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HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
By DOROTHY CANFIELD
Author of "The Bent Twig," "The Squirrel-Cage," "Hillsboro People," etc.
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
DEDICATED
TO
GENERAL PERSHING
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This book is fiction written in France out of a life-long familiarity
with the French and two years' intense experience in war work in France.
It is a true setting-forth of personalities and experiences, French and
American, under the influence of war. It tells what the war has done to
the French people at home. In a recent letter, the author said, "What I
write is about such very well-known conditions to us that it is hard to
remember it may be fresh to you, but it is so far short of the actual
conditions that it seems pretty pale, after all."
CONTENTS
Notes from a French Village in the War Zone
The Permissionaire
Vignettes from Life at the Rear
A Fair Exchange
The Refugee
A Little Kansas Leaven
Eyes for the Blind
The First Time After
Hats
A Honeymoon ... Vive l'Amerique!
La Pharmacienne
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
NOTES FROM A FRENCH VILLAGE IN THE WAR ZONE
Perhaps the first thing which brought our boys to a halt, and a long,
long look around them, was the age of the place. Apparently it has--the
statement is hardly exaggerated--always been there. As a matter of
historical fact it has been there for more than a thousand years. On
hearing that, the American boys always gasped. They were used to the
conception of the great age of "historical" spots, by which they meant
cities in which great events have occurred--Paris, Rome,
Stratford-on-Avon, Granada. But that an inconsiderable settlement of a
thousand inhabitants, where nothing in particular ever happened beyond
the birth, life, and death of its people, should have kept its identity
through a thousand years gave them, so they said, "a queer feeling." As
they stood in the quiet gray street, looking up and down, and taking in
the significance of the fact, one could almost visibly see their minds
turning away from the text-book idea of the Past as an unreal, sparsely
settled period with violent historical characters in doublet and ruff or
chain mail thrusting broadswords into one another or signing treaties
which condemned all succeeding college students to a new feat of memory;
you could almost see their brilliant, shadowless, New World youth
deepened and sobered by a momentary perception of the Past as a very
long and startlingly real phenomenon, full, scaringly full of real
people, entirely like ourselves, going about the business of getting
born, being married and dying, with as little conscious regard as we for
historical movements and tendencies. They were never done marveling that
the sun should have fallen across Crouy streets at the same angle before
Columbus discovered America as to-day; that at the time of the French
Revolution just as now, the big boys and sturdy men of Crouy should have
left the same fields which now lie golden in the sun and have gone out
to repel the invader; that people looked up from drawing water at the
same fountain which now sparkles under the sycamore trees and saw
Catherine de Medici pass on her way north as now they see the gray
American Ambulance rattle by.... "And I bet it was over these same
cussed hard-heads!" cried the boy from Ohio, trying vainly to ease his
car over the knobby paving-stones.
"No, oh no," answered the town notary reasonably. "The streets of Crouy
were paved in comparatively recent times, not earlier than 1620."
"Oh, the Pilgrim Fathers!" cried the boy from Connecticut.
"And nothing ever happened here all that time?" queried the boy from
California incredulously.
"Nothing," said the notary, "except a great deal of human life."
"Gee! what a lot o' that!" murmured the thoughtful boy from Virginia,
his eyes widening imaginatively.
After the fact that it had been there so long, they were astonished by
the fact that it was there at all, existing, as far as they could see,
with no visible means of support beyond a casual sawmill or two. "How do
all these people earn their living?" they always asked, putting the
question in the same breath with the other inevitable one: "_Where_ do
the people live who care for all this splendid farming country? We see
them working in the fields, these superb wheat-fields, or harvesting the
oats, but you can drive your car for mile after mile and never see a
human habitation. We thought Europe was a thickly populated place!"
Of course you know the obvious answer. The people who till the fields
all live in the villages. If you inhabit such a settlement you hear
every morning, very, very early, the slow, heavy tread of the big
farm-horses and the rumble of the huge two-wheeled carts going out to
work, and one of the picturesque sights of the sunset hour is the
procession of the powerful Percherons, their drivers sitting sideways on
their broad backs, plodding into the village, both horses and farmers
with an inimitable air of leisurely philosophy; of having done a good
day's work and letting it go at that; of attempting no last nervous
whack at the accumulated pile of things to be done which always lies
before every one; with an unembittered acceptance of the facts that
there are but twenty-four hours in every day and that it is good to
spend part of them eating savory hot soup with one's family. According
to temperament, this appearance, only possible, apparently, when you
have lived a thousand years in the same place, enormously reposes or
enormously exasperates the American observer.
You do not see the cows going out to pasture, or coming back at night
through the village streets, because those farmers who have a dairy live
on the outskirts of the town, with their big square courtyards adjacent
to the fields. The biggest farmhouse of this sort in Crouy is lodged in
the remnants of the medieval castle of the old seigneurs (symbol of
modern France!) where at night the cows ramble in peaceably through the
old gate where once the portcullis hung, and stand chewing their cud
about the great courtyards whence marauding knights in armor once
clattered out to rob.
Of course this arrangement whereby country folk all live in villages
turns inside out and upside down most of those conditions which seem to
us inevitable accompaniments of country life; for instance, the
isolation and loneliness of the women and children. There is no
isolation possible here, when, to shake hands with the woman of the next
farm, you have only to lean out of your front window and have her lean
out of hers, when your children go to get water from the fountain along
with all the other children of the region, when you are less than five
minutes' walk from church and the grocery-store, when your children can
wait till the school-bell is ringing before snatching up their books to
go to school.
You do not have to wait for your mail till some one can go to town or
till the R. F. D. man brings it around six hours after it has arrived in
town. The village mail-carrier brings it to you directly it arrives,
just as though you lived in a city. You do not have to wait for your
community news till it filters slowly to your remote door by the
inaccurate medium of the irresponsible grocery-boy. The moment anything
of common interest happens, the town crier walks up your street. At the
sound of his announcing drum or bell you drop your work, stick your head
out of your door, and hear at once, hot off the griddle, as soon as any
one, that there will be an auction of cows at the Brissons on Saturday
next, that poor sick old Madame Mantier has at last passed away, or that
school reopens a week from Monday and all children must be ready to go.
And if one of the children breaks his arm, or if a horse has the colic,
or your chimney gets on fire, you do not suffer the anguished isolation
of American country life. The whole town swarms in to help you, in a
twinkling of an eye. In fact, for my personal taste, I must confess that
the whole town seemed only too ready to swarm in, on any friendly
pretext at all. But then, I have back of me many generations of
solitary-minded farmer ancestors, living sternly and grimly to
themselves, and not a thousand years of really sociable community life.
"But if they are country-people who live in these dry-looking villages,"
asked our American Ambulance boys, "what makes them huddle up so close
together and run the houses into one long wall of buildings that look
like tenement-houses? Why don't they have nice front yards like ours,
with grass and flowers, and people sitting on the front porch, enjoying
life? You can go through village after village here and never see a
thing but those ugly, stony streets and long, high, stone walls, and
bare, stony houses, and never a soul but maybe an old woman with a gunny
sack on her back, or a couple of kids lugging water in a pail."
The best answer to that was to open the door into our own bare, stone
house, which, like all the others on the street, presented to the public
eye an unalluring, long, gray-white, none-too-clean plastered wall,
broken by square windows designed for utility only. The big door opening
showed a stone-paved corridor leading straight to what seemed at first
glance an earthly Paradise of green; an old, old garden with superb
nut-trees, great flowering bushes, a bit of grass, golden graveled
paths, and high old gray walls with grapevines and fruit-trees carefully
trained against them.
Our American visitor stared about him with dazzled eyes. "What a
heavenly place! But who ever would have guessed such a garden was in
Crouy!"
"Oh, but this is not one of the really good gardens of the town," we
assured him. "This is a poor old neglected one compared with those all
around us."
"But where _are_ they?" asked our American incredulously, his vision cut
off by the ten-foot wall.
At this we invited him upstairs to a lofty window at the back of the
house, leaning from which he had a totally new view of the town whose
arid gray streets he had traversed so many times. Back of every one of
these gray-white, monotonously aligned plastered houses stretched a
garden, often a very large one, always a jewel, gleaming, burnished, and
ordered, with high old trees near the house, and flowers and vines; and,
back of this pleasure spot, a great fertile stretch of well-kept
vegetables and fruit. He stared long, our American, reconstructing his
ideas with racial rapidity. On withdrawing his head his first comment
was, usually:
"But for the Lord's sake, how ever do they get the money to pay for
building all those miles of huge stone walls? It must cost every family
a fortune."
Upon learning that those walls had stood exactly there in those very
lines for hundreds of years, requiring only to be periodically kept in
repair, he sank into another momentary reconstructive meditation.
Then came the inevitable American challenge, the brave new note from the
New World which I always rejoiced to hear:
"But what's the _point_ of shutting yourself up that way from your
neighbors and making such a secret of your lovely garden that nobody
gets any good of it but yourself? Why not open up and let everybody who
goes by take pleasure in your flowers and your lawn and see the kids
playing and hear them laughing?"
Of course I always went duly through the orthodox historical and social
explanations. I pointed out that it was only in comparatively late
times--only since that very recent event the French Revolution or the
beginning of our life as a nation--that isolated houses in the fields
would have been safe; that up to that time people were obliged to huddle
together inside the walls of a town at night as a safeguard against
having their throats cut; that an age-old habit of apprehension and
precaution leaves ineradicable marks on life; and that it still seems
entirely natural for French people to conceal their gardens behind
ten-foot stone walls with broken bottles on top, although for
generations the community life has been as peaceful as that of any
drowsy New England village. But, having given this academic explanation,
I went on to hazard a guess that age-old habits of fear leave behind
them more than material marks, like stone walls and broken bottles. They
shape and form human minds into tastes and preferences and prejudices,
the uncourageous origin of which the owners of the minds are far from
divining.
"You know," I said to our boy from home, "they can't understand our open
villages with no fences or walls, with everybody's flowers open to
everybody's view, with our pretty girls showing their fresh summer
dresses and bright, sweet faces to the chance passerby as well as to the
selected few who have the countersign to enter. They can't understand
it, and they don't try to, for they don't like it. They don't like our
isolated houses. They, like all Europeans, apparently like the feeling
of having neighbors near so that they can enjoy shutting them out. They
say they like the feeling of 'being all to themselves'; they have a
passion for 'privacy' which often seems to mean keeping desirable things
away from other people; they can't see how we endure the 'staring eyes
of strangers.'"
At this point I was usually interrupted by the boy from home who cried
out hotly:
"Well, I hope _we_ won't ever get so afraid of people we haven't been
introduced to! I guess we can stand it, not being so darned private as
all that! I don't see that you need take any less satisfaction in a
rosebush because it's given pleasure to a lot of work-people going by in
the morning!"
On which proposition we always cordially shook hands.
"And yet, d'you know," added the boy from home, a little wistfully,
looking down into the green, secluded peace of the walled-in garden,
"there _must_ be something kind o' nice about the quiet of it, being
able to do as you please without everybody looking at you. It sort of
makes our front yards seem like a public park, instead of a home,
doesn't it?"
"Yes," I said sadly, "it does, a little."
Oh, Europe, Europe! seductive old Europe, ever up to thine old game of
corrupting the fresh candor of invading barbarians!
"But, anyhow," ended the boy from home bravely, "I don't care. I think
our way is lots the nicest ... for _everybody_!"
Dear boy from home!
Then we went downstairs and visited our modest establishment, typical in
a small way of all those about us, and although made up of the same
essential features as those of a small American town home, differing in
a thousand ways.
"Why, there are apples on this hedge, real apples!" said the American.
"Who ever heard of apples on a little low hedge plant?"
"Those aren't hedge plants," we told him. "Those are real apple-trees,
trained to grow low, cut back year after year, pruned, watched, nipped,
fertilized, shaped, into something quite different from what they meant
to be. They produce a tenth, a twentieth part of what would grow if the
tree were left to itself, but what golden apples of Hesperides they are!
The pears are like that, too. Here is a pear-tree older than I, and not
so tall, which bears perhaps a dozen pears, but _what_ pears! And you
see, too, when the trees are kept small, you can have ever so many more
in the same space. They don't shade your vegetables, either. See those
beans growing up right to the base of the trees."
The chicken-yard was comforting to our visitors because it was like any
chicken-yard; if anything, not so well kept or so well organized as an
American one. But beyond them is a row of twelve well-constructed brick
rabbit-hutches with carefully made lattice gates and cement floors,
before which visitors always stopped to gaze at the endlessly twitching
pink noses and vacuous faces of the little beasts. I hastened to explain
that they were not at all for the children to play with, but that they
form a serious part of the activities of every country family in the
region, supplying for many people the only meat they ever eat beyond the
very occasional fowl in the pot for a fete-day. They take the place, as
far as I could see, of the American farm family's hog, and are to my
mind a great improvement on him. Their flesh is much better food than
the hog's, and since the animal is so small and so prolific, he provides
a steady succession all the year round of fresh meat, palatable and
savory, not smoked and salted into indigestibility like most of our
country pork. In addition, he costs practically nothing to raise. This
is, under the usual conditions of the French countryside, almost
literally true. They are given those scraps from the kitchen and garden
which hens will not touch, the potato and vegetable parings, the
carrot-tops, the pea-vines after they have stopped bearing, the outer
leaves of the cabbages, and, above all, herbage of all sorts which
otherwise would be lost. Every afternoon, the old women of the town,
armed with gunny sacks and sickles, go out for an hour or so of fresh
air and exercise. The phrase is that they _va a l'herbe_ (go for the
grass). It is often a lively expedition, with the children skipping and
shouting beside their grandmother, or one of the bigger boys pushing
the wheelbarrow, cherished and indispensable accessory of French country
life. They take what with us would be a "walk in the country," and as
they pass they levy toll on every sod beside the road, or in a corner of
a wall; on the fresh green leaves and twigs of neglected thickets; on
brambles and weeds--rabbits adore weeds!--on underbrush and vines. Since
seeing these patient, ruddy, vigorous, white-capped old women at their
work I have made another guess at the cause of the miraculously neat and
ordered aspect of French landscapes. It is an effect not wholly due to
the esthetic sense of the nation. Toward twilight, the procession of old
women and children, red-cheeked and hungry, turns back to the village,
with wheelbarrows loaded and sacks bursting with food which otherwise
would have served no human purpose. No need to give the rabbit, as we do
the hog, expensive golden corn, fit for our own food, and which takes
the heart out of the soil which produces it. The rabbit lives, and lives
well, on the unconsidered and unmissed crumbs from Mother Nature's
table.
The rabbit-hutches being near the kitchen, we usually went next into
that red-and-white-tiled room, with the tiny coal-range (concession to
the twentieth century) with the immense open hearth (heritage of the
past) and the portable charcoal-stove, primitive, universal implement.
"But you can't bake your bread in such a play-stove as that," commented
the American.
And with that we were launched into a new phase of Crouy life, the
close-knit communal organization of a French settlement. Since all these
country people live side by side, they discovered long ago that there is
no need to duplicate, over and over, in each house, labors which are
better done in centralized activity. Instead of four hundred cook-stoves
being heated to the baking-point, with a vast waste of fuel and effort,
one big fire in the village _boulangerie_ bakes the bread for all the
community. These French country women no more bake their own bread than
they make their own shoes. In fact, if they tried to they could not
produce anything half so appetizing and nourishing as the crusty,
well-baked loaves turned out by that expert specialist, the village
bakeress; and they buy those loaves for less than it would cost to
produce them in each kitchen.
In addition to the _boulangerie_ where you buy your bread, there is in
Crouy (and in all other French towns of that size) another shop kept by
a specially good cook among the housewives, where you can always buy
certain cooked foods which are hard to prepare at home in small
quantities. Ham, for instance. In American towns too small to have a
delicatessen shop, how many of us quail before the hours of continuous
heat needed to boil a ham, and the still more formidable enterprise of
getting it all eaten up afterward without a too dreary monotony! I have
known American villages where people said the real reason for church
suppers was that they might taste boiled ham once in a while. In Crouy,
backward, primitive, drainageless community that it is, they cater to
the prime necessity of variety in diet with a competence like that with
which the problem of good bread is solved all over France. Every
Wednesday morning you know that Madame Beaugard has a ham freshly
boiled. You may buy one slice, just enough to garnish a cold salad, or
ten slices to serve in a hot sauce for dinner. On Saturdays she has a
big roast of beef, hot and smoking out of her oven at a quarter of
twelve, and a family or two may thus enjoy this luxury without paying
the usual Anglo-Saxon penalty of eating cold or hashed beef for many
days thereafter. On another day she has beans, the dry beans which are
such a bother to prepare in small quantities and such an admirable and
savory food. She is the village fruit-seller, and when you go to buy
your fruit in her little shop, which is nothing more or less than her
front parlor transformed, you are sure to find something else appetizing
and tempting. Note that this regular service not only adds greatly to
the variety and tastefulness of the diet of the village, but enables
Madame Beaugard to earn her living more amply.
In another big operation of housekeeping the simplest French country
community puts its resources together, instead of scattering them. On
wash days there is no arduous lifting and emptying out of water, no
penetrating odor of soapsuds throughout all the house, no waste of fuel
under hundreds of individual wash-boilers, no solitary drudging over the
washtubs. The French country housekeeper who does her own washing brings
around to the street door her faithful steed, the wheelbarrow, and
loads it up; first the big galvanized boiler full of soiled clothes,
then a wooden box open at one side, filled with clean straw, then the
soap, a flat, short-handled wooden paddle, and a stiff scrubbing-brush.
Leaving the children not yet at school in the charge of a neighbor--for
whom she will perform the same service another day of the week--her head
done up in a kerchief, her skirts kilted high to let her step free, she
sets off down the road for the _lavoir_. I use the French word because
the institution does not exist in English.
This is usually a low stone building, with an open place in the roof,
either covered with glass or open to the air. In the center is a big
pool of water, constantly renewed, which gushes in clean and eddies out
soapy, carrying with it the impurities of the village linen. Here our
housewife finds an assortment of her friends and neighbors, and here she
kneels in the open air, in her straw-filled box, and soaps, and beats,
and rinses, and scrubs at the spots with her scrubbing-brush (they never
use a rubbing-board), and at the same time hears all the talk of the
town, gets whatever news from the outer world is going the rounds, jokes
and scolds, sympathizes and laughs, sorrows with and quarrels with her
neighbors,--gets, in short, the same refreshing and entire change from
the inevitable monotony of the home routine which an American housewife
of a more prosperous class gets in her club meeting, and which the
American housewife of the same class gets, alas! almost never.
And, yes, the clothes are clean! I know it runs counter to all our fixed
ideas and what we are taught in domestic-science classes. I don't
pretend to explain it but the fact remains that clothes soaped and
beaten and rinsed in cold water, boiled in a boiler over the open fire
and dried on the grass, are of the most dazzling whiteness. It is just
another wholesome reminder that there are all kinds of ways to kill a
cat, and that our own, natural and inevitable as it seems to us, may not
even be the most orthodox.
Another such reminder is the fashion in which they manage baths in
Crouy. There are not (you can hear, can't you, the supercilious
Anglo-Saxon tourist saying, "_Of course there are not_"?) any bathrooms
in the houses, nor in the one little inn. And yet the people take plenty
of baths, and in big porcelain bathtubs too, bigger and deeper and
fuller of hot water than those we have in our houses.
Among the many curious little industries of the place is the
_etablissement des bains_. As you go down the main street of a morning
you stop in and fill up a little printed card stating that you wish a
hot (or cold) plain (or perfumed or sulphur or starch or what not) bath,
at such and such an hour. The little old woman in charge (note that this
is another way for a little old woman to earn an honest living) notes
your hour, and stokes up her stove according to the schedule of the day.
When you arrive you are shown into an immaculately clean tiled bathroom,
with an enormous tub, lined with a clean sheet (it has been definitely
decided by doctors that this precaution obviates any possibility of
contagion) and filled with clear, sparkling hot water. You can rent your
towels for two cents apiece, and buy a bit of soap for three cents, or
you may bring them from home, if you prefer. Of course, being unused to
this particular way of killing the cat, you feel rather foolish and
queer to be taking a bath in a community bathtub instead of in your own.
But the bath is a fine one; with a cold rub-down at the end, there is no
danger of taking cold; and as you dress, glowing and refreshed, you
cannot put out of your mind some such colloquy as this:
"Yes, of course I prefer a bathtub in my own house. Everybody would. But
suppose I haven't money enough to have one? At home, in a town like
this, you can only get a bath, or give it to your children, if you have
capital enough to buy, install, and keep up a bathroom of your own. Here
you can have an even better one, any time you can spare fifteen cents in
cash. Which method produces the bigger area of clean skin in a given
community?"
You usually end your colloquy by quoting to yourself, laughingly, the
grandly American-minded remark of the boy from Illinois, whose reaction
to the various eye-openers about him was thus formulated:
"Do you know, the thing we want to do at home is to keep all the good
ways of doing this we've got already, and then add all the French ones
too."
We laughed over the youthful self-confidence of that ambition, but, as
the boy from Illinois would say, "Honestly, do you know, there is
something in it."
In one of the few large, handsome houses in Crouy there is something
else I wish we might import into America. Very simply, with no brass
band of a formal organization, secretaries, or reports, the younger
girls of the town are brought together to learn how to sew and cook and
keep their household accounts. The splendid park which looks so lordly
with its noble trees is only the playground for the little girls in
gingham aprons in the intervals of their study; and the fine,
high-ceilinged, spacious old _salon_, a veritable Henry James room, is
employed in anything but a Henry James manner as the workroom where all
the children from the poorer houses round about sit in the sunshine,
setting beautiful fine stitches and chattering like magpies.
A large room at the side has been fitted up--oh, so long before domestic
science "struck" America--as a kitchen, and here the little girls daily
prepare their own luncheons, after having, turn by turn, done the
marketing and made up their small accounts under the supervision of an
expert teacher. Their rosy cheeks and bright eyes testify to the good
training which their own mothers received in this very room, in these
very essentials of life.
The gracious, gray-haired owner of the beautiful home has always been so
busy with her school and workroom that she almost never runs into Paris,
although she is not more than a couple of hours away.
"I've only been there five or six times in my life," she says, shaking
her head in mocking contrition, and turning superb old rings around on
her soft, wrinkled hands. She adds, with a pretty whimsical smile: "To
tell the truth, it bores me awfully when I do go. I have so much to see
to here, that I'm uneasy to be away."
You are to remember that this has been going on for at least two
generations. The quiet-eyed _chatelaine_ of the manor mentions, in
passing, that she is but continuing the work of her aunt who lived there
before her, and who for fifty years gave all her life and property for
her neighbors' children in quite the same way. When you leave you try to
murmur something about what two such lives must have meant to the
community, but this entirely unmodern, unradical, unread provincial
Frenchwoman cuts you short by saying in a matter-of-fact tone, with the
most transparent simplicity of manner:
"Oh, but of course property is only a trust, after all, isn't it?"
Will some one please tell me what are the appropriate sentiments for
good Socialists to feel about such people?
There is another _ouvroir_ (sewing-room) in Crouy of another sort, where
the older girls, instead of being forced to go away from home, as in
most American villages, to work in factories or shops, may earn an
excellent living doing expert embroidery or fine sewing. They are well
paid, and the enterprise is successful commercially because the
long-headed philanthropist at the head of the organization manages to
sell direct to consumers--as will always be done as a matter-of-course
in the twenty-first century--instead of passing the product through the
acquisitive hands of many middlemen. But there is so much to report in
detail about this wholly admirable and modern undertaking that I must
make another story of it. It is really curious how often, in this
little, backward, drainageless French village, an American is brought to
a halt, a long, scrutinizing inspection, and much profitable meditation.
* * * * *
So far you have seen Crouy as it was before the war, and as it is now in
the brief intervals between the departure of a regiment going back to
the front and the arrival of another with the trench mud still on its
boots. You have seen the long, gray, stony street filled morning and
evening with horses and laborers going out to work or returning, and in
the meantime dozing somnolent in the sun, with only a cat or dog to
cross it, an old woman going out for the grass, or a long, gray American
Ford Ambulance banging along over the paving, the square-jawed,
clean-shaven boy from the States zigzagging desperately with the vain
idea that the other side of the street cannot be so rough as the one he
is on. You have seen the big open square, sleeping under the airy shadow
of the great sycamores, only the occasional chatter of children drawing
water at the fountain breaking the silence. You have seen the beautiful
old church, echoing and empty save for an old, poor man, his ax or his
spade beside him, as he kneels for a moment to pray for his grandsons at
the front; or for a woman in black, rigid and silent before a shrine, at
whose white face you dare not glance as you pass. You have seen the
plain, bare walls of the old houses, turning an almost blank face to the
street, with closely shuttered or thickly curtained windows.
But one morning, very early, before you are dressed, you hear suddenly,
close at hand, that clear, ringing challenge of the bugle which bids all
human hearts to rise and triumph, and the vehement whirring rhythm of
the drums, like a violent new pulse beating in your own body. The house
begins to shake as though with thunder, not the far-off roar of the
great cannon of the horizon which you hear every day, but a definite
vibration of the earth under your feet. You rush to your street window,
throw open the shutters, and, leaning from the sill, see that all Crouy
is leaning with you and looking up the street.
There, at the turn, where the road leaves the yellow wheat-fields to
enter the village, the flag is coming, the torn, ragged, dingy, sacred
tricolor. Back of it the trumpets, gleaming in the sun, proclaim its
honor. They are here, the poilus, advancing with their quick, swinging
step, so bravely light for all the cruel heavy sacks on their backs and
the rifles on their shoulders. Their four-ranked file fills our street
from side to side, as their trumpets fill our ears, as the fatigue and
courage of their faces fill our hearts. They are here, the splendid,
splendid soldiers who are the French poilus. Everybody's brother,
cousin, husband, friend, son, is there.
All Crouy leans from its windows to welcome them back from death--one
more respite. They glance up at the windows as they pass; the younger
ones smile at the girls' faces; the older ones, fathers certainly, look
wistfully at the children's bright heads. There are certain ones who
look at nothing, staring straight ahead at immaterial sights which will
not leave their eyes.
One detachment has passed; the rumbling has increased till your windows
shake as though in an earthquake. The camions and guns are going by, an
endless defile of monster trucks, ending with the rolling kitchen,
lumbering forward, smoking from all its pipes and caldrons, with the
regimental cook springing up to inspect the progress of his savory
ragout.
After the formless tumult of the wheels, the stony street resounds again
to the age-old rhythm of marching men. Another detachment....
You dress quickly, seize the big box of cigarettes kept ready for this
time, and, taking the children by the hand, go out to help welcome the
newcomers as they settle down for their three weeks' rest.
I have told you that Crouy has a thousand inhabitants. There are twelve
hundred men in a regiment. Perhaps you can imagine that when the troops
are there men seem to ooze from every pore of the town. There are no
great barracks erected for them, you understand. Somehow Crouy people
make themselves small, move over to the edge, and make the necessary
room. There are seventy soldiers sleeping on straw in the big hall which
was before the war used for a concert-room or for amateur theatricals;
two hundred are housed in what is left of the old _salles de garde_ of
the ruined castle, old guard-rooms which after five hundred years see
themselves again filled with French fighting-men; every barn-loft is
filled with them; every empty shed has a thick layer of straw on the
ground and twenty to thirty men encamped; every empty stable has been
carefully cleaned and prepared for them; every empty room harbors one or
more officers; every attic has ten or fifteen men. One unused shop is
transformed into the regimental infirmary, and hangs out the Red Cross
flag; another sees the quartermaster and his secretaries installed at
desks improvised from pine boards; a sentry stands before the Town Hall
where the colonel has his headquarters, and another guards the fine old
house which has the honor of sheltering the regimental flag.
The street, our quiet, sleepy street, is like an artery pulsing with
rapid vibrations; despatch-riders dash up and down; camions rumble by; a
staff-car full of officers looking seriously at maps halts for a moment
and passes on; from out the courtyard where a regimental kitchen is
installed a file of soldiers issues, walking on eggs as they carry their
hot stew across the street to the lodging where they eat it. Our
green-vegetable woman, that supreme flower of a race of consummate
gardeners, arrives at the house, breathless and smiling, with only an
onion and a handful of potatoes in her usually well-garnished
donkey-cart.
"_Que voulez-vous, madame?_" she apologizes, sure of your sympathy. "The
instant I leave the garden, they set upon me. You can't refuse your own
soldiers, can you! With my Jacques at the front?"
Everywhere, everywhere where there is a scrap of cover from the sky, are
huddled horses, mules, guns, wagons, and camions. Every spreading
chestnut-tree harbors, not a blacksmith, but a dozen army mules tied
close to the trunk. Near the station the ground under the close-set
double line of trees in the long mall is covered to its last inch with
munition-wagons and camions, and to reach the post-office on the other
side of the little shady square you must pick your way back of lines of
guns, set end to end, without an inch to spare. The aviators, whose
machines wheel ceaselessly over the town, can see no change in its
aspect, unless perhaps the streets and courtyards send up to the sky a
gray-blue reflection like its own color. Not another trace of twelve
hundred men with all their impedimenta betrays to the occasional German
airman that Crouy's life is transformed.
Three times a week, in the late afternoon, just before sunset, the
regimental band gives a concert, in our big open square under the
sycamores, where, in the softer passages of the music, the sound of
splashing water mingles with the flutes. All Crouy puts on its Sunday
best and comes out to join itself to the horizon-blue throngs, and the
colonel and his staff stand under the greatest of the sycamores,
listening soberly to the music and receiving paternally the salutes of
the men who saunter near him.
Once during their stay there is a _prise-d'armes_, on the square, when
the men who have especially distinguished themselves are decorated with
the _croix de guerre_. All Crouy goes to see that, too--all Crouy means
now, you must remember, old men, women, little children, and babies--and
stands respectfully, with tear-wet eyes, watching the white-haired
colonel go down the line, pinning on each man's breast the sign of
honor, taking his hand in a comrade's clasp and giving him on both
cheeks a brother's kiss. That is a sight the children there will not
forget, those two, bronzed, grave soldiers' faces, meeting under their
steel casques in the salutation of blood-kin.
* * * * *
And once there is a mass said for the regimental dead in the old, old
church. All Crouy goes there too, all Crouy lost in the crowd of
soldiers who kneel in close ranks on the worn stones, the sonorous chant
of whose deep voices fills the church to the last vaulting of the arches
which echoed to the voices of those other Crusaders, praying there for
their dead, six hundred years ago. The acolytes at the altar are
soldiers in their shabby honorable uniforms; the priest is a soldier;
the choir is filled with them singing the responses; in an interval of
the service up rise two of them near the organ, violin in hand, and the
French church rings with the angel's voice of whom but old Johann
Sebastian Bach--oh, generous-hearted, wise poilu musicians, who hate
only what is hateful!
At the end, suddenly, the regimental music is there, wood-wind,
trumpets, and all. The service comes to a close in one great surging
chant, upborne on the throbbing waves of the organ notes. The church
rings to the pealing brass, thrilling violins, the men's deep voices....
Ah, when will it resound to the song of thanksgiving at the end?
THE PERMISSIONAIRE
"_What was in the ground, alive, they could not kill._"
Two weeks after the German retreat from the Aisne was rumored, five days
after the newspapers were printing censored descriptions of the ravaged
country they had left, and the very moment the official bulletin
confirmed the news, Pierre Nidart presented himself to his lieutenant to
ask for a furlough, the long-delayed furlough, due for more than two
years now, which he had never been willing to take. His lieutenant
frowned uneasily, and did not answer. After a moment's silence he said,
gently, "You know, my old fellow, the Boches have left very little up
there."
(Nidart was not an old fellow at all, being but thirty-four, and the
father of two young children. His lieutenant used the phrase as a term
of endearment, because he had a high opinion of his silent sergeant.)
Nidart made no answer to his officer's remark. The lieutenant took it
that he persisted in wanting his furlough. As he had at least three
furloughs due him, it was hard to refuse. There was a long silence.
Finally, fingering the papers on the dry-goods box which served him as
desk, the lieutenant said: "Your wife is young. They say the Germans
carried back to work in Germany all women under forty-five, or those
who hadn't children under three."
Nidart swallowed hard, looked sick, and obstinately said nothing. His
lieutenant turned with a sigh and motioned the _fourrier_ to start the
red tape for the authorization for the furlough. "All right, I think I
can manage a three weeks' 'permission' for you. They're allowing that, I
hear, to men from the invaded regions who haven't taken any furloughs
since the beginning of the war."
"Yes, _mon Lieutenant_. Thank you, _mon Lieutenant_." Nidart saluted and
went back to his squad.
His lieutenant shook his head, murmuring to the _fourrier_: "Those
north-country men! There is no use saying a word to them. They won't
believe that _their_ homes and families aren't there, till they see with
their own eyes ... and when they do see.... I've heard that some of the
men in these first regiments that followed up the Boche retreat across
the devastated regions went crazy when they found their own villages ...
Nidart has just one idea in his head, poor devil!--to go straight before
him, like a homing pigeon, till ..." He stopped, his face darkening.
"Oh, damn the Boches!" the _fourrier_ finished the sentence fervently.
"You see, Nidart is a master-mason by trade, and he built their own
little house. He carries around a snapshot of it, with his wife and a
baby out in front."
"Oh, damn the Boches!" responded the _fourrier_ on a deeper note.
"And like all those village workmen, they got half their living out of
their garden and a field or two. And you've read what the Boches did to
the gardens and fruit-trees."
"Isn't there anything else we can talk about?" said the _fourrier_.
Nidart passed through Paris on his way (those being before the days of
strictly one-destination furloughs) and, extracting some very old bills
from the lining of his shoe, he spent the five hours between his trains
in hasty purchasing. At the hardware shop, where he bought an ax, a
hammer, some nails, and a saw, the saleswoman's vivacious curiosity got
the better of his taciturnity, and she screwed from him the information
that he was going back to his home in the devastated regions.
At once the group of Parisian working-people and bourgeois who happened
to be in the shop closed in on him sympathetically, commenting,
advising, dissuading, offering their opinions with that city-bred,
glib-tongued clatter which Nidart's country soul scorned and detested.
"No, no, my friend, it's useless to try to go back. The Germans have
made a desert of it. My cousin's wife has a relative who was in the
regiment that first followed the Germans after their retreat from Noyon,
and he said ..."
"The Government is going to issue a statement, saying that land will be
given in other parts of France to people from those regions, because
it's of no use to try to rebuild from under the ruins."
"No, not the Government, it's a society for the Protection of the People
in the Invaded Regions; and they are Americans, millionaires, every one.
And it's in America they are offering land, near New York."
"No, near Buenos Aires."
"The Americans want the regions left as a monument, as a place to see.
You'll make much more money as a guide to tourists than trying to ..."
"Your family won't be there, you know. The Boches took all the
able-bodied women back with them; and the children were sent to ..."
"_Give me my change, won't you!_" said Nidart with sudden fierceness, to
the saleswoman. He turned his back roughly on the chattering group and
went out. They shrugged their shoulders. "These country-people. Nothing
on earth for them but their little hole of a village!"
Down the street, Nidart, quickening to an angry stride his soldierly
gait, hurried along to a seed-store.
That evening when he got into the battered, dingy, third-class
compartment of the train going north, he could hardly be seen for the
innumerable packages slung about his person. He pulled out from one
bulging pocket a square piece of bread, from another a piece of cheese,
and proceeded to dine, bent forward with the weight of his burdens and
his thoughts, gazing out through the dirty windows at the flat farming
country jerking by him in the moonlight. It was so soon after the
retreat that the train went no further north than Noyon, and Nidart had
lived far beyond Noyon. About midnight, he rolled off the train,
readjusted his packages and his knapsack, and, after showing his
perfectly regular _sauf-conduit_ to five or six sentries along the way,
finally got out of town.
He found himself on the long, white road leading north. It was the road
down which they had driven once a week, on market-days. Of all the
double line of noble poplar-trees, not one was standing. The utterly
changed aspect of the familiar road startled him. Ahead of him as he
tramped rapidly forward, was what had been a cross-roads, now a gaping
hole. Nidart, used to gaping holes in roads, walked down into this, and
out on the other side. He was panting a little, but he walked forward
steadily and strongly....
The moon shone full on the place where the first village had stood, the
one where his married sister had lived, where he and his wife and the
children used to come for Sunday dinners once in a while. He stood
suddenly before a low, confused huddle of broken bricks and splintered
beams, and looked about him uncomprehending. The silence was intense. In
the instant before he understood what he was seeing, he heard and felt a
rapid vibration, his own heart knocking loudly. Then he understood.
A moment later, mechanically, he began to move about, clambering up and
down, aimlessly, over the heaps of rubble. Although he did not know it,
he was looking for the place where his sister's house had stood.
Presently his knees gave way under him. He sat down suddenly on a
tree-stump. The lopped-off trunk beside it showed it to have been an old
cherry-tree. Yes, his sister's big cherry-tree, the pride of her garden.
A long strip of paper, one end buried in a heap of bits of plaster,
fluttered in the night-wind. It beat against his leg like some one
calling feebly for help. The moon emerged from a cloud and showed it to
be a strip of wall-paper; he recognized the pattern; he had helped his
brother-in-law put it on the bedroom of the house. His sister's four
children had been born within the walls of that bedroom. He tried to fix
his mind on those children, not to think of any other children, not to
remember his own, not to ...
The paper beat insistently and rhythmically against his leg like a
recurrent thought of madness--he sprang up with the gesture of a man
terrified, and stumbling wildly among the formless ruins sought for the
road again.
He walked heavily after this, lifting his feet with an effort. Several
miles further, at the heap of debris which had been Falquieres, where
his wife's family had lived, he made a wide detour through the fields to
avoid passing closer to the ruins. At the next, Bondry, where he had
been born and brought up, he tried to turn aside, but against his will
his feet carried him straight to the center of the chaos. When the first
livid light of dawn showed him the two stumps of the big apple-trees
before the door, which his grandfather had planted, he stopped short. Of
the house, of the old walled garden, not a trace beyond the shapeless
heap of stones and plaster. He stood there a long time, staring
silently. The light gradually brightened, until across the level fields
a ray of yellow sunshine struck ironically through the prone branches of
the murdered trees upon the gray face of the man.