in the only half-constructed chimney. Paulette crouched beside it,
blowing with all her might, and thinking of the big leathern bellows
which had been carried away to Germany with all the rest. Jean-Pierre
shaved off bits from a dry stick and Berthe fed them under the pot, but
the flame would not brighten. Pierre, coming down, cold and hungry, from
the top of the wall where he had been struggling with a section of roof,
felt physically incapable of going on with that work until he had eaten,
and decided to use the spare half-hour for pruning the pleached trees
and vines. Almost at the end of his strength after the long-continued
strained effort to accomplish the utmost in every moment and every hour,
he shivered from the cold of his wet garments as he stood for a moment,
fumbling to reach the pruning-shears. But he did not give himself the
time to warm his hands at the fire, setting out directly again into the
rain. He had been working at top speed ever since the breakfast, six
hours before, of black coffee and dry bread.
Sodden with fatigue and a little light-headed from lack of food, he
walked along the wall and picked out the grapevine as the least tiring
to begin on. He knew it so well he could have pruned it in the dark. He
had planted it the year before his marriage, when he had been building
the house and beginning the garden. It had not been an especially fine
specimen, but something about the situation and the soil had exactly
suited it, and it had thriven miraculously. Every spring, with the first
approach of warm weather, he had walked out, in the evening after his
day's work, along the wall to catch the first red bud springing
amazingly to life out of the brown, woody stems which looked so dead.
During the summers as he had sprayed the leaves, and manured the soil
and watered the roots and lifted with an appraising hand the great
purple clusters, heavier day by day, he had come to know every turn of
every branch. In the trenches, during the long periods of silent
inaction, when the men stare before them at sights from their past
lives, sometimes Nidart had looked back at his wife and children,
sometimes at his garden on an early morning in June, sometimes at his
family about the dinner-table in the evening, and sometimes at his great
grapevine, breaking into bud in the spring, or, all luxuriant curving
lines, rich with leafage, green and purple in the splendor of its
September maturity.
It was another home-coming to approach it now, and his sunken, bloodshot
eyes found rest and comfort in dwelling on its well-remembered
articulations. He noticed that the days of sunshine, and now the soft
spring rain, had started it into budding. He laid his hand on the tough,
knotted, fibrous brown stem.
It stirred oddly, with a disquieting lightness in his hand. The
sensation was almost as though one of his own bones turned gratingly on
nothing. The sweat broke out on his forehead. He knelt down and took
hold of the stem lower down. The weight of his hand displaced it. It
swung free. It had been severed from the root by a fine saw. The sap was
oozing from the stump.
The man knelt there in the rain, staring at this, as though he were
paralyzed. He did not know what he was looking at, for a moment,
conscious of nothing but a cold sickness. He got up heavily to his feet,
then, and made his way to the next vine. Its stem gave way also,
swinging loose with the horrible limpness of a broken limb.
He went to the next, a peach-tree, and to the next, a fine pleached
pear. Everything, everything, peach-trees, apple-trees, grapevines,
everything had been neatly and dextrously murdered, and their corpses
left hanging on the wall as a practical joke.
The man who had been sent to do that had been a gardener indeed, and had
known where to strike to reach the very heart of this other gardener who
now, his hands over his face, staggered forward and leaned his body
against the wall, against the dead vine which had been so harmless, so
alive. He felt something like an inward bleeding, as though that neat,
fine saw had severed an artery in his own body.
His wife stepped out in the rain and called him. He heard nothing but
the fine, thin voice of a small saw, eating its way to the heart of
living wood.
His wife seeing him stand so still, his face against the wall, came out
towards him with an anxious face. "Pierre, Pierre!" she said. She looked
down, saw the severed vine-stem and gave a cry of dismay. "Pierre, they
haven't ... they haven't...!"
She ran along the wall, touching them one by one, all the well-known,
carefully tended stems. Her anger, her sorrow, her disgust burst from
her in a flood of out-cries, of storming, furious words.
Her husband did not move. A deathlike cold crept over him. He heard
nothing but the venomous, fine voice of the saw, cutting one by one the
tissues which had taken so long to grow, which had needed so much sun
and rain and heat and cold, and twelve years out of a man's life. He was
sick, sick of it all, mourning not for the lost trees but for his lost
idea of life. That was what people were like, could be like, what one
man could do in cold blood to another--no heat of battle here, no
delirium of excitement, cold, calculated intention! He would give up the
effort to resist, to go on. The killing had been too thoroughly done.
His wife fell silent, frightened by his stillness. She forgot her own
anger, her grief, she forgot the dead trees. They were as nothing. A
strong, valiant tenderness came into her haggard face. She went up to
him, close, stepping into his silent misery with the secure confidence
only a wife can have in a husband. "Come, Pierre," she said gently,
putting her red, work-scarred hand in his. She drew him away from the
wall, his arms hanging listlessly. She drew him into the sheltered
corner of the room he had half finished. She set hot food before him and
made him eat and drink.
The rain poured down in a gray wall close before them. The heaped-up
ruins were all around them. Inside the shelter the children ate
greedily, heartily, talking, laughing, quarreling, playing. The fire,
now thoroughly ablaze, flamed brightly beside them. The kettle steamed.
After a time Nidart's body began slowly to warm. He began to hear the
children's voices, to see his wife dimly. The horror was an hour behind
him. The blessed, blurring passage of the moments clouded thick between
him and the sound of that neat small saw, the sight of that deft-handed
man, coolly and smilingly murdering ...
He looked at his wife attentively, as she tried to set in order their
little corner saved from chaos. She was putting back on the two shelves
he had made her the wooden forks and spoons which she had cleaned to a
scrupulous whiteness; she was arranging neatly the wretched outfit of
tin cans, receptacles, and formless paper packages which replaced the
shining completeness of her lost kitchen; she was smoothing out the
blankets on their rough camp-beds; she was washing the faces and hands
of the children, of their own children and the little foster-son, the
child of the woman who had given up, who had let herself be beaten, who
had let herself be killed, who had abandoned her baby to be cared for by
another, braver woman.
A shamed courage began slowly to filter back into his drained and
emptied heart. With an immense effort he got up from the tree-stump
which served for chair and went towards his wife, who was kneeling
before the little child she had saved. He would begin again.
"Paulette," he said heavily, "I believe that if we could get some
grafting wax at once, we might save those. Why couldn't we cover the
stumps with wax to keep the roots from bleeding to death, till the tops
make real buds, and then graft them on to the stumps? It's too late to
do it properly with dormant scions, but perhaps we might succeed. It
would be quicker than starting all over again. The roots are there,
still."
He raged as he thought of this poor substitute for his splendid trees,
but he set his teeth. "I could go to Noyon. They must have wax and resin
there in the shops by this time, enough for those few stumps."
The little boy presented himself imploringly. "Oh, let me go! I could do
it, all right. And you could get on faster with the roof. There aren't
but ten days left, now."
He set off in the rain, a small brave spot of energy in the midst of
death. His father went back to his house-building.
The roads were mended now, the convoys of camions rumbled along day
after day, raising clouds of dust; staff-cars flashed by; once in a
while a non-militarized automobile came through, sometimes with
officials of the Government on inspection tours, who distributed
miscellaneous lots of seeds, and once brought Paulette some lengths of
cotton stuff for sheets; sometimes with reporters from the Paris
newspapers; once with some American reporters who took photographs, and
gave some bars of chocolate to the children. Several times people
stopped, foreigners, Americans, English, sometimes women in uniforms,
who asked a great many questions and noted down the answers. Pierre
wondered why those able-bodied young men were not in some army. He had
thought all the able-bodied men in the world were in some army.
For the most part he found all these people rather futile and
uninteresting, as he had always found city people, and paid little
attention to them, never interrupting his work to talk to them, his
work, his sacred work, for which there remained, only too well known, a
small and smaller number of hours. He took to laboring at night whenever
possible.
* * * * *
The roof was all on the one tiny room before the date for his return.
The chimney was rebuilt, the garden spaded, raked, and planted. But the
field was not finished. It takes a long time to spade up a whole field.
Pierre worked on it late at night, the moonlight permitting. When his
wife came out to protest, he told her that it was no harder than to
march all night, with knapsack and blanket-roll and gun. She took up
the rake and began to work beside him. Under their tan they were both
very white and drawn, during these last days.
The day before the last came, and they worked all day in the field,
never lifting their eyes from the soil. But their task was not finished
when night came. Pierre had never been so exacting about the condition
of the ground. It must be fine, fine, without a single clod left to
impede the growth of a single precious seed. This was not work which,
like spading, could be done at night in an uncertain light. When their
eyes, straining through the thickening twilight, could no longer
distinguish the lumps of earth, he gave it up, with a long breath, and,
his rake on his shoulder, little Berthe's hand in his, he crossed the
mended road to the uncomely little shelter which was home.
Paulette was bending over the fire. She looked up, and he saw that she
had been crying. But she said nothing. Nor did he, going to lean his
rake against the reconstructed wall. He relinquished the implement
reluctantly, and all through the meal kept the feel of it in his hand.
They were awake when the first glimmer of gray dawn shone through the
empty square which was their window. Pierre dressed hurriedly and taking
his rake went across the road to the field. Paulette blew alive the
coals of last night's fire, and made coffee and carried it across to her
husband with a lump of bread. He stopped work to drink and eat. It was
in the hour before the sunrise. A gray, thin mist clung to the earth.
Through it they looked at each other's pale faces, soberly.
"You must get the seed in as soon as you can, after I'm gone," said the
husband.
"Yes," she promised, "we won't lose a minute."
"And I think you and Jean-Pierre can manage to nail in the window-frame
when it comes. I thought I'd be able to do that myself."
"Yes, Jean-Pierre and I can do it."
"You'd better get my kit and everything ready for me to leave," he said,
drinking the last of the coffee and setting his hand again to the rake.
They had reckoned that he would need to leave the house at ten o'clock
if he were to make the long tramp to Noyon in time for the train. At a
quarter of ten he stopped, and, the rake still tightly held in his hand,
crossed the road. His knapsack, blanket-roll, all the various brown bags
and _musettes_ were waiting for him on the bench hewn from a tree-trunk
before the door. He passed them, went around the little hut, and stepped
into the garden.
Between the heaped-up lines of rubble, the big rectangle of well-tilled
earth lay clean and brown and level. And on it, up and down, were four,
long, straight lines of pale green. The peas were up. He was to see that
before he went back.
He stooped over them. Some of them were still bowed double with the
effort of thrusting themselves up against the encumbering earth. He
felt their effort in the muscles of his own back. But others, only a few
hours older, were already straightening themselves blithely to reach up
to the sun and warmth. This also he felt--in his heart. Under the intent
gaze of the gardener, the vigorous little plants seemed to be vibrating
with life. His eyes were filled with it. He turned away and went back to
the open door of the hut. His wife, very pale, stood there, silent. He
heaved up his knapsack, adjusted his blanket-roll and _musettes_, and
drew a long breath.
"Good-bye, Paulette," he said, kissing her on both cheeks, the dreadful
long kiss which may be the last.
"I will--I will take care of things here," she said, her voice dying
away in her throat.
He kissed his children, he stooped low to kiss the little foster-child.
He looked once more across at the field, not yet seeded. Then he started
back to the trenches.
* * * * *
He had gone but a few steps when he stopped short and came back
hurriedly. The rake was still in his hand. He had forgotten his gun.
VIGNETTES FROM LIFE AT THE REAR
I
I was tucking the children into bed after their bath, my rosy, romping,
noisy children, when "le soldat Deschamps" was announced. Deschamps is
the man from the north of France, who had been a coal-miner before the
war, the man whose wife and little boy are still "up there," the man who
has not seen his family since he kissed them the fourth of August three
years ago.
A veil seemed to drop between me and the faces of my rosy, romping,
noisy children....
I went slowly along the hall to our living-room. Yes there he was, poor
Deschamps, the big, powerfully built fellow, a little thinner, a little
more gaunt, a little whiter than when I had seen him last, although that
was only a week ago. He rose up, very tall in his worn gray-blue
uniform, not so neatly brushed as it had been, and put out a flaccid
hand. "Bonsoir, madame ... excuse me for coming again so soon. I know I
ought not to take your time. But when we are allowed to go out ... where
shall I go? I know so few people in Paris" ... as though one would not
be willing to give time when there is so tragically nothing else to give
him!
I say something cordial, take up my sewing, and settle myself for what I
know is coming. Poor Deschamps! He needs only a word or two of sympathy
when out he pours it all in a rush, the heartsick desolation of the
uprooted exile, the disintegrating misery of the home-loving man without
a home. Of late, alas! it does not come out very coherently. "You see,
madame, we were so well off there. What could a man ask for more? My day
in the mine began at four in the morning, but I was free at two in the
afternoon, and I am very strong, as you see, so that I could go on
working out of doors as long as the daylight lasted. We had our own
house paid for, our own! And a big, big garden. I earned ten francs a
day cash in the mines, and we almost lived out of our garden, so we were
saving all the time. Our boy was to have a good schooling. Perhaps, we
thought, he might be like Pasteur. You know his father was a simple
tanner. My wife never had to work for others, never! She could stay
there and have everything clean and pleasant and take care of the boy.
We were so happy and always well.... We both worked in the garden, and
people who garden are never sick. And always contented. And our
garden ... you ought to see it ... all the potatoes we could eat I raised
there, and early ones too! And all the cabbages and some to sell. The
coal company sold us cheap all the manure we wanted from their stables,
and I could make the land as rich, as rich! Such early vegetables!
Better than any you can buy in the towns. And the winter ones ... you
should see how we protect our cabbages in the winter...."
The monologue has carried the big fellow out of his chair now. He is
grasping an imaginary spade, a heap of imaginary cabbages by his side.
"So ... we sprinkle sand first, and then cabbages all laid so ... you
understand...." The voice goes on and on, almost the voice of a person
hypnotized.
I lose my perception of what he is saying as I gaze at his sunken eyes
fixed on homely, much-loved scenes I cannot see.
"The best place for the carrots was the sloping bit of ground near the
big oak...." He sees it, his big oak, there before him. He makes me see
it, and what it meant to him. This was the man whom the twentieth
century forced to march away, to kill, and be killed.
"... And little Raoul used to help; yes, with his little hands he would
pat down the sand and laugh to see his finger-marks."
The voice stops abruptly. In the resultant silence I move uneasily.... I
find Deschamps' talk heartbreaking enough, but his silences terrify me.
I try to arouse him from his bleak brooding reverie....
"You had hares too, didn't you, and hens, and a pig...? That must have
helped out with the living."
He comes to himself with a start. "Oh, it was my wife who kept the
animals. She has such a hand for making them thrive. They were like her
other children. Those little chicks, they never died, always prospered,
grew so fat. We always had one or two to sell when she went to town to
market. Angele used to dress them herself, so that we could have the
feathers. Then she put them in one of the neat baskets she made from the
willow sprouts on the side of our little stream, with a clean white
cloth over them, as clean as her neckerchief. Angele is as neat as a
nun, always. Our house shone with cleanness ..." He breaks off abruptly.
"I have shown you the photograph of Angele and Raoul, haven't I,
madame?"
I hold out my hand and gaze again, as I have so many times before, into
the quiet eyes of the young peasant woman with the sturdy little boy at
her side. "She is very pretty, your wife," I say, "and your little boy
looks so strong and vigorous."
"I hear," he said with a great heave of his broad chest, now so sunken,
"that the Boches have taken all the livestock away from the owners, all
the hens and pigs and hares, and sent them to Germany. Perhaps Raoul and
Angele have not enough to eat ... perhaps there is even no house there
now ... a cousin of mine saw a refugee from his own region ... who had
seen the place where his house had been!... it had been shelled, there
was ..." His mouth sets hard in an angry line of horror.
I bestir myself. This is the sort of talk Deschamps must not be allowed.
"M. Deschamps," I say, "I shall be writing soon to that group of
American friends who gave the money for your articulated arm. Have you
any message to send them? I think they are planning to send some more
money to help you...."
He waves it away with a great gesture. "Money can't do anything for me,"
he says bitterly, adding quickly: "Not of course that I am not very,
very grateful for the so-costly artificial arm. It means I can earn
their living again, if ever Angele...."
I break in once more: "But I promised them a statement of all your case,
you know, the dates and places and everything. Could you just run over
them again...?"
But I do not listen as he goes wearily over the old story as familiar to
me now as to him: mobilized the first day, was in the Battle of the
Marne, advanced to B----, was wounded there in the leg, taken to a
hospital in an American ambulance, cured, returned to the trenches;
wounded in the shoulder, taken to the hospital, cured, returned to the
trenches ... all this time with no news whatever from his family,
knowing that his region was occupied by the invaders, hearing stories of
how the women and children were treated.... Fought during the winter of
1914-15, wounded in three places in June, 1915, taken to the hospital
where his arm was amputated. While there, heard indirectly that his wife
and child were still alive. As soon as the articulated arm (paid for out
of my blessed fund of American money) allowed him to work, he had begun
to learn the tinner's trade, since a one-armed man could no longer be a
miner. Now he had passed his apprenticeship and could soon be ready to
earn his living.
I knew all this laborious, heroic, commonplace story already, and looked
through it at the hospital pallor on the haggard face, at the dreadful
soft whiteness of the hands so obviously meant to be hard and brown, at
the slack looseness of the great frame, at a man on the point of losing
his desire to live....
"What use is it to earn money when not a cent can I send to them up
there, when I can hear nothing from Angele beyond that line on a
post-card once in three months? Madame, you have education, _why_ will
they not allow a wife to write to her husband?"
I have only the old answer to the old question: "We suppose they are
afraid of spies, of people sending information to France."
"But why do they _keep_ Angele there? Why don't they let women go to
their husbands? What harm can that do? Why do they make it a hell on
earth for them and then refuse to let them go?"
I had for this only the usual murmur: "A few _are_ allowed to come
away."
He struck his hands together. "So few! When they last said they would
allow some women and children to come to France, only a fifteenth part
of those who asked for leave were allowed to come. Why? Why? What has
Angele to do with the war?"
He gets up for the restless pacing about our little living-room which
always ends his visits. "I think I shall go mad, madame. I am there in
the hospital, two hundred of us in one great room ... oh, they are kind
enough to us, we have enough to eat. But we are not children. It is not
enough to have food and a roof. Two hundred men there ... what a
life ... for fourteen months! Nothing to work for, nothing to live for,
no home, no family, not even a chance to go back to the trenches. The
other men drink as much as they can get money for. I never drank in my
life. Madame, do you suppose it would make me sleep to drink?"
"See here, M. Deschamps," I say, moving to my desk, "I will write again
to the Spanish Embassy. I will tell them again about Angele and Raoul,
they will send the request to the German authorities in your town ...
perhaps _this_ time ..." It is a perilous stimulant to administer to a
sick heart, but what other have I? So I sit, swallowing the lump in my
throat, and once more make out the application which never has any
result.
"There," I say, putting it into an envelope with hands that are not very
steady--"there, my friend, you mail that. And now you must go, or the
night-nurse will scold you for being late."
He reaches for his cap, his old shabby cap with the bullet hole through
it, and stands fumbling with it, his head hanging. He towers above me,
gaunt, powerful, as pitiably defenseless as any little child. I wink
back the tears which threaten to come, shake his hand hard, and tell him
to be sure to come again the next time he has the "_cafard_". He nods
absently and shuffles to the door. "You will pardon me, madame ... but
when I think that my little Raoul has perhaps not enough to eat, and I
am not ..."
He has gone his lonely way to the hospital bed which is all he has for
home. I go back to the cool dark bedroom and look down at my sleeping
children.
There is no reason for it ... why should I feel guilty to see them rosy
and safe?
II