hanging, his shoulders bent, he followed the road which led like a white
tape laid straight across the plain, towards--towards ... The road had
been mined at regular intervals, deep and broad craters stretching
across it, enough to stop a convoy of camions, not enough to stop a
single soldier, even though he stumbled along so wearily, his cumbersome
packages beating against his legs and arms, even though he walked so
slowly, more and more slowly as he came in sight of the next heaped and
tumbled mound of debris. The sun rose higher....
Presently it shone, with April clarity, on Nidart lying, face downwards,
upon a heap of broken bricks.
For a long hour it showed nothing but that,--the ruins, the prostrate
trees, the man, like them stricken and laid low.
Then it showed, poor and miserable under that pale-gold light, a
wretched ant-like procession issuing from holes in the ground and
defiling slowly along the scarred road towards the ruins; women, a few
old men, a little band of pale and silent children. They approached the
ruins and dispersed. One of the women, leading three children, picked
her way wearily among the heaps of stone, the charred and twisted
beams ... stopped short, both hands at her heart.
And then the sun reeled in the sky to a sound which rang as strangely
from that silent desolation as a burst of song out of hell, scream after
scream of joy, ringing up to the very heavens, frantic, incredulous,
magnificent joy.
* * * * *
There they stood, the man and wife, clasped in each others' arms in the
ruins of their home, with red, swollen eyes, smiling with quivering
lips, silent. Now that the first wild cries had gone rocket-like to the
sky and fallen back in a torrent of tears, they had no words, no words
at all. They clasped each other and the children, and wept, constantly
wiping the tears from their white cheeks, to see each other. The two
older children, a little shy of this father whom they had almost
forgotten, drew away constrained, hanging their heads, looking up
bashfully under their bent brows. Nidart sat down on a heap of stone and
drew the little girl to him, stroking her hair. He tried to speak, but
no voice issued from his lips. His wife sat down beside him, laying her
head on his shoulder, spent with the excess of her relief. They were all
silent a long time, their hearts beginning to beat in the old rhythm, a
sweet, pale peace dropping down upon them.
After a time, the youngest child, cowering under the woman's skirts,
surprised at the long silence, thrust out a little pale face from his
shelter. The man looked down on him and smiled. "That's a Dupre," he
said in his normal voice, with conviction, all his village lore coming
back to him. "I know by the Dupre look of his nose. He looks the way my
cousin Jacques Dupre used to, when he was little."
These were the first articulate words spoken. With them, he turned his
back on the unfriendly, unknowable immensity of the world in which he
had lived, exiled, for three years, and returned into the close familiar
community of neighbors and kin where he had lived for thirty-four
years,--where he had lived for hundreds of years. The pulverized wreck
of this community lay all about him, but he opened its impalpable doors
and stepped once more into its warm humanity. He looked at the little
child whom he had never seen before and knew him for kin.
His wife nodded. "Yes, it's Louise and Jacques' baby. Louise was
expecting him, you know, when the mobilization ... he was born just
after Jacques went away, in August. We heard Jacques was killed ... we
have heard everything ... that Paris was taken, that London was
burned.... I have heard twice that you were killed. Louise believed it,
and never got out of bed at all after the baby came. She just turned
over and let herself die. I took the baby. Somebody had to. That's the
reason I'm here now. 'They' carried off all the women my age unless they
had children under three. They thought the baby was mine.'
"But Jacques isn't killed," said Nidart; "he's wounded, with one wooden
leg, frantic to see Louise and the baby...." He made a gesture of blame.
"Louise always was a fool! Anybody's a fool to give up!" He looked down
at the baby and held out his hand. "Come here, little Jeannot."
The child shrank away silently, burrowing deeper into his
foster-mother's skirts.
"He's afraid," she explained. "We've had to make the children afraid so
they would keep out of sight, and not break rules. There were so many
rules, so many to salute and to bow to, the children couldn't remember;
and when they forgot, they were so dreadfully cuffed, or their parents
fined such big fines...."
"_I_ never saluted!" said the boy of ten, wagging his head proudly. "You
have to have something on your head to salute, they won't let you do it
bareheaded. So I threw my cap in the fire."
"Yes, he's gone bareheaded since the first days, summer and winter, rain
and shine," said his mother.
"Here, Jean-Pierre," said his father, wrestling with one of his
packages, "I've got a hat for you. I've been saving it for you, lugged
it all over because I wanted my boy to have it." He extracted from its
brown canvas bag a German helmet with the spike, which he held out.
"And I've got something for my little Berthe, too." He fumbled in an
inner pocket. "I made it myself, near Verdun. The fellows all thought I
was crazy to work over it so, when I didn't know if I'd ever see my
little girl again; but I was pretty sure Maman would know how to take
care of you, all right." He drew out from a nest of soft rags a roughly
carved aluminum ring and slipped it on the child's forefinger.
As the children drew off a little, to compare and examine, their parents
looked into each other's eyes, the deep, united, serious look of man and
wife before a common problem.
"_Eh bien_, Paulette," said the man, "what shall we do? Give up? Move
away?"
"Oh, Pierre!" cried his wife. "You _wouldn't_?"
For answer, he shook himself free of his packages and began to undo
them, the ax, the hammer, the big package of nails, the saw, the trowel,
the paper bags of seeds, the pickax. He spread them out on the clutter
of broken bricks, plaster, splintered wood, and looked up at his wife.
"That's what I bought on the way here."
His wife nodded. "But have you had your breakfast? You'd better eat
something before you begin."
* * * * *
While he ate his bread and munched his cheese, she told him, speaking
with a tired dullness, something of what had happened during the years
of captivity. It came out just as she thought of it, without sequence,
one detail obscuring another. "There wasn't much left inside the house
when they finally blew it up. They'd been taking everything little by
little. No, they weren't bad to women; they were horrid and rough and
they stole everything they could, but they didn't mistreat us, only some
of the foolish girls. You know that good-for-nothing family of Boirats,
how they'd run after any man. Well, they took to going with the Boches;
but any decent woman that kept out of sight as much as she could, no, I
wasn't afraid of them much that way, unless they were drunk. Their
officers were awfully hard on them about everything--_hard_! They
treated them like dogs. _We were sorry for them sometimes._"
Yes, this ignorant woman, white and thin and ragged, sitting on the
wreck of her home, said this.
"Did you hear how they took every single thing in copper or
brass--Grandfather's candlesticks, the andirons, the handles of the
clothes-press, the door-knobs, and all, _every one_ of my saucepans and
kettles?" Her voice trembled at this item. "The summer after that, it
was everything in linen. I had just the chemise I had on my back ...
even what was on the clothes-line, drying, they took. The American
Committee distributed some cotton material and I made a couple for me
and Berthe, and some drawers for Jean-Pierre and the baby. That was when
we could still get thread. The winter after that, it was woolen they
took, everything, especially mattresses. Their officers made them get
every single mattress in town, except the straw ones. Alice Bernard's
mother, they jerked her mattress right out from under her, and left her
lying on the bed-ropes. And M. le Cure, he was sick with pneumonia and
they took his, that way, and he died. But the Boches didn't dare not to.
Their officers would have shot them if they hadn't."
"I can make beds for you," he said. "There must be trenches somewhere,
near,"--she nodded,--"they'll have left some wire-netting in an _abri_.
You make a square of wood, and put four legs to it, and stretch the
wire-netting over it and put straw on that. But we had some wire-netting
of our own that was around the chicken-yard."
"Oh, they took that," she explained,--"that, and the doors of the
chicken-house, and they pried off our window-cases and door-jambs and
carried those off the last days, too ... but there was one thing they
wouldn't do, no, not even the Boches, and that was _this_ dirty work!"
She waved her hand over the destruction about her, and pointed to the
trees across the road in the field, all felled accurately at the same
angle. "We couldn't understand much of what happened when they were
getting ready to leave, but some of them had learned enough French to
tell us they wouldn't 'do it'--we didn't know what. They told us they
would go away and different troops would come. And Georges Duvalet's boy
said they told _him_ that the troops who were to come to 'do it' were
criminals out of the prisons that the officers had let out if they would
'do it'--all this time we didn't know what, and somebody said it was to
pour oil on us and burn us, the way they did the people in the barn at
Vermadderville. But there wasn't anything we could do to prevent it. We
couldn't run away. So we stayed, and took care of the children. All the
men who could work at all and all the women too, unless they had very
little children, were marched away, off north, to Germany, with just
what few extra things they could put in a big handkerchief. Annette
Cagnon, she was eighteen, and had to go, but her mother stayed with the
younger children--her mother has been sort of crazy ever since. She had
such a long fainting turn when Annette went by, with a German soldier,
we thought we never could bring her to life...." The rough, tired voice
shook a moment, the woman rested her head again on her husband's arm,
holding to him tightly. "Pierre, oh Pierre, _if we had known what was to
come_,--no, we couldn't have lived through it, not any of us!" He put
his great, working-man's hand on her rough hair, gently.
She went on: "And then the troops who had been here did go away and the
others came, and they made the few of us who were left go down into the
cellars of those old houses down the road. They told us to stay there
three days, and if we went out before we'd get shot. We waited for two
whole days. The water they had given us was all gone, and then old
Granny Arnoux said she was all alone in the world, so it wouldn't make
any difference if she did get shot. She wanted to make sure that her
house was all right. You know what she thought of her house! So she came
up and we waited. And in half an hour we heard her crutches coming back
on the road, and she was shrieking out. We ran up to see. She had
fallen down in a heap. She hasn't known anything since; shakes all the
time as if she were in a chill. She was the first one; she was all
alone, when she saw what they had done ... and _you_ know ..."
Nidart turned very white, and stood up. "God! yes, I know! _I_ was
alone!"
"Since then, ten days ago, the French soldiers came through. We didn't
know them for sure, we were expecting to see the red trousers. I asked
everybody about you, but nobody knew. There are so _many_ soldiers in an
army. Then Americans came in cars and brought us bread, and blankets and
some shoes, but they have leather soles and I make the children keep
them for best, they wear out so. And since then the Government has let
the camions that go through to the front, leave bread and meat and once
a bag of potatoes for us. The prefet came around and asked if we wanted
to be sent to a refugee home in Paris or stay here, and of course I said
stay here. The children and I have come every day to work. We've got the
plaster and bricks cleared out from the corner of the fireplace, and I
cook there, though there isn't any chimney of course, but I think the
tiles of the kitchen floor are mostly all there still. And oh, Pierre,
we have one corner of the garden almost cleared, _and the asparagus is
coming up_! Come and see! They cut down everything they could see, even
the lilac bushes, but what was in the ground, alive, they couldn't
kill."
Nidart put the shovel in his wife's hand, and took up the pickax. "Time
spent in traveling isn't counted on furloughs," he said, "so we have
twenty-one days, counting to-day. The garden first, so's to get in the
seeds."
They clambered over the infernal disorder of the ruins of the house, and
picked their way down and back into what had been the garden. A few
sections of the wall were still standing, its thick solidity resisting
even dynamite petards.
"Oh, see, almost all of the pleached trees are saved!" cried Nidart,
astonished, "that part of the wall didn't fall."
"I'm not sure I pruned those right," said his wife doubtfully, glancing
at them. "I couldn't remember whether you left two or four buds on the
peaches, and I just gave up on the big grapevine. It grew so, it got all
ahead of me!"
"Did they bear well?" asked the man, looking across the trash heap at
the well-remembered trees and vines. "We'd better leave those till some
odd time, they won't need much care. I can do them between other things
some time when I'm too tired to do anything else. Here is where the big
job is." He looked the ground over with a calculating eye and announced
his plan of campaign.
"We won't try to carry the rubbish out. It's too heavy for you, and my
time has got to go as far as it can for the important things. We'll just
pile it all up in a line along the line where the walls used to stand.
All of us know that line! I'll use the pickax, and Maman the shovel.
Jean-Pierre will throw the bigger pieces over on the line, and Berthe
will go after and pick up the littler ones."
They set to work, silently, intensely. When they reached the
currant-bushes, all laid low, Pierre gave a growl of wrath and scorn,
but none of them slackened their efforts. About eleven the big convoy of
camions on the way to the front came through, lurching along the
improvised road laid out across the fields. The workers, lifting their
eyes for the first time from their labors, saw at a distance on the main
road the advance guard of the road-menders already there, elderly
soldiers, gray-haired territorials, with rakes and shovels, and back of
them, shuttle-like, the big trucks with road-metal coming and going.
Reluctantly leaving her work, Paulette went to get the supplies for
dinner, and started an open-air fire in the cleared-out corner of the
chimney. Over this she hung a big pot, and leaving it to boil she
hurried back to her shovel. "The soup-kettle and the flat-irons," she
told her husband, "they were too hard to break and too heavy to carry
away, and they are about all that's left of what was in the house."
"No, I found an iron fork," said Berthe, "but it was all twisted.
Jean-Pierre said he thought he could ..."
"Don't talk," said their father firmly,--"you don't work so fast when
you talk."
At noon they went back to the fire burning under the open sky, in the
blackened corner of the fireplace where it had cooked the food during
the years past. The man looked at it strangely, and turned his eyes
away.
"Now where is your fork, little Berthe?" he said. "I'll straighten it
for you. With that and my kit ..."
"I have my jackknife too," said Jean-Pierre.
They ate thus, dipping up the stew in the soldier's _gamelle_, using his
knife and fork and spoon and the straightened iron fork. The baby was
fed on bread soaked in the gravy, and on bits of potato given him from
the end of a whittled stick. In the twenty minutes' rest which their
captain allowed the little force after the meal, he and Jean-Pierre
whittled out two wooden forks, two-tined, from willow twigs. "That's one
apiece now," said Nidart, "and the asparagus bed is all cleared off. We
have made a beginning."
They went back to work, stooping, straining, heaving, blinded with the
flying plaster, wounded with the sharp edges of the shattered stones.
The sun shone down on them with heavenly friendliness, the light,
sparkling air lifted the hair from their hot foreheads. After a time,
Nidart, stopping for an instant to wipe away the sweat which ran down
into his eyes, said: "The air has a different feel to it here. And the
sun looks different. It _looks_ like home."
At four they stopped to munch the piece of bread which is the
supplementary meal of French working-people at that hour. Nidart
embellished it with a slice of cheese for each, which made the meal a
feast. They talked as they ate; they began to try to bridge over the
gap between them. But they lacked words to tell what lay back of them;
only the dry facts came out.
"Yes, I've been wounded, there's a place on my thigh, here, put your
hand and feel, where there isn't any flesh over the bone, just skin. It
doesn't bother me much, except when I try to climb a ladder. Something
about that position I can't manage ... and for a mason ..."
"I'll climb the ladders," said Jean-Pierre.
"Yes, I was pretty sick. It got gangrene some. They thought I wouldn't
live. I was first in a big hospital near the front, and then in a
convalescent hospital in Paris. It was awfully dull when I got better.
They thought if I had made an application to be _reforme_ and retired I
could be like Jacques Dupre with his wooden leg. But with you and the
children here ... what could I have done with myself? So I didn't say
anything, and when my time was up in the hospital I went back to the
trenches. That was a year ago last winter."
"Berthe and Jean-Pierre had the mumps that winter," said their mother.
"The baby didn't get it. I kept him away from them. The Boches shut us
up as though we had the smallpox. They were terribly strict about any
sickness. The Boche regimental doctor came every day. He took very good
care of them."
"He wanted to give me a doll because I didn't cry when he looked in my
throat," said Berthe.
"Of course she didn't take it," said Jean-Pierre. "I told her I'd break
it all to pieces if she did."
"But she cried afterwards."
"Come," said the father, "we've finished our bread. Back to work."
* * * * *
That night, after the children were asleep on straw in the cellar down
the road, their parents came back to wander about in the moonlight over
their ravaged little kingdom. The wife said little, drawing her breath
irregularly, keeping a strained grasp on her husband's arm. For the most
part he succeeded in speaking in a steady voice of material plans for
the future,--how he could get some galvanized roofing out of the nearest
trench _abri_; how he could use the trunks of the felled trees to
strengthen his hastily constructed brick walls, and for roof-beams; what
they could plant in the garden and the field--things which she and the
children could cultivate after he had gone back.
At this reminder of the inevitable farewell again before them, the wife
broke out in loud wailings, shivering, clutching at him wildly. He drew
her down on a pile of rubbish, put his arms around her, and said in a
peremptory tone: "Paulette! Listen! _You are letting the Boches beat
you!_" He used to her the tone he used for his squad, his new soldier's
voice which the war had taught him, the tone which carried the laggards
up over the top. At the steel-like ring of it his wife was silent.
He went on: "There's nothing any of us _can_ do but to go on. The only
thing to do is to go on without making a fuss. That's the motto in the
army, you know. Don't make a fuss." He lifted his head and looked
around at his home dismantled, annihilated. "_Not to give up_,--that and
the flat-irons are about all the Boches have left us, don't you see?"
He was silent a moment and went on with his constructive planning.
"Perhaps I can get enough lime sent on from Noyon to really rebuild the
chimney. With that, and a roof, and the garden, and the allocation from
the Government ..."
"Yes, Pierre," said his wife in a trembling voice. She did not weep
again.
He himself, however, was not always at this pitch of stoicism. There
were times when he looked up suddenly and felt, as though for the first
time, the downfall and destruction of all that had been his life. At
such moments the wind of madness blew near him. The night after they had
moved from the cellar into the half-roofed, half-walled hut, to sleep
there on the makeshift beds, he lay all night awake, crushed with the
immensity of the effort they would need to put forth and with the
insignificance of any progress made. There came before him the long
catalogue of what they had lost, the little decencies and comforts they
had earned and paid for and owned. He sickened at the squalid expedients
of their present life. They were living like savages; never again would
they attain the self-respecting order which had been ravished from them,
which the ravishers still enjoyed. With all his conscious self he longed
to give up he struggle, but something more than his conscious self was
at work. The tree had been cut down, but something was in the ground,
alive.
At dawn he found himself getting out of bed, purposefully. To his wife's
question he answered: "I'm going to Noyon to buy the seed for the field.
We haven't half enough corn. And I can get young cabbage plants there,
too, they say. I can make it in six hours if I hurry."
He was back by ten o'clock, exhausted, but aroused from his waking
nightmare--for that time! But it came again and again.
On the day he began to spade up the field he noticed that two of his
murdered fruit-trees, attached by a rag of bark to the stumps, were
breaking out into leaf. The sight turned him sick with sorrow, as though
one of his children had smiled at him from her deathbed. He bent over
the tree, his eyes burning, and saw that all the buds were opening
trustfully. His heart was suffocating. He said to himself: "They have
been killed! They are dead! But they do not know they are dead, and they
try to go on living. _Are we like that?_"
In an instant all his efforts to reanimate his assassinated life seemed
pitiful, childish, doomed to failure. He looked across the field at the
shapeless, roughly laid brick wall he had begun, and felt a shamed rage.
He was half-minded to rush and kick it down.
"Papa, come! The peonies have begun to come up in the night. The whole
row of them, where we were raking yesterday."
The man found his wife already there, bending over the sturdy, reddish,
rounded sprouts pushing strongly through the loosened earth. She looked
up at him with shining eyes. When they were betrothed lovers, they had
together planted those peonies, pieces of old roots from her mother's
garden. "You see," she said again; "I told you what was in the ground
alive they couldn't kill!"
The man went back to his spading silently, and, as he labored there, a
breath of sovereign healing came up to him from that soil which was his.
The burning in his eyes, the taste of gall in his mouth, he had
forgotten when, two hours later, he called across to his wife that the
ground for the beans was all spaded and that she and Jean-Pierre could
come now with their rakes, while he went back to building the
house-wall.
But that quick scorching passage through fire was nothing compared with
the hour which waited for him in his garden beside the wall on which the
branches of his pleached trees and vines still spread out their
carefully symmetrical patterns. He had put off caring for them till some
odd moment. He and his wife, glancing at them from time to time, had
made estimates of the amount of fruit they would yield, "and for us this
time--we haven't had a single peach or apple from them. The Boche
officers sent their soldiers to get them always."
"Queer they should have left those unharmed," said his wife once, and he
had answered: "Perhaps the man they sent to kill them was a gardener
like us. I know I couldn't cut down a fruit-tree in full bearing, not if
it were in hell and belonged to the Kaiser. Anybody who's ever grown
things knows what it is!"
* * * * *