she were giving a preliminary explanation to a class at the beginning
of a school-year, “Now let us understand clearly what is happening to
us, so that we can defend ourselves against it. What is it that is
being done to us? An attempt is being made to break us down, physically
and morally. But these people around us here are not the ones who wish
this; they are not as intelligent as we; and they haven’t half the
personal incentive to accomplish it, that we have to prevent it. We
have a thousand resources of ingenuity that they can’t touch at all.
“We must begin by economizing every atom possible of our strength,
moral and physical. And we can start on that right now by not wasting
any more strength hating our guards as we have all been hating the
Germans who have had to touch us, so far. We can think of them as
demons and infernal forces of evil and make them into horrors that will
shadow our every thought. Or we can look straight at them to see what
they are, and disregard them, just leave them out of our moral lives,
when we see that they are ordinary men, for the most part coarse and
common men, and now forced to be abnormal, forced by others into a
situation that develops every germ of brutality in them.”
At this, young Mme. Baudoin spoke out and told of the German guard who
had wept when her little boy was dragged away; and, “I’d rather be in
my shoes than his,” cried Octavie vigorously.
“So then we sweep them out of our world,” she went on, “and that leaves
the decks cleared for real action. I should say,” she went on with a
change of manner, including in one wide humorous glance her own dirty
hands, the tangled hair of the others, and the grease and grime of the
room, “that the next thing is to organize ourselves to get clean! It’s
plain only a few of us can do it at a time; let’s draw lots to see who
begins, and the others can lie down while they wait. Is there anybody
here who speaks German enough to ask for soap and water? I see the
broom here at hand.” A good many of the women proved to have studied
German at school, and three of them spoke it. But this did not carry
them far. The guards laughed at the idea of soap--nobody in Germany had
had soap for months--prisoners were not given such luxuries as towels,
and as for water, the tap was down the hall, and the pail was there,
and they could carry it for themselves. Besides there was water in the
kettle on the stove.
There and then they began their campaign. Lots were drawn, a certain
number of tired women collapsed into the bunks to wait, while Octavie
organized the others into squads, some to carry water; some to arrange
a bathing-place in a corner of the room by hanging up their cloaks on
strings stretched from nails; some to sweep out the worst of the dusty
litter on the floor.
There was order and purpose in the air. The first woman who emerged
from behind the curtain of cloaks, bathed, fresh linen next her clean
skin (for they had been allowed to bring one change of linen in their
little packages), her hair in order, was like a being from another
world, the world they had left. Self-respect came back to the others,
as they looked at her.
By night every woman was clean, had arranged her small belongings in
her own bunk, and had washed out and hung up the body-linen which
she had worn on the trip. One empty bunk had been set aside as the
pharmacy, and all their little stock of medicine gathered there;
another was the library, where a half-dozen books stood side by side;
and a third was the storeroom for miscellaneous goods, the extra
bars of soap they had brought from home, a little chocolate, thread,
needles, scissors, and the like, communistically put together to be
used for whatever proved to be the greatest need. They had taken stock
of their material resources and agreed to share them. They had eaten
what they could of the coarse, unpalatable food brought to them in the
evening, and now sat on the long bench and on the floor, trying to plan
out the struggle before them, the struggle to construct an endurable
life out of the materials at hand. Octavie was saying, “Everything in
order! That is the French way to go at things; classify them and take
them up one by one. What are we? Bodies and minds; both equally in
danger. Now, the body first. We must have exercise out of doors, more
than we’re used to at home, if we are to digest this awful food. They
say we’re to be allowed out an hour a day, but that is not enough. We
must open the windows once an hour and do something active in here. Any
volunteers to show us gymnastic exercises? Anybody who remembers them
from school days? I don’t know one.”
Yes, there were several, and one whose sister was a woman doctor
using curative gymnastics. The meeting voted to make them an athletic
committee, to organize such activities.
“Now, our digestions. You know how all prisoners in Germany have always
come home with ruined digestions. Is there anything we can do here? Is
there anybody here experienced in cooking who could guess at the raw
materials in that fearful mess we’ve just finished, and does she think
it might be cooked more intelligently so that it would be better? It
stands to reason that the prison cooks would naturally be incompetent,
and indifferent to their results. Could we do better ourselves? It also
stands to reason that we’d be allowed to, because it would mean less
work for the prison kitchens.” A group of housewives was appointed to
consider this, next day.
“Now, as to cleanliness. Any suggestions about how to get along with
no soap? We don’t dare use soap on the floor, we have so little, but
heaven knows it needs it!” All the practical housekeepers spoke at once
now, crying out upon her lack of ingenuity in not thinking of sand.
That sandy path outside the barracks, that would do excellently well as
an abrasive. With plenty of water and energy, sand and some bricks for
rubbing, everything in the room could be cleaned. As they spoke, their
faces brightened at the prospect of having cleanliness about them, and
of being active once more.
“Anything more for the body?” asked Octavie. “If we keep it exercised
and clean, and as well-fed as we can manage it, it ought to last us.
Now for the mind. We’re going to have hours and hours of leisure time
such as we busy women never had before. It’s the chance of our lives to
go on with our education. Let’s share each of us with the other, what
we have in our minds. I’ll begin. I have chemistry thoroughly, economic
history fairly, and the general theory of physics. I’ll give a course
of lectures on those. Who can do something else?”
They were all appalled at this and protested that she was the only one
who had any information to impart; but she scouted the idea and began
a relentless person-to-person inquiry. The result was that a group
of musicians were organized, under the guidance of the music teacher,
to give lectures on the history of music, the lives and works of the
composers, church music, ballads, songs, and operas. Three other women
who had brought up great families were to dive deep into their memories
and lecture to the others, as logically, coherently, and rationally as
they could on proper care for children. A shy, thin, drab-colored woman
was found to have been brought up in Indo-China, and was to lecture
on the life and education of that country. The German-speaking ones
were to give a course in German. Another, the daughter of a well-known
professor of French literature, was to assemble and arrange what she
knew, and be prepared to plan and lead literary discussions. Another,
the distinguished founder and former head of the best hospital in
Tourciennes, would lecture on the care of the sick--and so on. From
one, from another, from them all, Octavie drew potential treasures of
experience and information which lay almost visibly shimmering in a
great heap before them--“Enough,” she cried triumphantly, “to last us
for years!”
“And now because we’re not solemn Anglo-Saxons, but Frenchwomen,
we must plan for some fun, if we’re to keep themselves alive,” she
told them firmly, and at their sad-hearted wincing from the idea,
she said, “Yes, we must. It’s part of our defensive campaign. Our
task is to construct out of our brains and wills a little fortress
of civilization, and to protect ourselves behind its walls against
demoralization and barbarism! And you all know that amusement is needed
for civilization!” A majority agreed to this, a dramatic committee
was appointed, and another one on games (Octavie suggested drawing
checker-boards on the tables, playing with bits of paper for men,
and starting a free-for-all tournament); some one else thought of
manufacturing balls and inventing games to be played with them, and
there were two packs of cards, in the miscellaneous store. The musical
group undertook to provide a weekly concert.
One of the subjects which had been canvassed and found no professor
was the history of France; but like all French people, they had been
soundly and carefully instructed in history and planned, by putting
all their memories together, to reconstruct the story of their nation.
The meeting was trailing off from serious, purposeful planning to a
discursive attempt to get the list of French kings complete, when one
of the older women spoke to Octavie in a low tone, the quality of which
instantly made silence about them. She said, “But Mlle. Moreau, we
have souls too, souls hard beset.”
Up to this moment Octavie had, as always, dominated the situation! Now
she, who has not been inside a church since she was a child, and who
considers herself thoroughly emancipated from what she calls, “all
that theological nonsense,” was brought up short before the need to
make just such a whole-hearted concession to other people’s ideas as
she had urged on her comrades! She looked hard at the speaker. It was
the foundress of the hospital, Mme. Rouart. From her eyes looked out a
personality just as strong as Octavie’s, and tinctured to the core with
faith. Octavie’s arrogant intellectualism humbled itself at the sight.
She made a gesture of acquiescence and was silent. Mme. Rouart went on,
“We’re of all sorts of belief, but we can all pray.”
Then, after an instant’s pause, she said in a low, trembling voice,
“Let us pray.”
There was an interval of intense silence, during which, so Octavie told
me afterwards, quite without any shade of irony, she “prayed as hard as
any one ... and after that I prayed every evening when the others did.”
“How did _you_ pray?” I asked her, incredulously.
Her definition of prayer was characteristic. “I set every ounce
of will power to calling up all my strength and endurance. It was
wonderful how I felt it rise, when I called,” she said gravely. She
added that on that first evening after her silent plunge to the deep
places of power in her soul, she put both arms around Mme. Rouart’s
neck and kissed her. “I loved her,” she said simply, without attempting
her usual skeptical, corrosive analysis of reasons.
Other kisses were exchanged, soberly, as the stiff, tired women
stumbled to their feet to go to bed. They laid their exhausted bodies
down heavily on the dirty blankets, but in their hearts which had
seemed burned out to ashes with grief, indignation, and despair, there
shone a living spark of purpose. Some time later, into the darkness
came the voice of one of the younger women. “Oh, I’ve just remembered!
That fourth son of Clovis was Charibert;” to which Octavie’s voice
answered exultantly, “Ah, they never can beat _us_!”
The life which went on after this seems as real to me as though I had
lived it with them, because when I first saw them, they were fresh
from it, and could speak of little else. Every day was thrust at them
full of the noisome poison of prison life, idleness, indifference,
despair, bitterness, hatred, personal degeneration; and every day they
poured out this poison resolutely and filled its place with intelligent
occupation! Just to keep clean was a prodigious undertaking, which
they attacked in squads, turn by turn. With sand, water, and bricks
for rubbing, they kept the room immaculate, though it took hours to
do it. Even the blankets were washed out after a fashion, one by one
at intervals, by women who had never before so much as washed out
a handkerchief. To prepare the food with the more than inadequate
utensils and poor materials and the stove unsuited for cooking was
a tremendous problem, but they all took turns at it, Octavie humbly
acting as scullery-maid when her turn for service came; and the food,
though poor, monotonous, and coarse, was infinitely superior, being
prepared with brains and patience, to what was served all around them
to the apathetic, healthless mobs of Russian and Polish women and men,
sunk despairingly in degradation and disease, “giving up and lying down
in their dirt,” Octavie told me, “to die like beasts.”
The older and weaker women among the Tourciennes group, who could not
holystone the floor and carry water and wood, were set at the lighter
tasks, the endless mending which kept their garments from becoming
mere rags, peeling turnips, washing dishes, “making the beds” as they
called the process of drying and airing the straw in the bunks.
Every day they went out in all weathers, and exercised and played ball
with their home-made, straw-stuffed balls, and every evening they
played games, checkers, guessing games, capped rimes, told stories and
sang. They all “studied singing” and sang in twos, trios, quartets, or
the whole forty in a chorus. They sang anything any one could remember,
old folk-songs of which there are such an infinite variety in French,
ballads, church-chants, songs from operas.
Octavie told me that one evening, when the false news which was
constantly served to them was specially bad, when they had been told
that half the French Army was taken prisoner, and the other half in
retreat south of Paris, they sang with the tears running down their
cheeks, but still sang, and kept their hearts from breaking.
Every day there were “lessons.” Octavie was the only trained teacher
among them, so that her courses in general science and in economic
history were the most professional of the instructions given; but she
sedulously attended the “courses” given by the others, putting her
disciplined mind on the matter they had to present, and by adroit
questionings and summarizings, helped them to order it coherently and
logically. Once a week they had dramatics, scenes out of Molière,
or Labiche, or Shakespeare, or Courteline, farce, tragedy, drama,
anything of which anybody had any recollection, with improvisations in
the passages which nobody could remember. The German guards looked on
astonished at the spirit and dash of the acting, and the laughter and
applause from the bunks, where the audience was installed to leave the
room clear for a stage. Mme. Baudoin told me that she had never begun
to suck the marrow out of the meaty Molière comedies, as she did in the
stifling days of midsummer when they were giving a series of his plays.
By midsummer they had learned that one of the younger married women
had been pregnant when she left France, that a French child was to be
born in that German prison. How they all yearned over the homesick
young mother! How important old Mme. Rouart became with her medical and
nurse’s lore! What anxious consultations about the preparations of the
layette, manufactured out of spare undergarments and a pair of precious
linen sheets brought from home. They were supposed to have medical
attention furnished in the prison, but they had seen too much of the
brutal roughness of the overworked and indifferent army-surgeons of the
camp, not to feel a horror at the thought of their attending delicate
little Mme. Larçonneur. She begged them desperately not to call in a
doctor, but themselves to help her through her black hours. They were
terrified at the responsibility, and as her time drew near, with the
ups and downs of those last days, they were almost as frightened and
tremulous as she.
But the night when she called out in a strangled voice that she needed
help, found them all organized, each one with her work planned: some
who sprang from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart prepared as far
as her poor substitute for a nurse’s outfit would allow her; others
ready to lift the shivering, groaning woman from her own bunk to the
one which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling water, and kept
ready. The others, who could not help, lay in their beds, their hands
clenched tightly in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade,
shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life opened solemnly
there in that poor place.
When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was like a shout of triumph.
“All well,” announced the nurse to the anxious women, “a fine little
boy. No! nobody must stir! Perfect quiet for Mme. Larçonneur.” She
busied herself with the mother, while her two assistants oiled the baby
and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over the perfections of his tiny
finished body, and murmuring to the faces showing over the bunks, “Such
a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!--Oh, see how he fights us!”
The next morning they formed in line to worship him as he lay sleeping
beside his mother, and although the sight brought a fierce stab of
misery to all the mothers who had left their children behind, the
little boy brought into their lives an element of tenderness and
hopeful forward-looking which was curative medicine for their sick,
women’s hearts.
For in spite of all Octavie’s moral and physical therapeutics, there
were intolerable moments and hours and days for all of them. Women,
loving women, used to a life-time of care for others, used to the most
united family life, left for months at a time without the slightest
news of those they had left, could not, valiantly as they might try,
master the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon them in the
midst of the courageously planned life which they led. They all came
to recognize in others the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the
fixed, unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving whole-hearted
sympathy could ease human hearts, such moments of unendurable pain were
tempered by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one’s sorrow.
And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner,
pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one’s self-control to
prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome
bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious
hatred for other people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps,
almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned
prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century
prisoners of the Great War. Forty women, with lowered physical health,
with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidious privacy, now
shut up together in one room, with no chance ever to escape each other,
crowded each other morally almost as much as physically. Octavie told
me there were days when she would have liked to slap them, weak,
wavering, superstitious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her
face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating the human race.
And one of the devout Catholics told me that she often longed so
intensely for her old atmosphere of belief and faith that she was
almost ill. But they adopted as their battle-cry, “All together to
defend our civilization!” and, clinging fiercely to this resolve,
they fought away from everything that might have separated them and
struggled out on ground common to them all.
Then Winter was there again, endless, empty, gray days. There was
sickness in the camp, a terrible wave of influenza, carrying off
hundreds all around them. They redoubled their cleanliness, boiled
every drop of water, exercised, played, mended, studied, cooked, sang,
kept steadily on with the ordered precision of their lives. But old
Mme. Rouart, the one they loved the most of all, who led the silent
prayer of every evening, fell ill, endured silently a few bitter days
of suffering, died, and was borne out from among them to be buried in
alien soil. Three others were desperately ill, lay near to death, and
slowly recovered. Tragedy drew them more closely together than ever, as
they realized how utterly they depended on each other, and after this
there were fewer struggles against black days of bad temper. The little
boy was seven months old now, laughed and crowed, and played with his
fingers.
Time seemed to stand still for them, as they fought to protect their
little shining taper of civilization, feeding it from their hearts and
minds. When they went outdoors for the daily escape from their room to
the sandy, hard-trodden desert of the prison yard, they seemed with
their neat, threadbare, faded, well-mended garments, with their gray,
carefully dressed hair, their pale faces, clean and quiet, with brave
eyes and smiling lips, like another order of being from the shaggy,
dirt-crusted, broken-down Polish and Russian soldiers, whose corrals
were on each side of them, lying listlessly in the drizzling mist or
quarreling among themselves. They were known by this time all over the
camp, and the demoralized, desperate men watched the decent Frenchwomen
with that most humanizing of emotions, respect.
Do you see them, those gaunt, heart-sick women, shoulder to shoulder,
indomitable in the patient use of their intelligence, in their long
triumphant battle against the weakness and evil in their own nature,
which were, as they had known from the first, the only things in the
world which could harm them?
What a race to belong to!
Well, then came the end, foreshadowed by weeks of excited rumor, a
confused, bewildered period of guesses and half hopes, when nobody,
not even the guards, knew what was happening at the front. The camp
was all one crazy uproar, no newspaper, no certainty of anything. Our
little group of women clung to each other, as the world rocked round
them, till the evening when the guards came running to take them to
the train. Not an instant to spare; the thousands of other prisoners
were yelling in the riot which, the next day, tore the camp to pieces.
They huddled on their clothes and fled into the wild confusion of the
journey, standing up in locked cattle-cars, frantic to know what was
happening, with no idea in the world where they were or where the train
was taking them, until the moment when the jolting cars stopped, the
locked doors were broken open and French voices out of the darkness
cried, “Mesdames, vous êtes chez vous!”
They were at home, at their own station, a faint gray light showing
the well-known pointed roofs of their own city, the massive tower
of the old Town Hall black against the dawn. On the same platform,
where they had seen so many deported prisoners return, vermin-ridden,
filthy, half-imbecile, a burden to themselves and their families, there
they were, lean and worn and pale, but stronger, better, finer human
beings than they had been before. Half-awed by the greatness of their
victory, they stood there, like ghosts who had fought their way back
from the grave, peering out through the dim light at their own homes.
That’s where the story ought to end, oughtn’t it?
But you know as well as I do that five years have passed since that
morning when they stood there, awe-struck and transfigured. And I
cannot conceal the fact that I have seen them all again, a good many
times since then.
What are they doing with themselves now? Well, the last time I made
a round of visits among them, I found the housewives concerned about
their preserves and the hang of their skirts; the business-women deep
in calculations about how to get around the sinful rate of exchange.
The mothers were bringing up their children very hard, as we all do,
very much concerned about their knowing the children of the right
people and no others. The teachers were grumbling about the delay in
the promised raise of their pay and complaining about the tyranny
of the Directrice of their Lycée. Young Mme. Baudoin, now that her
children are old enough to go to school, often leaves them with the
servants and runs off to Brussels or Paris for a few days of fun. All
the returned hostages have grown quite stout, and they have taken up
bridge whist with enthusiasm, once more.