VITRIMONT
A merciless blaze of sun as we passed out through the town, badly
battered at the end, through the Place Brûlée, leading to the road to
Vitrimont, some three kilometers distant, running through green fields
with their little groups of black crosses. All is softly green and gently
rolling. Vitrimont, and around about it, was the scene of some of the
fiercest fighting of that first August of the war, and Vitrimont itself
was taken and lost at the point of the bayonet seven times in one day
as gray German floods kept rolling in over the green eastern hills. The
village is charmingly placed on a little eminence; sloping down from
it are very fertile meadows, then other thickly wooded hills slope up
against the sky.
We passed through encumbered streets of devastated, roofless houses,
going first to Miss P.’s little dwelling, that she has lived in during
all these months of the superintending of the reconstruction work. It
consists mostly of one perfectly charming room done up in yellow chintz
with a square pattern of pink roses, and some good bits of old furniture,
books, and flowers. She took down from the wall a violin made by a
convalescing soldier out of a cigar-box and drew from it a few soft and
lovely tones. The rest of the house, where she has installed herself
with a woman servant, is typical of the Lorraine peasant houses: a very
wide door to let the harvest-wagons in, a narrow one for human beings, a
narrow hall leading into a kitchen, then the bigger living-room giving
into it, now so charming in its yellow chintz. From the kitchen some
steep stairs lead up into an attic which Miss P. has converted into a
medical dispensary.
Outside, across the street, is a little pergola effect made of boarding,
where one can sit and look out across the softly rolling, wooded hills.
In it are a table and a few chairs and some pots of flowers. We deposited
our tea-things there, and were starting out to make the tour of the
village, when the mayor, in shirt sleeves, loose suspenders, and slipping
trousers (his wife was killed in the 1915 bombardment of Lunéville and
his son fell in the 1914 fighting in Vitrimont), came to welcome us and
do the inevitable stamping of our safe-conducts.
We then proceeded to the old church, one of the first things to be
restored, so that its delicious fifteenth-century vaultings and
window-tracings would be beyond further damage from exposure to the
weather. One of the things _not_ hurt was the dado running around
the interior in the form of painted cloth folds by a misguided
nineteenth-century _curé_. War, with its usual discriminating touch, had
left _that_. In the vestibule are some small, perfect Louis XV holy-water
fonts in the form of shells upheld on angels’ heads. A celebrated
baptismal font was removed to Paris.
We then went to the _maison forte_, as the peasants call what had been
a sort of château, the dwelling of the “first family” of the place.
Its medieval tower was battered beyond repair, and the house itself
pretty well damaged, while some of the rooms still had charming bits of
paneling, and the locks and latches of the doors were perfect examples
of eighteenth-century wrought-iron work. In one of the large rooms, whose
ceiling was broken in by a shell, was a lovely old fireback under a
marble mantel with the arms of the Counts of Vitrimont. By a north window
was sitting a woman working at an embroidery screen with a brilliant
green and silver design; an old man with palsied head was near.
The school also has been rebuilt. A rosy-faced young schoolmistress
received us, and two little boys kept to do their _pensums_ told us the
name of the President of the United States, and showed us Washington
_and_ San Francisco on the map hanging in the room. This having been
satisfactorily gone through with, the punished little boys, with the
usual luck of the wicked, were given chocolates by E. M. and dismissed;
then we walked out into the little cemetery, approached by a narrow
pathway of arching sycamores. It looks out toward the ancient forest of
Vitrimont; in between are more green, undulating fields ripening with
the 1917 harvest. The walls of the cemetery are battered and broken and
monuments and gravestones are overturned. There was furious hand-to-hand
fighting there, and in those first August days the long dead again
mingled with the living. I passed down by broken, sun-baked walls,
reading the names on the crosses as I went, and these are some of them:
_Lieut. Jeannot, 26ème Infanterie, aspirant—Un soldat inconnu—_
_Haye, Louis, Sergent—28 soldats—_
_A notre fils, Charles Diebolt, mort pour la Patrie 1895-1914,
26ème Infanterie—_
_Charles Carron, Musicien; Souvenir d’un camarade, mort au
Champ d’Honneur 31 août 1914—_
A rude wooden cross bears the words:
“_Ci-gît Edouard Durand, fusillé le 25 août 1914 par des lâches._”
As one goes out is the tomb of a young girl; “_Hélène Midon, 18 ans,
victime du 1er septembre 1915—une prière—la plus jolie fille du
village_.” A white and virginal rose has been planted where she lies. In
this cemetery lie, too, the wife and son of the mayor.
The first upspringing of early flowers is everywhere—asters, goldenrod,
wild roses—and the hot sun extracted from each its soft, peculiar
perfume. I picked a seemingly perfect rose from the grave of _un soldat
inconnu_. Its petals immediately fell to the ground. Everything grows
with an almost ironical luxuriousness on the shallow, hastily dug graves.
All over Lorraine is this same flowering; it has been and will be, but
there was no time to ponder on the fate of frontier lands, for we were
next to call on the officer commanding the detachment quartered at
Vitrimont, who was housed in a reconstructed building and who had been
waked from slumber to receive us. When I gave him my boxes of cigarettes
for his men he said that he had received some before for the soldiers who
had the Croix de Guerre. I promptly told him mine were for the soldiers
who had _not_ got it. Mrs. C. P. brought bundles of illustrated papers
and postal cards.
Soldiers are everywhere helping to get in the hay; sweet odors
of freshly cut grass float about on the warm air to the sound of
distant cannonading. However, in spite of everything, it is already
_l’après-guerre_ here, and the delivered population is breathing again,
but it all gives the sensation of something prostrate that needs the
help of strong, fresh hands before it can arise. Mrs. Crocker’s work is
on such a generous, imaginative, sliding scale, and Miss P., untiring
and executive, is of immense tact in dealing with the Lorraine peasant,
a peculiar type demanding peculiar handling. There are numberless
psychological situations needing adjustment in the human as well as
material affairs of devastated villages. Miss P. meets all difficulties
with understanding plus determination. Some are content, some not, with
what is done for them. One woman whose house was completed, and who was
evidently dazzled by the result, said, “It isn’t a house to live in, but
to rent.”
Another, however, when we went into the grange behind her house, pointing
to the posts sustaining the hay-lofts, said: “Will they hold? The old
ones were twice the size.”
Sanitary improvements have been worked out as far as possible, but when
you try to tamper with a peasant’s pile of _fumier_, it’s like tampering
with his purse—and _that’s_ impossible. Quite a good deal of live stock
has been put into Vitrimont.
A soldier stationed with the Vitrimont detachment cranked the motor for
us. His home was near by, and he told us with shining eyes that he had
just bought for ninety francs two pigs. Somebody observed it was the
_premier pig qui coûte_. However that may be, the purchase marked the
remaking of his home.
One is appalled at the time and energy and money necessary for the
rebuilding of this single village—a million francs is the cost
estimated—and materials and workmen are increasingly difficult to get.
One thinks of the hundreds that _aren’t_ being rebuilt. Vitrimont has
certainly been smiled on by heaven _and_ Mrs. C.
As we drove home, fleecy, delicately tinted clouds were pinned together
with mother-of-pearl cross-shaped brooches. It is in the air alone that
there is any “war beauty.”
Soldiers are passing under my window, some in the blue trench-helmets,
with their equipment; some in their fatigue caps, swinging their arms,
free of their eternal burdens; and there are officers afoot or on
horseback, and colonials—marines, we call them—in many kinds of uniforms.
The poster on the old garden wall opposite says: _Alice Raveau viendra
jouer “Werther,” dimanche, le 17 juin, 1917, en matinée_.
Charlotte might have lived in the house behind the wall on which it is
pasted, a gray, smooth-façaded house with a good eighteenth-century door,
and a chestnut and a linden in full bloom. At the café on the corner
soldiers are sitting, laughing and talking, humming, drinking their
_bocks_, reading their papers, or throwing words to women who pass by,
and I thought of the men who pass through these villages, leaving to
women an inexorable burden and an untransmittable joy. Many swallows are
flying about, and above it all, in the colorful afternoon air, _avions_
are humming. On the wings of the French airplanes are stamped a great
circle of color like an eye with red pupil, white retina, and a blue
outer rim. After the hot day, something lovely and cool begins to come in
at the window, and I know soldiers all over Lorraine are resting after
the heat and burden of the day, though in the distance the dull, muffled
sound of cannon continues. Now I must “dress”—that is, put on my other
dress—for the eight-o’clock dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s.