Between Epernay and Château-Thierry, the Marne flows through an
exquisite valley, whose gay hills are rich in orchards and vine
plantations, and crowned with verdure like woodland goddesses, and
abundantly adorned with those plants which have made France a country
without price, beautiful and noble.
It is the valley of rest. Jaulgonne, Dormans, Châtillons, Œuilly,
Port-à-Binson--those old smiling villages can never be repaid for
lavishing such hours of forgetful repose, that refresh like spring
water, on the exhausted troops leaving Verdun for the once quiet
sectors of the Aisne.
During the summer of 1916 the ---- Corps was once again concentrated on
the Marne, ready to take its share in the immense and bloody sacrifice
on the Somme front. Our battalion was patiently waiting the word which
would send them up the line; as they waited, they passed the time in
calculating, from the top of the hills, the number of waggons that
could be seen struggling along far down in the valley, and as usual
they made all sorts of conjectures.
Most of the time we passed in the fields with our friends, avoiding
serious thought as much as possible, and letting the body enjoy to the
full the repose which offered itself far from the murderous struggles
on the front.
There had been a few days of dazzling heat, then the storm had come
with a thundering sky, the clouds wildly charging, and a wide sweeping
wind carrying along with it the dust or the mist.
Late one afternoon we happened to be on the road which rises gently
from Chavenay to the copses of the south.
There were three of us. Conversation flagged, and, imperceptibly, we
had each fallen back on our secret thoughts--thoughts that were full of
pain, and which the climbing road seemed to make harder to bear.
“Let’s sit down on this bank,” said a voice softly.
Without replying, we found ourselves all at once lying in the
silver-weed. We tore it up abstractedly, like men who are obliged to
work their muscles in order to think more freely.
A little grape-vine was growing at our feet and reached, with two
graceful efforts, a ridge of earth gleaming with the freshness of
wet grass. It was a neat, pure little vine of Champagne, bursting
with juice, cared for like a divine and sacred thing. No wild plants;
nothing but the stubbly vine-stock and the soil--that rich soil which
the rains wash away and which, each season, the peasants carry up
again, on their backs, right to the summit of the hills.
From amid this blend of green herbage we saw suddenly emerging an old
thin woman, with a rusty complexion and hair white and disordered. In
one hand she held a pail full of ashes, and with the other scattered
handfuls of it on the feet of the vines.
On seeing us, she stopped, and adjusted with a dusty finger a coil of
hair blown about by the wind. She stared at us. Then she spoke:
“What’s your regiment, you others?”
“The 110th line, Madame.”
“Mine did not belong to that regiment.”
“You have boys in the army?”
“Ah! I had once.”
There was silence, broken by the cry of animals, the gusts of the high
wind, and the hissing murmur of the shaken foliage. The old woman
scattered a few handfuls of the ashes, and then came near and began in
a stumbling voice that often lost itself in the wind:
“I once had boys in the army. Now I have none. The two youngest are
dead. I have one remaining--a poor wretch, who is hardly a soldier now.”
“He is wounded, perhaps?”
“Yes, he is wounded. He has lost both arms.”
The old woman put her bucket of ashes on the ground, removed some grass
from her waist-belt and tied a wayward vine branch to a supporting
stick, and, standing erect again, she exclaimed:
“He has been wounded as few have been. He has lost his two arms, and
in his thigh there is a hole big enough to contain a small bowl of
milk. For ten days he was on the verge of death. I went to see him, and
I said to him:
“‘Clovis, you are not going to leave me all alone?’--for I must tell
you they had been for a long while without a father.
“And he always used to reply:
“‘I’ll be better to-morrow.’
“No one was gentler than this boy.”
We remained silent. One of us at length murmured:
“Your boy is brave, Madame!”
The old woman, who was looking at her grape-vine, turned her dim eyes
towards us and said in an abrupt tone:
“Brave! of course! My boys could not be anything else!”
A laugh escaped her--a laugh almost of pride, a strangled laugh that
lost itself at once in the wind. Then she appeared to talk absently:
“My poor unfortunate son will some day be able to look forward to
marriage, for there is no one so gentle as he is. But my two youngest,
my two little ones! It’s too much! Oh, God, it’s too much!”
We could find nothing to say. There was nothing to say. With hair
flying in the wind, she began again to scatter the ashes, like a sower
of death. Her lips were compressed, and in her face there was a mixture
of despair, bewilderment and defiance.
“What are you doing this for, Madame?” I asked, somewhat at random.
“You see, I’m mixing the ashes with the sulphate. It’s the season. I
shall never finish: I’ve too much to do, too much to do.”
We had got up, as if we felt ashamed of disturbing this tireless worker
in her task. Moved by a common impulse, we took off our hats to her.
“Good-night,” she said, “and good luck, too, you others.”
We climbed up the hill to the very edge of the wood without saying a
word. Then we turned round and had a last look at the valley.
There on the hillside, in a mosaic of plots, as it were, the vine
plantation could be seen, with the old woman, ever so small, who
was still sowing the ashes in the wind heavy with rain clouds. The
gentle country maintained in face of the stormy heavens an attitude
of innocence and resignation. Here and there, humble villages that
glistened seemed to be set like coloured jewels in the earth. And right
in the fields that were dressed for the needs of August, small specks
that moved could be seen: a race of old men were at grips with the
soil.