the hall.
André stood before her, a shadowy figure in the obscurity, pale,
unshaven, muddy, smiling, a strange, dim, tired, infinitely tender
smile. His arms were outstretched toward her.
For a moment--a long, silent, intense moment of full life--she knew
nothing but that he was there, that she held him in her arms, that his
lips were on hers. Nothing else existed. There was no war, no danger,
no fear, no wonder how he could have come. There was nothing in all
her being but the consciousness that they were together again. She was
drowned deep in this consciousness; the blessed flood of it closed over
her head.
Presently the door of the kitchen opened, and the littler ones trooped
out to find her. They could live but so few moments, those littler
ones, without sucking at her vitality.
She fell at once into the happy confusion of the usual leave of
absence, crying out to the children, “See, see, papa has come! See,
Uncle André is here!”
It seemed to her the children were singularly apathetic, not instantly
molten joy as she had been. The younger ones were even a little shy
of him, who was, after all, an unknown man to them; and more than a
little jealous of him, who came to share with them their _maman_, their
auntie, the source and light and warmth of their exacting little, new
lives. It seemed to Jeanne that they looked even more queerly at him
this time than usual, and that there was in the sidelong glances of the
older ones an element of strangeness. Their father was becoming a mere
legend to them, she thought with a painful contraction of her heart.
She found herself talking a great deal, in a quavering, excited voice,
gone back to her old exuberance of expression. It seemed to her that
she finally asked André how it could have happened, his coming, and
that he explained across the children’s clamor that his regiment had
gone down to the gates of hell in the offensive and that what was left
of them had been given a twenty-four hours’ leave of absence.
Oh, yes, she understood with no further words, she who knew by heart
every way of communication between his sector on the front and her
door; he had reached Paris by the 3.20 train, had hurriedly changed
stations, had caught the 4.40 train out and reached Méru at twenty
minutes of seven. And oh, she had not been at the station to meet him!
But of course he had not had time to telegraph. So, if it were only a
twenty-four hour leave, he would need to take the midnight train back.
He had come so far, so far, for five hours with her.
She thought this all out while flying to get him some food, to open the
can of meat, preciously kept for just such a golden chance, to heat the
potatoes which were left, to set Jacques to grinding some coffee, real
coffee, such as they never used, to uncover the sacred little store of
sugar, wide, to his hand! And at the same time to talk to the children.
How unresponsive children are, she thought; how quickly they outgrow
whatever is not immediately present. It is hard to remember that four
years, so long in the life of a child, is all eternity to a young
child; his utmost imagination cannot compass it. She said all this to
André, to explain the children. How absurd to try to explain them to
André, smiling his deep understanding of them and of her, far deeper
than she could ever fathom!
Then she was driving them all upstairs to bed, leaving the kitchen to
André, the big tin bathtub and the clean underclothes which she had
always ready for the first ceremony of every return from the trenches.
If only there were more hot water! But she always let the fire go down
toward night, to save coal. For her there was no need of fire. She
could put a blanket around her shoulders and wrap her legs in a rug of
an evening as she sat writing her letter to André by the poor light
of the one lamp, filled with war kerosene, which smoked and glimmered
uncertainly.
She hardly knew what she was doing as she hurried the children into
their beds in the cold rooms. Hurry as she might, there were six of
them; and many, many, of the priceless, counted-out moments had passed
before she ran down the stairs, as madly as any girl racing to meet her
lover.
André was there, at table, washed, shaven, a little color in his lean,
deeply lined cheeks under their warlike bronze. When he heard her step
flying down the hall, he pushed back from the table and, his napkin
across his knees, a good light of laughter in his eyes, he held out his
arms to her again, crying like the traditional bridegroom, “Alone at
last!”
So it began on the light note, that incredible good fortune of their
evening together, she perching on his knee, watching him eat, filling
his plate, pouring out more coffee, talking, laughing--yes, really
laughing as she only did when André was there on permission. When
he had finished she cleared the table, made up the fire, recklessly
putting in lump after lump of the sticky resinous coal and opening
all the drafts. They sat down together before the stove, beside the
surly ill-conditioned lamp, and their tongues were loosened for much
talk--light, deep, sad, hopeful, brave, depressed, casual, tragic. They
poured out to each other all the thousand things which do not go into
letters, even daily ones. She heard of the unreasonable irritability of
his captain, and the plain, restoring good faith of the old colonel;
the heroism of the men, the cowardly slinking back to a clerical
position at the rear by young Montverdier, the son of their _député_.
He heard of her struggles with the boys’ Latin and mathematics, and
with the little ones’ alphabet. “Just think, André, Annette, the
obstinate little thing, will not admit that B’s name is B. She says
it is ‘loof’ and she knows it is because she dreamed it was--haven’t
children the most absurd ideas?”
She spoke out with a Frenchwoman’s frankness of her moments of horror,
of despair, of doubt of the war’s meaning, of revulsion from the
industrial system which had made the war possible. There deep answered
deep; he brought to her the envenomed hatred of war which fills the
trenches to the brim. “It is not glorious; it is infamous. I am not a
hero; I am a murderer. But there are worse things. It would be worse to
have peace, with the German ideas ruling the world. No, every one of us
would better die than allow that to happen. Yes, I have had too--who
hasn’t?--moments of doubt, moments when the horror of our stupidity
was too great, when I have thought that any other way would be better
than war. But not since the Russian affair, not since the Germans
marched into defenseless Russia. _Russian children will be brought up
in German schools_ to form a new generation of Germans. I would kill
my children with my own hands before having them added to those ranks.
No, since Russia, there seems no other way but to go on to the end, and
to make that end an end to war forever.” The worn phrases, dubious and
tarnished on the facile tongues of public orators, repeated there in
that dimly lighted room by that worn man and suffering woman, became
new, became sacramental.
They clung to each other for a moment again, and gradually felt the
tension of the spirit melt away in the old cure of simple bodily
nearness. His cheek against hers--at the sensation she became just a
woman again.
She stirred, she smiled; she told an amusing story of their queer old
neighbor,--she interrupted herself to say reproachfully, “But I _do_
love little Maurice! I don’t love him _as_ I love the other children,
but just because of that I love him more, because I pity him so.”
“That,” he said with conviction, “must be true because nobody but you
would be capable of such mixed language and emotions.”
She had laughed at this and, remembering suddenly that she had a box
of cigarettes for him, jumped up to get it. He was amazed. Where, in
Heaven’s name, had she been able to get cigarettes in France in 1918?
Ah, that was her little secret. She had her ways of doing things! She
teased him for an instant and then said she had begged it for him from
an American Red Cross camion driver who had stopped there to get water
for his radiator. The recollection brought to mind something painful,
which she poured out before him like all the rest. “Oh but, André,
what do you think the woman in uniform sitting by him said? Of course
she couldn’t have known that I understand English, but even so-- She
looked at me hard, and she said, ‘These heroic Frenchwomen people make
so much fuss about, I notice you don’t see any of _them_ turning out to
run cars or distribute clothes to refugees. Much they bother themselves
for France. They stay right inside their comfortable homes and do
fancywork as usual.’ Yes, she said that. Oh, André, it _hurt_! I was
ashamed that I could be hurt so cruelly by anything but the war.”
This led to talk of America. “All our hope is with them, Jeanne.
You mustn’t mind what one woman said--very likely a tired woman too,
fretted by being in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. All
the future is in their hands, and, by God, Jeanne, I begin to believe
they realize it! They are really coming, you know; they are really
here. I see them with my own eyes, not just doctors and nurses and
engineers and telegraphists, as at first, but real fighting men. They
are in the sector next to ours now. They fight. They fight with a sort
of exuberance, as though it were a game they were playing and meant to
win. And they all say that their country is back of them as France is
back of us, to the last man, woman, and child. They’re queer fellows.
They remind me a little of our Normans and a little of our Gascons, if
you can imagine the combination. Whenever there is a difficulty they
have a whimsical, bragging little phrase, that they drawl out in their
sharp, level voices, ‘Never you mind, the Yanks are coming.’ It made
me smile at first, at their presumption, at their young ignorance.
But there is something hypnotizing about the way they say that jerky,
unlovely phrase, like the refrain of a popular song that sticks in
your mind. It sticks in mine. ‘The Yanks are coming!’ The Russians
have gone, or rather the Russians never were there, but ‘the Yanks are
coming!’”
Jeanne had been looking at him hard, scarcely hearing what he said,
drawing in a new conviction from his eyes, his accent, the carriage
of his head. “Why, André! you are really hoping that it may end as it
ought!” she interrupted him suddenly, “You are really hoping--” He
nodded soberly. “Yes, my darling, I really hope.”
He was silent, smiled, drew her to him with a long breath, his arm
strong and hard about her. They might have been eighteen and twenty
again. “And I know,” he whispered, “that you are the loveliest and the
best and the bravest woman in the world.”
The tears ran down her cheeks at this--happy tears which he kissed
away. When she could speak she protested, saying brokenly that she
was weak, she was helpless in the face of the despair which so often
overcame her, that she was perilously poised on the edge of hysteria.
“Ah, who isn’t near that edge?” he told her. “Not to go over the edge,
that is the most that can be done by even the strongest in these days.”
“No, no,” she told him. “You don’t know how weak I am, how cowardly,
how I must struggle every day, every hour, not to give up altogether,
to abandon the struggle and sink into the abyss with the children.”
“But you don’t give it up,” he murmured, his lips on her cheek. “You
do go on with the struggle. I always find the children alive, well,
happy. _You_ weak! _You_ cowardly! You are the bravest of the brave.”
The clock struck ten.
They went upstairs hand in hand to look at the sleeping children and to
try to plan some future for them. Jeanne told of her anxieties about
Michel, the oldest, who had silent, morose fits of brooding. “He’s old
enough to feel it all. The littler ones only suffer physically.” André
put his father’s hand on the sleeping boy’s forehead and looked down
at him silently, the deep look of strength and comprehension which was
like the wine of life to his wife. She thought it was a benediction
to the boy which no priest could better. André took his watch out of
his pocket and laid it on the table. “See here,” he said, “I’m going
to leave this here for Michel when he wakes in the morning. I only use
the old wrist watch nowadays. It may please the little fellow to know I
think him big enough to have my watch.”
“He’ll make it a talisman--it’s the very thing!” she agreed, touched by
his divining sympathy for the boy’s nature.
They roamed then through the cold deserted rooms of the much-loved
little home, unused because of lack of fuel, but the wan, clustering
memories were too thick even for their tried and disciplined hearts.
They went back into the smoky kitchen, shivering.
* * * * *
The clock struck eleven.
As it struck twelve, Jeanne turned back from the door, the lamp in her
hand, the last echo of his footsteps faint in her ears. She stood for a
moment, trance-like, staring at the yellow flame of the lamp, her eyes
wide. Already it seemed impossible that he had been there.
She felt horribly, horribly tired, hardly any other sensation but that.
She went upstairs, undressed rapidly, blew out the light, and lay down
beside little Maurice. She slept with him, that she might be sure to
watch over him carefully enough, fearing that she might not rise in the
cold so readily for him as for the others. Almost at once she fell into
a profound sleep.
She woke with a start, to find herself standing up in her nightgown in
the darkness, on the cold floor, in the middle of the room, the cold,
damp wind blowing in on her from the black opening of the window. And
at once she knew what had happened--knew it as though some one had just
finished telling her.
André had not been there at all that day. He had been killed, that was
it, and her intense longing had brought his spirit straight to her for
a moment, and all the rest she had imagined.
Staring into the darkness, she saw it all with perfect lucidity. That
was why he had looked so dim and shadowy when she had first seen him in
the hall; that was why his smile had been so strange. That was why the
children had seemed so queer; she understood now, it was because they
saw no one there and because they heard her talking to herself.
Did she, then, often talk to herself, that they should do no more than
look sidelong and askance when she did it? Yes, she must have been
slowly going near the edge of dementia during the last weeks, and quite
over the edge into madness the last five days of suspense.
A deadly chill shook her, so that her teeth chattered loudly in the
darkness, audible even to her ears. What did it matter? André had been
killed. There was no meaning in anything any more.
The cold settled around her heart, an icy flood, and congealed in her
veins. She felt herself to be dying and ran out to meet delivering
death.
She heard Andre’s voice saying clearly, “Whoever else is responsible
for the war, the children are not. They must not suffer if we can help
it.”
There was a pause when the world seemed to be slowly shifting under her
feet.
She knew what was coming. In an instant it came. In all that was left
alive of her, she knew that she must try to go on living for the
children.
She turned her back on escape, and in a spiritual agony like the
physical anguish of child-birth, she put out her hands to grope her way
back to the fiery ordeal of life.
* * * * *
Her hands, groping in the darkness, fell on something cold and metallic
and round--Andre’s watch, which he had left for Michel!
But if his watch was there, _he had been there himself_.
She ran trembling to the match box, struck a light, and looked. Yes,
there was the watch, and a burned-out cigarette beside it.
The match went out suddenly in the cold, damp breath from the window.
André had come, then! And she--she was in such a pass that she was
incapable of believing that her husband had been with her for an hour.
Stretched on the rack of long separation, her body and brain had lost
the power to conceive of happiness as real. She felt now that she had
not really believed in his presence any of the time. That was why she
had fancied the children looked oddly at him. _She had not been able to
believe it!_
But she did now! It had reached her very self, at last, the knowledge
that he had been there, that he had been of good cheer, that he loved
her, that he thought the war might yet be won for the right, that he
had even laughed, had said--what was that quaint phrase?--“The Yanks
are coming!”
She took the watch up in her hands, laid it against her cheek, and
began to cry, sweet, weak, child-like tears.
She groped her way back to the bed, weeping silently, the watch
clutched tightly in her hand.
She lay down beside the unloved little orphan, whom she loved through
pity; she took him in her arms; she felt the watch cold and hard and
actual against her heart, and, the tears still on her cheeks, she fell
once more asleep, smiling.
FRANCE’S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR
The American public has just heard of Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, the
woman doctor who was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, and
who proved herself so fearless and useful that she was kept there for
two years amid bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. She is being
cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof that women can take men’s
parts, and do men’s work, and know the man’s joy of being useful. But
she is much more than a woman doing a man’s work. She is a human being
of the highest type, giving to her country the highest sort of service,
and remaining normal, sane, and well-balanced.
Long before the tornado of the war burst over the world, Paris knew
her in many varying phases which now, as we look back, we see to have
been the unconscious preparation for the hour of crisis. Personally I
knew of her, casually, as the public-spirited young doctor who was
attached to the Paris _lycée_ where my children go to school, and
who was pushing the “fresh-air” movement for the city poor. People
who met her in a social way knew her as an attractive woman with a
well-proportioned figure, lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one
met once or twice a week at the theater or in the homes of mutual
friends, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk.
Other people who saw her every morning in her laboratory garb, serious,
intent, concentrated, knew her as one of those scientific investigators
who can not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is unsolved.
Those who saw her in the afternoon among the swarming sick and poor of
the _clinique_ of the great Beaujon Hospital, knew her as one of those
lovers of their kind who can not rest as long as the horrible apathy of
public opinion about tuberculosis continues. People who investigated
cures for city ills and who went to visit the model tenement house
for the very poor, near the St. Ouen gate of Paris, knew her as the
originator and planner of that admirable enterprise, whose energy
and forcefulness saw it financed and brought to practical existence.
Observers who knew her in the big international Feminist Conferences
in European capitals, saw an alert, upright, quick-eyed Parisienne,
whose pretty hats showed no sign of the erudition of the head under
them. Friends knew her as the gently bred woman who, although driven
by no material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, comfortable
life of the home-keeping woman for an incessant, beneficent activity,
the well-ordered regularity of which alone kept it from breaking down
her none too robust health. And those intimates who saw her in her
home, saw her the most loved of sisters and daughters, the most devoted
of mothers, adored by the little son to whom she has been father and
mother ever since he was four years old.
No one dreamed of war, but if the very day and hour had been known
for years, Dr. Girard-Mangin could hardly have prepared herself more
completely for the ordeal. Unconsciously she had “trained” for it,
as the runner trains for his race. She was not very strong, slightly
built, with some serious constitutional weakening, but she filled
every day full to the brim with exacting and fatiguing work. She had
two great factors in her favor. One of them was that enviable gift
which Nature gives occasionally to remarkable people, the capacity to
live with very little sleep. The other is even more noteworthy in a
doctor--in whom close acquaintance with the laws of health seems often
to breed contempt.
Dr. Girard-Mangin is that rare bird, a doctor who believes profoundly,
seriously, in the advice which she gives to others, in the importance
of those simple, humdrum laws of daily health which only very
extraordinary people have the strength of mind to obey. Never, never,
she says, as though it were a matter of course, has she allowed
fatigue, or overoccupation, or inertia, or boredom to interfere with
her early morning deep-breathing and physical exercises, and her tonic
cold bath. Never, never, no matter how long or exhausting the day, has
she rolled into bed, dead beat, too tired to go through the simple
processes of the toilet, which make sleep so much more refreshing.
No matter how absorbed in her work, she has always taken the time
at regular intervals to relax, to chat sociably with quite ordinary
people, to go to the theater, to hear music. She has always breakfasted
and lunched with her little boy, has steered him through his spelling
and arithmetic, has gone on walks with him, has been his comrade and
“pal.” This has been as good for her as for him, naturally. Every
summer she has had the courageous good sense to take a vacation in
the country. In short, she is a doctor who takes to her own heart the
advice about rational life which doctors so often reserve for their
patients.
To this woman, tempered to a steel-like strength by self-imposed
discipline and by a regular, well-ordered life, came the great summons.
And it found her ready to the last nerve in her strong, delicate
little hand. You have read, probably, how on that “Day of Doom” when
France called out her men, a _concierge_ received, among mobilization
papers for all the men in the big apartment house, one sending Dr.
Girard-Mangin (presumably also a man, by the name) out to a military
hospital in the Vosges mountains. The notice of mobilization was
handed to a woman, a patriotic woman who long ago had heard the call to
fight for France’s best interests. She had seen her brother go before
her into the fighting ranks and she followed him, into danger and
service. She said a quick good-by to her friends, to her parents, to
her son, her only child, a fine boy of fourteen then, from whom she had
never before been separated.
Will every mother who reads these lines stop here and think what this
means?
There is no need to repeat in detail here what has already been told
of the first three months of her service--her arrival at the field
hospital, disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever-renewed flood
of wounded men, of the astonishment of the doctor in charge. “What,
a woman! This is no place for a woman. But, good God! if you know
anything about surgery, roll up your sleeves and stay!”
There she stayed for three months, those blasting first three months
of the war, when French people put forth undreamed-of strength to
meet a crisis of undreamed-of horror. Out there in that distant
military hospital, toiling incessantly in great heat, with insufficient
supplies, bearing the mental and moral shock of the first encounter
with the incredible miseries of war, that modern, highly organized
woman, separated for the first time from her family, from her child,
fearing everything for them and for her country, had no word, no
tidings whatever, till the 28th of August. Then no knowledge of her
son, of her parents, only a notice that the Government had retreated
from Paris to Bordeaux! Comforting news that, for the first! Next
they knew that Rheims was taken. Then one of the men whose wounds she
dressed told her that he had been able to see the Eiffel Tower from
where he fell. This sounded as though the next news could be nothing
but the German entry into Paris.
All France throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its
normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s
part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among
the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull
her through.
Then the wild period of fury and haste and nervous, emotional
exaltation passed, and France faced another ordeal, harder for
her temperament even than the first fierce onset of the unequal
struggle--the long period of patient endurance of the unendurable. The
miracle of the Marne had been wrought; Paris was saved; the sting and
stimulant of immediate, deadly danger was past; the fatigue from the
supernatural effort of those first months dimmed every eye, deadened
all nerves. Then France tapped another reservoir of national strength
and began patiently, constructively to “organize” the war. And that
daughter of France bent her energies to help in this need, as in the
first.
A rough rearrangement of competences was attempted everywhere on the
front. Dentists no longer dug trenches, bakers were set to baking
instead of currying horses, and expert telegraphers stopped making
ineffectual efforts to cook. It came out then that the real specialty
of the valiant little woman doctor who had been doing such fine work in
the operating-room was not surgery at all. “I’m no surgeon, you know!”
she says, and leaves it to her friends to tell you of the extraordinary
record of her efficiency in that field, the low percentage of losses
in her surgical cases. If you mention this, she says, “Ah, that’s
just because I’m _not_ a born surgeon. I have to take very special
care of my cases to be equal to the job.” It was discovered that
her great specialty was contagious diseases. There was great need
for a specialist of that sort out at Verdun, where, alas! a typhoid
epidemic had broken out. This was before the extra precautions about
inoculations, which were taken later.
Dr. Girard-Mangin was sent to Verdun on November 1st, 1914, and was
there steadily for more than a year, until the 28th of February, 1916.
She found her sick men on mattresses, in tents, on such low ground
that they were often literally in water. Whenever there was freezing
weather, those who cared for them slid about on sheets of ice. Above
them, on higher ground, were some rough old barracks, empty, partly
remodeled, said to have been left there by the Prussians in 1871. “Why
don’t we move the sick up there?” she asked, and was met by all the
usual dragging, clogging reasons given by administrative inertia.
The sheds were not ready to occupy; there were no expert carpenters to
get them ready; it would be impossible to heat them; no order for the
change had come from Headquarters--furthermore, a reason not mentioned,
the sheds, being on higher ground, were more exposed to shell-fire.
Dr. Girard-Mangin had had some experience with administrative inertia
in her struggles for better housing for the poor; and long before the
war she had known what it was to put herself voluntarily in danger--the
scar from a bad tubercular infection on her hand is the honorable proof
of that. She knew that the sick men would be better off in the barracks
on higher ground. So she took them there. Just like that.