a wounded relative!”
The booking-clerk took the papers and looked at them.
“This is no good,” he muttered through his decayed teeth.
Madeleine, with all the contempt of the comparatively free and wealthy
farmer’s daughter for the small railway official, and all the cunning of
one who deals with beasts and the law, held her peace.
The booking-office clerk was in that category of age and infirmity which
alone in those days could exempt a man from mobilization. He worked
fifteen hours a day in a pigsty of an office, whose glazed wicket made a
perpetual draught. He was easily flustered.
“You asked for two privilege tickets to go and see a wounded relative in
hospital.”
“That is what I said!”
“This certificate is incomplete!”
Madeleine said never a word, but leaned calmly on the ledge of the
wicket, making herself look as stupid as she could, by letting her
lower lip droop. Behind her a queue was forming. Already there were
cries of: “Come on!” “The train goes in five minutes,” and a wag, “They
are making a film for the cinema!”
Tears of exasperation came into the little man’s eyes and his hand began
to tremble. He stamped his foot.
“Write the name of the relative you are going to visit.”
“I have no pen.”
Men were hammering on the partition and women were saying, “Are we going
to miss the train in addition to all our other miseries?”
The booking-office clerk flung his hairy crossed-nibbed pen at
Madeleine. She took it, and wrote in the margin of Blanquart’s
certificate the name of her dead brother, carefully using the Flemish
script, which the railway people, mainly pure French, could not read.
The paper was seized; the cards of identity, the privilege tickets, the
change were thrust into her hands. She moved away, counting her change
and smiling a very little to herself, and giving just a glance each to
the English military policeman and the French gendarme at the platform
entrance, both amused spectators of the scene. Behind her, the
booking-office clerk kept chewing over the words “sacred peasants,”
“swine’s luck,” and other expressions of feeling, as he jabbed the date
on tickets and served them in frenzied haste to the crowd that besieged
his wicket.
On the wooden benches of the third-class compartment old Vanderlynden
and Madeleine found many an acquaintance. There were cries of: “How goes
it, Madeleine?” “Jerome, what are you jolly-well doing here, since when
did you live St. Omer way?”
* * * * *
Madeleine, who had foreseen this contingency, nudged her father, and
replied for both:
“We have a little business to attend to,” having made up her mind that
no one would guess what it was. She was right. Thus she set running the
right stream of vague gossip. For weeks after, the news ran through all
the surrounding communes, and flowed back to Hondebecq, that she and her
father had been to St. Omer by train. It circulated from the inn of
“Lion of Flanders” to the restaurant “The Three Crown-pieces,” even
descended to mere estaminets like the “Return from the Congo” and the
“Brave Sapeur-Pompier.” No one could make it out. Victor Dequidt soon
rejoined his regiment, and if he mentioned the young baron, no one
except Madeleine was curious enough to ask which hospital he had gone
to. Nor did anyone know of Madeleine’s particular interest in him. At
last, when the tale got to the café-restaurant “de la Gare et de
Commerce,” one of the gaziers or bullock merchants who used that more
business quarter of the village was able to propound a theory. There was
an English Forage Officer at St. Omer, and he had his depot just exactly
at Naes’ farm, by the new sidings the English had had to make at
Schaexen Halte for their hospital, so as to be out of the way of the
bombing. No doubt old Vanderlynden had worked the trick all right with
that officer (who was buying large quantities), and done well out of it.
The certificate of having mobilized relatives that Blanquart had given
in such a hurry (and which, of course, was known through Cécile and the
other school-children), might be on account of Marcel Vanderlynden, or
might be merely a blind. The original paper on which Madeleine had
written her brother’s name remained in the archives of the station
until all were burnt in the bombardment of December, 1917.
* * * * *
Descending at Schaexen Halte, Madeleine and her father made their way to
the block of white marquees and tents that almost filled the manor
pasture of Naes’ farm. In spite of the fresh air, the smell of
anæsthetics and disinfectants hung over the duck-board paths and
cindered drives, and mingled with the odor of cooking maconochie and the
smoke of a giant incinerator that, never quenched, burned the daily load
of discarded clothing and bandages, filthy with human refuse and trench
mud. Near by, in the corner where Naes used to grow his maize, was a
small neat cemetery of little mounds with inscribed wooden crosses,
destined to grow with the years into a bigger area than the hospital and
the sidings together, until lawyers had to argue out the compensation
due to Naes for the expropriation. At this point luck deserted
Madeleine, for no sooner had she and her father got into conversation
with an orderly, than up rolled a convoy of a dozen ambulances, out ran
all the available orderlies, and the whole place hummed like a railway
station. There was no getting an answer to a question, and the pair
were obliged to step into the nearest tent to avoid being run over. They
found themselves, in the peculiar half light of such places, before a
wooden table at which a sergeant was writing hurriedly. At Madeleine’s
question he called over his shoulder:
“What about these civilians, sir, are they allowed?”
A young doctor came in from somewhere behind, buckling on a belt. He
spoke kindly in French, but was obviously preoccupied. There had been
some French casualties in the hospital, he thought, but it had not been
his tour of duty, and they had been passed on at once.
“Besides,” he added, “all next-of-kin are informed if it is a serious
case, and you will soon hear for certain.”
Aware of the truth of this, and of her false position, Madeleine did not
press the matter. She knew the English were queer about such things. So
were the French, but she understood their sort of queerness and
sympathized with it, not the English sort.
The officer and sergeant went outside, and began examining, questioning,
listing, sorting the long line of stretchers, each with its pale,
patient face above dirty blankets, a line that grew faster than it
could be dealt with. Madeleine drew her father outside and sent him off
to the halte on the railway, to drink a glass of beer. She herself pried
about among tent-pegs and ropes, canvas flaps and damp twilight. She
managed to get into one big tent with iron beds in rows, and was going
from one to the other when she was stopped by a girl of her own age, in
the ugly gray and red uniform and beautiful white coif of English
nurses. The girl said:
“Défendu!” She spoke with a queer accent.
Madeleine had a flash of inspiration:
“I am looking for my fiancé, a French soldier,” she said in English. The
girl’s eyes melted.
“I’m so sorry, there are no French here, all gone!” She called an
orderly to “show the lady out!”
Madeleine tried to question him, but all she got was: “Straight down the
cinder track you’ll find the road!” and “Now then, mum, get on, ’ow the
’ell am I to evacuate these bloody blessays with you in the gangway.
’Tisn’t decent, besides!”
She made a détour and tried once more, but only once. She pushed her way
into a tent behind some screens, and peeping over, saw a
sergeant-major, followed by bearers with a stretcher covered by a Union
Jack. They put it on the iron table, lifted the flag and began fetching
water, unbinding and washing the helpless thing. She slipped away behind
the screens unnoticed. She tried no more. She did not connect the dead
body with Georges. She could not imagine him dead. But it was unlucky.
Deep down some superstition was touched.
* * * * *
She rejoined her father, and they caught a train that got back to
Hazebrouck at four. Suddenly she wished to be alone, felt a necessity
for a moment to gather herself for the next stroke, as it were. Her
father had not said a word since the hospital, but she wanted him to go
away. She sat in the salle d’attente and sent him for the horse and gig.
She stared in front of her at the gathering shadows, between the
sand-bagged windows. She heard the feet of the old horse, the rattle of
the gig-wheels. Then suddenly her father appeared with Lieutenant Skene.
She had not thought of him, but she thought fast enough now. Quickly,
using the word “fiancé” for Georges, she explained her plight. He was
the same well-brought-up, handy, decorous young officer. In a moment he
had broken into the Railway Transport Office, pushed aside the corporal,
possessed himself of the telephone and was trying to get something
definite from the hospital as to Georges’ destination after leaving the
place. He came back disappointed; they could not trace the name.
Meantime, the fighting half of her spirit had got its breath, and
cutting short his apologies, she went rapidly on to the next thing.
Could he get her a lift in a car or lorry to the English base to which
alone, so he said, casualties passing through English clearing-stations
would go? In a moment she saw her mistake, she had asked too much, had
run across some inexplicable--to her, unreasonable, prejudice in the
young officer’s mind. She knew well enough that it was forbidden for
civilians to travel in British vehicles, but had counted hastily on his
position as an officer and her powers of persuasion. He began to use
commonplaces, to inquire how she was getting on with the troops at the
farm. Briefly, tartly, she replied she must be getting home, and rose to
go. She did not bother about the look of concern on his face, but
turning to say good-bye from the gig, as it got slowly in motion, she
reflected that it was foolish to throw away possible friends and their
help, and called to him, “Come and see us soon.” He made a gesture and
she accepted the fact that he was rather taken with her. He would be.
Driving home in the twilight, however, she had only one thought--rather
one feeling. This war had dealt her a blow. She admitted that, on the
day’s doings, she was worsted. Was she going to give in? Not she! Silent
beside her father, up the road between the silent fields, one process
only was going on in her. A hardening, a storing-up of strength. Done?
She was only just beginning!
* * * * *
She had plenty of time for reflection as the winter wore on. Madame la
Baronne did not send down to the farm for anything special enough to be
made a pretext for a visit to the château. Moreover, though she longed
to go and ask boldly what had happened to Georges, and was only
prevented by a sure knowledge of his resentment if she exposed herself
and him in that way, yet she was able to tell herself with confidence
that if the very worst had happened, it would have got known--would
have filtered out through the servants, through Masses announced in
church, through mourning worn by the Baron and Madame. But there were no
rumors, no horror-stricken whispers, no sign of black in Madame’s dress
or in what the Baron called his “sports” (indicating cloths of material
that meant to be Scotch tweed, color meant to be khaki, cut meant to be
that of an English gentleman out shooting--but which failed at all
points, as Frenchmen’s clothes so often do). So far, so good.
There existed in Madeleine, as in so many women of those days, the
queerest contradiction. Fearing daily and desperately the very
worst--death to their loved man--they never could believe in it
happening, often even when it did actually happen, as was usual in those
years. Relieved, respited at least from the major anxiety--for Georges
must be in hospital or depot somewhere, and out of the fighting,
Madeleine began to be a prey to a lesser--to know what had happened to
him? which led her curiosity to explore the unknown at least once a day.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, the war that had dealt her that private blow was gentle with
her. The English kept on increasing. Seldom was the farm without its
happy-go-lucky khaki crowd, whose slang, mixed with Indian words learned
from old regular soldiers, and cheerful attempts at anglicized French
phrases, Madeleine learned and used, as she learned the decorous
politeness of the older officers, the shy good humor of the younger
ones. Many a good sum did Blanquart pay her for billeting, many a neat
bill did she receipt for anxious Mess Presidents. It was a queer
education for a girl of her sort. At the convent school she had
committed to memory certain facts about England and its people, not
because they interested her, but because she soon discovered that it was
easier to do lessons than to be punished for not doing them, and because
her scheming mind knew by practice, if not by theory, that knowledge is
power. And now she was having an object-lesson in very deed.
All the communes lying close to the line, whose population had been
decimated by general mobilization, were being re-peopled by
English-speaking men and women, in billets and horselines, rest-camp and
hospitals, aerodromes and manœuver grounds. Night after night she heard
the winter darkness atremble with traffic on the road, and learned to
know it as the sound of “caterpillars” (which she took to be the name of
some new kind of road engine, and was not wrong) bringing up guns and
yet more guns. This was interesting, comforting, profitable, there were
no dull hours, no sense of danger, and plenty of money to be made. But
it had an indirect effect which Madeleine saw clearly enough, if she did
not trace the connection very closely. The more ships were torpedoed by
German submarines, the fewer ships there were. The more English there
were, the more ships were wanted. Therefore the still fewer ships to
import foodstuffs. Therefore appeals from deputies, maires, publicists,
parliamentarians of all sorts, praising, cajoling, inciting the “honest
peasants” to grow more and more food. The greater waxed the importance
of the question, the more the endless bargaining and speculating to
which she and her father, instinctively prone, needed little
encouragement.
Jerome Vanderlynden and all his sort--all backed up by wives and
daughters more or less like Madeleine--hung on to their produce for
better and better prices. Subsidies had to be granted, taxes eased,
bounties promised, facilities given. Then they would go on and grow
some more--and then hang out again for greater and greater benefits.
Beet, haricots, potatoes, wheat, barley, oats, all served their turn.
Flax doubled in price, and doubled again. Hops were worth their weight
in gold. Chicory had to be the object of special legislation. The
farmers learned slowly, but surely. There was no brisk, open “business
as usual” propaganda--and no need for it. The dour old men, and quiet,
careful women and girls, were not likely to miss the opportunity. The
atmosphere was right. If death and disaster come to-morrow--“gather ye
rosebuds while ye may.” Gathering rosy thousand-franc notes is even
better. And who would blame an old man with one son dead and one a
prisoner, with his barn full of English soldiers who smoked pipes and
set lighted candles among the straw as they wrote home, not to mention
the ever-present possibility of shells--like all the farms Armentières
way--or bombs--like all those toward St. Omer.
* * * * *
As a side issue, the social position of the peasant farmer began to
improve. He had been accustomed to brief spells of flattery at election
times--not to the wave of adulation that now engulfed him. He began to
look the whole world in the face, and fear not any man. But many a man
began, if not to fear him, at least to seek his good offices. Besides
all the politicians, the contractors, the endless train of semi-public
opportunists the War had created, the easy-going world of retired
middle-aged people that are to be found in every French Department,
suddenly discovered that the only way to remain easy-going was to get
the farmer to befriend them. Everything from coals to chicken meal, from
bread to cotton was being rationed. That facile plenty which is the
basis of the French provincial middle class was threatened. Thus, as
1916 advanced, and the long sordid epic of Verdun began to string out
its desperate incidents, the Baron Louis d’Archeville, walking round his
shooting with the air of a child gazing at a birthday cake it has been
forbidden to touch, bowler hat, “sports,” camp-stool, all complete,
stumped over the pavement of the yard, and found Madeleine putting her
week’s washing through the portable wringer.
Having it in his mind to ask for wooden logs, eggs, ham, and anthracite,
he naturally began:
“Ah, good day, Madeleine, pretty as ever!”
“Good day, Monsieur le Baron.”
“And this brave Jerome, he goes well? A glass of beer? I shall not say
no!” He sat down on a wheelbarrow and waited for her to call her father.
Old Jerome came at Madeleine’s cry of “Papa, kom ben t’haus!” from
picking over his seed potatoes.
Madeleine, who wanted the men out of the way, let it pass for politeness
that she took the carafe of beer and two hastily washed glasses into the
kitchen, swabbed the table and invited the Baron to place himself. She
went back to her wringer, leaving the door into the scullery open. One
never knew. She had kept her secret in her heart ever since her visit to
the English hospital. She had no news, and had been able to think of no
new way of getting even with the War, but she had forgotten nothing,
forgiven nothing, renounced nothing.
Old Jerome, who, even a year before, would have stood in the Baron’s
presence until told to be seated, now sat down beside his landlord
without apology.
The Baron did not remark on this, but said: “Then, you have your farm
all full of English?”
“They do damage enormously.”
“Very likely, but you have the right to be paid!”
“They pay, but they do damage all the same.”
Old Jerome was not going to let go a possible advantage.
The Baron, whose feelings against the English had been cool from 1870
until Fashoda, then violent until the idea of the Entente and its
meaning had filtered into his unreceptive mind, had just been reading
propagandist literature, “The English Effort,” and so forth, designed
for just such as he. Expanding with the new ideas he had received, he
reviewed the situation at some length, dwelling on England’s immense
resources of material, untouched reserves of men, all that cheerful
unknown which was so comforting in face of unpleasant known facts of the
growing wastage of France.
Jerome added one remark born of the unaccustomed way money was now
handed about. “Besides, they are rich!” which led the Baron on again,
along the path pointed out by yet another pamphlet he had been reading,
on the subject of the new war loan.
Much of the verbiage and all the argument was lost on old Jerome. He was
thinking of his sons and poured out another glass for himself and the
Baron. “It’s a grievous business, this war,” he sighed. “You must feel
that as much as I.”
The Baron did not miss the allusion, blinked a moment, for what is one
to say to a man who has two sons, one of whom is dead and forever gone,
and the other a prisoner, with uncertain prospects. He concluded that
the most comforting thing was to talk of his own son. Besides, he
preferred to.
“At last we have news of Georges. He has written to us, you will never
divine from whence!”
He waited a moment, but old Jerome was not good at guessing. In the
scullery the wringer was no longer creaking as it turned, and the
splashing of water and the soft flop of the clothes into the tin pail
had ceased.
“He has written from Monte Carlo. It seems that the army surgeons found
he was making himself a bad chest, and sent him to the south for
convalescence. He is being marked inapt for service, but he still wishes
to do his part, and they will put him in this French Mission with the
English Army as Officer-Interpreter. One day or another, we may see him
here, if he is attached to a division that passes this way.”
In the scullery Madeleine was standing over the wringer, allowing
herself to smile ever so little. Within her breast her blood was dancing
to the tune “I knew it, I knew it!” Now, that terribly serious Georges
of the day of mobilization that she did not understand and for whom she
could do nothing would be changed back to the gay Georges (Monte Carlo,
she had heard him speak of it, could see and hear him doing so now) that
she did understand, and who would want her. The Baron was talking of
other things now, of how the French would take it easy, and how the
English would come in and finish the War. It was quite their turn. One
had made sufficient sacrifices. Could Jerome let him have--this, that,
and the other? She paid little heed. Her father bargained a bit, then
acquiesced. She thought it fitting, when the Baron rose to go, to come
to the door of the kitchen and say:
“Au revoir, Monsieur le Baron.”
“Au revoir, Madeleine, remain young and pretty, it is all one asks of
you!”
* * * * *
She on her side asked little. She would get Georges back. She was sure
now. The days might pass, nothing happen, no news come, but she was
sure, sure as though he had written giving the date of his arrival.
Spring came--never more beautiful than in Flanders, where beauty can
only exist on a basis of utility. It came shyly, a northern spring. The
sodden grayness of the marshland winter on flat hedgeless fields gave
way to cold and fitful sunshine that shone on rich young green
everywhere, while the black dripping leaves of the elms in the dank
pastures seemed blurred in vapor, that, upon examination, proved to be
but a profusion of tiny light-colored buds. And then something happened.
It began happening so far away and so high up among the principalities
and powers of this world that it was weeks before Madeleine felt its
effects.
As the horrors of Verdun dragged on, the wastage that was obvious to so
mediocre an observer as the Baron began to be acutely felt at the more
sensitive Great Head-quarters. So much so that Great Head-quarters of
France insisted to British Great Head-quarters that something must be
done. British Great Head-quarters, well groomed, well mannered, had a
long way then still to go before it should shake off its slightly
patronizing attitude towards its ally. It merely said that something
should be done when it was ready. Great Head-quarters of France,
doubting when that time would come to a people who had to be so well
groomed and well mannered, insisted still harder. British Great
Head-quarters replied good-humoredly, “Oh, very well then!” It became
known that there was to be a British offensive in the Somme. Gigantic
rearrangements were necessary, and among the million schemes, orders and
moves, was the establishment of Corp Head-quarters at Hondebecq. This
necessitated a lot of room, and the mere fighting troops had to be
pushed farther out. Thus Madeleine, one fine morning early in March,
only just saved herself from dropping a saucepan of boiling soup. An
officer-interpreter, in the uniform of the French Mission, had ridden
into the yard. She knew the uniform well, had seen many such a one, but
since the Baron’s last visit it meant to her only one person. Her
emotion, kept well under, was gone in a flash. She saw directly, as the
officer dismounted, it was not Georges. He came from the new Corps
Head-quarters to say that no more infantry would be billeted at the
farm. Instead, she would be expected to house the Corps Salvage Officer.