to the château of Hondebecq.
Madeleine, by the light of Placide’s candle, soon knew better. The
Australian who had spoken was a Colonel, the other two and the French
interpreter were privates. As they trooped into the passage, the Colonel
called over his shoulder, “Come on, boys!”
From the kitchen garden, where they had sat silent and unnoticed
spectators of the scene, there emerged a Lewis-gun section and
orderlies. Beyond them transport was dimly visible: mules silent as
their drivers, standing as if cut in stone.
“Madeleine,” called the Baron, “explain to these gentlemen that all my
servants have run off, but that Placide will serve supper as soon as may
be!”
The Colonel, however, was busy with his machine gunners. The “cubby
hutch,” as he called Leon’s potting shed, half-way up the drive would do
for one position well, but he wished to command the garden and meadow
beyond, and the fields skirting the village on that side. Madeleine
understood perfectly. “There is the cellar skylight, level with the
ground.”
The Colonel went to look. “It fits like the tail of Barnes’ donkey!” was
his only comment.
Before he would sit down to his meal he asked: “Do I get the old man
right, that his wife is here still?”
“She is praying for her son in the chapel!”
“Is he wounded?”
“He is dead.”
“He’ll be just as happy if she keeps alive. I’ve got a limber going back
St. Omer way. She’d better go in that! Tell ’em!”
Madeleine explained the offer to the Baron, who thanked the Colonel
profusely, saying that it was worthy of one gentleman to another.
The Colonel not understanding, when his mouth was empty, bowed as one
unaccustomed and inquired: “It is his wife, isn’t it, all correct?”
Madeleine confirmed that the Baroness was “all correct.”
But the Baroness was an obstacle. First Placide, then the Baron himself
went up to see her. She would only moan: “No, let them kill me, I shall
see him again all the sooner. Besides, it is too late, and I am at least
warm with the calorifère!”
Then Madeleine went up. There was nothing dramatic in the meeting
between those two, the mother and the mistress of a dead man. Madeleine
said steadily: “Madame, Monsieur Georges would prefer you to go!”
“You think so?”
“I am sure, madame!”
“In that case, I will!”
Madeleine helped her. But no one, unless it was the French interpreter,
realized the pathos of the moment. The limber had been furnished with
cushions, a small trunk, and a wooden box of Placide’s. The driver had
announced that he was “going by the dirt roads, it’s easier for wimmen.”
Then that faded lady kissed the man whom she had married because the
Second Empire told her to, and replied to his “Courage, Eugènie,”
simply: “I think I shall not catch cold!” and went away in an army
limber, with Placide stalking behind.
* * * * *
Madeleine watched them go. Alone of all those present she, perhaps,
noticed the change which seemed to settle down on the house, almost at
once. It was not yet abandoned, but its women, its natural guardians,
had gone from it.
The orderly, ration “fag” in mouth, cleared the table with a clatter,
spilling grease on the floor. The marble overmantel, between the vases a
former D’Archeville had brought from the sack of Pekin, and the Sèvres
clock, became, as though by magic, littered with pipes, ashes, revolver
ammunition, maps, indelible pencils--all the flotsam of men campaigning
far from the decencies of property and housewifery. She tried to get the
Baron on one side, having not for a moment forgotten her business at the
château, but he was busy giving the Colonel, and a young officer who had
come quietly in, as if by chance, some detail of the district. Before
she could make her wants known, the Colonel, who had swept back the
cloth, silver salts, plates, flower vases, all at one sweep, planted his
1 in 40,000 army map, and had his finger on the square pasture, and
centerless E of building labeled “Ferme l’éspagnole”--the Spanish Farm.
“That belongs to mademoiselle,” the interpreter interposed, prompted by
the Baron, indicating her.
“Arthur,” said the Colonel to the young officer, “your platoon can make
a ‘strong point’ there, where the roads join, and sleep in the house,
while it’s worth it!”
In an instant, Madeleine relinquished all thoughts of pursuing her
father on the Baron’s bicycle. It was not merely that if she had had to
choose between loyalty to her father and loyalty to the home, she would
have chosen the latter. It was also that, had her father been there to
counsel her, he would certainly have said, “Garde la maison, ma fille!”
“Stick to the house, my girl.”
“I’ll go with you,” she told the lieutenant, and went out into the
darkness with him.
The horizon, from beyond Ypres, to the northeast, right round to near
Béthune to the south, was ablaze. Over captured Merville, Estaires,
Armentières, hung floating lights. The bombardment had ceased, the
Bosche being too fearful of hitting their own advanced parties. The
machine gun clamor was subsiding, both sides no longer knowing in the
darkness where their bullets went. The farm Madeleine found already
occupied. Tall lean figures, magnified in the candle-light, had stripped
lengths of fabric from an aeroplane that had come down in the pasture,
and lay half buried, grotesquely mangled, a putrefying mass of charred
human flesh, wood and delicate machinery in the middle. They were
covering every crevice in the kitchen windows. They made shelters, and
gun-pits, and loopholes. By midnight the house was no longer a farm, it
was a tactical “strong point.” Madeleine had too much sense to protest,
and declined firmly to be evacuated. Calling the officer and sergeant
together, she pointed to her door:
“This my room. I lock the door. See, diggers?”
“All serene, missy, sleep well,” was the reply.
Madeleine did so. Like all those strong enough to stand it, she felt a
kind of exaltation rising above any fear. Many a man felt like her that
night. The long-distance bombardment, under which a human being was
matched against a lump of steel as large and many times harder than
himself, was over. To it succeeded the direct struggle of man against
man, with machine gun, rifle and grenade. The Bosche were no longer
awe-inspiring once they got beyond the range of their big guns. Let them
come, the sooner the better. The great offensive had been threatened for
months. It was here. Some would survive it. Meantime the chances were
even. Madeleine slept.
* * * * *
No one knows, to this day, why the Bosche never got to Hondebecq, but
they halted a mile short of it. Nothing happened. Anticlimax ruled. War
moods of exaltation, begotten of danger, and the vitality that rises to
meet it, cannot last. The battle of Bailleul dwindled out in gray, cold
spring weather. The trench line stiffened and became as fixed as the old
line from the Ypres salient to La Bassée had been, before Messines and
Paschendaele. The Bosche tried again and again farther south with no
more effect. In the north the reorganized English line held good. The
mood which came with this new state of things began to show itself, in
civilians and soldiers alike, to be one of steady exasperation. For what
did all this endless effort amount to? One lived in a state not
comparable to that of Peace, as regards comfort, business, or personal
liberty. One side or the other made an offensive. The discomfort
increased, the hectic war-time business was dislocated, personal liberty
disappeared. But one thing remained--War. Enormously expensive,
omnipresent, exasperating. Civilians and soldiers, the latter nearly all
unwilling civilians now, felt its exasperation. Madeleine felt it. The
Baron felt it. The troops billeted in the château and the farm felt it.
The Baron, relieved from his wife’s querulous exactions, Madeleine, set
free from dutiful if doubtful belief in her father’s methods of
business, found the first Australian troops, if not charming visitors,
at least good companions for the work in hand.
When it became certain that the enemy could get no farther, they were
relieved, first by French troops, then by a Clydeside labor battalion.
The Baron found his salle-à-manger filled with officers, who, though not
actively ill-behaved, and probably well-meaning, he could see, whether
he spoke their language or not, came of no particular family.
Madeleine found herself confronted with a set of cooks and
quartermasters as businesslike as herself, far more akin to her in
methods and outlook than had ever been the original volunteer army of
England--who had paid what she asked with shy good humor. The neat walks
and formal “bosquets” of the château garden, box-hedged, and decorated
with plaster figures of nymphs and cupids, situate amid greenish pools,
became pitted with latrines, and scarred with dugouts.
The village was beyond bullet range, but a 5.9 shell crashed in the top
of the “shot” tower in the yard of the Spanish Farm. But worse than
these evils were the continual thefts from the cellar of the château of
wine, coal, and mattresses (for half the village had readily obtained
leave to store their possessions there). At the farm, Madeleine was
amazed to find herself forced to sell beer and butter, at less than cost
price, by well-organized “strikes” that threatened to leave her
merchandise on her hands.
The Baron, moreover, like so many of his age and nation at that time,
had his private sorrow. Sharing his meals with the ever-changing messes
of officers that filled his salle-à-manger (for the village being
evacuated, there were no shops, and he was glad enough to trade away the
accommodation he could to provide for food), he would stare round the
youthful, unwarlike faces about him, faces of professional or business
men, farmers or engineers from all corners of Great Britain or the
Colonies, and would mutter, “I have no longer my son!”
Madeleine, more self-controlled, wore black. No funeral service had been
said for Jerome Vanderlynden. He had “disappeared” in the trite phrase
of the Casualty Lists. The old church in the “place” of Hondebecq had
three gaping shell-holes in the roof. The doors were closed, and it was
declared in brief official notice “Unsafe.” She did not even know if her
numerous cousins and relations by marriage, scattered by the evacuation
all across France from Evreux to Bordeaux, had heard what had happened
to him. Nor did the thought of them greatly trouble her, accustomed to
think and act for herself. She was doing what she knew so well her
father was expecting of her. She was looking after the farm. The crops
were sown. Such beasts as remained were tended. Jerome Vanderlynden had
disappeared! That could not be helped, any more than the thefts of all
the fowls from the yard. Madeleine just went on.
* * * * *
The days went by, and the two civilians left in Hondebecq hardly noticed
a change that came over things in the last week of July, 1918. That war,
continuing year in and year out, could not be measured according to its
“victories” of one side or the other, by people so intensely intimate
with it, because they lived on the edge of the trenches. The most
perhaps that they noticed was the gradual cessation of the shelling. It
was no longer necessary to run to dugouts from one’s bed at dawn, or
from one’s evening meal. Yet, at last, something really had happened.
Madeleine was dimly conscious of a new atmosphere in the shuttered and
sand-bagged salle-à-manger, when she went up on one of her usual
errands to the château. The old interpreter, Mercadet, attached to the
area, was sticking flags in the map of the Western Front, with his
melancholy precision. “One has still some force left!” he announced, and
Madeleine saw without heeding that he was _moving the flags forward,
instead of back_. It was, of course, Mangin’s flank attack of July, the
turning-point of the war. She paid more attention, however, a week or
two later, when the troops in the farm began to move. The Bosche were
gone from Kemmel Hill, was all they said. She lost touch with the war at
this point, having no one to give her news.
She contrived to secure a couple of mules she found wandering about, and
being handy with animals, shut them up and fed them sparingly. Probably
nothing in the whole war frightened her so much as those weeks of the
month of September, when she was quite alone. Even the dog had been
killed by the shell on the “shot” tower. Then, as the troops abandoned
the château she found there a couple of aged veterans, left as billet
wardens, and induced them, by pointing out truthfully how much better
they would fare with her than in the Baron’s company in the lonely
château, to move to the farm. These two old casual laborers, who had
enlisted in 1914 when drunk or workless, and had ever since been living
better than before the war, made no difficulties. But it was no object
to her to make hardships for the Baron, once she had gained her point,
and secured potential guardians and laborers for the farm. She invited
him to take his meals with her, and neither laughed nor chided as he
stumped off, cigar glowing in the dark, to sleep on the moth-eaten rugs
in his gun-room, revolver beside him, lest the château should be
robbed--though what indeed there remained to steal in the darkened
rooms, save the heavy furniture, no one could have said--wine, food,
bedding, small objects had gone one by one, for use, or as souvenirs.
The silver had been buried by Mercadet in the garden. But the Baron
slept in the empty château, by instinct.
He was not alone long.
There was an almost dramatic fitness about the Army’s choice of his one
companion. A red-headed Welshman, answering to the name of Jacobs, was
posted there, as District Sanitary Engineer. The glamor and intensity
was gone from the war, and the situation was now one for Municipal
Health Officers. The appointment was additionally fitting. For though
adorned by the title of “doctor,” and adorning the rank of Captain,
Jacobs was by profession a Borough Sanitary Engineer, one of those
species peculiar to Great Britain. In its dying stages, those who ran
the war were at last learning to put men to the job they could do best.
* * * * *
Such was the situation of what the French staff aptly called the “open
town” of Hondebecq in the last weeks of the war. By daylight, the
Spanish Farm was at work, Madeleine and her two veterans, with the two
mules, getting in all the undamaged crops--for nearly a quarter of the
total acreage of the farm was lost in trench and wire, dugout and
shell-hole. Hardly a day passed but had its hair-breadth escape from
buried “duds” or unexploded shell, or caved-in gun-pit. Madeleine worked
because it was natural to her--because she had nothing else to do,
possibly with some unconscious idea of dedication to her father’s
memory. At dusk, Jacobs and the Baron would arrive, on bicycles, the one
having toured his area, which stretched from the line of evacuation that
ran from the Belgian border, through Hazebrouck down to Aire--away to
the maze of desultory trenches from which the English troops were slowly
pushing the last German machine gunners. The Baron usually acted as his
guide, and in Jacobs’ company avoided otherwise certain arrest.
Madeleine would just be finishing her evening meal with the veterans.
Jacobs would produce a field message book in which he had noted the map
reference of any unburied offence, human or otherwise, and at his order
the old men would jog off with one of the tireless mules in a salvaged
limber, two shovels, a tin of disinfectant, and a lantern clattering in
the springless vehicle. Madeleine cleared the table and served dinner to
Jacobs and the Baron, who would sit over it, drinking canteen whisky and
discussing in English-French and French-English the submarine menace and
surface drainage, by means of any daily papers they had gleaned during
the day’s wandering, and with the help of Madeleine’s translation. By
the time both were ready to return to their never-made “beds” in the
château, the veterans would come clattering back, the mules going at an
unearthly amble in the darkness, and all was ready for the morrow.
* * * * *
The War had been full of surprises--had been one great catastrophic
surprise, since its declaration, and had kept up its pyrotechnic
suddenness of change through all its four years. But the change that
extinguished it outdid all else in strangeness. Late in October, the
inhabitants of the château and the farm had heard the familiar sound of
twelve-inch shells falling in Dunkirk, and never dreamed that they were
never to hear that sound again. All day the roads and rail had been busy
with French and English troops. They had halted in and around Hondebecq
and passed on. The inhabitants of the farm and the château little
dreamed that no more were to pass that way. The days and nights became
quieter and ever more strangely quiet. There was a continual tension of
the ear to catch that familiar rat-tat-tat, swish, boom. No sound came.
Then, early in gray November, Jacobs and the Baron returned earlier than
usual from their eternal cycling tour. In all the cellars of Hazebrouck,
in all the hastily contrived, already-forgotten “strong points” in the
area, they had not found one unburied mule, one neglected latrine. Or
Jacobs had forgotten to take map references, for both were excited.
Instead, they bent over a day-old English paper, that pretended to have
the terms of the Armistice.
At first it was mere meaningless words. Nothing happened. The daily life
of Hondebecq did not change. But soon a phenomenon was observed. Up the
solid gray pavé road that Napoleon built from Lille to Dunkirk, along
which the victorious armies of mid-October had advanced, there flowed,
in the opposite direction, another human stream. No army this, and
nothing victorious about it, though here and there a dirty old hat, or
wonderfully made, decrepit wheelbarrow was decorated with the flags of
the Allies, bought from Germans who had been selling them during the
last weeks in the French industrial area. By one and two, here a family,
there an individual with a dog, all those civilians who had been swept
within the German lines in the offensives of 1914 or 1918, were walking
home. Such a home-coming surely never was since misery began. Doré used
to picture such events in his illustrations to the Bible, but no one has
even seen the like in reality. For censors had been strict, and the line
of trenches where the Allies had fronted the Germans unpassable. Many a
man of the Flemish border, or the Somme downs, had hoped to find his
house or his field spared, and had to go to look himself in order to be
finally disillusioned. Madeleine, superintending the cleaning of the
fields, the weed burning, and autumn plowing, saw them come incuriously,
not able to realize that even she, who had seen the whole War through,
with the trenches only just beyond the sight of her eyes and never out
of her hearing, had only now to begin to learn what it really had been.
She left the veterans and the mules, busy in the fields, and stood, for
a few moments, on the edge of the pavé, where the by-road to the farm
left it, watching the melancholy procession. True, some were laughing,
or greeted her with a cheer, but the general impression of those pinched
faces and anxious eyes, above worn and filthy clothes, gave a better
idea than any historian will ever do, of the rigors of the blockade.
Madeleine gained from the sight just her first inkling of the
irreparable loss, that was to weigh upon the lifetime of her generation.
War, the Leviathan, was giving up that which it had swallowed, but there
was no biblical jubilation in them, none of those sharp terrors that, in
scripture, foretell everlasting joy. Madeleine, better than any
Bible-reading Protestant, comprehended. These poor souls (as she called
them to herself, pityingly, for they had been “caught out,” a defect she
did not admit) had now got to work to catch up the wastage. A bright
chance for most of them!
She returned to the farm, and now, finally convinced of the Armistice,
yoked the mules to the strongest tackle she could find amid the
abandoned and salvaged engineer stores that Jacobs had gathered, and
began to pull away the barbed wire that laced the farm about, fifty
yards at a time.
* * * * *
She worked thus with the veterans, beating, shouting at, jerking the
mouths of the mules, tugging, cutting, coiling the rusted venomous
strands, piling the stout pickets on one side for further use, until it
was nearly dark. Hastening home to prepare supper she noticed a dark
bent figure standing irresolutely in the courtyard. She was walking over
the slippery furrows by aid of a half pick-handle, but, though thus
armed, was unafraid, and found something unaccountably familiar in that
listless bent-shouldered form. Coming up to it, she gave a cry. It was
the ghost of Jerome Vanderlynden. She took him by the hand, called him
“Father,” told him with a choke in her voice that she was glad to see
him back. He just stared at her, but when spoken to with decision, sat
in the settle by the stove, and smiled at the warmth and the smell of
food. Other sign of animation he would not give, nor could she elicit
what he thought, or how he had found his way home. When her veterans
came in from the stable, she introduced him, and they displayed all the
kindliness of their sort, seemed to understand at a glance the nature of
the case, called him “Poor old gentleman” and offered him a ration
cigarette, which he took, and immediately laid aside, as if he did not
know its use. He appeared better for the food and rest, and was willing
to be led to the bare tiled bedroom in which he had always occupied the
crazy old double bed, where his children had been born and his wife had
died, and which, with the big old press, two pegs, and two photos of the
children, constituted the whole furniture. He allowed Madeleine to help
him off with his sodden, shapeless boots, rolled on the bed, and slept.
Madeleine covered him and left him. In the morning he appeared, awakened
apparently by habit, or the smell of food, but replied only by vacant
looks to his daughter’s questions--pertinently designed as they
were--“What has happened to the horse and tumbril?” “Where have you
been?” “Do you remember me?”
To the blandishments of the veterans (well-meant attempts to cheer him
up), he paid no regard. It was not Jerome Vanderlynden who had returned.
It was his ghost, something that, having lost its human mortal life,
could not quite die, but must wander about the scenes to which it was
accustomed, handle the objects it had used, but nothing more.
* * * * *
The condition of her father might have weighed heavily on Madeleine’s
mind had it been her only preoccupation, but fortunately it was not.
First of all there was work. She was working harder than anybody ever
works in England. From before the gray wet winter dawn, until long after
the solitary army candle had been lighted in the kitchen, making
grotesque shadows in the broken glass of the oriel window, her hands
were never still, tugging, smoothing, shifting earth, timber, wire,
weeds, produce; housework, cooking, mending, were relaxations. Her mind
and voice, thinking for and directing the veterans, the mules,
presently the four bullocks and two milch cows, she contrived to obtain
from those wandering loose after the break-up of the trench lines, were
never still except during the six or so hours that she slept. She
regarded the Armistice as a piece of personal good luck. She would get
the ground into some sort of order before the spring sowing. There would
be manure, too, now that she had beasts, and with manure at hand, no
Fleming ever quite loses heart. But besides work, the Peace that had so
suddenly descended upon earth (without, alas, bringing that Goodwill
supposed for centuries to accompany it) proved itself more inexorable
than War.